Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

— Partisan Review, 1967.

After coming under heavy criticism for this statement, Sontag eagerly recanted and revised it, saying that “it slandered cancer patients.”

As representatives and protectors of America’s white supremacist ethos, the current roster of Republican Party presidential office seekers demonstrates daily its steadfast determination to keep Black people at the absolute bottom of this republic’s racial, political, economic and social hierarchies.   Rick Santorum’s declaration and warning against giving “somebody else’s money” to Black people sums up the entire Republican Party’s “platform.”  He echoes Newt Gingrich, who has described the First Black President as “the food stamps president” and whose solution to Black youth joblessness is to turn them into janitors in their own deteriorating public schools.  Notice that he does not suggest putting Black students to work as student-clerks, teachers’ or principals’ aides, library attendants, shop or home economics helpers, or even hall monitors, but as menial laborers.  His default position for all problems black is a return to a kind of forced labor, a neo-slavery.  Willard (“Mitt”) Romney consistently decries “entitlements” for everybody except his fellow fat cats and their transnational companies while Ron Paul’s white supremacist past is rapidly catching up with him via his opposition to long settled civil rights legislation and blatantly racist tracts, pamphlets and newsletters.

But Santorum’s admonition is the clearest and most direct statement of just exactly where so-called “conservative” whites stand:   Who are the “somebody else’s” in his nostrum?  They are readily identified as the consistent opponents of all policies or programs which might even remotely help Black people, including Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, educational grants and loans, jobs and job training, housing assistance, and, God forbid, welfare.  (In the recent past – post-World War II – Santorum’s predecessor-“somebody else’s” even opposed giving Black military veterans benefits offered in the G.I. Bill of Rights).  In short, Santorum’s “somebody else’s” view all of these as “stealth”  forms of “reparations” to Blacks for centuries of slavery and subsequent racial segregation and discrimination. This the “somebody else’s” cannot – and will not — abide.

Why can’t Santorum’s“somebody else’s” and most so-called “conservative” (and many not so conservative) white folks come to grips with the fact that they owe Black people?  Here’s a short list of the most common arguments against reparations:

1)  Nobody in my family ever owned slaves; the corollary to this is that no Black person living today was ever a slave;

2)  My European ancestors didn’t even get to America until long after slavery ended;

3) Reparations have already been paid in the form of welfare, Supreme Court decisions, Presidential Executive Orders, civil rights laws,  affirmative action policies and programs, etc.;

4) Any white debt owed to Blacks was paid in blood by the 600,000 white men who died on both sides during the Civil War;

5) There is no consensus – even among Blacks – as to how reparations would be paid and to whom;

6) It was the Africans themselves who eagerly participated in, if not actually originated, the Atlantic Slave Trade.  The corollary to this is that there were actually many Black slaveholders – not to mention a significant number of Native Americans who likewise held Black slaves; and,

7) Finally….a completely new “rationale” against reparations has surfaced: the election of America’s First Black President “proves” that “white racism” is over and done with.  President Obama’s election canceled any debt owed by whites to Blacks, and thus obviated the need to pay Black people anything at all.

On the surface, these arguments appear reasonable, even compelling.  But as we dig just beneath the surface, each one of them fails both the “reasonable” and “compelling” tests.

“Nobody in my family owned slaves…..”  This argument renders slavery and the ongoing horrendous treatment of Blacks as a matter of individual acts and choices by long dead misguided white ancestors (and a rapidly diminishing number of live throwbacks to a bygone era).  It ignores the supportive and enabling role that kings, princes, elected and appointed legislatures, courts, and executives played in institutionalizing and maintaining a brutal slavocracy which benefitted all whites whether they did or did not own Black slaves.

This and the ”no living black people were slaves”, and the post-slavery European immigration arguments center around a general conservative and white America political myth that this nation-state was organized by,  and comprised of, only  “rugged individuals” who united for their own personal and “private” self-interest.  America, they argue, is not, never has been, and never will be a “society”  composed of disparate peoples who came together as a result of a “social contract”, a la’ John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du Contract Social (1762).

The late arrival of European immigrants.    The late comedian Richard Prior and author Toni Morrison point out that a European immigrant’s entrance into American whiteness was expedited,  facilitated, and gauged by just how quickly and thoroughly he or she could learn, embrace, and express the most important word in the American socio-political lexicon:  “Nigger.” 

This was only the first step in embracing an American ethic and ethos of whiteness.  One’s Irish-ness, Italian-ness, German-ness, French-ness, Hungarian-ness, or…..were not shed completely, but firmly relegated into and served as a backdrop for a brand spanking new identity – American.

Next came the actual acceptance and use of one’s whiteness as not just a matter of privilege, but of right  — a God-given, if not Constitutional right.

Reparations have already been paid.  It was not until half way through the Civil War, when it looked as though the south might actually win, that Lincoln and the north decided that this really might be a war to end slavery rather than simply to “save the union.”  Yes, 600,000 white men died in that orgy of blood and bluster.  But the number of direct Black casualties has never been calculated, and is probably impossible to know.  How many of the almost 200,000 Black men who fought for the north were killed outright rather than taken as prisoners of war?  It is known that thousands of Black people (civilians and soldiers) died at the hands of civilian whites who objected to being drafted into the war and took their frustrations out on basically defenseless Blacks especially in the so-called more enlightened north.

General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Order No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865, granted 40 acres and a mule to those slaves who had been freed as the north neared its ever increasingly assured victory.   More than 10,000 people settled on 400,000 acres of their former slave owners’  lands as a result of this order.   After Lincoln’s assassination in April, however, the new president, Andrew Johnson, immediately rescinded Sherman’s order, expelled the new “freedmen”, and returned the land back to the self same former slave owners.

The “reparations have already been paid” argument also ignores the fact that immediately following the Civil War Blacks brought constant, numerous, well-argued claims to the courts and state legislatures, through the national congress, against the federal government, the states individually, corporations, and specific former slaveholders for payment of “services” rendered.  All such entreaties were denied.

Likewise, all efforts to compensate Blacks in the decades and now centuries following the war were also turned back.  Black people were specifically excluded from most provisions of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”  Harry Truman’s Executive Order  9981 on July 26, 1948 (desegregation of the military)  was the first such effort by any president since Lincoln to directly address the plight of Black people.  The landmark legislation of the 1960’s (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968) came into being not because of a change of heart on the part of Santorum’s “other people.”  Rather, it was the Civil Rights Movement beginning in the 1940’s and 50’s, the raised fist of the Black Power Movement of the late ‘60s and the concurrent  “Long Hot Summers” of revolution and riots in the major (and not so major) cities — all forced President Johnson’s hand to sign those bills into law.   So let’s be clear:  Each and every proposed bill, law, program, policy, ordinance, suggestion that Black people might need even a little extra help in order to “even the playing field” has been met with not just denial but scorn, ridicule, feigned disbelief, and, in many cases, violence.

The “some Black people owned slaves” argument.  Yes, a significant number of free Black people and Native Americans owned slaves.  In the case of free Blacks, it was more often than not a former slave husband who after years of moonlighting bought his still enslaved wife and children.  Yet, as with any other group, there were those who today would be described as “race traitors.”  These people were generally of “mixed” lineage and identified more with the white “majority” than with the enslaved Black laboring class/caste.

Africans enslaved Africans.  Slavery has existed in all societies in one form or another throughout recorded history – Africa included.  Whether in Africa, Europe, the Americas or Asia, capture as a prisoner of war usually led to enslavement by the victors.  Nell Irvin Painter’s 2010 book, The History of White People, is a fascinating and detailed look at the history of “white slavery”, beginning with the ancient Greeks. African kings and merchants participated in that slavery from the beginning; but at no point, in her chronicle does the scope, brutality and sheer evil manifested during the Atlantic Slave Trade come through.  For the most part, in Africa slaves were viewed as extended, if subservient, members of the slave owner’s family.  They were never considered as commodities or chattel in the European sense of those words.  They could marry, own property, and some even rose to positions of power as slaves within the system.  Thus, most African sellers of Africans thought that they were selling their war captives to be used in the African sense of term.   This is an essential difference and distinction.

As for Indians, by 1860 the Cherokees held 4,600 Black slaves; the Choctaws, 2,344, the Creeks, 1,532; the Chickasaws, 975; and the Seminoles, 500.  Some Indian slave owners were just as harsh and cruel as any white slave master and were often hired to catch runaway slaves.  Indeed, slave-catching was a lucrative business for some Indians, especially the Chickasaws.  Interestingly, the very last Confederate General to surrender at the end of the Civil War was Brigadier General Stand Watie, a Chief of the Cherokee Nation.  Now, Santorum’s “other people” will take this fact and determine that if they must pay Blacks for slavery, why also should Indians not be required to do so?  The answer, of course, is that compared to the not quite 4 million Black people held in bondage by white people, the less than 10,000 owned by Indians is but a drop in the proverbial bucket; and that, for the most part, slavery as practiced by Indians was never as institutionalized, wide-spread and deeply engrained into the Indian psyche as it was among whites in both the North and South.

The First Black President.    The majority of white folks in this country did not vote for Barack Obama.  And that has always been the problem.  Despite the John Browns, the Henry Lloyd Garrisons,  the Quakers, the Viola Liozzos, there has never been a majority of white Americans who supported anything “black.”   Yet, Obama represents a chance, perhaps a last chance, for many white folks to reclaim their humanity; to join the human race.  At once, his presence has allowed them to face and yet hide their sordid race history.  They know they are guilty.   Obama has allowed them to assuage some of that guilt.  He has allowed them to deflect some of that guilt onto his own persona.  The fact of his own “whiteness” has helped them immensely.  It is unlikely that he would have been elected had he not had a white parent.  So for him, and him alone, the “one-drop rule” has been suspended.

But this does not mean that white supremacy has ended, or even been suspended.  This First Black President’s policies and practices are virtually identical to every other “white” president who has preceded him save LBJ, FDR, and Lincoln.  That is, he not only supports white supremacy but has deepened and enhanced it to the point that Black people today are in a worse socio-economic position than at any time since the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Finally, there is really only one argument necessary to refute those who oppose reparations for Black people:  White people today still benefit from slavery while Black people still suffer from its devastating, lingering, ongoing, effects.

The sorry History of five hundred years of capitalist ‘Progress’ points to the Conclusion that, by its very Nature, Capitalism cannot expand without devouring Workers’ Lives and chewing up the Natural World — no more than a Shark can survive without gorging on fresh Flesh and Blood.

The original Breeding Ground of Capitalist Sharks was Western Europe, where they set about devouring the Commons, knocking down the Peasants’ Cottages with the thrashing Tails, hanging the Homeless as ‘Vagabonds,’ driving free Yeomen Farmers off the Green Land into Dismal Factories, devaluing the Labor of Women, and persecuting them as Witches.

Capitalist Sharks were sighted off the American Shores as early as 1492, ravaging the Caribbean. In their savage Hunger for Silver and Gold, they nearly exterminated the Native Peoples. So the greedy Colonial sharks were obliged to replace dead Native Americans with ever fresh supplies of Black Africans, kidnapped and sold to be worked to Death as Slaves. In their Home Waters, the voracious European White Sharks grew larger and hungrier, battening on Generations of toiling Men, Women and Children, sucking in and chewing up their Substance through fourteen daily hours of Dreary Labor in soot-darkened Satanic Mills or under the Lash on their American Plantations.

Naturally, as the Capitalist Sharks grew their Appetites increased, and by the end of the 19th Century ravenous full-grown Imperial sharks were swarming in a Feeding Frenzy, driven by a desperate Urge to devour the teeming Populations and fabulous natural Wealth of Africa and Asia.

As the 20th Century dawned, the Imperial Sharks began attacking each other (as sharks in a Feeding Frenzy will). The larger Capitalist Sharks naturally overcame the smaller, and the surviving Giants continued slashing and biting each other around the Globe, thrashing up blood-tinged Foam across both Oceans. Soon the various National Species were forming into great Schools for the purpose of Mutual Aggression. Political Ichthyology distinguishes at least four such Schools: the Freemarketus omnovorus, the Fascii viciocii, the Stalinea rapacea, and the Theocraticus ferocius.

After each Orgy of Mutual Destruction, the surviving Species enjoyed a few prosperous Years of fat Feeding until leaner Years drove them to new Hecatombs.
But by the 21st Century, the older Species of European White Sharks were being challenged in their former Feeding Grounds by younger breeds of fast-growing Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Russian and Brazilian capitalist Sharks, better adapted for preying on the local varieties of Fish and increasingly more competitive. Soon new Oceans were churning with Blood, but with so many Sharks competing, the supply of big Game-Fish was soon depleted, and only the Masses of Little Fish were left to prey on.

The most successful Capitalist Sharks tempered their Ferocity with Guile. As the pickings got slimmer, these smarter Sharks adopted Protective Coloration to lurk in Shallow Shoals where they could sneak up on the Littler Fish (the only ones left) and devour them. Some clever Capitalist Sharks painted themselves Green. Others pretended to be Vegetarians the better to lull their Prey!

The Political Ichthyologist Doktor Bertolt Brecht of Berlin had predicted this phenonmenon as early as 1930: ‘If sharks were men there would be an end to all little fish being equal, as is the case now. Some would be given important offices and be placed above the others. Those who were a little bigger would even be allowed to eat up the smaller ones. That would be altogether agreeable for the sharks, since they themselves would more often get bigger bites to eat. And the bigger little fish, occupying their posts, would ensure order among the little fish, become teachers, officers, engineers in box construction, etc.’

Following in Herr Dr. Brecht’s august Footsteps, your Humble Author has spent the past fifty Years patiently collecting Specimens of ‘vegetarian’ Shark behavior among both Left-finned and Right-finned Species from every corner of the Globe.¹ These Anatomical Descriptions are designed to help the Reader recognize the different Species as they swim across the Aquarium of her TV Screen. This ‘Taxonomy of Capitalist Sharks’ is his modest scientific Contribution to the Cause of the Working People and other Small Fry in the Class Struggle (which the Rich have been waging against the Poor as a one-way affair for far too long!).

Recent studies in Political Ichthyology have identified seventeen new species of Vegetarian Sharks, including the Oxymoronic Clean-Coal Shark, the Great Green Oil-Derrick Shark, the Elusive Trickle-Down Economics Shark, the Philanthropic-Billionnaire Shark, the Humanitarian War Shark, The Compassionate Conservative Shark, the Safe Nuclear Power Shark, the Slippery Shared-Sacrifice Shark, and the Change-You-Can-Believe-In Shark.

These Corporate Sharks pretend to be Vegetarians, but never forget they really are Man-eating capitalist Sharks! No point in trying to get them to give up Human Flesh or even go on a Diet, as Liberal Reformers urge us to do. They can’t. It’s not in their Nature.

Today, these ‘Vegetarian’ Species are flourishing, despite the increasing Mistrust of the Little Fish, some of whom even want to ban Sharks of any kind from entering the Shoals (!) Indeed, through Natural Selection the surviving Little Fish have become smarter, and today Little-Fish Scientists and Whistle-Blowing Blowfish have been trying to understand why so many Little Fish continue to be fooled by their Predators’ apparently transparent ‘vegetarian’ Disguises. The reason is that the Corporate Sharks have evolved glowing, Multicolored Media Eyes with which they are able to hypnotize their Prey. Corporate Species also inject a poisonous green Substance called ‘Campaign Contributions’ into the Small Fish General Assembly — effectively paralyzing its Members.

These same Corporate Sharks also fatten different Species of Judas Goatfish, bred to mislead the other Fish. For example, the Demagogic Goat-Fish divide the Little Fish by tricking different the Species into fighting each other — Whitefish against Black Bass, Smoked Herring against Smoked Salmon — meanwhile blaming division on the crafty Hooked-Nose Gefiltefish. At the same time, VoteForMe Goatfish are bred to ‘represent’ the Little Fish by luring them into the waiting Jaws of Lurking Privatizer Sharks (who of course swallow up everything including the Schools where Fish Children learn to swim). There are also innocent-looking Do-Gooder Goatfish which lurk in NGOs, Think-Tanks, Universities, Trade-Union Bureaucracies and Left Parties as well.

The Irony of this situation is that the Billionaire Sharks and their pet Judas-Fish cry ‘Class War!’ every time some Liberal Little-Fish dares pronounce Forbidden Words like ‘Taxing’ and ‘Spending.’ Nonetheless, many Little Fish secretly suspect that the Billionnaire Sharks don’t want to see their bloated Corporate Profits spent on Fish-Nursuries, Fish-Schools, Fish-Nests, Fish-Food and Clean Water. Meanwhile, Neo-Liberal Privatiser Sharks have nearly devoured the Undersea Commons in the so-called ‘Developing Oceans’, and now their Gaping Jaws are taking great Bites out of the Public Goods of the ‘Advanced’ Oceans.

Today, Capitalist Sharks, first sighted off South America in 1492, continue devouring the Planet, penetrating every remote Corner of the Earth, privatizing the Water, fouling the Air, cutting the Trees, killing off the Creatures and enslaving the People in their ever-increasing Hunger for more Profits. These Profit are deposited by the Capitalist Sharks in Fish-Banks and inflatable Underwater Bubbles, and in 2008 one of them exploded, plunging the world’s Oceans into Dark Depression.

Meanwhile, the Waters were growing warmer as a result of years of Frenzied Thrashing by Capitalist Sharks, and the heat destroyed the Coral Reefs on which the Little Fish Feed. Soon there would be no more Little Fish for the Capitalist Sharks to feed on, but this did not stop their Frenzied Thrashing for Profits. From this Somber Observation, Political Ithyology draws that Inference that Capitalism is no more likely to reform itself than a Man-Eating Shark is likely to embrace Vegetarianism.

This Inference points to an unavidable Conclusion. The Billions of us Small-Fry need to to turn the tables by uniting globally and waging Class War on the Billionnaire Loan Sharks who rule the World. The name of the Game is ‘Billions vs. Billionaires.’ Numbers are the Small-Frys’ trump suit. “We are many, they are few” the Poet Shelley famously wrote (anticipating the ‘99 percent-ers’ by 200 years). As for Strategy, if there is one chance in a hundred of winning this Game, Planetary Self-Organization is the card for us to play. Not by fighting capitalist Terror with Terror, capitalist Violence with more Violence (in any case, they have all the guns) but through Solidarity and militant, united Resistance.²

Sound like a pipe-dream, Dear Reader? Just remember: Thanks to the Internet, mass global Civil Disobedience can be organized in Real Time. The Day when all us Little Creative-Working-Fish wake up and go on a Planetary General Strike will be the Day when the Power of the Bankers and Corporations dissolves into thin Air. That day could be Tomorrow.³)

1. Beware of ‘Vegetarian’ Sharks! Radical Rants and Internationalist Essays (Illustrated, Praxis, 2008. Free downloads here.
2. Interested in joining a multi-player, online videogame called Billions vs. Billionaires? B&B is a Wiki set up for people interested in translating ecotopian visions and revolutionary class struggle tactics into entertaining popular foms designed to go viral and help save the world. Become part of phase one: ‘Collective Creation.’
3. These lines were written in August 2010. Five months later, the ‘Arab Spring’ spread from Tunisia to Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, Syria, and beyond — inspiring workers in Wisconsin (USA) to fight back against the Right-Wing capitalist offensive. Ironically, Arabs were ‘teaching democracy’ to Americans. The Fall brought Occupy Wall Street, which then went viral around the world. What will the next ‘tomorrow’ bring? (For a glimpse of a possible future.

Despite opposition from the imperialist countries led by the US, the 2001 WCAR became a flashpoint for focusing international attention on two issues: reparations for slavery and the liberation of Palestine. It involved a convergence of several events: the official meeting of member states that adopted the DDPA; the NGO Forum that approved a substantially stronger document (the WCAR NGO Forum Declaration); a two-day general strike led by COSATU against the privatization of social services in South Africa/Azania; and daily protest marches outside the conference venue regarding land reform, Palestine, and reparations. The government meeting was marked by a walkout of the US, Canadian, and Israeli delegations.

A 2009 review conference took place in Geneva, Switzerland following the 2001 WCAR and reaffirmed the DDPA. The US, Canada, Israel, and seven other rich countries boycotted this meeting as well.

Now, ten years after the Durban conference, delegates representing the member states of the UN will discuss the DDPA again – this time in Midtown Manhattan. The Obama administration, along with the governments of Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Israel, Italy, and the Netherlands, have already announced plans to boycott the gathering. Combined with this boycott, the lackeys and mouthpieces of the US ruling class are already working to derail the conference with false charges of anti-Semitism and jingoistic references to the 9/11 attacks (see for example the 6/3 New York Daily News editorial “President Obama must organize an international boycott of obscene, anti-Semitic Durban III confab” which contains blatant falsehoods about the content of the DDPA).

Why Is the US Empire So Afraid?

The Obama administration’s decision to boycott the September 2011 conference in NYC was announced in a June letter from Joseph E. Macmanus, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, addressed to some members of Congress. The letter claimed that the US was boycotting, because the Durban and follow-up conferences have “included ugly displays of intolerance and anti-Semitism.”

Two years ago, the Obama administration released a more detailed press statement regarding its decision to boycott the 2009 review conference in Geneva. Titled “U.S. Posture Toward the Durban Review Conference and Participation in the UN Human Rights Council,” the statement opposed the reaffirmation of the DDPA and outlined the conditions for a document that would be tolerable to the US:

It must not single out any one country or conflict, nor embrace the troubling concept of “defamation of religion.” The U.S. also believes an acceptable document should not go further than the DDPA on the issue of reparations for slavery.

The Obama administration’s reasons for boycotting the September 2011 conference in NYC and the 2009 review conference in Geneva are pretenses for shutting down criticism of Israel. Out of 341 paragraphs, the DDPA contains four paragraphs on Palestine, hardly any “singling out” of the Zionist entity. To protect its attack dog in the Middle East, the US is once again resorting to the usual tactic of equating criticisms of Israeli settler-colonialism with anti-Semitism.

The Obama administration’s non-participation is not surprising or exceptional. It exposes the fact that this administration continues to carry out the strategic interests of the US ruling class in maintaining white supremacist national oppression inside the Empire and in dominating the people of the world.

The Bush administration deliberately sent a low-level delegation to the 2001 WCAR, which did not include secretary of state Colin Powell, and then recalled it in the middle of the conference. During the Carter and Reagan administrations respectively, the US boycotted the 1978 and 1983 World Conferences to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination in Geneva, where UN member states condemned apartheid in South Africa/Azania as a crime against humanity and denounced Israel’s collaborative relationship with the apartheid regime.

Why is the US Empire so afraid of participating in UN-sponsored conferences on racism and racial discrimination? While the one-country-one-vote forum of the UN General Assembly is certainly more difficult to control than the UN Security Council or an exclusive gathering of the imperialist countries, most of the countries in the General Assembly are neocolonial states, run by local elites that play varying roles in administering imperialist relations. Thus, why does the US have such a record of non-participation?

First, there exist real contradictions in foreign policy between the US ruling class and certain dependent countries, even while the latter do not break fundamentally with the imperialist system and are not reliable allies of the peoples’ movements. Second, each of these UN-sponsored gatherings is a forum for shaping the views of people around the world, where peoples’ movements have the opportunity to influence international public opinion through militant street mobilizations outside conference venues.

Both of these factors contribute to the possibility of embarrassment and isolation at any UN function for the US ruling class, which sits at the head of a country with racism in its DNA. To paraphrase Mao, here is one arena where it is not the people who fear US imperialism, but it is US imperialism that fears the people of the world.

A Hard Look at the Text of the DDPA

The DDPA is not legally binding or enforceable under international law. It derives its authority from moral recognition and the commitment of UN member states to implement its provisions. As such, the struggle over the DDPA’s language is primarily an ideological struggle over how to understand history and our present conditions. Viewed in this way, it is a compromised text. The DDPA contains a few provisions that could be advances in the fight against racism if seized by the peoples’ movements, but embodies a capitulation to the imperialist countries in some other important ways.

The most important advance made in the text is the acknowledgement in Paragraph 13 that “slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade.” The term “crime against humanity” carries weight under international law and the recognition of slavery as such may have given a boost to reparations litigation. Yet, at the same time, the DDPA does not contain any language advocating reparations for slavery. It only expresses profound “regret” for slavery and states in Paragraph 100 that “some States have taken the initiative to apologize and have paid reparation, where appropriate, for grave and massive violations committed.” Beyond that, there are only general provisions discussing the right of all victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance to seek “just and adequate reparation.” Furthermore, the DDPA fails to similarly characterize colonialism as a “crime against humanity.” There is much further to push.

The four paragraphs discussing Palestine in the DDPA are even more timid. Paragraph 65 discussing the right of refugees to return voluntarily to their homes and properties provides no indication that it is addressing Palestinian refugees in particular. This should be contrasted with the declaration and programme of action adopted at the 1978 World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination which referred explicitly to the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe” – the name given to the 1948 mass expulsion): “the cruel tragedy which befell the Palestinian people 30 years ago and which the[y] continue to endure today – manifested in their being prevented from exercising their right to self-determination on the soil of their homeland, in the dispersal of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the prevention of their return to their homes, and the establishment therein of settlers from abroad.”

The leading provision Paragraph 63 simultaneously recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state alongside “the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel.” The previous declarations and programmes of action adopted at the 1978 and 1983 World Conferences to Combat Racism did not condition the Palestinian right to self-determination on Israel’s security. In that respect, the DDPA is a step backward. Further, note that the text discusses the right of States to “security,” not people or populations, in effect codifying the existing states in the region. This is a predictable gesture in a document adopted by the UN member states, yet ironic in light of the North African and Arab democratic revolts. Finally, of course, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which correctly identified Zionism as a form of racism and remained in place from 1975 to 1991, continues to set the bar in the struggle within the UN over the proper characterization of Israeli settler-colonialism and its ideology.

Build the People’s Movements; Isolate the US Imperialists

As September 22 approaches, working and oppressed people in the US Empire can draw lessons from past historic campaigns to bring the crimes of the US ruling classes before the UN. In 1951, Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson presented a petition to UN officials titled “We Charge Genocide” condemning the oppression of Black people in the US, reflected in the widespread practice of lynching. Malcolm X would again raise the call during the 1960s for Black people to use the UN as a forum to expose their oppression in the US. In 1970, the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Student Union organized a march of 10,000 people to the UN demanding independence for Puerto Rico, the release of political prisoners, and an end to police violence. In 1979, the National Black Human Rights Coalition organized a 5,000-strong march to the UN, with the slogans “Black People Charge Genocide” and “Human Rights is the Right to Self-Determination.” There should be a renewed focus today on the UN as an important site of struggle for working and oppressed people in the US.

COSATU’s two-day general strike against neoliberal policies on the eve of the 2001 WCAR in Durban provides a powerful example of how peoples’ movements can utilize such international gatherings to their advantage. The September 22 meeting is taking place not only in the country that is the home base of the Empire, but in the city that is the heart of US finance capital. It is crucial for all working and oppressed people to mobilize for the Durban + 10 Coalition activities from September 18 through 22, especially any protest marches that are planned.

The movement for reparations in the US can broaden and deepen its forces by highlighting the survivals of slavery in the foundations of US society today and the failure of Reconstruction to fully uproot them. Mass incarceration. Racist policing. Schools that operate like jails. Disproportionate unemployment. Enduring Black poverty throughout the country and in the Black Belt south.

In the weeks leading up to the conference and during the days of scheduled activity, we must make clear that reparations for slavery, as well as one hundred years of semi-slave sharecropping and national oppression that continues to this day, is a just demand that exposes the true character of the US Empire. It is a demand that is central to the liberation of the Black nation and the right of Black people to self-determination everywhere. It is a demand for the global redistribution of wealth stolen by the Empire. Without it, socialism is impossible.

Of course, Alexander is far from first to chronicle the American penal system’s attempts to neutralize, if not destroy, the Black community. She writes in the wake of not a few stalwarts – from the incisive pen of James Baldwin and Malcolm X’s fire-breathing oratory, to the persistent, clarion call for justice by and on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal; and from the public intellectualism of Cornell West and the late Manning Marable, to the tireless educative and organizational work of long time Black Power and anti-war and feminist Angela Davis, among many others. Alexander’s contribution to this body of protest literature and tradition is important not because she presents any novel ideas. Rather, for the first time, she meticulously lays bare the 500-year-old political, social, economic and legal context of this seemingly “new” phenomenon. But beyond context, Alexander names and defines this particular singularity in such a way that not just “racial justice advocates” but anyone with a sense of right and wrong may more productively analyze and then organize against it. The New Jim Crow, indeed.

The thrust of her argument is that the mass incarceration of Black men is simply the latest iteration of a racialized social control system first inaugurated by wealthy white colonial planters in 1676, a full one hundred years before slave rapist Thomas Jefferson declared that “…all men are created equal.” What is new, as Alexander patiently but insistently explains, is the method and means of implementing this revised social control system: the putative war on drugs waged under the guise of a faux racial neutrality – or as she puts it, “colorblindness.”

Early in both the text and in her talk, Alexander points to a largely forgotten, dimly understood yet seminal event in this budding republic’s history, Bacon’s Rebellion, which set the whole “racial” concept in motion. In 1675-76, rich white land owners instituted what Alexander calls America’s first “racial bribe.” To wit, in order to keep poor European American and African American indentured servants from uniting against them, the planters offered the European indentureds a chance at “freedom” based solely on their “whiteness” – a freedom which came “due” once their terms of “service” were completed and included a plot of land, tools, clothing, seed and foodstuffs. As another legal scholar, Cheryl I. Harris, has written,¹ whiteness itself was thus rendered an intrinsically valuable and tangible property — as valuable, tangible and real as any other form of property. Crucially, though, this new property interest in whiteness was not fungible. That is, although it was as heritable as any other property, it could not be exchanged for any other commodity. Whiteness was therefore limited only to those who were recognized as or reputed to be, and thus validated as “white” by the paramount holders of all forms of property including whiteness – the ruling class of planters and their functionaries. Thus, it was a closed system of not just property relations, but “race” relations as well.

By their offer of substantial material gain, the planters convinced European workers that the absence of skin color, now defined as whiteness, was neither an abstraction nor a random accident of birth. Rather, the essence of whiteness’ – the condition of being “white” –was its inherent and static reification and affirmation of identity as a “fellow” human being. Deeper than an emblem or token, whiteness as one’s principal physical feature denoted ownership of one’s own person conveying meaning in much more than a physiological or even psychological sense. The lure of whiteness was irresistible because its possession was affixed to, dependent upon, and conferred the reality of personal “freedom.”

At the same time and as a result, African American indentureds were relegated to lifetime and hereditary bond servitude by virtue of their “non-whiteness”, their blackness alone. (After herculean efforts to enslave them, Native peoples had simply proven to be too “savage” and just plain too recalcitrant to be reduced to slavery in their own land. Alternating systems of “domestication,” internment, pogroms and outright extermination obtained against them instead).

Instead of receiving land and “freedom dues” for their years, often decades, of unrelenting, unpaid, backbreaking labor, African Americans were rendered “black” in direct opposition to the newly minted class of “whites.” African identity was emptied of all social and political content. Its only value was as a means of exchange – economic. African beings and their progeny became nameless chattel – a special class of property, to be sure — perfectly fungible and capable of being exchanged among whites (and a minuscule number of nominally “free” Blacks and indigenes) in the so-called “free market” economy of the day.

Alexander identifies this as the origin of the American version of the divide-and-conquer social control strategy, but with a decided “racial” twist, a strategy which has governed “race relations” in America ever since.

Alexander argues that this system was/is a racial caste system, overlain by an already in place and overarching social and economic class system. Africans were located completely outside this class system and by virtue of their status as eternal, biological, intellectual and moral aliens – a subspecies of true “humanity” — they constituted the lowest rung of a caste system which made them irredeemable and utterly unworthy of any interaction with “whites” save as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

Due to the vagaries of human nature, this system could not and did not function automatically. As historian Lerone Bennett² and others have pointed out, Black and white indentured servants had worked and relaxed cheek-by-jowl together for at least two generations before Nathaniel Bacon organized them into a protest-cum-revolutionary movement. Therefore, the system must needs be reinforced, adjusted, and adapted from time to time to meet changed circumstances or challenges to its legitimacy.

Alexander follows a dark meandering line of oppression: After 250 years of outright African (Black) slavery, the Civil War crushed the slavocracy and ushered in Emancipation and Reconstruction. Reconstruction constituted only a brief period (less than fifteen years) of political, social and economic uplift of the former slaves before a “white backlash” against the new “Freedmen” ensued.

Enter America’s second racial bribe: In exchange for the re-institution of white supremacist rule under a different guise, southern whites agreed to end their political opposition and obstructionism. Their payoff? One hundred years of African (Black) neo-slavery, featuring special Black Codes, share cropping, tenant farming, and convict leasing — all undergirded by a sometimes loosely, sometimes strictly enforced Jim Crow segregation and discrimination.

Just as the Civil War destroyed slavery, by the late 1960’s the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements finally broke the back of Jim Crow. Again, an uneasy peace, punctuated by significant gains among Blacks, including the creation of a fledgling Black middle class, obtained until the next white reactionary response appeared. Like clockwork, a backlash eventually set in signaled by the election to the presidency of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, a white backlash. The whole dynamic began anew.

Again, Alexander has termed that response The New Jim Crow. More precisely, she has identified it as a third American racial bribe: The Age of Colorblindness. Enter the war on drugs.

1. Whiteness As Property, Harris, Cheryl I., 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1709-1791, 1724-1737 (1993).
2. Before The Mayflower: A History Of Black America, Bennett, Lerone, Johnson Pub. Co., Inc. (1962).

An old love was rekindled for me recently when I sadly picked up a copy of Huck Finn at the local library “buck a bag” sale. Classics a plenty were left on the tables, and this lonely copy of an old favorite was passed over by other patrons as they grabbed up the more lurid tell-all biographies. To add insult to injury, the book was stamped with a garish red “DISCARDED”. It looked to be a donation from the local Middle School and the book, otherwise in perfect condition, was obviously being purged from the shelves. It grieved me in a manner really only suitable to feel for other humans, not books so of course I had to grab up the book and save it from the indignity. As I drove home with several bags of books, I realized that I must read my old love again to fully rectify the situation.

The most searing moment of the book comes when Huck Finn discards the note he penned to turn in Jim, his runaway slave companion. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” is the statement the boy makes as he realizes he does not have it in him to go along with the “morals” he has been taught since birth, that of the slave as being property. He grasps that he is going against the teachings of the church, the teachings of his elders, basically going against the full of society that he has been immersed in. The statement is heartfelt, as Huck sees his betrayal to hold serious consequences. He believes he will indeed go to hell, but has the overwhelming organic notion that adhering to the social norms of the day was simply not possible for him any longer. The depth of this selfless act is most likely lost on the myriad of kids who were “forced” to read this book. The twisted irony of this moment is the fact that losing oneself to a personal upwelling of good is indeed the correct choice; in this case, ignoring the voice of society connected him to the potential and the sublime.

The soul of America is complicated and nuanced. Our patriotism is always tempered by a foundation of dread — that of land theft, aggression and bondage. Even the most willfully blind in this nation know this fact in their core. Perhaps this nagging wound, knowing that there is an unholy footing is what has led to something of an over compensation in the American psyche. The concept of American Exceptionalism. These ideas come from a delusional culture that willfully looks away from truths.The well-adjusted can be aware of personal weaknesses; it’s the maladjusted that create myths and dogma.

In much the same manner as Huck Finn, scores of individuals in America feel ill at ease with everyday imperatives. For some it’s the Imperialism, even if they don’t know what to call it. For even more it’s the degrading, soul eroding workplace. We are to derive all measure of worth as a person by the presence of a job, and a well paying one at that. Most do not have a “good job” and even those who do, often have some measure of discord inside them due to the requirements lurking to keep said well paying job. Generally it involves hardening oneself off from the plights of others, and making excuses to condone any corruption inherent. If the strife in the mind becomes too unbearable, then suggestions are generally made to medicate oneself. This is sometimes enough to quiet the demons, but they are still there, to be sure.

Every civilization has made war on certain aspects of what it means to be human. During Huck Finn’s time, the very concept of being human was argued in percentages. 3/5 a person, not at all….? It’s ludicrous and sick to think our lawmakers ever spoke of this, but they did, and it wasn’t that long ago by any measure besides the paltry human lifespan.

The assault of our age is that of being considered a consumer, not a citizen. It was foisted upon us insidiously until we all started using the same verbiage. Our society said it was natural; that is was expected to be a “consumer” not a human or citizen. A consumer uses resources, period. A consumer is a measure to be managed and quantified. A consumer hasn’t the right to ask for dignity or happiness. It’s just a measure of flesh to use and produce and to be discarded when unable to perform these functions. We are seeing the expected and continued degradation of what it means to be human. Consumers need producers, and neither need to be particularly human. The demand of more productivity, the enhancement of the human as simply as cog in the machine that produces wealth for the few-that is what it is truly about. This doesn’t sit well in our souls simply because it is wrong. No amount of propaganda will rid us of the feeling completely, and that is why there is great interest in medicating the humanity out of us. The harmony will never be there under this system.

Change always seems impossible, at least change that benefits the many instead of the few. But there are instances of change that we can look back upon. Slavery was considered to be natural and expected, but through an incomprehensible number of disobedient acts, the collective delusion was lifted. Individuals found a moral compass removed from the shroud of society.

Our current assault on humanity is not as dramatic as a human in shackles. But make no mistake, to maintain the consumer death spiral, misery and even slave like conditions still exist. War is now an integral part of the system. The level of suffering is growing worldwide to simply advance the cause that the human is nothing but a mindless consuming machine, there to facilitate even more consumption by the top few.

The beauty of an “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” moment is that it takes no sophistication, no advanced degree. Just an individual presented with a small moment that they can control. These moments are hard to predict, but when they occur they can bring back humanity. The owner of these moments will probably have hell to pay in the short run. These incidents may be born of individuals who will not beat protestors, maybe employers who refuse to implement soul degrading practices. The possibilities are endless, as are the choices that we can make. And when we hear of such stories we need to share them far and wide.

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”. Say it … because it truly is the path to redemption.

Home is where the hatred is
Home is filled with pain and it
Might not be such a bad idea
If I never, never went home again

—Gil Scott-Heron

They returned home to a Jim Crow South that expected them to go back to the servile position they left. Most resented it and wanted to be honored for risking their lives for their country rather than attacked for being uppity. Some survived the war only to lose their lives to Jim Crow.

—Isabel Wilkerson¹

Men lynched, castrated, and burned alive for using their tongues as weapons—against a terror state that told them each day they counted less than human. Women hanging from trees, their fingers severed and stored in jars as souvenir, throngs of ecstatic worshippers cheering, commemorating a weekly ritual—the women probably talked back in a way that suggested they forgot their place in the society they were born into. Angry mobs banging down doors in the dark night, searching out a young man accused of stealing turkeys—if found, a tree needs watering.

Hang onto your rosary beads
Close your eyes to watch me die

6 million Black Americans in the South had seen enough to know Death had their names written in blood; so starting World War I a great migration began—many, like Nicodemus, creeping through the night to elude the paranoid suspicions of their vengeful captors. They slipped onto freight trains, crammed into cars, and dragged their feet for long walks from a place more hell than home, unsure of the future but desperate in conviction. And with heads pressed forward, never looking back—at a ghastly past that had made migration compulsory—they fled the South for the North, commencing a sprawling relocation which slashed in half the South’s Black population within six decades.

Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Boston University professor, documents this heretofore unengaged history in her grand new text, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, a dexterous and detailed look into what became of a movement—told through the trails of three central characters—without which Motown might have never found meaning and Jazz might have never found new notes, relegating John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Louis Armstrong to obscure footnotes in the book of time.

Recently I had the chance to speak with Wilkerson on the scope of her research, ongoing migration in the 21st century, and the unique literary approach used to tell this great story until now never told.

Tolu Olorunda: Thanks for taking the time out of your chaotic schedule to speak with me. I guess the personal is political because your mother migrated from Georgia to Washington, D.C., and your father from Southern Virginia to Washington, as well.

Isabel Wilkerson: Yes. I literally would not exist if they had not made that decision because they never would have met. They were from different parts of the South, and the culture, believe it or not, is different from state to state. My experience growing up first generation in the New World made me very aware of how that experience is very close to the immigrant experience—and I identified in school with people whose parents had migrated from around the world—because you’re having to forge your way in a place your parents can only help you so far in trying to adjust to.

TO: 6 million Black Folks?

IW: Correct: beginning in World War I, with the opening and great demand—really desperate need—for labor in the steel mills and on the railroads in the North. And that was the beginning of the defecting from the caste system in the South, continuing until after the 1960s, when the system, as it had been known in the South, was dismantled. So that went on for almost three generations—people leaving.

TO: And I guess the concept of Citizenship is prominent in your book because this act you describe as migration—which we normally think of as an inter-national affair: relocation from one country to the next. But for these brave men and women who embarked on this journey, and in such massive proportions, it almost suggests they couldn’t have been recognized as citizens of and by their very country.

IW: Oh, absolutely. They were not recognized as citizens; they didn’t even have basic human rights. Their citizenship was not recognized in the land of their birth. And so they got about trying to find a place where it would be recognized and where they could live freely as citizens. And they shouldn’t have had to do that—but it was necessary: they could either stay in a caste system that restricted every inch of their movement, or they could leave. This was the choice every African-American family in the South had to face.

TO: So they make the migration from the South to the North, thinking this might be night-and-day, hell-and-heaven; but they get to the North and find out that trying to flee one terror doesn’t exclude the existence of another terror awaiting you.

IW: Many of the assumptions about them followed wherever they went, partly because the South was not another country, even if it acted like it in many respects. They found great resistance and hostility because they were coming from places where they were underpaid or earning no wages at all, so there was some fear that wages might go down and also fear from Blacks already there that this could endanger their already tenuous positions. So it’s one of the great tragedies of the 20th century, and it’s going on now with groups coming from faraway lands, just trying to make it in this forbidden and hostile environment, which end up pitted against each other, not realizing how much they share in common.

TO: These misconceptions, your book documents, were expressed by the layman, the working-class woman who had to compete with someone willing to work for lower wages; but they were also expressed by sociologists and economists. You quote economist Sadie Mossell who, speaking of the mass migration to Philadelphia, wrote, “With few exceptions, the migrants were untrained, often illiterate, and generally void of culture”; and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier: “The inarticulate and resigned masses came to the city … [and] the disorganization of Negro life in the city seems at times to be a disease” (260-261).

IW: And that’s an assumption made about people arriving from a faraway place who are misunderstood, underappreciated—their motivations and full humanities are not recognized even by the people with whom they should have the most in common. It was not just Whites in the North, but Blacks as well, making assumptions and judgments about them, which made the transitions difficult. They had all the challenges you could imagine, which in some ways are proxy for what any new immigrant group has to go through when they come to a new place. And I would hope the book helps people feel more empathy for what it takes to make that great leap: to recognize what they had to go through to get there—that’s astonishing!—and what they left behind.

TO: If more Blacks had migrated from the South to the North, do you think the South would have remained the South as we know it? And what possible consequences for the North—since people and things were left behind, as you point out. If more had left, fed up with the brutality of Jim Crow, would the north have had its own southification?

IW: I think the North did have a southification. Think about it. Look at what happened to the family which tried to move into the apartment in Cicero. First they had a difficult time getting in the building: they were turned away before they could actually move in; and when they did they couldn’t stay because the people took all their belongings and hurled them out the second floor window and burned it all. They even went as far as ripping out the radiators and faucets. It was a mob scene—not in the South but in the North. These were working-class, recent eastern and southern European immigrants who were themselves feeling insecure and economically threatened in this foreign place.

But I think that had more people left, the Civil Rights Movement would have taken off earlier because there needed to be a critical mass of people leaving in such numbers with a velocity that would make an impact on the South and would ultimately embolden the states to say, Enough has happened—now is the time to make our move. And the North only began paying much attention to the atrocities in the South when it was attracting so many Black people—when the cities began changing dramatically, demographically. All these factors were interconnected.

TO: And what separated those who stayed from those who left?

IW: That’s a really good question. You might be able to answer that question, too, when you think about the people in the community where you came from—who stayed. I don’t make a judgment whether it’s a good or bad thing to leave, as an individual. I look at it as necessary to make the change we now all benefit from—as such a necessary historical moment that it’s hard to imagine what life would be like had they not left. The people who stayed tend to be more the keepers of the culture, the ones tied to the sentiments and history of a place. Those who left are more restless, impatient; they have an agitation for something better and different. I heard people say over and over again, “If I stayed, I would have died. I would have said something that would have gotten me in trouble.”

TO: I sense that this great migration is very much applicable to what we’re going through today. There was story a couple months back of Hispanics fleeing a small town in Connecticut following persistent police brutality: hardworking business owners just leaving in droves; they couldn’t take it anymore. So I guess it’s still going on today.

IW: Oh, it’s still going on because human behavior is fairly predictable—people react a certain way when exposed to certain stimuli. And the continuity factor in all these cases is economic insecurity. So I would hope by reading this book people would recognize and see the humanity in anyone seeking to leave a place for someplace better, and recognize this as the background of all Americans—there would not be a country without migration: relocation, dislocation, adjustment.

And people don’t realize that if you’ve come a long, long way to get to a place, you cannot fail. Failure is not an option. You’re too far from home. You can’t even afford to stumble. You have to succeed. So that means the people who come here are often determined and courageous people who are misunderstood as wanting to take advantage, when often they are coming with the same hopes and ambitions as anyone who’s ever crossed the Atlantic, or the Rio Grande, or the Pacific to get here.

TO: We hear that a whole lot with the Mexican, Middle-Eastern, African influx these days. I mean, people do think it’s about spitting in the faces of blue-collar workers, when it’s anything but. And I hope your book helps people, the literate public at least, understand something it needs knocked into its head: that immigrants are simply trying to establish a better life for themselves.

IW: Exactly. I also would add, though, that the caste system, being what it is, means a lot of assumptions are made about African-Americans who have been here for a while, who have been forced to live like immigrants in their own country. So I also hope the book helps newer immigrants empathize with, and see the humanity, the commonality with people they may not know have lived the immigrant experience, as well. I hope it fosters greater understanding on both sides. We haven’t yet had a dialogue to see how much we have in common, and in the absence of it: suspicion, resentment, hostility—all these replace what could have been an opportunity for understanding.

TO: Now, you could have written the book in some dreadful, legalese, textbook format. But you chose something, I think, more poetic, something magisterial—narrative journalism, which in long-form demands a lot of time, hard work, extensive research. And it was fascinating to see that in 2010 someone was still keeping alive that legacy.

IW: Thank you. I chose it because I wanted to pull the reader into that world beyond imagining-right-now: when you think of the daily terrors, arcane laws, and then the hard decisions the people made to move, and even what they encountered when they made it to this New World. I wanted the readers to picture themselves in those same situations: see what they saw, feel what they felt, and to ask, What would I have done in the same situation?

So I wanted it to come alive for the reader, which means an extra layer of work because you do all the research necessary to write the more scholarly book, which is important for the furtherance of intellectual understanding, then you take another step, though, to get deep into the lives of the characters to tell their story: you spend a lot of time with them. I wanted to reach as many readers with a story that has been, in my view, the greatest underreported story of the 20th century. And I thought people needed to know about it.

One of my inspirations was The Grapes of Wrath, which is a seminal novel about the Dust Bowl migration, and yet there was no Grapes of Wrath for the Great Migration, which is by many times a larger relocation of people within the borders of this country.

TO: How did this decade-long hustle match with your former gig as Chicago Bureau Chief of the New York Times?

IW: Oh, totally different. In other words, because it was so much bigger than any single topic I had ever tackled, it just took so much more time. But, really, it was the scale. I mean, the attention to detail, sitting down and talking to people, doing additional research: all that I would have done for any piece I would write for The Times. This was just so much bigger in scale. You’re talking 6 million people leaving over the course of three generations, the need to really talk about it from a century-long experience, the precipitating events, and the need to follow people afterwards. So you’re exploring 100 years of history, and that’s a lot. That’s a lot of material.

TO: Yeah, I don’t think you’ll find out what Ms. Ida Mae was wearing at ten-years-old, or what she was thinking at thirteen, after 10 minutes of interview.

IW: Yeah, one phrase might have taken an afternoon.

TO: And if it’s not too personal a question, I’m just wondering where the funding came from, to be able to travel back to all these places and…

IW: That’s a good question. I mean, it’s all part of the work of making it happen. For one thing, it’s nonfiction, so publishers provide an advance, very much like the music industry. And on that basis you make it work. But for 100 years of history, over 1,200 interviews in four different states in the North and three in the South, I had to get additional support. So I was awarded a Guggenheim: they recognized faith in the work and my commitment to complete it. And I also took teaching positions. I taught at Princeton and Emory. I had a lectureship at Northwestern. I continued to write—took short breaks. I did all that to supplement it.

TO: But you had to create multiple selves to be able to teach and simultaneously embark on this great journey.

IW: It also meant watching the budget. I remember catching a plane ride to California which had three or so stops. Soon as you went in the air it came back down. I stayed at the cheapest hotels at airports. You know, you do what you must to make it work.

TO: How do you whittle down 1,200 subjects to 3?

IW: Everybody had a certain strength and a window into the migration that they were sharing with me. But it really came down to about 30 people on my list, all very strong personalities—something that made them of interest. The book would still have maintained the same overarching goal, but the specifics would have been different, which would have affected the experience of the reader. I always wanted people the reader could identify with and see themselves in. So the deciding factor ended up being one person for each migration stream, and then I needed each to be different from one another. They had to all be leaving for different reasons, with different motivations. And they all needed to emerge from different classes. Finally, just great storytellers and characters in their own rights, who you would want to sit down and listen to.

TO: Every now and then, you come in as a character—introduce the first-person pronoun. It’s usually short-lived, but I’m curious about the literary decisions you made to bring yourself in, tell the story of your mother and father, and then take yourself out.

IW: That is really a great question because I struggled with that: I am a journalist who was trained to not use the first-person. So to use it felt like a wild leap into unknown territory. But I think it was probably more comfortable because I was talking not about me but my parents, who were part of that migration and generation. I felt it was necessary to help the reader understand the inspiration for the book, where the passion came from, to give a window into my awareness of the similar experiences of my family: it’s not as if I’m on the outside looking in. I am an observer, but one who has seen it up-close in my own life.

I did it with great thought each time. And other times I used the first-person had only to do—generally speaking outside of the Methodology section—with driving down the Mississippi with Ida Mae, and she wants to stop on the side of the road to pick cotton. And because I’m there, I can’t say, “She was with someone who was driving, and suddenly they stopped.” I was hoping for an authenticity, integrity, and intimacy in the work itself.

TO: You Flipped O’Brien’s The Things They Carried for “The Things They Left Behind,” a small section in the book.

IW: Yes! Of course. Thank you! I love that book!

TO: So what got you thinking you could tell stories with the abandoned possessions of these people?

IW: Well, you know, I just love that book. Telling stories through things is a kind of art unto itself. And it has great meaning. I mean, what people choose to carry and what they leave behind—by definition, things were left behind because many people left on-the-run. And those things become emblems, symbols of loss, homesickness and heartache. And every person who leaves a place has something tangible they had to leave behind, and I think that makes it real for the reader, too.

The idea of just saying, They left, sounds so simple; but saying, “They would never be able again to sit down with their mother for a cup of coffee or grits and bacon”—that has a different connotation and meaning. It’s a way of cataloguing the loss and sacrifice.

TO: Speaking as the first Black woman (Feature Writing, 1994) awarded a Pulitzer for individual reporting in journalism, would you like to see more Black writers involved in this sort of long-form, time-sapping, hopefully timeless, work your book is such a shining example and legatee of—as opposed to much of what we have today, which really could be described as fast-food novels? Shouldn’t there be a more vigorous push from the different levers we have for more Black involvement in narrative nonfiction and literary journalism?

IW: I absolutely believe that and hope the book opens the door for more of this kind of work. I hope it has proven there’s an audience for it and there’s a desire for it. The issue, of course, is that it takes a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of determination and perseverance; and it just takes so long. A person has to really feel within themselves that it’s worth all that. No one can make that decision for you.

I hope there will be more such work because this is one opportunity to humanize a people that have often been left to the assumptions of conventional wisdom, rather than the reality of their lives and heart desires. And it can only come through when you take the time to make people feel really comfortable enough to tell their stories. It’s a delicate thing that takes a lot of time. There’s a need for stories to be told from the perspectives of ordinary people, not just the celebrities and household names. With ordinary people, truth and wisdom is found.

TO: Certainly. And I think just as Mr. Talese did with Unto the Sons for his people, you’ve done for Black people with The Warmth of Other Suns—bringing to life stories of everyday people who would normally go uncounted in history; but now generations to come would pick up this book to discover what life was like and the legacy that birthed them. So you’ve told this epic story; took you 15 years, 1,200 interviews, and god knows how many miles and how many airplane rides—

IW: You’re right about that.

TO: How quickly do you take up another project after exhausting so much energy and time on this?

IW: I’m still in the process of trying to make sure this gets into the hands of as many people. My goal was just for people to read it. You know, there was a library with 147 holds on the book. Some people may not get the book till 2013! And so I am thrilled the word has gotten out and people want to read; it shows we have more in common than we’ve been led to believe, it helps humanize people who—as you’ve indicated and I agree—would otherwise go uncounted, unheard from; and, of course, these people are getting up in years, so there was a great effort on my path to try to get the stories told before it was too late. So right now, I’m thinking about that, but I can say about the next project that it would not take 15 years because I would never have taken on something if I knew it would take that long. But it’s a good thing I didn’t know.

1. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010), p. 145.

So far, I haven’t heard a single dissenting voice from the nation’s media, nor the trade union movement – which does not surprise me.

Clarke’s new policy is of course being dressed up as being in the best interests of prisoners and society. It is supposed to alleviate boredom, encourage prisoners to get used to hard work, teach transferable job skills, blah, blah, blah…. But just like everything government does, the initiative relies upon an ancient and very successful controlling illusion: that government always acts in our best interests. It doesn’t of course, and never has. It acts in the interests of the tiny handful of plutocrats who truly pull the strings.

As is normally the case with politicians’ speeches, it seems that Clarke’s performance was rich in oratory and poor in detail. But let’s take a little look at Clarke’s proposal in as dispassionate a way as I can muster.

1. The Practical Argument

British prisons are notoriously overcrowded places with very little spare space in or around them. Where exactly is all this work going to be carried out? Are the scarce recreational and educational facilities that currently exist in prisons, such as exercise areas and classrooms, to be transformed into places where people are to be forced to do something they might not want to do? And what provision will be made for the subsequent loss of those facilities i.e. how would prisoners get any exercise at all, or learn the few useful skills they can currently acquire, once those meagre facilities are converted into sweatshops?

How exactly is this new regime to be administered? Many prisons currently require prisoners to be locked up in their cells for nearly all of the day – no doubt as the most cost-effective means of administering the system. How exactly is that regime to be changed so that people no longer need to be so confined?

2. The Ethical Argument

Ethics is of course largely irrelevant to our government (the one and only morality it acknowledges is subservience to the plutocrats who rule us); but that doesn’t mean the morality of forcing people to work should not be examined – quite the contrary: if our trusted leaders ignore it, along with the nation’s media and supposed champions of the worker – the trade union movement – then obviously someone else must do the job.

Our labour is intimately connected to our freedom, and it is one of the very few things we can significantly control – albeit not easily, for most of us. Many people spend most of their waking hours working, so it stands to reason that the more control we have over the conditions under which we work the more freedom we are able to exercise. Prisoners obviously have no freedom. If Mr Clarke was suggesting that prisoners should be free to choose whether to work or not – i.e. they would not be discriminated against in any sense if they didn’t so choose – I wouldn’t be writing this article: I wouldn’t need to. But that is not what he is saying. He said prisoners will be made to work.

There’s a perfectly good word for prisoners who are made to work: slaves. For most people, the ethical argument begins and ends in that simple fact.

c. The Economic Argument

Since it became an unofficial American state, our government does very little unless it produces a profit somewhere along the line for the plutocrats. On the face of it, converting prisoners into slaves makes no economic sense. We might think the fundamental premise behind ‘making prisoners work’, is that there is work for them to do – otherwise work is obviously being created just for the sake of creating jobs, something which is supposedly anathema to the New Capitalists who rule the planet. The fact is, however, that there’s little enough work available for non-prisoners, let alone those who must be made to do it. So one might reasonably wonder where all these jobs are that must be so plentiful they can fully occupy the nation’s sizeable prison population.

The one clue given appeared in a BBC report which suggests Clarke intends somehow to convert factories into prisons – as happens in some other great democracies such as Brazil for example, or China. That might explain how the work will be produced, but does it produce a sound economic argument?

As I said Clarke’s speech was typically light in detail, so we’re left on our own to try to join the dots.

If existing factories (which are presumably in already in working order) are to be converted into secure prisons, existing prisons will… do what? Perhaps they’re to be used just to provide sleeping accommodation for the slaves, who are to be transported each day between prison and factory? And this is in the nation’s and the factories’ economic interests?

I am of course being slightly ironic. England has a great history of exploiting slave labour. It became a wealthy country by using two different but related tactics. Firstly it made things in factories (at home as well as abroad) where the conditions for workers were arguably the worst in recorded history. Secondly it used its laws, reinforced by its naval and military might, to ensure the products of those factories dominated the domestic market, and had free access to foreign markets – usually to the total exclusion of anyone else.

After the Second World War, English imperial control took a nosedive, which meant that markets for its products (foreign and domestic) collapsed. The government could have resisted much of the subsequent demise of manufacturing by taking a more aggressive stance on imports; but no, not while huge profits could be made by exploiting virtually free (and union-light) Asian labour. Directors of factories made huge fortunes for themselves by killing off British industry and switching operations to Central and Eastern Asia. It was of course short-sighted, but who cares? It’s all about filling your boots today – fuck the future.

So today England now finds itself in a position where it simply cannot compete with India and the Far East – unless it can somehow re-create a slave labour force which is even cheaper to run than Asian sweatshops are. It has no chance, of course – even under prison conditions. It will inevitably cost more to produce something in a British prison than it does to produce it in Asia. It will also cost the government far more to administer a slave labour prison factory in anything vaguely like a humane manner than it would cost it simply to run a prison. So what on earth can be the economic sense behind such an idiotic proposal?

Catherine Austin Fitts, the one time director of a Wall St investment bank, and a Federal Housing Commissioner during the reign of George I, explains on her website exactly how American corporations profit from the prison business – it’s a truly obscene little story.¹ Given that the British government is basically a department of the United States government, which is itself joined at the hip with Wall St., it comes as no surprise to learn that our so-called ‘Justice’ minister (who is no stranger to the inner workings of the British Treasury) intends to copy our American role model.

The economic argument turns out to be a very simple one. It basically boils down to the same old story: more taxpayer pounds diverted into the bottomless pockets of corporations. American prison corporations worship ‘growth’ just like any other corporation, and the way they grow is by increasing their volume of prisoners – with the willing assistance of the state. What these prison-factories actually produce is irrelevant. Clarke’s proposal means that British prisoners themselves are to be exploited, exactly as American prisoners are, just like any other commodity; but at public expense, for private profit. An obvious implication is that the numbers of prisoners must inevitably be made to increase, for maximum ‘growth’ – the raison d’etre of all corporations.

Clarke’s speech was all but ignored by the media through the use of one of their more common tactics: ‘distraction news’. If it weren’t for the fact that I just happened to hear the briefest of mentions about Clarke’s new policy whilst listening to a fringe rock music radio station I wouldn’t have known anything at all about it. Because on the very same day as the return of slavery was publicly announced the Tories also informed a largely indifferent nation that child benefit would no longer be payable to rich families, and this was the non-event that the nation’s media locked on instead, successfully diverting our attention away from Clarke telling us about a far more serious outrage.

There’s absolutely nothing to commend Clarke’s proposal. His existing American role model proves without doubt that forcing prisoners to work as slaves in no way improves their later employment prospects. Instead of our taxes being used to improve prison conditions, to rehabilitate and help provide meaningful work to people once they leave prison, they are used instead to enrich corporate directors.

All this from someone rejoicing in the title Minister for ‘Justice’?

1. See Cornell Corrections.

In the last ten years this country (or the corporate slavers) has committed more crimes against Man, God, and Planet than is still possible to conceive, yet what ‘seems’ to be most Americans are content to pretend none of it happened.  Granted, a good portion of that ‘appearance’ is due to corporate control of media and mis-education from diversionary propaganda, but there is no shortage of examples of good old fashioned ignorance and denial.

Two stolen national elections, false-flag operations (and 3 Trillion dollars) to start two colonial corporate wars, policy of torture for false confessions, destruction and dissolution of constitutional privacy into a covert corporate surveillance industry, deliberate economic collapse through industry wide mortgage and insurance fraud, 24T to refinance the Globo-Econo-Criminals that crashed it in the first place, destruction of the illusion of finance, fairness, and justice, and any number of other staggering overt efforts have been exposed and acknowledged, yet people have ‘forgotten’ all of it and have been drawn back into their comfortable delusions about what this country is and what this country does.

Obviously it’s a psychological dysfunction to ignore this amount of reality, and were I on any other planet, I have no doubt it would be diagnosed as such.  However the roots of delusion on this planet stretch back to the beginnings of ‘recorded history,’ and this country is a perfect example of why that is.  So many societies have been destroyed and their historical knowledge replaced with the conqueror’s propaganda that virtually no historical reality remains.

Christians, landing upon their coasts, seized as many as they found, men, women, and children, and transported them to America.  It was about 1551 that the English began trading to Guinea. They set the men on shore, to burn their towns and take the inhabitants. In 1556, Sir John Hawkins sailed with two ships to Cape Verd, where he sent eighty men on shore to catch Negroes, but they met with such resistance, that they had seven men killed, and took but ten Negroes.

It was some time before the Europeans found a more compendious way of procuring African slaves, by prevailing upon them to make war upon each other, and to sell their prisoners. Till then they seldom had any wars; but were in general quiet and peaceable. But the white men first taught them drunkenness and avarice, and then hired them to sell one another. Nay, by this means, even their Kings are induced to sell their own subjects. — John Wesley: Christian Theologian / Methodist Founder, 1774

Here we see one of the cornerstones of the ‘modern’ world, and one of the foundational lessons learned by the colonial slavers.  In fact, our Global Society is built on it.  Just look at the planet and you can see how well and how often it has been applied over the last 500 years.  All over the world in all of the colonized countries we have Blacks fighting Blacks for no apparent reason, Kings driving Bentleys while their people have no food, and guns and bullets for everyone, yet none of them have any shoes.  All the while the corporate slavers quietly steal the resources and labor as they fund all sides of the conflicts, and these two simple paragraphs from John Wesley explain why that is.  This practice of division, diversion, and the self-perpetuation of slavery and violence has been the primary method of colonization for hundreds of years.

Divide and concur is used in almost every operation against our own people as well.  In this country (and on this planet) it is a very simple matter to create racial division by playing to the ingrained belief developed over 500 years of slavery that White people are superior to Black people, and that Black people are inherently scary and dangerous.  This division is easy to trigger (because many consciously or subconsciously still very much believe it is true), and it easily creates strife over artificially induced divisions while preventing unity in seeking out the real tyrants and criminals.  Although the equally poor, disaffected, and ignorant White people in this country are as enslaved as anybody else, playing to their belief (‘remembrance’) that they are superior to Black people hearkens back to the ‘good ol’ days,’ and is as American as baseball and apple pie. 

There have been numerous examples of just how easy it is to vilify Black and Brown people in this country without any evidence or basis in reality, but one glaring example that haunts the planet is the false flag operation of 9/11.  Only a couple of days after the event, all evidence and signs pointed to a massive large scale operation that involved local, State, National, and International Governments, yet all of it was trumped by one planted passport supposedly found on the street from a building disintegration that didn’t leave so much as a keyboard intact.

“They hate our Freedom” was all it took to convince the people of this county that brown people 5,000 miles away in caves with box cutters defeated the NSA, CIA, and United States Military, and ten years of evidence has yet to dissuade them from their delusional belief. The ignorance and hate emanating from the Park51 Community Center ‘controversy’ demonstrates conclusively that just as it was ten years ago, still no evidence is required to demonize an entire race or religion of brown people because American White people ‘feel’ violated based on their self-delusion and lack of historical knowledge.  The whole world is expected to capitulate to American unreasonable and outrageous demands because the people are too ignorant and fearful to know the truth of anything. 

The very people responsible for starting the two colonial wars are the ones scapegoating Muslims for the violence, and the American Islamophobic masses are all too eager to believe.  The slavers are betting (and to this point are correct) that the masses are too medicated and exhausted to reevaluate who was responsible for 9/11, and like I said – fear of ‘Black and different’ is an easy sell.  By fabricating a conflict over whether it is ‘sacrilege’ to allow a Muslim Community Center to be built four blocks from WTC in an old Burlington Coat Factory, the misdirected masses never get around to asking the real questions about 9/11 like why is there evidence of 100 Tons of Nano-thermite in WTC dust, or how could the building (WTC Building 7) that housed the SEC (All Worldcom and Enron investigation evidence), the Secret Service, the IRS, and the Office of Emergency Management be wired for demolition prior to the event, so that Larry Silverstein and the ‘Fire Department’ were able to ‘pull it’ into it’s own footprint – just like both Towers.

The real conversation gets lost in the lowest common denominators of hate and ignorance, and that is the corporate slavers’ intention.  Rather than figure out why all of the supposed hijackers are still alive, it’s easier for the people to believe box cutters made three of the most soundly constructed buildings on the planet turn to powder, and made the air force disappear for a day.  Rather than question why all of the steel beams from WTC were immediately trucked off in guarded convoys and shipped to China for meltdown without any forensic investigation, it’s easier for them to blame an entire ‘dark, foreign, and strange’ religion that had nothing to do with it.  All of this while heaping religious and moral hypocrisy upon religious and moral hypocrisy with one group trying to get a Catholic Bishop to mediate whether Muslims can build a Community Center, while another plans a Koran Book Burning.

The slavers know this, and that’s why this trumped up ‘controversy’ is all over the news along with issues like Dr. Laura’s fight for her First Amendment right to tell ‘niggers’ they are too sensitive and shouldn’t marry outside of their race.  Division and diversion away from their own motives and actions are the intent, and division and diversion are the result. If the denial in this country were not equivalent to a 15 meter thick titanium shield, it would be easily understood why turning half the population against the Alien Muslim Marxist Communist Kenyan Terrorist Manchurian (‘Nigger’) President is so easy to do, while ten years of actual fascist takeover went unnoticed.

To the top 2% (The Slave Owners) however, we are all slaves regardless of color or geographic location.  As I said some time ago in “Free in Our Time,” everyone on this planet is in Slavery whether they are cognizant of it or not. The ill-gotten wealth, power, and legacy that were built upon 500 years of injustice and the institution of slavery didn’t magically disappear at any point, it evolved into the system you call ‘Capitalism.’ There was no magic reset period where 500 years of conquest, theft, and crimes against Creation were suddenly made right, and everyone was made ‘equal’ and ‘whole.’

The empire and system of slavery still very much exists, and the fact that you remain enslaved to it is easy to define.  Individuals in this country (and on this Planet) have “jobs” which occupy most of their waking life to produce goods and services for the Institution of the Corporation for generally meager compensation, which they promptly give right back to the Institution of the Corporation for the same goods and services. At best you live in indentured servitude, but in reality you are still on the Plantation.

To even jest that equality exists in any form on this planet is preposterous.  This system has been designed and evolved with the specific purpose of steering all money, power, privilege, and influence in one direction, and no ‘equality’ can result from such a system.  For instance, if you set out to play a game of Monopoly, but your opponents Grandparents previously killed the last people that were playing the game, took all the money and property, built houses and hotels on all of it, and left you nothing but 2 dollars and starting off in jail, there’s no chance of you “working your way up” in the game.  There’s no chance of you ever becoming “equal” to your opponent.

However, this is precisely the situation the descendants of slaves and colonization face in this country and on this planet, except it’s even considerably worse than that.  Continuing the Monopoly analogy, imagine that in addition to this resource deficit you were also enslaved for 500 years prior to the game and forbidden to learn how to play, count money, or read the names of the properties under penalty of death.  Imagine that an hour before the game you are handed the instructions that you cannot read, are told you are now ‘free’ to play, and told that you are now ‘equal’ to he who has enslaved you.  For 40 minutes of that hour while you are trying to learn how to read, your opponent’s father is whipping you with a tree branch and setting your relatives on fire in an effort to scare you out of playing at all.  Clearly there is nothing resembling equality in the nature of this game, and there is no intent for there to be.

This is the farcical delusion they call the “Land of the Free.” This is the miracle of the “Free Enterprise” system.  Criminality masquerading as Civilization and always one step from being discovered as the fraud it is.  This is the reason for the sudden burst of propaganda, tax-payer funded ‘terror’ attacks, and every divisive issue since the 1950s being rolled out in the hopes of continuing to derail Evolution.  If the people of this planet actually realize the simplicity and outrageousness of their own enslavement, the Slavers know they are not long for this world. They need to reignite the fear and hatred that fueled the origin of their way of life and business, lest the truth of that business be revealed for all to see. 

This is why their biggest fear is what they call ‘redistribution of wealth.’ They want to keep all of that Monopoly money to themselves.  The slavers are very well aware that everything they have is built on the backs and bodies of slaves and that all of the ‘property’ they claim is stolen.  The fact that part of an 18th century slave ship was just found under WTC Ground Zero (something that should have gotten considerably more press than the Islamophobia diversion) is literal proof of that.  They know if that reality is understood by the masses, ‘redistribution’ is exactly what would and should happen.  So when you see the likes of Lady Lynn Forester De-Rothschild show up on MSNBC portending to be a Democrat and the voice of the little people, pay close attention to the language they use.  Once you understand the truth of their motivations, the language and fears of the slavers becomes easy to see.

It’s an outrageous Failure of the President to put confidence into the small businesses where people who have money (the ones withholding 2T in idle funds while the slaves starve) would be willing to spend money.  To give people confidence that the Government is behind the creation of wealth (meaning giving them the 1T tax cut) instead of really the distribution of wealth (spending it on ANY worthwhile social, educational, humanitarian, or infrastructure project).

Let the private sector (the slave owners), let the genius of American entrepreneurial spirit take over, not the sense of entitlement (humanity and equality) that president Obama always talks about.  He talks about our need to give, we are people who build (steal). That’s what made America, America.  This Democrat is messing with the sauce of American goodness, American greatness.

What made America, America, was genocide, slavery, theft, and deception.  You may not like our history, but it doesn’t change the reality of it.  Every time the President (or anyone else) proclaims “This is America” like it places us above reproach, it demonstrates the pathological denial that he and this country suffer from. Until you face the truth of this country’s origin and modus operandi, whatever you believe in is based on a Disneyland fraud.  If that seems harsh, it’s your own fault for spending 500 years in denial. 

Based on this country’s historical record, the evidence of the resulting state of humanity and the planet, and the magnification of the behavior exhibited over the last ten years, neither this country nor this religion can feign moral superiority (or even perspective) on any matter at all until it faces the incalculable mountain of deception and fraud upon which its empire was built.  Descendants of slavers who are still slavers, yet deny they are slavers or descendants of slavers, can no longer be afforded ‘free speech rights’ or moral standing to continue their denial, diversion, and deception.

For starters, always use the phrase ‘the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.’ Your audience must be reminded again of Haiti’s exceptional poverty. It’s doubtful that other articles have mentioned this fact.

You are struck by the ‘resilience’ of the Haitian people. They will survive no matter how poor they are. They are stoic, they rarely complain, and so they are admirable. The best poor person is one who suffers quietly. A two-sentence quote about their misery fitting neatly into your story is all that’s needed.

On your last visit you became enchanted with Haiti. You are in love with its colorful culture and feel compelled to return. You care so much about these hard-working people. You are here to help them. You are their voice. They cannot speak for themselves.

Don’t listen if the Haitians speak loudly or become unruly. You might be in danger, get out of there. Protests are not to be taken seriously. The participants were probably all paid to be there. All Haitian politicians are corrupt or incompetent. Find a foreign authority on Haiti to talk in stern terms about how they must shape up or cede power to incorruptible outsiders.

The US Embassy and United Nations always issue warnings that demonstrations are security threats. It is all social unrest. If protesters are beaten, gassed, or shot at by UN peacekeepers, they probably deserved it for getting out of control. Do not investigate their constant claims of being abused.

It was so violent right after the January 2010 earthquake. ‘Looters’ fought over goods ‘stolen’ from collapsed stores. Escaped prisoners were causing mayhem. It wasn’t necessary to be clear about how many people were actually hurt or died in fighting. The point is that it was scary.

Now many of those looters are ‘squatters’ in ‘squalid’ camps. Their tent cities are ‘teeming’ with people, like anthills. You saw your colleagues use these words over and over in their reports, so you should too. You do not have time to check a thesaurus before deadline.

Point out that Port-au-Prince is overcrowded. Do not mention large empty plots of green land around the city. Of course, it is not possible to explain that occupying US Marines forcibly initiated Haiti’s shift from distributed, rural growth to centralized governance in the capital city. It will not fit within your word count. Besides, it is ancient history.

If you must mention Haiti’s history, refer vaguely to Haiti’s long line of power-hungry, corrupt rulers. The ‘iron-fisted’ Duvaliers, for example. Don’t mention 35 years of US support for that dictatorship. The slave revolt on which Haiti was founded was ‘bloody’ and ‘brutal.’ These words do not apply to modern American offensives in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Today, Cite Soleil is the most dangerous slum in the world. There is no need to back up this claim with evidence. It is ‘sprawling.’ Again, there’s no time for the thesaurus. Talk about ruthless gangs, bullet holes, pigs and trash. Filth everywhere. Desperate people are eating cookies made of dirt and mud! That always grabs the reader’s attention.

Stick close to your hired security or embed yourself with UN troops. You can’t walk out on your own to profile generous, regular folk living in tight-knit neighborhoods. They are helpless victims, grabbing whatever aid they can. You haven’t seen them calmly dividing food amongst themselves, even though it’s common practice.

Better to report on groups that periodically enter from outside to deliver food to starving kids (take photos!). Don’t talk to the youth of Cite Soleil about how proud they are of where they come from. Probably gang members. Almost everyone here supports ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But their views aren’t relevant. There is no need to bring politics into your story.

You can’t forget to do another story about restaveks. Child slaves. It’s so shocking. There is little new information about restaveks, so just recycle old statistics. Present it as a uniquely Haitian phenomenon. Enslaved Haitian farmworkers in southern Florida, for example, aren’t nearly as interesting.

When you come back here in six months, there will still be a lot of desperate poor people who have received little to no help. There are many big, inefficient foreign NGOs in Haiti. Clearly something is wrong. Breathless outrage is the appropriate tone.

But do not try to get to the bottom of the issue. Be sure to mention that aid workers are doing the best they can. Their positive intentions matter more than the results. Don’t name names of individuals or groups who are performing poorly. Reports about food stocks sitting idly in individual warehouses are good. Investigations into why NGOs are failing to effect progress in Haiti are boring and too difficult. Do not explore Haitian-led alternatives to foreign development schemes. There are none. Basically, don’t do any reporting that could change the system.

On the other hand, everyone here loves Bill Clinton and Wyclef Jean. There are no dissenting views on this point. Never mind that neither lives here. Never mind that Clinton admitted to destroying Haiti’s domestic rice economy in the ’90s. Never mind that Jean’s organization has repeatedly mismanaged relief funds. That’s all in the past. They represent Haiti’s best hope for the future. Their voices matter, which means the media must pay close attention to them, which means their voices matter, which means the media must …

Finally, when you visit Haiti again: Stay in the same expensive hotels. Don’t live close to the people. Produce lots of stories and make money. Pull up in your rented SUV to a camp of people who lost their homes, still living under the wind and rain. Step out into the mud with your waterproof boots. Fresh notepad in hand. That ragged-looking woman is yelling at you that she needs help, not another foreigner taking her photo. Her 3-year-old boy is standing there, clinging to her leg. Her arms are raised, mouth agape, and you can’t understand her because you don’t speak Haitian Creole.

Remove the lens cap and snap away. And when you’ve captured enough of Haiti’s drama, fly away back home.

Flaherty’s most recent articles have tackled a variety of important stories. His article, Jena Sheriff Seeks Revenge for Civil Rights Protests, follows up on the Jena Six story and exposes a wave of post-Jena 6 arrests directed at activists and the Black community in general. New Complaints of Police Violence in New Orleans, reports that “New Orleans’ Black and transgender community members and advocates complain of rampant and systemic harassment and discrimination from the city’s police force, including sexual violence and arrest without cause,” and then the article provides a voice to the activists who are fighting back. Did a White Sheriff and District Attorney Orchestrate a Race-Based Coup in a Northern Louisiana Town? focuses on a town called Waterproof, where “the African American mayor and police chief assert that they have been forced from office and arrested as part of an illegal coup carried out by an alliance of white politicians and their followers.”

This summer, Haymarket Books will release his new book, Floodlines: Stories of Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, and this fall he will be touring with the Community and Resistance Tour. Contact him at gro.nruttfelnull@snaelrowen. For more information on the book and tour, please see floodlines.org.

Angola 3 News: Can you please tell us about your upcoming book?

Jordan Flaherty: Floodlines is a firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans in the years before and after Katrina. The book weaves the interconnected stories of prisoners at Angola, Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, public housing residents, gay rappers, spoken word poets, victims of police brutality, out of town volunteers, and grassroots activists.

From post-Katrina evacuee camps to organizing with the family members of the Jena Six, Floodlines is the real story behind the headlines. The protagonists of this book are the people who have led the fight to save New Orleans.

A3N: What will it show readers about New Orleans and LA that they won’t get from the corporate media?

JF: If this city is going to recover, the first step is getting out the truth that New Orleans is not okay. Most of the country believes either that New Orleans has been rebuilt, or that, if not, it’s because people here are lazy and/or corrupt and wasted the nation’s generous assistance. But New Orleans is still a city in crisis. The oft-promised aid, whether from FEMA or various federal and private agencies, has not arrived. We don’t need charity, but we do need the federal and corporate entities responsible for the devastation of New Orleans to be held accountable for supporting its rebuilding. I want the world to know that it’s not too late to make a difference.

The other crucial element of this book is a tribute to grassroots resistance and culture in New Orleans. People like Sunni Patterson, Norris Henderson, Rosana Cruz, Sess 4-5, and the many other organizers and culture workers who have cultivated this steadfast resistance.

A3N: What is one of your favorite stories from the book?

JF: A central story I focus on is the case of the Jena Six, and the people’s victory it represents. Our movements should be proud of what happened in Jena. We should claim it as a success. Fifty thousand people marched in Jena, in a mass movement led by the family members of these six kids who were facing life in prison for a school fight. These Jena families didn’t have the corporate media behind them, they didn’t have money or mainstream civil rights organizations supporting them. All of that came eventually. But for months, these families were on their own, and they kept struggling and fighting for justice against incredible odds.

The massive national support these courageous families brought together helped the students. All of them remained in school rather than going to prison – and they are all now either in college or on their way. Without the world watching, the DA and judge could have done whatever they wanted.

Jena was more than a historical moment. I think that the young people from around the US – and especially the south – who traveled to Jena for the mass protests, and who also organized in solidarity in their own community, will continue to lead exciting struggles. I think we will see a Jena Generation.

A3N: You have written several articles focusing on the Angola 3. How do you think the story of the Angola 3 fits into the broader picture of injustice in Louisiana?

JF: Every year, thousands of New Orleanians are shipped upstate (or upriver) to prisons like Angola and Elayn Hunt. In telling the story of New Orleans, it’s important to tell the story of these institutions.

The United States has the largest incarcerated population of any nation on earth — the people imprisoned here represent 25 percent of all prisoners around the world. Nationwide, more than seven million people are in U.S. jails, on probation, or on parole, and African Americans are incarcerated at nearly ten times the rate of whites. Our criminal justice system has become an insatiable machine — even when crime rates go down, the prison population keeps rising.

The state of Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration in the United States — 816 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 state residents. By comparison, Texas places a distant second with 694 per 100,000. African Americans make up 32 percent of Louisiana’s population but they constitute 72 percent of the state’s prison population.

Prison makes us all less free — by breaking up families and communities, by dehumanizing the imprisoned both during and after, by perpetuating a cycle of poverty, and by making all citizens complicit in the incarceration of their fellow human beings. Since so many New Orleanians live in prisons around the state, the stories from these prisons are also the stories of New Orleans itself. Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Orleans Parish Prison, and all the other prisons of this state are central to the narrative of New Orleans’s poor and dispossessed.

Angola or another “lifers’ prison” is frequently the final stop on an unjust journey that begins with children born into substandard health care and housing; then shuttled into a school system that treats them like criminals from a young age; then left with few job options in a tourism-based economy in which corporations such as those that own the city’s hotels profit while the residents are left out; and finally entangled in a criminal justice system that treats them as guilty until proven innocent. This is the “cradle-to-prison pipeline,” and nowhere is it more entrenched than here in New Orleans.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the injustice perpetrated by this system is the case the Angola Three, locked in solitary confinement because of their political beliefs.

Statements by Angola warden, Burl Cain, have made clear that Woodfox and Wallace are being punished for their political views. At a 2009 deposition, attorneys for Woodfox asked Cain, “Let’s just for the sake of argument assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent Miller.” Cain responded, “Okay. I would still keep him in [solitary]…I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the Blacks chasing after them….He has to stay in a cell while he’s at Angola.”

Louisiana attorney general James “Buddy” Caldwell has said the case against the Angola Three is “personal” to him. These statements by Caldwell and Cain indicate that this kind of vigilante attitude not only pervades the DOC, but that the mindset, in fact, comes from the very top.

The problem is not limited to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola —similar stories can be found in prisons across the country. American Friends Service Committee reported that on any given day in the United States, up to two hundred thousand men and women are held in solitary confinement. The director of the ACLU’s National Prisoner Project, Elizabeth Alexander, told reporters, “If you look at the iconic pictures from Abu Ghraib, you can match up these photos with the same abuses at American prisons, each one of them.”

A 2008 legal petition filed by Herman Wallace echoed Alexander’s words. “If Guantanamo Bay has been a national embarrassment and symbol of the US government’s relation to charges, trials and torture, then what is being done to the Angola Three… is what we are to expect if we fail to act quickly….The government tries out its torture techniques on prisoners in the US — just far enough to see how society will react. It doesn’t take long before they unleash their techniques on society as a whole.” If we don’t stand up against this abuse now, it will only spread, he argued. The vigilante violence enacted on the streets of New Orleans after Katrina — condoned and carried out in part by the police — is one example of the truth of Wallace’s predictions.

The case of the Angola Three is truly an international issue, and Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King are an important part of the city’s civil rights history. Among those who know this history, the Angola Three are an urgent and ongoing concern.

A3N: Any closing thoughts?

JF: Those who have not experienced New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city—a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority–African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and hip-hop to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, and jazz funerals, New Orleans is a place of art and music and food and liberation.

New Orleans is a city of slave revolts and uprisings. In 1811, the largest slave uprising in U.S. history was launched just up river, as more than five hundred armed formerly enslaved fighters marched toward New Orleans, partially inspired by the Haitian revolution. As one historian described, “The leaders [of the revolt] were intent on creating an [enslaved persons] army, capturing the city of New Orleans, and seizing state power throughout the area.” Although the revolt was defeated, it inspired more over the following years.

In 1892, Homer Plessy and the Citizens Committee planned the direct action that brought the first (unsuccessful) legal challenge to the doctrine of “separate but equal” — the challenge that became the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy, part of a community of Creole Black intellectuals and community leaders, boarded an all-white railcar after notifying the railroad company and law enforcement in advance. While the action was ultimately unsuccessful, it was an important turning point in this long history of locally led resistance to racist laws.

You could say the spirit of the Panthers was born in Louisiana. The Deacons for Defense, an armed self-defense group formed in rural central Louisiana in 1964, inspired the Panthers and other radical groups. The Deacons went on to form twenty-one chapters in rural Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, continuing a legacy of defiance that inspired future generations. Several civil rights workers and future revolutionaries were born in this state, including Black Panther leader, Geronimo Ji-Jaga, born in Morgan City, and founder, Huey P. Newton, born in Monroe. Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, also known as H. Rap Brown, former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later the justice minister of the Black Panther Party, was from Baton Rouge. Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton’s parents were also from Louisiana.

So there is an intense and terrible history of racism and white supremacy in New Orleans, but also an incredible history of resistance, and that is what I am trying to pay tribute to in Floodlines.

Professor Gates’s arguments aren’t original and they effectively absolve the U.S. and Europe of primary responsibility for slavery and other imperial crimes.

He claims that, in assigning guilt for the enslavement of some 12 million Africans, “There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.”

Why does Professor Gates find the seemingly obvious culpability of the U.S. and European colonial powers so vexing? He argues that since African kingdoms actively participated in the slave trade providing captives to the European slave traders, they share equal responsibility for the crime of slavery. Therefore, for Gates, it’s difficult to determine who should pay reparations, if anyone.

Gates looks to President Obama, given his African and American heritage, “to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike on of the greatest evils in the history of civilization.”

While Gates never quite says so in his article, he for all intents and purposes opposes reparations because of this supposed shared guilt.

Gates has put himself in strange company. The ex-leftist and now right wing fanatic, David Horowitz, made essentially the same case against reparations in his notorious 2001 article “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks–and Racist Too.”

Horowitz’s first reason for opposing reparations is “There is no single group clearly responsible for the crime of slavery.” He argues, “Black African and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African Americans. There were 3,000 black slave owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?”

It’s shocking to say the least that Gates, a black liberal and recent victim of racist police harassment in Cambridge, Mass., should find common ground with a bottom-feeder like Horowitz who campaigns against Black Studies programs. The fact that Gates is a bedfellow with Horowitz, while it should trigger our suspicion and outrage, doesn’t refute his argument.

First of all, Gates’s main point that some African rulers were involved in the slave trade, which he presents as some new revelation, is common knowledge to anyone who has read even some of the voluminous literature on slavery.

As historian Eric Foner wrote in a letter in the New York Times:

Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes that African rulers and merchants were deeply complicit in the Atlantic slave trade. Despite Mr. Gates’s contention that “there is very little discussion” of this fact, it hardly qualifies as news; today, virtually every history of slavery and every American history textbook includes this information.

Gates is using known facts to make an absurd claim that European powers and African kingdoms have some kind of equivalent responsibility for slavery. In reality, Europe and the U.S. are primarily to blame for the horrors of slave catching, the Middle Passage and new world slavery.

Their demand for slave labor transformed the patriarchal slave system in Africa into a new and different system to supply chattel slaves for plantations. Of course, African rulers in various kingdoms participated in the process for their own purposes. So did a few thousand black slaveholders in the U.S.

To equate the main perpetrators of the system of modern slavery–the European and white American merchants and slaveholders–with its African bit players is simply illogical. It would be like equally apportioning blame between the U.S. and its puppet regime in South Vietnam for the killing of 4 million Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

That’s ridiculous. The U.S., not its puppet, was responsible for that slaughter. In the same manner, Europe and America, not their African collaborators, hold primary responsibility for the horrendous crime of slavery.

Moreover, the vast majority of Africans and Black Americans in no way collaborated with the slave trade and exploitation of slave labor. Only a tiny number of African rulers and black slaveholders did. The vast majority of Africans and Black Americans were slavery’s victims.

Therefore, the U.S. and European states as well as the numerous corporations that participated in the slave trade should pay reparations to its Black American and African victims.

Gate’s argument, while fairly easily refuted, plays a pernicious role in domestic and international politics. Inside the U.S., Gates provides cover for the Obama administration’s failure to redress racial inequality in America. Black unemployment is at record levels, public education has become as segregated as it was in the 1950s, and as every study documents, Blacks face systematic discrimination in everything from housing to hiring and police harassment.

In this context, Gates decides to write a column arguing that Obama is in a special position to assert the equal culpability of whites and blacks for slavery and therefore against reparations to African Americans. Whether consciously or not, Gates strengthens the forces on the right who argue that we are in a post-racial, even post-racist, society where we don’t need special legislation and programs like reparations for African Americans and other racially oppressed groups.

Gates has joined a chorus of liberals who displace blame for conditions in Africa away from imperialism and onto African rulers. As Margaret Kimberly writes:

[S]everal years ago, Gates proudly showed the world how little he knew in the PBS documentary series “Wonders of Africa.” In the slave trade segment, Gates’s only moment of anger was directed at an Ashanti Prince. If Gates wants to wax righteously indignant, he should interrogate a member of the Brown family of Brown University. The Brown fortune was made through slavery, as were many others. Gates ought to give a Brown descendant the third degree on camera.

But Gates knows enough not to bite the hand that feeds him. Ensconced at Harvard, he’s not about to attack let alone demand reparations from the Ivy League institutions built on the backs of the slave trade. Instead, Gates wants to shift blame from its rightful place onto petty collaborators.

Bush and the right wing utterly failed to accomplish this when they bungled the debate over reparations by boycotting the Durban Conference on Racism. Gates hopes that Obama will better present the argument of equal culpability for slavery on both sides of the Atlantic to enable the U.S. to escape the demand for reparations.

Back in the real world, as Walter Rodney rightly argued in his classic book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, first the European slave trade and then colonization pushed Africa’s economic development backwards. That legacy of imperialism is largely responsible for the situation in many African countries today. No academic trickery or poetic rhetoric can obscure this fact.

But Gates’s argument for U.S. imperialism extends far beyond the case of African reparations. He’s trying to shift blame from American and European imperialism onto its victims right at the moment when demands are rising for reparations on many fronts.

African nations have called for reparations for slavery most dramatically in 2001 at the anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa. Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, before he was overthrown by a U.S.-backed coup in 2004, agitated for $21 billion in reparations from France, which forced the country it lost to a slave revolution in 1804 to pay for its loss of property–its ex-slaves.

The antiwar movement, the Iraq Veterans Against the War in particular, has raised the call for reparations for Iraq and Afghanistan for the destruction of those two societies. And the international movement against climate change, which recently held a summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia, just issued a demand for the industrialized world to pay climate reparations to the developing world.

In this situation, Gates is providing academic alibis for the U.S. and Europe to evade responsibility for their imperial crimes.

We know the U.S. and European governments and corporations–firms like FleetBoston Financial Corporation, Aetna Group Insurance and CSX railroad–who have the blood of slaves on their hands and profits from the slave trade in their coffers. They should be made to pay.

There is ample precedent for supporting these demands. The U.S. has made indemnity payments to Japanese Americans who were jailed in internment camps during the Second World War, to American Indians for the theft of their lands and mineral rights, and to Filipino veterans that fought with the U.S. Army during Second World War.

There’s also precedent for specific compensation for Black victims of racism. For example, in 1997, President Bill Clinton paid $10 million to Black victims and their families to compensate for syphilis experiments conducted on in 1930s by the Public Health Service.

The recipients of reparations shouldn’t be the black elite, but working-class Blacks whose slave forbears were the systems victims and who today suffer under the legacy of slavery in the form of racism and poverty. As Earl Ofari Hutchinson argues

Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and other mega-rich blacks will not receive a penny in reparations. Any tax money to redress black suffering should into a fund for HIV/AIDS education and prevention and underfinanced inner-city public schools; should expand job skills and training, drug and alcohol counseling and rehabilitation, and computer access and literacy training programs; and should improve public services for the estimated one in four blacks still trapped in poverty.

Internationally, Africa, Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan–to name just a few–all deserve reparations from the U.S. and Europe. The struggle for reparations is a part and parcel of a larger fight to redistribute money from the bloated Pentagon budget and super-rich to the majority of society here and around the world.

If we can win reparations for slavery and imperialism, we can raise everyone’s aspirations to take the money back from those who have stolen it from us through exploitation and oppression. Contrary to the sophistic arguments of Professor Gates, the demand for reparations is therefore a key element in the fight for a whole new society that puts people’s needs before profit and empire.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

– 13th Amendment, 1865

An 18,000-acre former slave plantation in rural Louisiana, the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is the largest prison in the U.S. Today, with African Americans composing over 75% of Angola’s 5,108 prisoners, prison guards known as “free men,” a forced 40-hour workweek, and four cents an hour as minimum wage, the resemblance to antebellum U.S. slavery is striking. In the early 1970s, it was even worse, as prisoners were forced to work 96-hour weeks (16 hours a day/six days a week) with two cents an hour as minimum wage. Officially considered (according to its own website) the “Bloodiest Prison in the South” at this time, violence from guards and between prisoners was endemic. Prison authorities sanctioned prisoner rape, and according to former Prison Warden Murray Henderson, the prison guards actually helped facilitate a brutal system of sexual slavery where the younger and physically weaker prisoners were bought and sold into submission. As part of the notorious “inmate trusty guard” system, responsible for killing 40 prisoners and seriously maiming 350 between 1972-75, some prisoners were given state-issued weapons and ordered to enforce this sexual slavery, as well as the prison’s many other injustices. Life at Angola was living hell — a 20th century slave plantation.

Black Panthers Robert Hillary King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace are known as the “Angola Three.” Woodfox and Wallace were co-founders of a Black Panther Party chapter at Angola in the early 1970s. These Panthers saw life at Angola as modern-day slavery and fought back with non-violent hunger strikes and work strikes. Prison authorities were outraged by the BPP’s organizing, and retaliated by framing these three BPP organizers for murders that they did not commit. Woodfox and Wallace were both framed for the 1972 stabbing death of white prison guard Brent Miller, and have now spent over 37 years in solitary confinement. King was framed for a 1973 murder of another prisoner, and spent 29 years in solitary confinement until he was released from in 2001 after his conviction was overturned.

This new video released by Angola 3 News is the third part of an interview conducted with Robert King and Terry Kupers in October 2009, in Oakland, CA. when King was in town for Black Panther History Month. In the first two parts King and Kupers discussed the psychological impact of imprisonment (watch here). In this new video, Robert King and Dr. Terry Kupers, argue that slavery persists today in Angola and other U.S. prisons, citing the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which legalizes slavery in prisons as “a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” As King says: “You can be legally incarcerated but morally innocent.”

Dr. Terry Kupers, M.D., M.S.P. wrote the introduction to Robert King’s 2008 autobiography entitled From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Robert Hillary King, and is Institute Professor at The Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. Dr. Kupers is a psychiatrist with a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, forensics and social and community psychiatry. His forensic psychiatry experience includes testimony in several large class action litigations concerning jail and prison conditions, sexual abuse, and the quality of mental health services inside correctional facilities. He is a consultant to Human Rights Watch, and author of the 1999 book entitled Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It.

This video features archival photos from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Wall Street Journal editor Douglas A. Blackmon, entitled Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. The book’s website states:

In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—when a cynical new form of slavery was resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War and re-imposed on hundreds of thousands of African-Americans until the dawn of World War II.

Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel Corp.—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies which discouraged prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black workers against their wills. As it poured millions of dollars into southern government treasuries, the new slavery also became a key instrument in the terrorization of African Americans seeking full participation in the U.S. political system.

Angola 3 News: Please tell us about your recent visit to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola this past month.

Nancy A. Heitzeg: I was at Angola with a University-level off-campus class I was teaching on Racism in the Criminal Justice System. Students and I were in New Orleans for a week where we met with Sister Helen Prejean and did some work for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. I had been to Angola once before and both tours were comparable.

I should say that it is surprisingly simple to get a tour at Angola – just call the Museum, fill out a form and just turn up. No background checks, no IDs and no trips through metal detectors—which, of course, I have experienced at other prisons even when I was an invited speaker. You can and we did even drive our own vehicle through the grounds on the tour with a tour guide who rides along. Of course matters would be much different if one was at Angola to visit an inmate.

A3N: What happened during the tour?

NAH: The tour is quite extensive—we were there for 6 hours—and consisted of the following stops/activities:

• Guard/employee Village: A small “town”—built by inmates of course—house about 200 employees that live and work there with their families. Kids are bused in and out of the prison gates to outside schools. The town sits in the shadow of the Warden’s new mansion atop a high hilltop—built again by inmate labor.

• The Dog Kennels: Angola is very proud of their dog breeding and training operation, which includes Bloodhounds, German Shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, and wolves. They are attempting to breed a more “vicious” attack dog by crossing Shepherds with the metaphoric “black wolf” they have. It is Mengelian really. Dogs are trained to track and attack unruly and escaping inmates. Some are trained to sniff drugs and contraband—some sold to law enforcement.

• Point Look-Out: The inmate cemetery for those whose bodies are not claimed and removed by relatives after death. Angola now claims a “dignified burial” for inmates by actually giving them a coffin! A coffin made, of course, by other inmates—and a horse drawn hearse procession. The coffin-making work drew recent attention when Billy Graham’s wife Ruth was buried in one. Point Look-Out has recently been renamed—ironically—for the slain guard Brent Miller, which does not seem to bode well for Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, of the Angola 3, who were convicted of Miller’s 1972 death (note: Miller’s widow, Leontine Verrett, now questions their guilt and has called for a new investigation into the case).

• The Horse Barn: Angola loves its horses. They have quarter horses, Percherons, some thoroughbreds and mules. Again mad breeding experiments—crossing Percherons with mules and thoroughbreds—these, of course, are for sale at auction, often to law enforcement agencies.

• The “Red Hat”: The most chillingly evil place I have ever been. The Red Hat is a Louisiana “Historical Landmark”—it is a cement cellblock with maybe forty 8 x 8 cells. It is cold as ice regardless of the weather outside and still smells of death and suffering even though it is open to ventilation. The Red Hat was built in the 1930s and was used for disciplinary purposes and public execution. The original electric chair with its old generator and battery is there. This is the chair that failed to kill Willie Lee Francis the first time in 1947, so yes, they had to “execute” him twice. Anywhere from 6-13 inmates were thrown naked into a single cell for punishment. This facility was used until 1973! Tour guides tell the story of Charlie Frazier who murdered two guards in the cane fields and escaped. After apprehension and upon his extradition from Texas, he was put in the last cell on the left and the door and window were welded closed. He lived that way for 7 years until he became ill and died. This is supposed to be a great story of punishment and justice served.

• The New Death House: Tours do not go in, but the new larger death house is further inside the property. There were complaints that it was too close to the gate and outer perimeter. There was an escape from the old death house in the late 1990s where 3 inmates made it out and off the prison property.

• The Execution Chamber: Tours go right in and stand by the lethal injection table. Louisiana used the electric chair until 1991—there is still a ventilator which was used to clear the smell of burned flesh. The witness rooms are small. Louisiana does not allow an inmate’s family to witness an execution and Warden Cain edits and reads the inmate’s last words. Angola owns all of you, even this.

• Inmate “Dormitory”: Tours walk right into and through a “typical” 90 bed dormitory as if the inmates there were invisible. A bed and a trunk for possessions is what you get. Due to state budget crunches, Angola may go to double-bunks in these dorms.

• Lunch: For $3, tours can eat what the entire prison eats. The day I was there it was a grease soaked piece of fish, rice in bacon grease, a biscuit, 2 greasy cookies and some sugar flavored drink. Needless to say, we looked at the trays and went without.

• Visit with the editor of The Angolite: This takes place in the Visitor Center where inmates are bused to meet their guests and where parole hearings and other legal proceedings take place. Since the release of Wilbur Rideau, Kerry Myers has been the editor and the inmate who speaks to tours. He is a white middle-class man who is serving life without parole for the 2nd Degree Murder of his wife. Myers told 2 different versions of his crime when I visited so I looked up his case which is actually infamous—the subject of a book and TV movie. Unlike most inmates who spend at least 3 months and in many cases 10 years toiling in the fields planting by hand, Myers was offered a 20 cents an hour job at The Angolite just 45 days into his incarceration there. Race and class privilege rule even here.

• Radio Station: The “Incarceration Station” broadcasts live to all seven prison complexes at Angola. Inmate DJs play mostly gospel but it also serves as a means for communicating to all facilities during emergencies.

• Museum/Gift Shop: Here are many lots of displays of Angola’s history—weapons, a section on the Red Hat, the “heeling” incident, and “Gruesome Gertie,” which is the last electric chair, with photos of all executed inmates since 1981—the most recent in January 2010. There is a rodeo display, a section in Angola as portrayed in films such as Dead Man Walking and Monster’s Ball, a history of escape attempts and more. Angola’s reputation as “the bloodiest prison in America” is portrayed as an artifact of the past. We are led to believe that Angola is now a peaceful, humane institution where religion has ushered in a new era of calm, but the inmate who works as a janitor and likes to talk will tell you different. Warden Cain may run a less overtly brutal regime than previous wardens, but much repression is now just more hidden from public view. Warden Cain is quite adept at public relations. Of course you can buy Cain’s book at the gift shop and lots of junk with his name all over it, including small bales of cotton.

A3N: How much do you think things have changed since Angola was infamously labeled “the bloodiest prison in America?”

NAH: The tours are apparently part of Warden Burl Cain’s efforts to make Angola seem more humane, safe and open, in an effort to undo the image of Angola as “the bloodiest prison in America.” On the surface, I suppose what visitors see on the tour could reinforce that notion because there is regular interaction with inmate trustees, trips into inmate “dormitories” and never any sense of danger or risk. Of course, there is a great emphasis on the role of religion. For example, there is the new Graham Foundation Chapel, KLSP Incarceration Station that plays mostly gospel and the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary program. All of this emphasizes conservative evangelical Christianity over other faith traditions. Religion is clearly seen and used at Angola as a source of social control. Warden Cain has said that “the only true rehabilitation is moral.”

But many questions remain about what is unseen or unspoken unless you directly ask. Inmates still try to escape and as many as 1200 inmates—about 20% of the total population of over 5100—are in administrative segregation/lock-down at the notorious Camp J. These inmates are granted their one hour of “exercise” in an incredibly small dog kennel-like cage and are forced to remain handcuffed during their brief time out (this is apparently the response to inmates “flashing” female guards in the tower). An array of deadly weapons is still confiscated weekly, and there is reportedly on-going use of dogs and other force to control the population. Sexual assault is also reportedly still an issue and the obituary column in The Angolite often refers to deaths of relatively young inmates in Camp J without noting cause of death, as it does in other obituaries.

If allowed to, inmates also offer a critique of The World Famous Angola Rodeo, where inmates participate for cash prizes at great risk. There have been several inmate deaths at the rodeo as well as extreme injuries and on-going chronic conditions. Inmates are allowed to sell crafts at the rodeo but the Warden/prison takes a 20% cut. The rodeo makes approximately $1 million each weekend in October as the new arena (built by inmates in short order under Cain’s directive) seats 10,000. This is just one of several money-making endeavors at Angola that depends on neo-slave inmate labor starting at 2 cents per hour—the minimum wage had been raised to 4 cents per hour but was recently returned to 2 cents, according to the tour guide. The highest available wage for a few rare jobs is 20 cents per hour.

Despite the supposedly benign tour, both students and I were horrified. There is a cavalier attitude, a blasé acceptance of capital punishment, mass incarceration and of course little critique of the class and race dynamics of the inmate population—80% of whom are black and nearly all of whom were poor, under-educated and dependent on a public defender at trial. There is passive acceptance and even sometimes celebration of Louisiana’s harsh sentences—it has the highest incarceration rate in the US—and of the fact that 90% of the inmates will die there and 80% will receive no visitors after 5 years.

Angola is reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s description of the plantation “Sweet Home” in her novel Beloved—a physically beautiful and natural space that is the site of great hidden suffering and degradation. It is a place where men are made to be docile “yes sir” and “yes ma’m” boys—where only the compliant and subservient are slightly rewarded, but are still disappeared, invisible and inconsequential to those inside and outside the gates. Yes, you can survive and maybe work a tolerable job there after decades of submission–but at what cost? And, what of the rest who resist?

Those who want to learn more should watch the films –The Farm and The Farm: 10 Years Down. A word of caution though: while much is revealed, they do, in my estimation, especially in the second film, over-estimate an inmate’s chances of leaving Angola and “success” of the moralistic program imposed by Warden Cain. The stories of George Crawford and Vincent Simmons are much more typical than those of Ashanti Witherspoon and Bishop Tannehill.

A3N: Many people call Angola Prison a “modern day slave plantation.” Do you think this is a fair label?

NAH: Absolutely. Angola was and is still is very much a plantation. At 18,000 acres, it is the largest prison in the US—the only prison with its own zip code. Mostly black men are still maintaining the same agricultural activity—planting, hoeing, picking cotton and other crops by hand—that slaves did originally. And they are doing so as captives who are compensated for their back-breaking labor with mere pennies per hour. While Warden Cain may not be Simon Legree, he is still a plantation master—albeit one who uses Christianity as a means of controlling the neo-slave labor under his watch. The very same practices and social control mechanism that existed under slavery persist—just under a new name.

My interest in Angola is as both a paradigm of the Southern transformation of plantations into prisons and as a prototype for what we now call the prison industrial complex. Many old plantations in the South became prisons after the Civil War. Angela Y. Davis traces the initial rise of the penitentiary system to the abolition of slavery, writing: “in the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for the newly released slaves.”

Slave Codes became Black Codes and criminalized a range of activities if the perpetrator was black. The newly acquired 15th Amendment right to vote was curtailed by tailoring of felony disenfranchisement laws to include crimes that were supposedly more frequently committed by blacks. And, the liberatory promise of the 13th Amendment – “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States” – contained a dangerous loophole: “except as a punishment for crime”. This allowed for the conversion of the old plantations to penitentiaries, and this, with the introduction of the convict lease system, permitted the South to continue to economically benefit from the unpaid labor of blacks.

The patterns established in the old south have proliferated and expanded throughout the US, as African Americans are disproportionately policed, prosecuted, convicted, disenfranchised and imprisoned in the prison industrial complex. There has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codified explicitly into the law and to a de facto racism where people of color, especially African Americans, are subject to unequal protection of the laws, excessive surveillance, extreme segregation and neo-slave labor via incarceration—all in the name of “crime control”. It is the current manifestation of the legal legacy of the racialized transformations of plantations into prisons, of Slave Codes into Black Codes, of lynching into state-sponsored executions. The “imputation of crime to color” that Frederick Douglass warned of 125 years ago continues to the present.

In 1990, the UN Commission on Human Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography with a mandate to investigate the problem and submit reports to the General Assembly.

Today, Gulnara Shahinian holds the post, and on June 10, 2009 addressed Haiti’s Restaveks, a century-old system under which impoverished families, mostly rural and unable to adequately provide for their children, send them to live with wealthier or less poor ones in return for food, shelter, education, and a better life in return for tasks performed as servants — de facto slaves subjected to verbal and physical abuse.

Some as young as three are beaten, forced to do anything asked, request nothing, speak only when spoken to, display no emotion, and receive none of the benefits parents expected, just exploitation and mistreatment that’s often severe. Too often it’s from relatives as poor families often send their children to live with those better able to provide care, yet they seldom do.

Haiti’s poor also use them to help with domestic and other chores, and some work for homeless families under the worst of conditions, including nothing to eat for days, harder work, greater abuse, at times whippings leaving scars, getting attacked by rats in their sleep or street predators any time, and being easy prey for kidnappers who seize them for prostitution or forced labor, internally or abroad.

On July 10, 2009, Shahinian released a report titled, “Promotion and Protection of all Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, including the Right to Development” covering contemporary forms of slavery that affect adults and children.

She called it a global issue in traditional and emerging forms that haven’t been sufficiently addressed. She also found that where laws on forced labor exist, enforcement is limited, and “very few policies and programmes… address bonded labour.” They should given its scale worldwide, affecting an estimated 27 million people conservatively and very likely many more as much of the problem is unreported.

In March 2009, this writer addressed it in an article titled, “Modern Slavery in America.” It’s disturbing and pervasive despite US laws prohibiting all forms of human trafficking through statutes created or strengthened by the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) providing for imprisonment for up to 20 years or longer as well as other penalties. Other laws were also enacted, including the 2003 Protect Act to end child exploitation.

Yet slavery exists in different forms, affecting farm workers, domestic help, factory and other sweatshop labor, restaurant and hotel work, guest workers on US military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and most of all for prostitution and sex services that exploit children as well as adults.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines forced labor as follows:

“… all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which said person has not offered himself (or herself) voluntarily.”

Forced child labor is:

(a) all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict;

(b) the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for pornographic performances;

(c) the use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties; (and)

(d) work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.

The Free the Slaves.net‘s definition is being “forced to work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk away.”

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

If sweatshop wage slavery is included, the problem is far greater, affecting many hundreds of millions of exploited workers globally, including a 2004 UNICEF estimate of about 218 million children performing labor (other than domestic), some as young as five, many in forced bondage, the majority doing hazardous work, and governments doing little or nothing to protect them.

On December 29, 1994, Haiti ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Under its provisions, authorities issue reports on the problem as required, but little else. Until he was ousted, however, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide addressed it. He created a special Haitian National Police child protection unit, and in 2003, got a new law passed prohibiting child domestic labor, mostly as Restaveks. Other legislation also passed banning trafficking in persons, a longstanding problem affecting adults as well.

Except for measures under Aristide, Haiti did little before or after his tenure to curb the problem, claiming a lack of resources. Instead, it established a hotline for children and others to report abuses, has a minimal staff, gets about 200 requests a year, visits homes for educational purposes, advises violators to stop their practices, occasionally removes abused children, but barely addresses the problem Shahinian called tantamount to slavery and condemned.

After a nine-day visit in early June, she said Haiti’s Restavek system:

deprives children of their family environment and violates their most basis rights such as the rights to education, health and food as well as subjecting them to multiple forms of abuse including economic exploitation, sexual violence and corporal punishment, violating their fundamental right to protection from all forms of violence.

She condemned professional recruiters who exploit children for financial gain and called for establishing a National Commission to eliminate the problem. She recommended registering all of them, providing alternative income generating programs for poor families, compulsory free primary education, and training for government officials to address the issue. Under the current Preval government, practically nothing has been done so far.

In June 2009, the US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report called Haiti a: “Special Case for the fourth consecutive year as the new government formed in September 2008 has not yet been able to address the significant challenges facing the country, including human trafficking.”

Urging its government “to take immediate action to address its serious trafficking-in-persons problems,” it was silent about America’s role in ousting Aristide and the fascist regime it installed. In collusion with Haitian elites, the result has been rampant oppression, sham elections, destruction of the majority democratic opposition, jails overflowing with political prisoners, and ending the beneficial political, economic and social changes Haitians briefly enjoyed.

Now the State Department calls Haiti a:

“source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Haitian women, men, and children are trafficked into the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas, the United States, Europe, Canada, and Jamaica for exploitation in domestic service, agriculture, and construction…. Several NGOs noted a sharp increase in the number of Haitian children trafficked for sex and labor to the Dominican Republic and The Bahamas during 2008,” the majority being Restaveks, including those trafficked internally.

Dismissed and runaway Restaveks comprise “a significant proportion of the large number of street children, who frequently are forced to work in prostitution or street crime by violent criminal gangs. Women and girls from the Dominican Republic are trafficked into Haiti for commercial sexual exploitation.”

Some Haitians in the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas and America become virtual slaves as forced labor on sugar-cane plantations, in agriculture and construction. To a large degree, America bears major responsibility, yet is silent and initiates no change.

The Restavek Foundation

Founder Jean-Robert Cadet was once one himself, “endur(ing) years of physical and emotional abuse as a domestic slave until he received access to education-first in Haiti and later in the United States.”

He now addresses the problem on his web site and by speaking at colleges and universities throughout America and to government organizations globally. He also uses his foundation to help trapped children, providing them opportunities for education, paying for their tuition, uniforms and books, feeding them once a day, monitoring their health and well-being, and restoring their dignity.

His mission is to end Haitian child slavery and give hope to those enslaved. The Restavek Foundation “invest(s) in Haiti so that Haiti will allow us to invest in the children” — through a network of over 500 advocates across the country acting as a “voice for the voiceless.”

In the aftermath of Haiti’s quake, the Foundation is providing food and other essentials to areas not reached by others. They need help and ask for donations on their web site.

Post-Quake Child Trafficking

On February 1, New York Times writer Ginger Thompson headlined, “Case Stokes Haiti’s Fear for Children, and Itself,” reporting that, on January 29, 10 Americans were detained at the Dominican border for illegally trying to spirit 33 children from the country.

“The 10 Americans, the authorities said, had crossed the line.” Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive called them “kidnappers (who) knew what they were doing was wrong.” National Judicial Police chief, Frantz Thermilus, said: “What surprises me is that these people would never do something like this in their own country.” He’s wrong as the US is beset with adult and child trafficking, and the problem is global.

Affiliated with two Idaho-based Baptist churches, the excuse given rings hollow, saying that: “God wanted us to come here to help children, we are convinced of that. Our hearts were in the right place.”

They were headed for a Dominican Republic orphanage, existing only on paper, later to be “adopted” by US Evangelical Christian families. When stopped at the border, Haitian agents found them packed inside a bus. None had passports, and no documents authorized their transfer.

SOS Children’s Villages ran the Port-au-Prince orphanage where they were temporarily placed. Its regional director, Patricia Vargas, told Agence France Presse that “The majority of these children have families. Some of the older ones said their parents are alive, and some gave an address and phone number.” One eight-year child said “I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.” The Haitian Social Ministry confirmed that so did others. On January 30, SOS Villages was asked to help under the circumstances.

Its officials accused the Idaho group of taking “children under false pretenses. The allegations have to be thoroughly investigated but the Haitian police consider this incident as organized child trafficking.”

Laura Silsby heads the groups as CEO of a Boise-based online shopping web site called personalshopper.com. Last November, it filed papers with Idaho authorities to establish the New Life Children’s Refuge, ostensibly as an NGO. As part of their “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission,” they plan a Dominican Republic orphanage for up to 200 children, earmarked for US adoptions, conversion to Evangelical Christianity, and apparent extremist indoctrination, given Silsby’s admission that Sarah Palin and the Manhattan Initiative are two of her favorites, the latter a right-wing Evangelical group opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

Although one scheme was stopped, UNICEF says, pre and post-quake, documented evidence shows many Haitian child abductions, including from hospitals, orphanages, and the street where so many are vulnerable.

The agency explained that pre-quake, Haiti had about 380,000 orphaned children. The number now is incalculable, but the message is clear. Many are on their own own to find food, shelter and medical care, making them vulnerable to traffickers for profit and exploitation.

In 2000, the UN adopted the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, then in 2003, its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children. Under its provisions, trafficking is illegal, defined as:

Trafficking in persons (by) the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.

Exploitation is defined, “at a minimum,” to include “prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”

Anyone under 18 is considered a child, and State Parties are called on to adopt laws or other measures “to establish criminal offences” under the Convention. Haiti hasn’t done so, leaving its children vulnerable to trafficking and other abuses.

Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) Report on Child Trafficking in Haiti

In November 2009, PADF published a report titled, “Lost Childhoods in Haiti: Quantifying Child Trafficking, Restaveks & Victims of Violence.” It’s a disturbing picture of “extremely poor children who are sent to other homes to work as unpaid domestic servants,” and end up being beaten, sexually assaulted, and exploited by host families. Later, in their teens, “they are commonly tossed to the streets to fend for themselves and become victims of other types of abuses” because Haitian labor laws require employers to pay domestic workers over aged 15.

PADF studied the problem through “the largest field survey on human rights violations, with an emphasis on child trafficking, abuse and violence.” It conducted 1,458 personal interviews in troubled urban neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haitien, Gonaives, Saint-Marc and Petit-Goave and learned the following:

• children are moving from impoverished households to less poor ones;
• in urban areas, an estimated 225,000 children are Restaveks, two-thirds of them girls;
• the impoverished Cite Soleil Port-au-Prince neighborhood had the highest percentage of Restavek children – 44%;
• families in the southern peninsula communities of Les Cayes, Jacmel, Jeremie and Leogane supply the most Restaveks to Port-au-Prince;
• some children sent to host families for education aren’t classified as Restaveks, but perform similar duties;
• more than 7% of urban households report incidents of rape, murder, kidnapping, or gang involvement, but the true number is likely higher as many incidents go unreported; and
• Port-au-Prince households had over double the amount in other cities (16%).

Over 30% of surveyed households have Restavek children, affecting 16% of all children and 22% of them treated that way. Overall, study findings show Restaveks aren’t solely a rural phenomenon given the high proportion of urban households with them.

The majority of urban ones were born in rural Haiti, but urban households comprise the largest recruitment destination. All regions supply them, the most important being southern peninsula rural areas. In addition, many households take in children as school borders, the vast majority treated like Restaveks without the label, and some families with them also send their own children to live with host families in return for services performed.

Kinship is a prime and more socially acceptable recruiting source. However, family ties may camouflage poor treatment when children are away during the school year. They traditionally do household chores at home, but as Restaveks far more in an abusive environment.

PADF cited other issues, including:

• growing numbers of street children forced to beg to survive;
• young women (including underage adolescents) recruited for prostitution;
• Restavek cross-border trafficking to the Dominican Republic, including for sex;
• kidnappings to sell children and women into bondage; and
• violence in urban neighborhoods, including organized murder, rape, other physical assaults, and kidnappings committed by the Haitian National Police, UN MINUSTAH peacekeepers, other armed “authorities,” and politically partisan gangs.

PADF Summary of Key Findings

An “astonishing high percentage” of surveyed children live with host families — 32% and 30% of surveyed households had Restaveks present. Other findings included:

• 16% of all surveyed children were placed as Restaveks, and 22% were treated that way, including 44% in Cite Soleil;
• two-thirds of Restaveks are girls;
• poverty is the root cause of Restavek placements;
• a significant minority of Restavek households placed their own children with host families; yet kinship ties don’t shield them from abusive treatment, even for those sent only for the school year;
• “the magnitude of the intra-urban movement of children within… metropolitan area(s) is (a) significant new development;”
• most urban Restaveks were born in rural areas, but in Port-au-Prince, other households are the largest single source; thus Restavek recruitment no longer can be viewed solely as a rural to urban phenomenon;
• other victimization forms include rape, murder, kidnapping, and cross-border trafficking; and
• most abused victims don’t seek help from authorities because little is available, including in court.

Public Policy and Haitian Law

Haitian law doesn’t specifically prohibit trafficking internally or cross-border, so seeking judicial redress is futile, and the police child protection unit doesn’t pursue these cases because statutory restrictions don’t exist.

Nonetheless, in March 2009, the Haitian parliament ratified (but doesn’t enforce) the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols on human trafficking and smuggling. The parliament is also considering a human trafficking law, but real social change was never before achieved, except under Aristide. Haitians have been oppressed for over 500 years. The current government has done nothing to change things, and now can’t under occupation.

A Final Comment

Given their overwhelming hardships, the last thing Haitians needed was the January 12 quake (the most destructive in the region in 170 years), affecting Port-au-Prince, surrounding areas, and other parts of the country, devastating the capital, killing many thousands, injuring many more, and disrupting the lives of three million or more people, adding to their crushing burden.

Many tens of thousands lost everything left stranded on their own, given the lack of essential aid most still aren’t getting. Everything is in shambles. Rubble is everywhere. The National Cathedral, Palace of Justice, and Supreme Court collapsed. So did hotels, other municipal buildings, business structures, schools and hospitals.

People still wander the streets dazed, searching for loved ones. The National Palace was heavily damaged, now under US control as a command center. So was UN headquarters, and many of its employees remain missing. In the wealthy Petionville neighborhood, a hospital, ministry building and private homes collapsed. So did other buildings across the capital and in rural communities like Leogane. Jacmel in the southeast also sustained major damage.

The Parliament collapsed. So did public buildings and hospitals, and those functioning are packed with victims or others queued outside waiting for treatment. The World Food Program (WFP) reached only 100,000 people as of January 31. On February 2, targeted vaccinations will begin that, according to the world’s foremost authority, Dr. Viera Scheibner, will exacerbate, not lessen the communicable disease problem as vaccines often cause the diseases they’re designed to prevent.

Enough food, clean drinking water and medical care remain urgent problems, the US occupation force doing nothing to help and actually obstructing aid deliveries by restricting incoming humanitarian flights and letting supplies stack up undelivered at the airport it controls. As a result, vital shipments are reaching a fraction of the millions who need them.

In its latest February 1 report, OCHA said hundreds of thousands of displaced Haitians need shelter provisions. Poor sanitation greatly increases the risk of communicable diseases and remains a huge challenge, and virtually all essential needs are in short supply.

It added:

Preliminary results from Port-au-Prince found that 93 percent of people surveyed said there was no adequate lighting; 93 percent said there were no latrines for women and men; 41 percent said the level of security was acceptable and 29 percent said it was very poor. The preliminary findings confirm that food, water, sanitation, health and shelter are the areas with the most urgent needs.

Before the tragedy, most Haitians had no running water, electricity, sanitation, or other public services leaving them on their own, virtually out of luck, and now out of it entirely with relief expected only for the privileged, not them beyond lip service and bare essentials, way short of what’s needed.

It’s an old story for some of the most abused, exploited, and neglected people anywhere, mostly by their powerful northern neighbor allied with Haitian economic elites; names like Acra, Apaid, Baussan, Biglo, Boulos, Brandt, Coles, Kouri, Loukas, Madsen, Mevs, Nadal, Sada, Vital, Vorbes, and other influential bourgeoisie interests exploiting their own people for profit.

Hundreds of thousands around the country are still coping with the damage that summer 2008 storms caused leaving them without food, clean water, other essentials, and around 70,000 homes destroyed. Gonaives, Haiti’s third largest city became uninhabitable. Most of Haiti’s livestock and food crops were destroyed as well as farm tools and seeds for replanting. Irrigation systems were demolished, and buildings throughout the country collapsed or were damaged, many severely. Now this, affecting Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas with the overall toll yet to be assessed.

For poor Haitians, it’s already known. Decimated by unimaginable hardships and deprivation, they’re on their own and out of luck because of the callous disregard for their lives and well-being – and their country now occupied for the duration.

You wonder how many died immediately, suffocated by rubble, and how many over many hours through neglect. There is no infrastructure in Haiti. Unlike nearby Cuba, which is organizationally well-equipped to handle natural disasters, Haiti has no emergency aid network. There’s not even a military; that was disbanded during the last invasion, the one that followed the US-abetted uprising of thugs in 2004, the kidnapping of President Aristide (sent into exile in Africa), his replacement with Boniface Alexandre as a provisional president, and the subsequent election of Rene Preval. There’s no way of knowing what’s going on in that country, poorest in the hemisphere to begin with, now without power or water or meaningful news coverage.

Frankly, I don’t have much stomach for TV infortainment-news. I get physically ill hearing Bill O’Reilly’s screech, or watching Sean Hannity’s smirking choirboy face. CNN doesn’t appeal to me much more than Fox, which it emulates by constantly dumbing down every presentation and scrupulously avoiding questions of substance or historical perspective. The point is not to inform viewers but to make them feel, to stimulate, to sell the personalities of the anchors and compete with American Idol.

Don’t expect to hear Betty Nguyen on CNN affect a serious expression and say something like the following from the next few days: “Multiple authorities have now confirmed that the death toll in the January 12 earthquake in Haiti has now reached 200,000. Since population figures on Haiti range from 9.8 (World Bank) to 9.1 (CIA) that means over 2% (1 out of every 50 Haitians) has died. That would be like 6 million Americans (the whole population of the Bay Area) dying from one massive earthquake. This was a terrible disaster the country was completely unprepared for. Now let’s discuss why…”

No, that’s not going to happen. It’s easier not to discuss it and just bemoan the terrible poverty which is that country — as though it were somehow its mysterious fate as the only majority black, one-time majority slave state in the hemisphere — with appropriate clips, still visuals and soundtrack. There are awards waiting to be won here.

Although I rarely watch TV news, I saw a lot of the Haiti earthquake reports because I happened to be staying at my boyhood home in Honolulu on January 12 and for the following several days. My parents and other family members were there, all watching different TV stations, so I took in the range of coverage while keeping an eye on the internet. I was pleased that my father, who had a glioblastoma tumor removed from his brain over the summer and has been having some very difficult days, was able to understand what was going on and to empathize. For my part I thought the reportage extremely shallow. Why, I kept thinking, is there no analysis about why the country’s so messed up? But then of course, Rev. Pat Robertson provided an asinine answer, which became a news story in itself, of particular interest to people who believe in the existence of a devil. Robertson comes out looking like an ass (again) to people who already know what he is, while maintaining his power-base. Meanwhile no light’s been shed whatsoever on the history of Haiti and its unique degree of victimhood in this hemisphere.

In the long layover in the San Francisco airport the following Friday, I had little to do but watch T.J. Holmes and Nguyen on CNN handling the Haiti coverage. First they interviewed a fairly prominent Haitian-American man whose daughter had been missing but finally located in Haiti. The anchors offered congratulations on that. The father thanked everyone prolifically but said his daughter lacked food, water, clothing, and much had to be done, all of which is of course true. The father’s words were cut off when he appeared to want to thank a religious congregation by name too prolifically. Nguyen handled the situation deftly.

Then there was a segue from the living to the dead. Holmes interviewed the family of a 60 year old woman confirmed dead in Port-au-Prince. First Holmes posed the question frankly: with all these decomposing bodies piling up, and loved ones wanting to give them a proper burial, what can we do? And then he brought on the family to share photos and offer their personal story and implicit appeal for help in retrieving their mother’s remains within a day of so from the morgue and transporting them to the U.S.

The whole concept was bizarre. I wondered to myself, “Does T.J. realize what he’s talking about?”

I mean, here I am in the in San Francisco Airport, en route from Honolulu to Boston, my dad’s parents and grandparents buried in North Dakota, this very question current in my mind. Does Holmes, and do these good folks, have any idea what kind of money this requires, in the best of times? On top of that, absent any ground transport or infrastructure in Haiti, you’d have to hire a commando unit to go in, get the remains, and ship them back on a special flight…

T.J. shouldn’t have agreed to this cruel hope-stoking interview days before tens of thousands were bulldozed by necessity into mass graves. It was the worst sort of tabloid journalism. And again — no historical background, no reference to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, his movement, the coup against him in 1991, his restoration to power 1994 by the Clinton administration, his removal from power by the Bush administration in 2004. No analysis of the suffering and its causes, just a maudlin indulgence in the feeling, with an eye to the competition and its shameless exploitation of emotions.

I’m not a specialist on the history of Haiti, but I do think it important to look at things in perspective. This the mainstream media seems unable to do. Attractive young people with nice hair and attractive smiles increasingly deliver the copy. They are poised and can engage in pleasant light banter, their little quirks endearing them to specific market demographics and enhancing their contract extension prospects. These valuable products don’t need to be all that well-informed or even inquisitive about the recent past. If the story is “devastating earthquake in Haiti” they instinctively enter a “Let’s see, who can we interview that will bring out the human dimension of this tragedy?” mode. It doesn’t occur to them to ask, “Why does Haiti have no infrastructure to address natural disasters, after repeated invasions that were supposed to be for the Haitian people’s own good?”

I don’t blame them of course. It’s the editors who roll their eyes at such queries as “ideological.” And of course there are certain things television anchors can’t do, like say “U.S. imperialism” as though it were something real. (This is because they are employed by U.S. imperialists who prefer to see themselves as mere defenders of liberal capitalism and who when supporting wars against Iraq and other countries based on lies insist that their own investments have nothing to do with their journalistic viewpoint.) But current reportage could outline Haiti’s history just a bit better, from a dispassionate apolitical point of view.

African slaves rose up against French colonialists from 1791 to 1803 and established the only black republic in the hemisphere (the Haitian gene pool is about 95% African). That republic was subjected to the equivalent of contemporary sanctions by the world’s leading nations. (U.S. leaders feared that to recognize Haiti would encourage slave revolts and only recognized it — that is, the Union recognized it — in 1862.) French capital dominated throughout the nineteenth century; in exchange for diplomatic recognition, Haiti had to pay France 150 million gold francs in compensation for “lost property” (that is, the citizens of the hemisphere’s second republic, who had once been slaves and had won their freedom through violent struggle, subsequently had to compensate their former masters for the cost of their freedom — up until 1947.) In the early twentieth century German families intermarried into the Haitian mulatto elite and in the period leading up to the First World War the putative German threat and political instability in Haiti produced excuses for an invasion and U.S. occupation that lasted from 1915 to 1934. Since then the U.S. has ultimately called the shots.

I’d like to hear a CNN anchor mention in passing, “Of course you know the U.S. occupied Haiti for two decades in the 20th century.” Or hear him or her add casually, “Maybe 3000 rebels were killed in the uprising against forced labor imposed by Gendarmerie commandant Smedley Butler.” Wouldn’t this moment, with attention focused on Haiti, be the ideal moment to visit some of that history?

Maybe it’s a good time to introduce the term, to those who haven’t heard it, Tonton Macoutes, the name of the vicious paramilitary police who killed about 30,000 people under the regimes of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier (1957-86), who ruled with U.S. support. Or explain how a mass movement led by former Roman Catholic parish priest Aristide could win 67% of the vote in the internationally monitored 1990 elections, only to fall in a military coup against him the following year. (Following this a CIA contact formed the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti or FRAPH, an anti-Lavalas death-squad.) I’ve heard no discussion in the mainstream media of why Bill Clinton restored Aristide to power in 1994, despite reservations about his “left” politics (or perhaps because of some political deal) or why George W. Bush toppled him in 2004.

Aristide, reelected with an overwhelming majority in 2001 when his Lavalas movement won 80% of local and parliamentary seats, was confronted by a rebellion of U.S.-backed thugs in 2004 after (as he tells it) he refused to agree to the privatization of the state-owned telephone and electricity enterprises. On Feb. 29, he was forced by U.S. soldiers to board a plane into exile not knowing the destination (Central African Republic), finally settling in South Africa. In repeated phone calls to prominent U.S. citizens, including legislators, he declared he’d been the victim of a kidnapping. The Bush administration via Colin Powell (who told us about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction) assured us that, no, Aristide resigned voluntarily. (We were expected at the time to suppose Aristide confused rather than Powell outright duplicitous.)

Following the removal of Aristide the U.S., which had had a strained relationship with France due to French opposition to the attack on Iraq, persuaded Haiti’s former colonial master to join in a re-invasion of the country together to restore order. (The French have a naval presence in the Caribbean — Martinique and Guyene — and were happy to use the occasion to make up with the U.S. as of Feb. 2004. The U.S. paid them back by condoning their attack on the Ivory Coast, another former French colony, that November.) Now there’s a UN-validated “peacekeeping” force which, having disbanded the former military, which was accused of engaging in summary executions, is itself accused of engaging in summary executions. President Preval, a former Aristide ally, seems not so much unpopular as powerless.

In the generally vapid commentary on Haiti I’ve seen, the topic of the Revolution has come up, most prominently in connection with Robertson’s remark that the devil made them do it. That event, occurring incrementally from 1791 to 1803, culminated with a revolt against Napoleon Bonaparte’s effort re-introduce slavery into the colony. (Robertson with characteristic ignorance mentions “Napoleon the Third or whatever” confusing the nephew with the uncle.) It’s sad that that revolutionary upheaval isn’t being discussed more positively. It shows how the power of the ideas of the French Revolution of 1789, that mother of modern revolutions for which the American Revolution was a mere prelude, could resonate around the world.

In May 1791, the National Assembly in Paris voted to grant French citizenship to free men of color. White leaders in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) refused to accept the decision, occasioning not just indignation from the mostly mulatto freemen but a general slave revolt. (Vodou priests played some leading roles; this might explain the Christian vilification of the revolution as somehow demonic.) When the Spanish and British, in league with white planters, invaded the colony in 1793, the French were obliged to declare an end to slavery. Thereafter Toussaint L’Ouverture, a general and self-educated former slave, consolidated power as governor, his demands for autonomy resulting in arrest and imprisonment in France where he died in 1802.

Restoration of direct French rule meant moves towards the reintroduction of slavery. A rebellion headed by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had been an officer in the French army, met with victory over the French at the Battle of Vertières in 1803. The next year Dessalines proclaimed the Republic of Haiti (from the indigenous Arawak name). But taking his cue from Napoleon, he soon had himself crowned Emperor. A wide range of leaders bridged the period to Papa Doc.

Why does Haiti occupy a place of almost unique humiliation within the world-system? I can’t believe it’s cultural or religious in the main. Surely the exploitation of religiosity has kept people down — as it has everywhere in the Americas, from square one. But issues of ownership, labor and capital, position of the nation in the world system, are key to understanding.

Mainstream television news doesn’t ask any key questions because the answers, clear and honest, would just be too painful to those in power, to whom the news editors must defer because they buy the ads that make it possible for you to read the news. (They “bring you the news.” So since they bring it to you, why shouldn’t they interpret, sanitize and explain it for you all along the way?)

We have here two percent of the people of a neighboring island nation dead from a natural disaster. Our corporate media tease us with the suggestion that it might be due to the people’s voodoo-satanic tendencies. Or maybe it’s just tectonic plate interactions. (Hey it’s a big country, room for LOTS of opinions). Meanwhile they steer away from anything resembling real discussion of Haitian history.

Anderson Cooper rescues a boy, Sanjay Gupta a girl. Both join together to “help a young child in danger” in Haiti.” That’s great when the headline can combine promotion for these well-loved CNN figures and for the general project of Haiti earthquake relief. But it also looks a little contrived, frankly. Or is that just cynical me?

Can’t we do better than this? If people are moved to donate to earthquake relief, shouldn’t they know why things are so messed up in Haiti? Aren’t they owed some journalism?

This occurs because the current system provides no alternative. There is no progressive third party or grassroots movement to support such a party. There is not even a grassroots movement that vocalizes the desires of millions for a fair and just society where people’s needs come before Wall Street’s profits and the Pentagon’s wars that help protect and expand those profits. So, the Democrats step in as they have always done and pretend that they are the party that will address these desires. There was a time when such an argument was plausible. From FDR to LBJ, the Democrats were the party that passed many reforms making life better for America’s working people. They even passed bills outlawing racial segregation. Of course, this occurred because of immense pressure from the Left–pressure a hundred times greater than the pressure from America’s right that the Democrats claim has caused them to compromise on virtually every progressive piece of legislation during the current period. Yes, there was a time when that claim could have been made.

Today’s Democratic Party however, is not that party. It is the party of Wall Street as much as its opponents are. It is the party of war as much as the GOP is the party of war. Sure, there are a few congresspeople under the Democratic mantle that oppose the greed and bloodlust of Wall Street and the Pentagon, but they are such a small minority they are irrelevant. Indeed, if they truly wanted to be effective, they would leave the Democrats as soon as possible. Nowadays, when leftists and progressives align themselves with the Democratic Party and its positions, they also align themselves with the reactionaries that run the Republican Party. When leftists and progressives align themselves with the Democrats, they align themselves with those who have sent billions of US dollars into the coffers of the war industry and hundreds of thousands of US men and women into combat for the princes of oil and finance. When leftists and progressives align themselves with the Democrats, they tell the people of the world that they support the transfer of America’s wealth to the bankers and insurance industry through bailouts and so-called health care reform. When leftists and progressives align themselves with the Democrats, they tell the American people that they are willing to give lip service to the concerns of America’s workers and poor, but when it comes right down to it, those workers and poor will have to figure out on their own how they will get jobs that no longer exist. Jobs that are not being created because the Democrats and the GOP bailed out the banks instead.

The Democratic Party has never been the party of the people. It served the slaveowners of the US South until the Civil War ended that foul practice. Then it served the slaveowners’ successors: the cotton and sorghum producers that kept their workers in serflike conditions and never saw a lynching they didn’t like. In terms of America’s growing industrialization, the Democrats were right there with the GOP pushing through legislation favorable to capital and (at best) ignoring the conditions of American labor. As mentioned before, the Democrats’ best years in terms of serving the working and poor people of the United States came during the years between 1936 and 1968, when they passed legislation like Social Security and Medicare and pushed through laws outlawing racial apartheid in the United States. Also, as noted before, this occurred only because of extreme pressure from mass movements of progressive and leftist opponents of the anti-worker and racist policies of the government in Washington. Even then, however, the role the party played was designed more to diminish the strength of those movements. Nonetheless, the reforms occurred because of the movements, not in spite of them. In terms of economics, today’s Democrats resemble the Democrats of old more than they do the Democrats of the New Deal and the Great Society. They are in the pay of today’s equivalent of the slaveowners–the global capitalists that roam the world searching for labor pools easy to exploit because of their desperation and national governments willing to brutalize workers into submission just like the slavedrivers and field bosses of old. Not only are they in their pay, but they push through legislation like NAFTA designed to make that search for exploitable labor and new markets easier and more profitable than it already is. On the domestic front, it was the Democrats under Bill Clinton that dismantled the system of public assistance for women with children and it is under Barack Obama that a new commission designed to bypass the Congress on the question of possibly dismantling Social Security was recently set up.

As if one needed more convincing, after the recent defeat of the Democratic candidate in the Massachusetts special election, an op-ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The piece was written by a mainstream Democratic party member who blamed the left wing of the party for the defeat. It was time, said the writer, to move back to the right in order to win the next round of elections. In other words, try and steal the traditional GOP voters away from the GOP instead of going after the traditionally unorganized mentioned at the beginning of this piece. In case I haven’t made it clear already, the writer in the Journal is what the Democrats really are. The party is not interested in genuinely addressing the concerns of the poor, the newly unemployed and the rest of America’s disenfranchised. That is why most of these voters (many who voted in 2008 for Obama) stayed home in Massachusetts this last time. They understand that the Democrats are for someone other than them and they won’t be lied to again. Unless the Left gets it act together, they are willing to let the chips fall where they may–even if that means a resurgence of the GOP.

I can’t be emphatic enough, there is no reasonable reason to waste a dollar or a moment of your time campaigning for the Democratic Party. Barack Obama’s campaign based on false hope and promises and the subsequent reneging on almost every promise of change should be enough to convince any left-leaning or progressive person in the United States who voted for Obama in 2008 that the time has come to end this relationship for good and forever. Like the cheating and lying spouse that keeps asking for one more chance after you find them in bed with your enemy once again, there comes a time to end the relationship. Not only have the occasional moments of bliss and the crumbs that say I care become fewer and fewer, they are no longer enough. The denial so many left-leaning Americans have lived with in their relationship with the Democrats is causing more harm then it is worth. Walk away, close the door behind you and begin the work required to build a real force for progressive change in the United States.

The US has worked to break Haiti for over 200 years. We owe Haiti. Not charity. We owe Haiti as a matter of justice. Reparations. And not the $100 million promised by President Obama either – that is Powerball money. The US owes Haiti Billions – with a big B.

The US has worked for centuries to break Haiti. The US has used Haiti like a plantation. The US helped bleed the country economically since it freed itself, repeatedly invaded the country militarily, supported dictators who abused the people, used the country as a dumping ground for our own economic advantage, ruined their roads and agriculture, and toppled popularly elected officials. The US has even used Haiti like the old plantation owner and slipped over there repeatedly for sexual recreation.

Here is the briefest history of some of the major US efforts to break Haiti.

In 1804, when Haiti achieved its freedom from France in the world’s first successful slave revolution, the United States refused to recognize the country. The US continued to refuse recognition to Haiti for 60 more years. Why? Because the US continued to enslave millions of its own citizens and feared recognizing Haiti would encourage slave revolution in the US.

After the 1804 revolution, Haiti was the subject of a crippling economic embargo by France and the US. US sanctions lasted until 1863. France ultimately used its military power to force Haiti to pay reparations for the slaves who were freed. The reparations were 150 million francs. (France sold the entire Louisiana territory to the US for 80 million francs!)

Haiti was forced to borrow money from banks in France and the US to pay reparations to France. A major loan from the US to pay off the French was finally paid off in 1947. The current value of the money Haiti was forced to pay to French and US banks? Over $20 Billion — with a big B.

The US occupied and ruled Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to invade in 1915. Revolts by Haitians were put down by US military — killing over 2000 in one skirmish alone. For the next nineteen years, the US controlled customs in Haiti, collected taxes, and ran many governmental institutions. How many billions were siphoned off by the US during these 19 years?

From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was forced to live under US backed dictators “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvlaier. The US supported these dictators economically and militarily because they did what the US wanted and were politically “anti-communist” — now translatable as against human rights for their people. Duvalier stole millions from Haiti and ran up hundreds of millions in debt that Haiti still owes. Ten thousand Haitians lost their lives. Estimates say that Haiti owes $1.3 billion in external debt and that 40% of that debt was run up by the US-backed Duvaliers.

Thirty years ago Haiti imported no rice. Today Haiti imports nearly all its rice. Though Haiti was the sugar growing capital of the Caribbean, it now imports sugar as well. Why? The US and the US dominated world financial institutions — the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — forced Haiti to open its markets to the world. Then the US dumped millions of tons of US subsidized rice and sugar into Haiti — undercutting their farmers and ruining Haitian agriculture. By ruining Haitian agriculture, the US has forced Haiti into becoming the third largest world market for US rice. Good for US farmers, bad for Haiti.

In 2002, the US stopped hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Haiti which were to be used for, among other public projects like education, roads. These are the same roads which relief teams are having so much trouble navigating now!

In 2004, the US again destroyed democracy in Haiti when they supported the coup against Haiti’s elected President Aristide.

Haiti is even used for sexual recreation just like the old time plantations. Check the news carefully and you will find numerous stories of abuse of minors by missionaries, soldiers and charity workers. Plus there are the frequent sexual vacations taken to Haiti by people from the US and elsewhere. What is owed for that? What value would you put on it if it was your sisters and brothers?

US based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.

The Haitian people have resisted the economic and military power of the US and others ever since their independence. Like all of us, Haitians made their own mistakes as well. But US power has forced Haitians to pay great prices — deaths, debt and abuse.

It is time for the people of the US to join with Haitians and reverse the course of US-Haitian relations.

This brief history shows why the US owes Haiti Billions — with a big B. This is not charity. This is justice. This is reparations. The current crisis is an opportunity for people in the US to own up to our country’s history of dominating Haiti and to make a truly just response.

(For more on the history of exploitation of Haiti by the US see: Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti; Peter Hallward, Damning the Flood; and Randall Robinson, An Unbroken Agony).

2. There’s no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF “austerity” plans.

3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, “My sister, she’s under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?” Should I tell her, “Obama will have Marines there in ‘a few days’”?

4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right there.

5. Obama’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “I don’t know how this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has.” We know Gates doesn’t know.

6. From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It’s all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, “I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people.” Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.

7. Send in the Marines. That’s America’s response. That’s what we’re good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed — without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.

8. But don’t worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They’re from Iceland.

9. Gates wouldn’t send in food and water because, he said, there was no “structure … to provide security.” For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to hang around by Obama, it’s security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.

10. Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It’s treated like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.

11. How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent — there are two fire stations in the entire nation — and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for “nature” to finish it off?

Don’t blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets — with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was easily won: the Duvaliers’ death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime.)

12. What Papa and Baby didn’t run off with, the IMF finished off through its “austerity” plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo orchestrated by economists zomby-fied by an irrational belief that cutting government services will somehow help a nation prosper.

13. In 1991, five years after the murderous Baby fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF’s austerity diktats. Within months, the military, to the applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The farce was George W. Bush. In 2004, after the priest Aristide was re-elected President, he was kidnapped and removed again, to the applause of Baby Bush.

14. Haiti was once a wealthy nation, the wealthiest in the hemisphere, worth more, wrote Voltaire in the 18th century, than that rocky, cold colony known as New England. Haiti’s wealth was in black gold: slaves. But then the slaves rebelled — and have been paying for it ever since.

From 1825 to 1947, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee to reimburse the profits lost by French slaveholders caused by their slaves’ successful uprising. Rather than enslave individual Haitians, France thought it more efficient to simply enslave the entire nation.

15. Secretary Gates tells us, “There are just some certain facts of life that affect how quickly you can do some of these things.” The Navy’s hospital boat will be there in, oh, a week or so. Heckuva job, Brownie!

16. Note just received from my friend. Her sister was found, dead; and her other sister had to bury her. Her father needs his anti-seizure medicines. That’s a fact of life too, Mr. President.

Through our journalism network, we are trying to get my friend’s medicines to her father. If any reader does have someone getting into or near Port-au-Prince, please contact moc.tsalaPgerGnull@itiaH immediately.

Urgently recommended reading: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the history of the successful slave uprising in Hispaniola by the brilliant CLR James.

First appeared in The Huffington Post.

No, this has been an exciting week for Capitalism folks, as in the economic enterprise that supposedly sails our ship of state through the stormiest of seas. If only we believe. If only we believe and remove the shackles of unfair unfree trade. Once again that definition of Free Trade: anything Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh agree is good for business and they always agree with their bosses.

Broken down to its nuts and bolts: Capitalism means you screw people over as hard as you can for as much as you can. If they lose their homes, die from lack of medical service, or find themselves treading water next to a drowning polar bear, it is not your problem if you can successfully deny it through litigation. OR, that other popular definition for capitalism: provide as minimal a good or service as possible all the while convincing your customers that they are happy. OR, the one most of us live through: essentially slavery, except they also get to torture you with math problem you’ll never solve: how can you afford to live on the little bit you make. And the capitalists will tell you loud and long how they have done you a favor by inventing this system and your place in it; but most of all theirs.

By those and numerous other standards, 2009 has been a very good year for capitalism. This year saw the number of billionaires in America nearly double at a time when the rest of the world lost over five trillion dollars. Where did the money go? Up the ladder. It’s the famous trickle up theory made famous by Reaganomics loving neocons way back when. There are now 793 billionaires in America. That’s a lot of billions that had to go somewhere, such as away from our schools and roads and healthcare. But it sure made a lot of millionaires a whole lot richer.

In fact among the factoids amid this week’s news flotsam is that the 400 richest people in America got 30 billion richer. Whew. At a time when 3.5 million more homes are expected to go belly up, it warms my heart to know the money is safe.

Look how much happier we all are now that they have our money and not just our houses, but our taxes too. With a year like this, it is hard to keep straight which example of unfettered capitalism is the most audacious, so I personally have taken to breaking down my list to a week-by-week basis. With several outstanding examples of why this paradigm has been good for society in the current news cycle there are so many choices to be dazzled by.

To hear the right-wingers blog about it, the biggest news this week is that the entirety of global warming is a hoax and that every scientist everywhere who does not propound that Jesus dated dinosaurs is part of a conspiracy to ruin petrodollar profits and thus screw over Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney and several Bushes all at the same time and that, sir, is Un-American.

Those of you who know that Rush is always right also knew it all along that it’s all those phony lying lefties that cooked up this whole fake global warming thing and now they have been busted. Sure.

Where is my Hummer? Can I get it to reduce my mileage to like 5mph, maybe 3? And why not if there’s no global warming? Maybe you can get it rigged up to run on clubbed baby seal?

Anyway, all that was good red meat for the anti-environmentalists around the country. Except the opposite side, the folks who say that quote scandal is a classic misdirection, folks who say it’s all a conflation and intended to distract the public support away serious commitments at Copenhagen’s Climate Change Conference, happen to be the majority of the world’s scientiests who are hoping we as a people will wise up before we destroy our planet beyond recognition.

They explain that the accusations being hurled against the emailing climate scientists in question are intentional outlandish distortions of language and intent. By the way, backers of the emailers include their bosses, and John Roberts, the CNN reporter sent to talk up the teapot into a tempest and even Bill Nye the Science Guy doing his level best to debunk the global warming would-be debunkers. The CNN coverage of the controversy was a load of bunk to be sure. But as Roberts noted, finishing his coverage, by the time the experts sort it out, Copenhagen will be over and Exxon-Mobile can continue to make billions by destroying our future for the mere cost a few hackers and a couple of bribed talking heads spreading a little doubt.
Capitalists win!

Over in the Banking sector which has been so inspiring this last year when it comes to doing dirt unto others and calling it good clean profit, many folks are impressed with Bank of America’s announcing they are attempting to return their TARP money so they can award themselves more profits and bonuses. But I am partial to that other Bail Out Powerhouse AIG. In “Bailed-Out AIG Forcing Poor to Choose Between Running Water and Food,” Yasha Levine’s not-that-astonishing expose on AIG going all 3rd world on the poverty stricken of Rural Kentucky. Taking a page from the Bechtel rape of Bolivia’s water supply back in 2000, AIG subsidy Utilities, Inc. acquired the water supply for poor mountaineers who barely keep their families fed and then jacked their rates by more than 51%. Phony, erroneous and repetitive billing ensued. Kidding aside these are people whose per capita income is 13,000. Through the rate hike and working out the “bugs” in their new billing system, AIG nets an additional 3/4s of a million and all they had to do was torment a few more poor people. Why not, they’re good at it, they’re capitalists.

But my choice for This Week in Capitalism’s “Just Getting Down to the Brass Tacks of it All” Award for cutting to the essence of capitalist values, at least the espoused capitalist values of our captains of capitalism in the press and the pubs of America … well, it actually goes to Mexico. That’s right, the people who were once held as farm animals and concubines for their Spanish missionaries have now gone that ultimate last mile for capitalism, cut labor costs completely and just kidnapped themselves a bunch of slaves right in the heart of the biggest city in the world. That’s right, December 4th the Associated Press, among others, reported that a factory in Mexico City that disguised itself as a rehab center was actually kidnapping people off of the streets then forcing them to work 16 hour days making shopping bags and clothespins. One hundred and seven people were rescued having been found working as slaves and 23 suspects allegedly working as their overseers and guards were taken into custody.

And I say, well what happened here? Why has the free market failed capitalism? People need their cheap plastic bags and clothespins and business man has a right to make a profit doesn’t he? Of course that’s not that different from the occasional corporate faux pas here in America where dozens of undocumented immigrants happen to be working in the same meat packing plant, or restaurant, which just happens to be owned by some big American business: like Tyson, like McDonalds, like Swift.

Like another Swift might once have suggested, next thing you know the capitalists will be selling us our own babies to eat. Why not? It’s pure capitalism in motion. They don’t have to pay for the labor. They don’t have guarantee the product. They don’t have to protect the consumer. Yipes, if the capitalists ever figure out how to make a buck on this, we’re doomed.

Robinson Crusoe’s ethics are rooted in his inherent imperialism. Being the only representative of his race and culture for 27 of his 28 years upon the island, and considering both superior to all others, he not only endeavors—regardless if it is applicable, necessary, or even viable—to replicate the society from which he came but, through these means, to reign supreme over his environment. Crusoe is culpable because he acknowledges that he has been freed from socially-defined standards and, more importantly, that such standards might, in themselves, be questionable yet, after rationalizing the ethically justifiable course of action, he frequently opts for a more self-aggrandizing, convenient, or profitable avenue.

For example, he criticizes the Spanish Inquisition as being unjust yet forces a Caribbean native whom he has liberated from being cannibalized—not on moral grounds but in order to obtain a servant—to assimilate to his Anglo-Saxon lifestyle. Crusoe never bothers to ask the native’s given name. Instead, to commemorate the day upon which Crusoe acted so gallantly, “the creature” is nonchalantly dubbed “Friday.” Crusoe then demands that the native be clothed despite Friday being uncomfortable in such adornments and, moreover, the climate not requiring such. Furthermore, Crusoe rarely inquires into Friday’s perspectives, customs, or culture (the latter has to offer them), thus implying that Crusoe believes his ways to be implicitly superior as he proceeds to teach Friday to speak English and convert him to Christianity. It is worthy of note that, when Friday is rescued, he grovels at his liberator’s feet. Crusoe does not lift Friday up but permits him to remain in his subservient position so as to establish the desired hierarchy (he has Friday refer to him as “Master”) as well as to satiate his narcissism. Astoundingly, Crusoe allows this to occur not once but twice. (Similarly, prior to Crusoe’s discovery of humans upon the island, he revels in his “sovereignty” over the island’s fauna, as he observes that he has capricious control over whether it lives or dies.) The epitome of Crusoe’s moral myopia toward Friday resides in Crusoe’s lack of empathy after having once been enslaved himself. Most pointedly, being free of societal customs and beliefs, there is no alibi for why he continues to uphold the institution of slavery, especially considering that, for several years, Crusoe and Friday are the island’s only inhabitants. Granted, he does not literally bind Friday in shackles and chains, however, he treats him as an inferior and in a manner which, if back in Europe, he would by no means apply to a fellow Briton.

It is with such happenstance convenience that Crusoe reinforces his religious views before summarily dismissing them. For instance, after several languid gestures toward reverence, once Crusoe is born-again, he maintains a calendar and observes the Sabbath. Yet, when he loses track of the date, his devotion subsequently subsides. Additionally, when he notices that barley has sprouted near his “castle” (shelter), being unable to reconcile how it arrived there, he attributes its presence to God’s will. He then recalls that he’d discarded several husks which might have contained seeds and dismisses divine intervention as being the culprit. Obviously, Crusoe’s level of devotion is dependent upon need (such as illness or desperation) or occurrences which he cannot readily rationalize and his theological fervor abruptly diminishes once he no longer requires assistance or deduces a non-supernatural cause for previously inexplicable events. Not surprisingly, he considers abandoning his faith in favor of another once he is rescued because doing so would be more lucrative (Catholicism is the reigning religion in Brazil, which is where his tobacco plantation resides).

Even in the wake of society, Crusoe is unable to sever himself from his entrepreneurial tendencies and, however futile, desire for material and monetary possessions. Despite his conjectures that, like Jonah, he might have been cast out for his sins (Crusoe would have never found himself stranded had he not set out to sea to procure more slaves), he produces more food than he can consume only to watch it rot. He practices animal husbandry and agriculture after conceding that the island aptly provides for his needs without having to resort to such labor-intensive activities. He even goes so far as to craft a table and chair. As noted, he has a “castle,” but he also possesses another shelter-cum-estate as well, which he refers to as his “bower.” Even after admitting that money has no intrinsic value in a tender-free existence, Crusoe hordes every coin he finds. Lastly, toward the end of his “reign” upon the island, the self-described “king” begins cataloguing people as possessions: He refers to the island’s inhabitants as his “subjects,” prisoners as “my people,” and even perceives specific (and in his mind, civilized) individuals as being his own, i.e. “the Spaniard” quickly metamorphoses into “my Spaniard.”

Other instances of Crusoe’s moral hypocrisy and logistic incongruity include his consenting that cannibals might well be acting upon political or cultural principles and, as a result, it may not his place to pass judgment upon them. (Friday confirms this when he informs Crusoe that cannibalism is the consequence of warfare and is not a standard practice, as evidenced by 17 stranded Britons currently residing peacefully amongst Friday’s people.) Nevertheless, and despite his newfound religiosity, Crusoe—against his better judgment and moral conscious—proceeds to slaughter cannibals in the name of God. He never reconciles the paradox in his condemnation of the cannibals’ capital punishment and his own country’s like sentence for mutiny.

Not surprisingly, Crusoe hasn’t any friends. Rather, his associations are strictly limited to accomplices, acquaintances, or business partners. (After he is rescued, he does go on to marry but never cites his wife by name.) Every individual’s worth is based upon the person’s utilitarian value as Crusoe refuses to permit sentimentality to intervene in his decision-making. This is best evidenced in his selling of Xury, a Moorish youth who aided Crusoe in escaping enslavement, which Crusoe later regrets—not because he misses the boy (though he does)—but because he is in need of additional labor on his Brazilian plantation. Dauntingly, when he is rescued, Crusoe leaves the island to British criminals without attempting to notify those who have set off to sea in search for help—the aforementioned Spaniard and Friday’s father—that there are new, dangerous inhabitants awaiting them upon their return. These individuals are not even an afterthought in that, in lieu of the maritime risks involved atop the political tension between Spain and Britain, Crusoe never bothers to inform us of the rescue mission’s fate, even after returning to the island years later. This omission is all the more insulting given that the seafarers aided Crusoe in retaining control of the island after mutineers came ashore.

What perhaps best outlines the Crusoe’s Machiavellian nature is his reaction to a single footprint which mysteriously appears on the beach one day. Though, upon his initial appearance upon the island, he longed to be rescued, Crusoe gradually becomes apprehensive of any sign of human life, as seen in him automatically assuming the enigmatic mark to be the sign of a hostile presence. Crusoe’s paranoia stems from fear that his comfortable state of existence and omnipotence might be compromised whereas before, when he was unsure of his ability to survive, he longed for salvation. He fears, not only cannibalistic natives, but also Spaniards. Yet ironically, fellow Britons prove to be his greatest threat (thereby negating Crusoe’s ethnocentricity). His megalomania is exemplified by his inability and unwillingness to admit fault even after he has returned to Europe. Various dates in his calendar are blaringly incorrect and, though a simple pen stroke would eradicate the errors and the reader would be none the wiser (while saying nothing of the intellectual integrity that most authors would insist upon in acknowledging the mistakes so as to better represent the conditions under which they were operating), Crusoe chooses to ignore them.

Though he does possess a few redeeming qualities, such as resourcefulness and determination, Daniel Defoe’s character of Robinson Crusoe is by no means a hero or even an admirable human being. He is an unapologetic racist, imperialist, fickle theist, and megalomaniac par excellence. He continually shirks moral obligation in favor of activities wherein he will profit, be it financially or socially, or which will appease his narcissism. His lethargy is only superseded by potential harm or ennui. He displays little moral development in that he rewards those who were faithful to his financial interests while he was stranded—not out of respect or gratitude—but anxiety and vanity respectively: Fearing that the Inquisition may result in martyrdom, he sells his plantation and donates the proceeds, of which “The world will seldom be able to show the like of.” During his valediction, Crusoe declares that he has since cast off once again, thereby implying that—to our knowledge—he might have committed many of the same moral atrocities on his “new adventure.” And why not? What evidence do we have to the contrary that, after 28 years on a desert island, he is any the wiser since this ten-year voyage opens with his return to the island where (in true capitalistic spirit) he divides “his colony[’s]” land into plots before announcing to its populace that it is not permitted to leave?