Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

by Stephen Lendman

For Hondurans, the event marked a new beginning, not an end to their dark history. Widespread killings and human rights abuses followed and a sham November election, installing Porfirio (Pepe) Lobo Sosa president, a US-friendly stooge heading a fascist regime. The nation’s military is firmly in control against popular resistance, street violence and death squad terror its repressive tools. The Obama administrative stands firmly supportive. It blessed the coup, the new government and provides aid, all for hardline rule, none for popular needs. 

Activists and journalists are especially threatened. Honduras is one of the most dangerous countries anywhere for those speaking openly about government corruption, human rights abuses, and despotism, the latest casualty – Radio Internacional reporter Zelaya Diaz, shot dead on August 24 along a rural San Pedro Sula road. According to press reports, he died from two bullet wounds to the head, another in his chest. Like similar past incidents, an investigation, if it occurs, will be whitewashed. No one will be held accountable.

Though not openly threatened, an earlier suspicious fire damaged Diaz’s home, a message perhaps demanding he stop reporting on politics and crime. Since March alone, eight journalists have been killed, a disturbing pattern against others stepping too close to honest reporting about what Hondurans most need to know – the truth about their corrupted, brutal regime.

Despite the UN General Assembly’s June 30, 2009 condemnation of the coup “by acclimation,” 90 nations have now restored diplomatic ties, normalizing relations after the October 30 Tegucigalpa-Jose Accord (the unfulfilled agreement to form a National Unity/ Reconciliation Government) and Lobo’s election – business as usual triumphing over the rule of law and democratic freedoms, Washington always in the lead, pressuring others to go along.

Resistance, however continues. On August 27, Honduras Resists reported that protests and police repression filled Tegucigalpa streets, the nation’s capital, for the third straight day. Security forces surrounded the National Pedagogic University where teachers, students, unionists, campesinos, and other activists gathered inside demanding social justice.

They were attacked, police using tear gas, then beating some overcome and forced outside. Others were arrested. The previous day, thousands of teachers were assaulted near the Presidential Palace (Casa Presidential), the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH) saying a number were wounded, yet Escuela Hospital refused to treat four injured professors. Protests erupted after negotiations with the Lobo government failed. Security forces responded repressively.

Honduran human and worker rights are consistently denied. As a result, on August 31, the National Front for Popular Resistance (FNRP) called for a September 7 nationwide strike for a living wage and other demands, including keeping the nation’s natural resources public, not privatized.

According to Juan Barahona, President of the United Federation of Workers of Honduras (FUTH), it’s also to “express our rejection of this regime,” its repressive policies and neoliberal model.

In addition, FNRP wants a National Constituent Assembly to review and rewrite the Constitution, supported by most Hondurans. It also plans a September 15 national mobilization commemoration on the 187th anniversary of independence from Spain.

It needs another from Washington, Honduras’ ruling oligarchy, fascist government, and repressive military and police, cracking down brutally against activists, campesinos, and supportive journalists for social justice.

Report from Rights Action (RA)

RA focuses on community development, emergency relief, environmental and human rights issues in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and El Salvador. It aims to “build north-south alliances and carries out education, political and legal work for global equity and justice,” following a “just development model.”

On August 31, it reported that Honduran repression continues, elaborating on three-days of Tegucigalpa crackdowns. It followed weeks of public school teacher demands for the return of $200 million taken from the National Institute of IMPREMA, an institution managing their pension funds.

The umbrella organization FOMH represents six teachers unions and their 63,000 members nationwide. After the June 2009 coup, they said the new regime took the money they want back.

Students have demands as well, wanting 180 fired workers reinstated and National Autonomous University (UNAH) director, Julieta Castrellano’s resignation. Allied with teachers, they also oppose Lobo’s plan to privatize public education. As a result, it’s been in crisis for months without resolution. Students occupied the university. Police assaulted it repressively.

Peaceful protests continued. Hardline crackdowns followed. Police used water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets, brutal beatings, and arrests, in the presence of women and children around the National Pedagogical University. From a black Toyota, a gunman fired a 9-millimeter weapon at protesters, the car belonging to the National Congress.

Besides arrests, “Over 100 people were captured and ‘guarded’ by police against a fence outside the University.” After human rights representatives intervened, they were released. Yet many teachers and students were trapped in classrooms suffering tear gas exposure. Seven or more others were injured, including a Globo TV/Radio journalist.

Earlier in August, security forces brutally beat three union leaders and one teacher, fingered by regime infiltrators in their marches. The corporate-owned media call protesters “instruments of violence,” accusing them of disrupting children’s education. In fact, they’re Hondurans for social justice.

On August 31, the Honduras Solidarity Network (HSN), a coalition of US organizations, denounced state repression, saying:

“the recent brutal attacks by government forces against non-violent protests show that there has been no reconciliation after last year’s coup d’etat, and the US government’s policy of support for the current government must be changed. We call for an immediate end to the repression and human rights violations against the opposition movement,” its teachers, students, unionists and other supporters.

HSN spokeswoman Vicki Cervantes said “The United States government continues its support for the oligarchy and Lobo in the form of aid and pressure on other governments in the hemisphere to accept” its legitimacy when, in fact, it has none.

Meanwhile, popular opposition is growing. For the first time since 1954, Honduran trade union federations called a general strike. In addition, nearly one million eligible voters signed letters demanding a National Constituent Assembly to rewrite the Constitution. So far, hardline repression continues, Washington providing weapons and ammunition.

Campesinos Struggling for Their Rights

They’re ongoing throughout Honduras, including in the northern Valle de Aguan, once the country’s agrarian reform capital, campesinos now contesting their land rights agreed to in a MUCA arranged deal – the Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Agua.

Signed in December, they agreed to abandon occupied areas in return for 11,000 acres of cultivated and uncultivated land. However, powerful landowners objected, using security forces to intimidate, threaten, and persecute farmers, killing eight or more and arresting others on grounds of “theft and trespassing.”

The Aguan land struggle continues, the Committee in Defense of Human Rights (CODEH), saying “the facts show that the justice system like the Public Ministry and the Police are allied with the landowners of the zone to persecute those who try to challenge their privilege.”

Decades of the country’s dark history under a ruling oligarchy left up to two-thirds of Hondurans impoverished, unable to meet basic needs. Most are landless or have too little, over half unemployed or underemployed, while wealthy landowners control most valued areas and want more, never satisfied with enough.

Despite the 1962 agrarian reform, the 1992 Law for Agrarian Modernization rolled back earlier gains. Thereafter, indigenous movements only marginally restored losses, no match against wealthy oligarchs backed by repressive state forces, enforcing death squad terror.

Honduras’ class struggle persists in the hemisphere’s second poorest country after Haiti, committed to end decades of repression, injustice and poverty, a growing problem throughout most of the world, dark interests wanting more wealth and power at the expense of easily exploitable people.

Final Comments

In America, the major media suppress the Honduran story – the coup, deep repression, and popular struggle for change. Committed grassroots pressure continues, what’s mostly absent in the United States on a fast track toward despotism, the kind Central America has long experienced, Haitians and Hondurans most affected, yet persist for their rights against long odds they’re determined one day to overcome.

by Stephen Lendman

Wall Street and other financial scammers do it from the living, Prudential and many insurers from the dead, ripping off families of killed war vets. On July 28, Bloomberg.com’s David Evans discussed how it works in an article titled, “Fallen Soldiers’ Families Denied Cash as Insurers Profit,” a polite way of explaining grand theft. From the living, it’s bad enough, from the dead, it gives chutzpah new meaning, affecting countless thousands of bereaved families. 

Evans wrote about one, Cindy Lohman. Two weeks after her son Ryan was killed, she received a Prudential Financial, Inc. “9-inch-by-12-inch envelope,” the company managing life insurance for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

A letter explained. As his beneficiary, she was entitled to $400,000 in death benefits along with something looking like a checkbook. The funds “would be placed in a convenient interest-bearing account, allowing her time to decide how to use” them, the letter saying:

“You can hold the money in the account for safekeeping for as long as you like,” plus a disclaimer in easily overlooked fine print, explaining “what it called its Alliance Account,” a non-FDIC insured scheme, a ripoff to defraud beneficiaries like Lohman.

After leaving the funds untouched for months, she tried unsuccessfully using one of the “checks,” then failed a second time. She was “shocked,” saying she thought the money was FDIC insured, in a bank, to be used freely.

Not so. The “checks” were drafts or IOUs. “That money – like $28 billion in 1 million death-benefit accounts managed by (130 insurers like Prudential) wasn’t actually sitting in a bank.” It was in Prudential’s general corporate account earning income – around 4.8% for insurers, 1% or less for survivors. This summer it was 0.5%, less than half what some banks pay on jumbo CDs, and way less than insurers yield on their investments.

“It’s a betrayal,” said Lohman. “It saddens me as an American that a company would stoop so low as to make a profit on the death of a soldier. Is there anything lower than that?”

For sure – waging an illegal war of aggression, sending young men and women to die for a lie, Ryan Lohman one of thousands affected (plus others maimed and disabled for life), their deaths compounded by insurance fraud ripping of their survivors, and VA officials doing nothing to stop it, claiming ignorance when they damn well knew or easily could have found out. For every branch of government, the business of America is business, the public their patsies to be scammed of their money, health and welfare.

So-Called “Retained-Asset” Accounts

They’ve become standard practice “in an industry that touches virtually every American: There are more than 300 million active life insurance policies in the US, and the industry holds $4.6 trillion in assets, according to the American Council of Life Insurers.”

Insurers tell survivors their money is safe, guaranteed by them not the government, making them woefully unsafe when investments are ripped off, and the principal depends on the company’s health.

According to Jeffrey Stempel, Law Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law, the “checkbook” system cheats survivors.

“It’s institutionalized bad faith. In my view, this is a scheme to defraud by inducing the policyholder’s beneficiary to let the life insurance company retain assets they’re not entitled to. It’s turning death claims into a profit center,” and Washington lets them get away with it.

Three firms, including Prudential and Metropolitan Life, handle retained-asset accounts for about 130 life insurers. No public records show how much, but at least $28 billion is involved.

Besides scamming beneficiaries, insurance companies may be violating federal bank law – a 1933 statute making it “a felony for any company to accept deposits without state or federal authorization.” Only chartered banks and credit unions can do it. Insurers aren’t chartered or regulated, so funds they hold for beneficiaries will disappear if they go under.

Further, the bogus Obama administration “financial reform” doesn’t address retained-asset accounts, only a new federal insurance office with no teeth. The same holds for the entire bill, a gift to Wall Street and big insurers, small investors left unprotected, or as one analyst explained – “austerity” for the public, high times for the big boys, and why not. They wrote the bill and got what they want as they did for “healthcare reform” and everything else Congress enacts, corporate occupied territory like the White House and all federal agencies. How else could Wall Street and insurers like Prudential commit fraud and get away with it.

Pru and Met Life alone rip off hundreds of millions of dollars annually, stealing one of their main profit centers with no accountability. Since 1999, the VA let Prudential send survivors “checkbooks” for its Alliance Account. “In 2009 alone, (recipient) families….were supposed to be paid” $1 billion in death benefits “immediately, according to their insurance policies. They weren’t.”

Pru VA policies offer either a lump sum payment or 36 monthly installments. About 90% choose the former and get a “checkbook,” not a cashable check. Yet under a 2008 law, recipients have one year to put their funds into a tax-free Roth IRA. Lohman said Pru never told her. Unless Congress corrects the fraud, she and other recipients “will remain a secret profit center for the life insurance industry,” their officials robbing the graves of dead soldiers.

Parents Sue for Lost Benefits

On August 30, AP reported that the parents of six dead soldiers “are suing Prudential Financial, saying it paid paltry interest on military life insurance benefits while keeping more generous” payouts for itself.

Filed in Springfield, MA US District Court, it accuses Pru of using “bookkeeping maneuvers,” misrepresenting how benefits are handled. “Their attorneys are seeking class-action status” for potentially tens of thousands of others.

One of four attorneys involved, Cristobal Bonifaz, said lost interest varies, “depending on how quickly beneficiaries withdrew the money,” those leaving it untouched (the great majority) owed the most, as much as $30,000 per recipient.

“What we’re saying to Prudential is, ‘You kept investing the money, but that money did not belong to you as of the day that person died, and whatever you made off it, you should give to those persons it was meant for.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. Plaintiffs in the current suit are parents of soldiers who died in Iraq, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and those dying after returning home.

Lead plaintiffs, Kevin and Joyce Lucey, spoke for many saying: “It’s totally unacceptable for any company to think they can treat any family that has gone through this kind of trauma, especially military families. (We) think it becomes part of our responsibility to make sure no one has to go through anything similar to this.”

Given Washington’s complicity with banksterism, insurance fraud, and numerous other corporate scams, imagine how many others haven’t come to light. Imagine also the challenges ordinary people face for restitution, even by class-action, deep-pocketed bigness and business-friendly courts huge hurdles to overcome, plus interminable litigation years, especially when high stakes are involved.

by Stephen Lendman

August 29, 2005, a day of infamy remembered less for the storm, catastrophic floods and destruction, and more as a metaphor for disaster capitalism, exploiting security threats, “terror” attacks, economic meltdowns, and “natural” disasters like Katrina. 

It turned this aging senior into a writer and radio host, furious over federal, state and local authorities using it to reward business at the expense of New Orleans’ poor Blacks. Five years later, their lives remain in disarray through no fault of their own.

Levies protecting their neighborhoods were left weak, vulnerable to fail as they did, then Congressman Richard Baker (R. LA) saying, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it but God did,” with considerable willful negligence help.

Malik Rahim, (New Orleans) Common Ground Relief (CGR) co-founder said:

“They wanted them poor niggers out of there and they ain’t had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers, you know? And that’s just the bottom line.”

Blank is beautiful. Ethnic cleansing was long-planned, the scheme, of course, to erase poor neighborhoods, replacing them with upscale condos and other high-profit projects on choice city land, New Orleans developer Joseph Canizaro saying, “we (now) have a clean (slate) to start (over and take advantage of) big opportunities.”

A year later, an affected resident spoke for many saying:

“They(‘re) just messing all over us. Putting me out of our own house. We (try going) back and when we get there they got the police there putting us out….they ain’t letting nobody in….but where (am I) going to go – me and my kids?”

Rahim calls New Orleans two cities, one “for the white and rich, (the other) for the poor and Blacks. (The former) recovered. They had a Jazz Fest….a Mardi Gras….But for those who haven’t recovered, there’s nothing.” Most haven’t been allowed back. Their neighborhoods were stolen for development, Katrina a chance to wage class warfare against them, no match for predators turning tragedy into profit.

It’s a familiar pattern nationwide and in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, commerce following the flag abroad and exploiting natural disasters at home, complicit politicians easing “free market” solutions for the privileged.

Though no match against dark, entrenched forces, Rahim’s Common Ground Relief fought back. Founded right after Katrina in the Lower 9th Ward, it’s a volunteer not-for-profit organization running numerous projects, including new home construction, free medical and legal help, education for school children, community gardening, a women’s shelter, job training, wetlands restoration, food security and environmental science.

By mobilizing people to work together against long odds, it provides hope through “short term relief for victims (and) long term support in rebuilding” destroyed communities. In the Lower 9th alone, 14,000 people and 4,800 homes were affected, most residents with longstanding neighborhood roots, enjoying “the highest percentage of African American home ownership of any city” in America. Losing them meant “the disappearance of (their) major asset, economic livelihood and, as a result, their future.”

Bill Quigley is a longtime activist/Law Professor, Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director, and former Loyola University, New Orleans Director of the Law Clinic and Gillis Long Poverty Law Center.

Three years post-Katrina, his aftermath assessment was disturbing but unsurprising, including:

– renters getting no financial aid;

– rental homes not repaired;

– unaffordable housing for poor and low income people because rents, on average, rose 46%;

– no rebuilding plans for destroyed public housing;

– thousands of poor neighborhood homes demolished to prevent residents from returning;

– half the city’s public schools destroyed, replaced by privatized ones; today, 75% are for-profit, favoring Whites, shutting out Blacks;

– all unionized city school employees fired, then selectively rehired for less pay and few or no benefits;

– displaced Blacks entirely disenfranchised;

– four of the 13 city Planning Districts as much at flood risk as before Katrina;

– only 11% of Lower 9th families returned, the community formerly one of the richest culturally, now destroyed by design; today about 20% are back;

– 25% of hospitals gone and 38% fewer beds available;

– thousands still living in temporary trailers; many others displaced across other states, still unable to return;

– 72,000 vacant, ruined or unoccupied houses;

– the city’s Black population reduced by half;

– thousands of their children never returned to public schools;

– new hurricane protection construction barely started, and much more, the city wrecked for corporate predators, the poor exploited for profit.

In his early August article titled, “Katrina Pain Index 2010 New Orleans,” Quigley, Davida Finger and Lance Hill updated the disturbing picture, saying:

“….tens of thousands of (New Orleans) homes….remain vacant or blighted. Tens of thousands of African American children who were in the public schools (aren’t) back, nor have their parents been able to return.” The metro area lost over 140,000 people, the city itself over 100,000. “Thousands of elderly and displaced people (were affected). Affordable housing” is in short supply, poor and low income people forced either to pay up or do without.

Displaced residents were scattered across the country, in as many as 5,500 cities, “the largest concentrations in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and San Antonio.” Most are women. “A third earn less than $20,000 a year” – for a family of four, it’s below the Census Bureau’s $22,000 poverty threshold and well below minimum needs in any US metropolitan area.

In addition, one fourth of area housing is either vacant or blighted, “by far the highest” US rate. As a result, about 58% of city renters and 45% of suburban ones pay “more than 35 percent of (their) income on housing.” Above 30% is unaffordable, forcing families to do without, including for essentials like enough nutritious food and health care, less available to poor people throughout the country, especially in New Orleans where the official poverty rate is double the national average. The unofficial one is even higher, given the indifference to Blacks communities five years post-Katrina.

In greater New Orleans, everything they need is in short supply, including schools, medical care, jobs, public assistance, and affordable housing, the number of public apartments down 75%. Destroying them was planned, upscale properties intended for well off White folks. Blacks aren’t wanted.

The same holds for schools, mostly privatized, 85% of their students White in a formerly Black majority city. No longer, and a result, less public ones accommodate 43% fewer students, poor Blacks most affected. They also get less public assistance, fewer social services overall, or none at all.

The entire region was affected, nearly 100,000 square miles of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama communities destroyed or heavily damaged. Over one million people were permanently displaced. Hundreds of thousands lost everything, compounded by the spring Gulf disaster, the greatest ever environmental crime, potentially affecting the lives and livelihoods of millions.

Billions of dollars in promised aid never arrived, going instead for luxury hotels, casinos, private clubs, the oil industry and gentrification, the polite term for dispossessing poor communities, replacing them with upscale ones for the rich and well off, a similar pattern across the country, especially impacting Blacks and Latinos. They’re victimized by class warfare under Democrat and Republican administrations, destroying the lives of millions. An uncaring nation left them on their own and out of luck.

New Orleans is a metaphor for as bad as it gets, poor Black communities devastated and ignored, most of the two hardest hit still uninhabited – the Lower 9th and St. Bernard Parish back to less than one fourth of pre-Katrina levels.

After it hit, FEMA provided 120,000 trailers throughout the region. Now, they’re gone, sold at public auction, some to families using them. On August 20, Newsweek said only 860 Louisiana families were still accommodated, excluding buyers still in theirs.

Getting no federal, state or local help, others now pay unaffordable rents, live in destroyed or damaged houses, double up with relatives, or go homeless, the numbers twice the pre-Katrina rate, south Louisiana’s social infrastructure gutted to displace Blacks for preferred Whites.

Even New Orleans levee rebuilding isn’t finished, the Army Corps of Engineers estimating completion by late summer or early fall 2011 at the earliest. Some experts say the new system still won’t protect adequately against another major hurricane.

Post-Katrina, New Orleans bears testimony to a callous, uncaring nation. “America the beautiful” is for the privileged alone – no one else, especially people of color, the poor and disadvantaged, “The Big Easy” their ground zero.