New Fascism Spreads From America to Australia

Nazi Propaganda Poster From WWII-

White Student Union Picture –

University of Queensland condemns ‘racist’ Facebook campaign for white student union

The University of Queensland has condemned a “racist” Facebook page attempting to garner support for a “white student union” on its campus.

The so-called University of Queensland White Student Union page was created this week and purports to be “a safe place to support and promote the interests of domestic students of European descent” at the university.

The first post published on the page contains a rant about the number of international students enrolled with the institution.

“We’re forced to do group work with internationals who can’t speak English. We carry the load and do all the work, while our marks are dragged down,” it says.

“We’re forced to put up with the antisocial behaviour of a particular group of students who treat study spaces as social spaces and constantly attempt to ‘reserve’ public resources, such as computers.”

The university released a statement today distancing itself from the page.

“The University of Queensland is in no way affiliated with the so-called University of Queensland White Student Union Facebook page, and no ‘white student union’ exists at UQ,” the statement read.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Joanne Wright said the university prided itself on diversity.

“We thoroughly condemn any attempt to undermine the importance of fostering an equitable society, both on campus and more broadly,” she said.

The page has 27 likes on Facebook, but has responded to the university’s statement, saying it plans to apply to become an official group next year.

“Our group has never claimed to be an ‘official’ club or society but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” it said.

“There are numerous student groups that aren’t UQU affiliated but exist nonetheless.

“If we have sufficient support from the student body we will apply to affiliate a White Student Society at UQ in 2016.”

Page part of larger US trend promoting white supremacy: UQ

The university said the page appeared to be part of a larger trend that has spread from North America, where dozens of similar pages have appeared, each claiming affiliation with university communities.

According to US media, “white student union” Facebook pages have popped up at colleges across the country in recent days, including at Princeton, Berkeley and Stanford.

The pages are suspected to be in response to a wave of anti-racism protests which have been taking place on campuses this month.

The trend come days after photographs of black Harvard Law faculty members were defaced on the university’s famous Boston campus.

 

America’s Complicity In the Cuban Slave Trade

Slavery in Cuba was aided and abetted by both the United States and England. Today, that history casts a shadow on future US-Cuba relations. The average lifespan of a Cuban slave was only 8 years.

From and Article “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Cuban Slavery”

• Life Expectancy of Enslaved People in Sugar Mills Was No Greater than Eight Years

Working in sugar mills and on sugar plantations was incredibly hard work, and it often slashed the life expectancy of enslaved people dramatically. Based on harsh working conditions, deplorable living quarters, insufficient hours for rest and a variety of other factors, enslaved people who worked in the sugar mills were only expected to live for another eight years at most, according to materials provided by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU

• Enslaved Pregnant Women Were Often Beaten in the Stomach

Cuban slave masters were particularly cruel when it came to pregnant women. While the owners of enslaved people in the Americas tended to punish women without any regards to their pregnancies, in Cuba their pregnancies were used as part of their punishment.

• Slavery Continued On Well After It Had Been ‘Abolished’ in 1817

According to the 1817 treaty that Cuba made with England, slave trade into Cuba was abolished. Unfortunately, this didn’t put an end to enslaved Black people being brought to the foreign land.

• Slavery in Cuba Was Gendered

Unlike slavery in America, Cuba’s slavery system was gendered, according to “General History of the Caribbean,” Vol III. Enslaved women often had a different set of tasks and responsibilities than enslaved males.

• The Haitian Revolution Boosted Demand to Enslave Black People in Cuba

After the Haitian Revolution, slavery became even more profitable for slave traders and masters in Cuba. Without a huge population of enslaved people, Haiti backed out of the sugar market, leaving Cuba to be the only major global force dominating the space.

• Enslaved People Started to Outnumber the White Population in Cuba 

The population of enslaved people in Cuba started to grow so quickly that there was a serious fear that the number of enslaved people would outnumber the white population in the country. According to “A Companion to Latin American History,” enslaved people comprised nearly 40 percent of the Cuban population. When this number was combined with the number of freed Black people in the country, they easily outnumbered the white population.

• There Was a Spanish Flavor of  ‘Slave Codes’ in Cuba

Spanish rule actually created laws that would regulate the treatment of enslaved people. There were guidelines on everything from how many times an enslaved person could be whipped to how many hours they could be worked every day. Unfortunately, this set of rules, known as the Código Negro Español or the Spanish Black Code, was largely ignored by those who enslaved people.

• Black Women Endured Rape by White Masters in Hopes of Gaining Freedom 

There were actually policies in place that would allow enslaved people to obtain their freedom, but they certainly weren’t easy. Enslaved people had the option of buying their freedom, but it was a hefty price that many couldn’t afford. Women, on the other hand, had another option. According to “General History of the Caribbean” Vol III, enslaved women who were raped by white men hoped that they would at least become pregnant after dealing with the traumatic experience because Cuban policies would grant freedom to some enslaved Black women who had a child by a white man.

• Spaniards Weren’t the Ones Who Introduced Cuba to Large-Scale Slave Trading

While Spaniards kept slavery thriving in Cuba, they actually weren’t the ones who introduced it on a major scale. Small groups of enslaved people had already been brought to Cuba before the British took control of the island in the 1760s, but it wasn’t until the British imported thousands of enslaved people to Cuba that it became a major part of their economic foundation.

• Black People Were Enslaved Specifically for Their Superior Strength

Both Africans and Chinese people were enslaved in Cuba, but Black people were chosen specifically for their superior strength over other races. According to CubaHistory.org, Black people were often considered to be in much better physical condition than white people, which made them a target for those involved in the slave trade.

Cuba’s Star-Spangled Slavery

The stars and stripes, not the Confederate flag, once represented the sordid system of human slavery in Cuba.

Old Glory is flying once again in front of the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba. And at the flag-raising ceremony on Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry did everything he could to remind people of the history that brought it down 54 years ago. “For more than half a century,” he said, “U.S.-Cuban relations have been suspended in the amber of Cold War politics.”

The U.S. punditocracy, meanwhile, weighed in with predictable platitudes about the meaning of it all. Many complained that Cuban dissidents should have been invited to the embassy. The Washington Post called the State Department’s excuses for this failure “lame” and proclaimed, “The American flag is a powerful symbol of the country’s long and noble struggle to defend the values of freedom and democracy.”

Fair enough. But as we’ve learned in the course of this summer, flags can mean many things to many people. And if we want to have a better understanding of Cuba, now that it’s beginning to open up, we should remember that its troubled relations with the United States did not begin with Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959 or even Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill. We should understand that for many years the American flag—not the Confederate flag—was, for Cubans, the star-spangled banner of slavery.

Early in the 19th century, Great Britain, the United States, and most of the governments of Europe had passed laws banning the horrific slave trade between Africa and the Americas. The British, who finally emancipated the slaves in their colonies in 1833, moved not only to end their own previously extensive participation in the trade in humans, but to prevent others from carrying out that grim commerce as well. They deployed warships off the coast of Africa and South America to stop, search, and seize suspected slavers, and they used gunship diplomacy more than once to impose their will on weaker nations.

But the United States had gone to war against Britain in 1812 to stop it from stopping and searching any American ships, and steadfastly refused to let the British anti-slaving fleet stop American-flag vessels. Instead, Washington deployed its own feeble squadron off the coast of Africa which did little to stop slavers and much to interfere with the British efforts to do so.

The main market for the slaves—tens of thousands of them every year— was the Spanish colony of Cuba, where it was more profitable to work them to death in the cane fields and then replace them with new, cheaply bought Africans, than it was to keep them healthy and alive. Technically, it was illegal to import them, but the law was ignored.

And, technically, trafficking in African slaves was illegal in the United States as well—it was supposed to be a hanging offense—but the New York ship builders and outfitters figured it was well worth the risk, and when cases were brought before the Southern courts they refused to indict.

Indeed, the pro-slavery faction in the United States had its own designs for Cuba: to buy it or conquer it and turn it into two new slave states, thus assuring control of the Senate and greater power in the House of Representatives. (Slaves had no rights as citizens or as human beings under the Constitution, but counted as three-fifths of a person for census purposes, thus hugely inflating the voting power of the states that held them.) More than a century before the Bay of Pigs fiasco, adventurers in the United States organized invasions of Cuba to “liberate” it from Spain in the interests of American slavery. Those, too, were fiascos.

It is difficult to conceive, today, just how gruesome was the trade carried out under that American banner of “freedom and democracy.” In the 1850s, Southern politicians known as “fire-eaters” were defending slavery—and the slave trade—as a moral good. They were pushing to reopen it between Africa and the United States. And at the epicenter of Southern radicalism, Charleston, many refused to acknowledge the grotesque inhumanity of the Cuban trade even when it stared them in the face.

In late August 1858, the horror that the South did not want to imagine—a slave ship—was right there in Charleston harbor. Vomit and urine and feces and blood had seeped deep into the raw wood of the sunless slapped-together slave decks in the hold, staining them indelibly with filth. Cockroaches by the millions seethed among the boards, and clouds of fleas and gnats rose up from them.

The stench that came from this vessel wasn’t the smell of a ship full of cattle and horses, but that peculiar smell that surrounds humans, and only humans, who are very afraid and very sick, or dying, or dead. The water in Charleston Harbor was still and flat and thick as oil, and the air was stifling hot and heavy. The stinking vessel, a brig called the Echo, had been captured off the coast of Cuba a few days before.

Because it was the summer, the season of disease, many of Charleston’s better-off residents had left the city. For those who remained behind the spectacle of the Echo and its Africans was a disgusting but almost irresistible novelty. Because the transatlantic trade had been banned for 50 years, many had never beheld such a ship before. “You will see by this morning’s Mercury that we have a slaver in our harbor,” one distinguished Charlestonian wrote to a friend. “She has on board about 300 naked native negroes, 60 of them women. Every one of whom is in the family way. Everybody is talking about them. The yellow fever, the cables and every other subject have faded before this. There is really and truly an excitement among these cold, stolid Charlestonians.”

That the Echo had been captured at all was the result of a dawning awareness by the federal government of something that the British consul in Charleston, Robert Bunch, had been explaining to the foreign office in London for years: the fleets of slave ships flying the American flag, supported by money-men in New York, and incited and abetted by the fire-eaters like Robert Barnwell Rhett and Leonida Spratt, posed a growing threat to the authority of Washington and to the Union itself.

The slave traffic was growing fast. Something had to be done before the momentum became unstoppable. So, quietly and against stubborn bureaucratic resistance, President James Buchanan had American warships step up their anti-slaving patrols off the coast of Cuba as well as Africa. And the Echo was their first prize…Read the rest here…

 

The New Jim Crow – Virtual Slavery – Republicans Bring Back Chain Gangs to Replace Paid Labor and Illegal Immigrants

Post Civil War Much of the South Was Rebuilt By Prison Labor Slavery

Chain Gangs were once a fixture in the South. Used as a slavery replacement strategy, prisoners – almost exclusively black, were used for everything from rebuilding the City of Atlanta after the Civil War to picking cotton, and laying railroad tracks.

The Prison Slavery System is making a big comeback, with major corporations – and in states which have driven out their “illegal immigrants”, now need Prison labor to pick the crops.

With black unemployment hovering at 16.5%, and teen unemployment hovering at 50% – in conservative America, if you are black – you have to go to jail to get a job.

Wisconsin Republicans aren’t that ambitious…yet.

Prison inmates replace unionized workers in Racine, Wisconsin

 

Prison inmates have replaced union workers in Racine County, Wisconsin, thanks to the changes to the states collective bargaining laws that went into effect at the end of June.

The Journal Times reported prison inmates will now be able to do tasks such as landscaping, painting, and shoveling sidewalks in the winter that were previously performed by unionized employees.

Inmates are not required to do any work for the county, but can receive time off their sentence if they do. Racine County Executive Jim Ladwig said the use of prison labor would not result in any public works staff reductions.

“We’re gonna have them do landscaping at county buildings, have them pick up trash on the roads,” he told local Fox News 6. “So we can use some of the county personnel to do difficult tasks, such as putting in a parking lot at the park.”

Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed a non-fiscal version of his budget plan into law in March that stripped nearly all collective bargaining rights from Wisconsin public workers, giving officials the power to make many changes affecting workers without formal negotiations.

 

 

Why Bin Lauden Won the War

It has become obvious to members of the intelligentsia what has been obvious to some of us for a very long time…

Bin Lauden, and Al Quada have won the “War of Terrorism”.

It started with the entirely unnecessary and illegitimate invasion of Iraq, and has gone steadily downhill since then.

The objective of international terrorism to to fool larger enemies into giving up their freedom, and into becoming frozen by fear. We had an entire presidential administration under the Bushit which used that fear to shred our Constitution and Laws. Today’s Republican Party, serving as little more than Faux New’s sock puppet, and the Tea Party’s legitimacy – revels in promoting fear for political gain. When you see the Tea Bagger clowns marching down our streets to protest the building of a Muslim Religious Center near the site of the WTC Buildings…

If you haven’t figured it our yet – Bin Lauden won.

Back during the bad old days of the Bushit Administration I argued that the best response to the downing of the 110 Story WTC Buildings…

Was to build 200 story buildings on the same spot.

But the chicken littles won that argument…

Just like Bin Lauden has won the war.

Ted Koppel hits one out of the park with this one – finally pointing out what should have been obvious.

Ted Koppel: Nine years after 9/11, let’s stop fulfilling bin Laden’s goals

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, succeeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could possibly have envisioned. This is not just because they resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, nor only because they struck at the heart of American financial and military power. Those outcomes were only the bait; it would remain for the United States to spring the trap.

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

It did not have to be this way. The Bush administration’s initial response was just about right. The calibrated combination of CIA operatives, special forces and air power broke the Taliban in Afghanistan and sent bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda scurrying across the border into Pakistan. The American reaction was quick, powerful and effective — a clear warning to any organization contemplating another terrorist attack against the United States. This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared “mission accomplished,” with the caveat that unspecified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda’s leader. The world would have understood, and most Americans would probably have been satisfied.

 

1 in 5 Black Men Marry Interracially Today

While black-black Marriage still makes up 75% of all marriages involving black folks, the numbers are changing rapidly.

What the report doesn’t say is if the number of black women marrying men of other races is increasing, of by how much. At this rate in 20 years or so, the concept of a “black” community in the United States will disappear outside of the “encapsulated” urban communities. Indeed, “blackness” is slowly migrating from a racial definition to an “ethnic” definition.

I would like to see statistics on the education and socio-economic level of black folks who are marrying outside of their own racial group. What I would bet is this is dominated by a high percentage of working class blue collar and educated, professionals.

Black Women See Fewer Black Men at the Altar

A new study shows that more and more black men are marrying women of other races. In fact, more than 1 in 5 black men who wed (22 percent) married a nonblack woman in 2008. This compares with about 9 percent of black women, and represents a significant increase for black men — from 15.7 percent in 2000 and 7.9 percent in 1980.

Sociologists said the rate of black men marrying women of other races further reduces the already-shrunken pool of potential partners for black women seeking a black husband.

“When you add in the prison population,” said Prof. Steven Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center, “it pretty well explains the extraordinarily low marriage rates of black women.”

Among all married African-Americans in 2008, 13 percent of men and 6 percent of women had a nonblack spouse. This compares with nearly half of American-born Asians choosing non-Asian spouses.

“The continuing imbalance in the rates for black men and black women could be making it even harder for black women to find a husband,” said Prof. Andrew J. Cherlin, director of the population center at Johns Hopkins University.

The study, to be released Friday by the Pew Research Center, found that intermarriage among Asian, black, Hispanic and white people now accounts for a record 1 in 6 new marriages in the United States. Tellingly, blacks and whites remain the least-common variety of interracial pairing. Still, black-white unions make up 1 in 60 new marriages today, compared with fewer than 1 in 1,000 back when Barack Obama’s parents wed a half-century ago.

While the increased rate of intermarriage reflects demographic changes in the American population — a more diverse pool of available spouses — as well as changing social mores, they may presage a redefinition of America’s evolving concepts of race and ethnicity.

“The lines dividing these groups are getting blurrier and blurrier,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, an author of the Pew analysis.

For instance, of the 2.7 million American children with a black parent, about 10 percent also have one nonblack parent today. Because many mixed-race African- Americans still choose to identify as being black — as Mr. Obama did when he filled out the 2010 census — the number of multiracial African-Americans could actually be higher…

The Pew analysis found that among newly married couples, 14.6 percent were mixed in 2008, compared with 11.2 percent in 2000 and 8.3 percent in 1990. (Among all people currently married, 8 percent of marriages were mixed in 2008, compared with 6.8 percent in 2000 and 4.5 percent in 1990.)

Of all 3.8 million adults who married in 2008, 31 percent of Asians, 26 percent of Hispanic people, 16 percent of blacks and 9 percent of whites married a person whose race or ethnicity was different from their own. Those were all record highs.

 

Dr, Boyce Watkins – Gates Full of It!

Watkins lights into Gates with this piece. I agree with Watkins that Gates has missed the key issues relative to slavery and Reparations, and fallen for the white supremacist line which is oft quoted as an excuse.

Henry Louis Gates lets US off the hook in ‘slavery blame game’

Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently wrote an interesting piece for the New York Times called, “Ending the Slavery Blame Game.” In the piece, Gates effectively argues that the fight for reparations is convoluted and somewhat mitigated by the fact that African elites participated in the slave trade. While describing complex business deals made between some African leadership and the Europeans who brought Africans to the New World, it almost appears as though Gates is saying that this disturbing relationship somehow undermines the right of African-Americans to hold our government accountable for its involvement in crimes committed against our people.

At very least, I am under the assumption that by “ending the slavery blame game,” Gates is arguing that we should stop blaming the United States government and white America for the rape, murder, castration, lynching and beating of our ancestors.

Sorry Dr. Gates, but I must respectfully (or perhaps not so respectfully) disagree. If a young girl is sold into prostitution by her own parents, the pimp must still pay for the suffering he caused the young woman. He can’t simply say, “Her parents made a deal with me, so you should stop the blame game.”

In other words, the United States, as a broad and powerful industrial entity, benefited from slavery to the tune of several trillion dollars. Much of this wealth was passed down from one white man to another, and was always out of the grasp of the black men, women and children who gave their lives on American soil in order to earn it. As a result, the median net worth of the African-American family is roughly one-tenth that of white American families and we have consistently higher unemployment due to our inability to create jobs, since white Americans own most businesses.

 

Henry Louis Gates – On Slavery and Reparations

Think Professor Gates misses a half a dozen points here in this article, including the issues of generational slavery and Jim Crow being the actual driving issues behind much of the Reparations discussion…

So I believe Gates is wrong here on a number of points. After a snippet from the Gates piece, I will include a response by Boyce Watkins response, which isn’t very dissimilar to my reaction, except for the personal shot at Gates’ ego…

Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.

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.

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

 

Ending Modern Slavery – Not Only In the Rest of the World

This video discusses the existence of, and the methodology to end modern slavery as well as the economics.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Estimates vary on the number of people being held in slavery in the Untied States.

Modern Slavery

In textbooks across the country, students are still taught that slavery in the US ended with the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

But the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) knows better, and its Modern-Day Slavery Museum is traveling throughout Florida to drive that point home–that slavery persists in the agriculture fields of the state right up through this very day.

The Village Voice recently described the significance of the museum this way: “Though it’s unlikely to compete for crowds with Disneyworld, the Modern-Day Slavery Museum may be Florida’s most important new attraction.”

 

How Corruption Destroyed America

Corruption threatens “soul and fabric” of U.S.: FBI

BOCA RATON, Florida (Reuters) – Corruption, whether in the form of crooked officials, financial fraudsters or even philandering sports stars, is tearing at the fabric of U.S. society and is the country’s No. 1 criminal threat, a senior FBI agent said on Tuesday.

Corruption destroying the country

Addressing businessmen in Florida, where financial fraud cases jumped by 42 percent in the last year, FBI Miami Division Special Agent in Charge John Gillies said failures in personal ethics and integrity sowed the initial poisonous seeds of corruption in a society.

Gillies said transgressions by high-profile public servants and even perceived social role models, like top golfer Tiger Woods, currently embroiled in allegations that he had extramarital affairs, sent the signal to young Americans that cheating and stealing were acceptable.

“Where do our children learn this? They see us, their elected officials, their sports stars, they see how they act and they figure, ‘well it’s OK,'” he said, citing the case of Woods, whose early morning car accident in Florida last month triggered a storm of media questioning of his clean-living reputation.