Watch: The Murder of Fred Hampton (documentary)

The Murder of Fred Hampton began as a film portrait of Hampton and his leadership of the Illinois Black Panther Party, but half way through filming, Hampton was killed by Chicago police. In an infamous moment in Chicago history and politics, over a dozen armed officers from Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office, in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and FBI, burst into Hampton’s apartment on December 4, 1969 while its occupants were sleeping, killing Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark and brutalizing the remaining occupants including Hampton’s pregnant girlfriend. In ten minutes, 99 rounds were fired by the police during the raid, two of which were point blank shots to Hampton’s head. Filmmakers Mike Gray and Howard Alk arrived a few hours later to shoot film footage of the crime scene that was later used to contradict news reports and police testimony.

The pre-dawn raid was organized to serve a warrant for illegal weapons. Originally the officers claimed self-defense, stating the Panthers fired multiple shots at the officers first. The only shot fired by the Panthers was later determined by a 1970 Federal grand jury to be a reflexive reaction in Clark’s death convulsions after being shot by the raiding team while he was holding a shotgun. The same grand jury concluded that the original investigations by the Chicago Police internal investigation division and the Cook county coroners’ office  were complete shams, with each officer being asked questions which had been previously written up and given to them, along with a set of answers. The 243 page report would go on to say, “Physical evidence, standing alone and unexplained, is sufficient to establish probable cause to charge the officers with a willful violation of these survivors’ civil rights.”

Read more about Fred Hampton’s death here

Read the declassified FBI files on Hampton here

Watch: “Darwin’s Nightmare” (documentary)

Some time in the 1960′s, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world. Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo - Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the continent. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots.

From the director Hubert Sauper:

The old question, which social and political structure is the best for the world seems to have been answered. Capitalism has won. The ultimate forms for future societies are “consumer democracies”, which are seen as “civilized” and “good”. In a Darwinian sense the “good system” won. It won by either convincing its enemies or eliminating them.

In Darwin’s Nightmare I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish and the ephemeral boom around this “fittest” animal into an ironic, frightening allegory for what is called the New World Order. I could make the same kind of movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds, in Honduras, bananas, and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, crude oil. Most of us I guess, know about the destructive mechanisms of our time, but we cannot fully picture them. We are unable to “get it”, unable to actually believe what we know.

It is, for example, incredible that wherever prime raw material is discovered, the locals die in misery, their sons become soldiers, and their daughters are turned into servants and whores. Hearing and seeing the same stories over and over makes me feel sick. After hundreds of years of slavery and colonisation of Africa, globalisation of african markets is the third and deadliest humiliation for the people of this continent. The arrogance of rich countries towards the third world (that’s three quarters of humanity) is creating immeasurable future dangers for all peoples.

It seems that the individual participants within a deadly system don’t have ugly faces, and for the most part, no bad intentions. These people include you and me. Some of us are “only doing their job” (like flying a jumbo from A to B carrying napalm), some don’t want to know, others simply fight for survival. I tried to film the personalities in this documentary as intimately as possible. Sergey, Dimond, Raphael, Eliza: real people who wonderfully represent the complexity of this system, and for me, the real enigma.

Read more about the film here

Read: “Wikileaks Haiti, Let Them Live on $3 a Day”

Wikileaks recently unveiled some damning cables about the US government’s involvement in Haiti’s economy via The Nation and Haïti Liberté. To sum up:  Haiti planned to raise its minimum wage from 24 cents per hour to 62 cents, angering the contractors for U.S. corporations such as Levis and Hanes, who pay these ridiculously low wages to Haitians who sew American clothing. Apparently the Obama administration was not pleased with this development, or should I say attempted development.

According to Doug Coughlin of The Nation and Kim Ives of Haïti Liberté:

Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables.

The factory owners told the Haitian Parliament that they were willing to give workers a 9-cents-per-hour pay increase to 31 cents per hour to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for US clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica.

But the factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5 per day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when they took that stand.

To resolve the impasse between the factory owners and Parliament, the State Department urged quick intervention by then Haitian President René Préval.

“A more visible and active engagement by Préval may be critical to resolving the issue of the minimum wage and its protest ‘spin-off’—or risk the political environment spiraling out of control,” argued US Ambassador Janet Sanderson in a June 10, 2009, cable back to Washington.

Two months later Préval negotiated a deal with Parliament to create a two-tiered minimum wage increase—one for the textile industry at about $3 per day and one for all other industrial and commercial sectors at about $5 per day.

Still the US Embassy wasn’t pleased. A deputy chief of mission, David E. Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”

Haitian advocates of the minimum wage argued that it was necessary to keep pace with inflation and alleviate the rising cost of living. As it is, Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere and the World Food Program estimates that as many as 3.3 million people in Haiti, a third of the population, are food insecure. In April 2008 Haiti was rocked by the so-called Clorox food riots, named after hunger so painful that it felt like bleach in your stomach.

According to a 2008 Worker Rights Consortium study, a family of one working member and two dependents needed at least 550 Haitian gourdes, or $12.50, per day to meet normal living expenses.

The revelation of US support for low wages in Haiti’s assembly zones was in a trove of 1,918 cables made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté by the transparency group WikiLeaks. As part of a collaboration with Haïti Liberté, The Nation is publishing English-language articles based on those cables.

In an emailed statement, the State Department declined to comment on the disclosures in this article, citing a policy against commenting on documents that purport to contain classified information and stating that it “strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of such information.” However, the State Department spokesperson added in the email:

“In Haiti, approximately 80 percent of the population is unemployed and 78 percent earns less than $1 per day”— actually, according to the UN Development Program, 78 percent of Haitians live on less than $2, not $1, a day—and “the US government is working with the government of Haiti and international partners to help create jobs, support economic growth, promote foreign direct investment that meets ILO labor standards in the apparel industry and invest in agriculture and beyond.”

For a twenty month period between early February 2008 and October 2009, U.S. Embassy officials closely monitored and reported on the minimum wage issue. The cables show that the Embassy fully understood the popularity of the measure.

The cables said that the new minimum wage even had support from a majority of the Haitian business community “based on reports that wages in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua (competitors in the garment industry) will increase also.”

Still, the proposal engendered fierce opposition from Haiti’s tiny assembly zone elite, which Washington had long been supporting with direct financial aid and free trade deals.

In 2006, the U.S. Congress passed the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) bill, which gave Haitian assembly zone manufacturers preferential trade incentives. Two years later, Congress passed an even more generous version of the duty-free trade bill called HOPE II, and USAID provided technical assistance and training programs to factories to help them expand and take advantage of the new legislation.

U.S. Embassy cables claimed that those efforts were imperiled by parliamentary demands for a wage hike to keep pace with soaring inflation and high food prices. “[Textile i]ndustry representatives, led by the Association of  Haitian Industry (ADIH), objected to the immediate HTG 130 (USD 3.25) per day wage increase in the assembly sector, saying it would devastate the industry and negatively impact the benefits of the Haitian Hemispheric through Opportunity Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE II),” said a June 17, 2009, confidential cable from Charge d’Affaires Thomas C. to Washington.

Tighe said that the “ADIH and USAID funded studies on the impact of near tripling of the minimum wage on the textile sector found that an HTG 200 Haitian gourde minimum wage would make the sector economically unviable and consequently force factories to shut down.”

Bolstered by the USAID study, the factory owners lobbied heavily against the increase, meeting with Préval on multiple occasions and with more than forty members of Parliament and political parties, according to the cables.

The Haiti cables also reveal how closely the US Embassy monitored widespread pro–minimum wage demonstrations and openly worried about the political impact of the minimum wage battle. UN troops were called in to quell student protests, sparking further demands from Haitians for the end of the 9,000-strong UN occupation.

As the Haitian Platform for Development Alternatives put it in a press release in June 2009, “Every time the minimum wage has been discussed, ADIH has cried wolf to scare the government against its passage: that raising minimum wage would mean the certain and immediate closure of industry in Haiti and the cause of a sudden loss of jobs. In every case, it was a lie.”

In related news: How Washington and big oil fought Venezula’s PetroCaribe deal in Haiti.

In related news: How the US, EU rubber-stamped and paid for an election that they knew was flawed from the start.

Street Art: Bulgarian Monument to the Soviet Army Turns Red, White and Blue

click to enlarge/photo by soho42

Last weekend, the citizens of Sofia, Bulgaria awoke to find a public monument to Red Army defaced by an unknown interventionist. The statues of Soviet soldiers who “liberated” Bulgaria from the Nazis in 1944 were painted as Superman, Joker, Ronald McDonald, Santa Claus, Captain America and other pop culture icons of capitalist Americana. Below it, a graffiti caption read: “In step with the times!” or “”abreast with the times!” depending on the translation. As you might guess this angered both Bulgarian and Russian officials who are actively searching for the artist some are calling the “Bulgarian Banksy”.  The clean-up process on the sculpture started on Tuesday morning even though 1,700 people rallied on Facebook against removing the artists’ work.

Read: Noam Chomsky’s Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Via Guernica:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda…”

Continue reading here