The FBI has reported that hate crimes in the U.S. rose 8% in 2006. Of 7,720 "single-bias incidents," 51.8% were "racially motivated." Hate crimes are a minor issue, however, compared to the fact that the income gap between blacks and whites has grown in the last 30 years. And it's no surprise: what is sometimes mythologized as a post-civil rights period of ascent towards equality has really been one of retrenchment and backlash. From tax-based school funding to the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush prison boom, the policy of the U.S. government toward black and brown America since the 1970s has been one of racial neoliberalism.
Since Hurricane Katrina, many have warned that white elites will attempt to 'whitewash' New Orleans demographically and politically as well as economically. Well, this is exactly what is happening. The NY Times reports that the New Orleans City Council is now majority white for the first time in two decades.
The death toll from the cyclone in Bangladesh last week, initially calculated at around 1,000, has now been lifted to 3,100. In the most affected districts of the country, according to CBC, up to "70 percent of of homes — mostly made of mud and bamboo — have been partially or completely destroyed, while an estimated 300,000 hectares of crops were lost in the storm." The death toll numbers are probably low, however. From Bangladesh's Daily Star: Pounded Patharghata now a valley of death
The official death count for the upazila, until Saturday, was 307. But even a cursory examination on the ground, witness reports, and simply from the number of mass graves, the death toll is well over 3,000. Cut off from the rest of the country, the upazila was accessible only by air or a long-route by the sea. The approach road was blocked by fallen trees and power-lines, preventing any relief vehicle from entering within a 40-kilometre area.The corpses were found wrapped in paddy sheaves on rice fields, emanating heavy stench of rotting flesh. Most of the bodies were found one or two kilometres from where their homes had been. Some bodies lay tangled on tree branches, some were lining the shore, some unidentified were just left to rot. Sidr rose out of the southern-most village of Patharghata -- Padma. First, it took out a five-kilometre stretch of homes that had been built on the slope of a long mud-baked embankment lining the border of the village. In its wake, a 20-feet tidal surge wiped out the entire community. The tide swept the houses and most of its inhabitants, carrying them two to three kilometres inland. Most of the corpses were found three, sometimes four villages away. In one small pocket, where a 100-metre stretch of the embankment was damaged by a previous flood, the tidal surge wreaked its greatest havoc.The tide broke through the embankment and channelled all of its awesome power through that 100-metre gap razing all of at least 50 homes in one clean sweep.The power of the deadly tidal surge is evident by the vanishing of the big mosque building, made of bricks and concrete, which used to occupy a section of that small pocket."We were about to run to the shelter my mother, my wife, two nephews, and I when we saw the great big wave. I looked up and up and there was no end to it. It swept us up and I grabbed the first tree trunk that I could find," said Delwar, one of the rare survivors from the ill-fated 50 homes. The rest of his family died. At least 135 corpses from that small pocket of Padma village were found till Saturday morning.Similar ghastly stories were found in three other villages along the Baleshwar river, in Rohita, Tangra, and Gouharpur. With at least 400 corpses from Padma village alone, the death toll was rising and no one knew or dared to imagine what it was.
Some 20,000 people protested the School of the Americas at Fort Bening, Georgia yesterday. The School of the Americas, like Philip Morris (now Altria), has renamed itself in an attempt to shed bad publicity. It now calls itself the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Indeed, the SOA is so notorious that 203 members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to close it in June, but came up six votes short of the majority.
Run by the U.S. Department of Defense, the SOA has been a major conduit of state terror in Latin America since 1946. SOA graduates include a long rogues' gallery of military dictators and death squad commanders. To name just a few, graduates of the SOA are implicated in atrocities in Argentina (Leopoldo Galtieri, Roberto Viola), Bolivia (Hugo Banzer), Peru (Vladimiro Montesinos), Panama (Omar Torrijos, Manuel Noriega), Guatemala (José Efraín Ríos Montt), Honduras (Policarpo Paz Garcia, Aquilino Sorto Gonzalez, and many others), El Salvador (Roberto D'Aubuisson, Jose Guillermo Garcia, and many others). And this merely scratches the surface, as at least 63,000 Latin American military personnel have been trained in the school, averaging 700-1,000 students a year.
Even the most ardent ex-Cold Warriors, quick to defend all U.S.-backed state repression between 1917 and 1989 as a justifiable counter to "the threat of communism" (the same arguments are now recycled for Uribe, Mubarak, Musharraf, Arroyo...) cannot defend the documented slaughter of 200,000 Mayan indian civilians, the assassination of archbishops and trade unionists, the torture and rape of teenage girls and nuns.
Even if most Americans do not understand the role of the U.S. government in arming, training and funding thugs and killers in other countries, the populations of those countries do. And those on the recieving end of chemical weapons, coups, proxy invasions and nuclear weapons are likely to percieve U.S. foreign policy a bit differently from those who get their news from MSNBC, CNN and FOX.
Similarly, for most Kenyans the phrase "Mau Mau" conjures up savagery of the white British kind, rather than of the black African kind. Read more!
