Hungry Blues

By Marsha Joyner

Did Martin die in vain on that fateful day of April 4, 1968? What has transpired in these 40 years with respect to King’s dream? There are several events in the Bible where the number 40 is of paramount importance---can any of them be related to our struggles these past 40 years? Rain 40 days and 40 nights (original flood); Israelites in wilderness 40 years; Jesus in the wilderness 40 days; Ascension occurred 40 days after the resurrection; Pentecost occurred the 50th day; (do we have to wait for another 10 years for The Dream (Pentecost)?). No I have not become a religious fanatic, but these things came to mind in my thinking about the plight of the US today, forty years after the assassination.

The Southern Poverty Law Center recently issued a report about the 888 organized hate groups operating in our country---a staggering 48% increase since 2000 in white supremacist, neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant extremist, anti-gay and other groups. Is this the content of our character? Are we not living up to the dream? Or is it a nightmare?

When the government of the United States lied about the connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between 9.11.01 and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

When the government of the United States lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq being a threat to the United States peace.

When the government of the United States allows the economy to get out of hand and its citizens suffer while it spends 3 trillion dollars on an unwinnable war. Is this the content of our character?

Martin Luther King, Jr said:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Can we afford to stand by and silently allow this to happen?

40 years after his death what would Martin Luther King, Jr. say about this election season? We have a Black man and a White woman running for the highest office in the land. But as a nation have we shown our commitment to ending injustice, racism and sexism? When the media bashes immigrants, and overweight people are the targets of jokes... Do we pay homage to Dr. King and his dream one day a year and then go back to being a purveyor of violence and hate? Is this the content of our character?

As the ranks of hate and violence swell, people of concern must stand up and be counted.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

(Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963)

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method, which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

(Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1964)

Moses led the Israelites out of bondage and into the wilderness. For forty years they labored and toiled in the desert. He did not reach the promised land with them. However, they grew in strength, throwing off the shackles of bondage. The Bible tells us they made the final journey to the promised land.

Will it take another 10 years or 40 years for us to rise from the ashes of bondage, hate and violence? And awaken from this nightmare to live out the true meaning of the content of our character?

---
Photo: The family of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. walk in the funeral procession of the slain civil rights leader in Atlanta on April 9, 1968. (AP)

I've uploaded to scribd.com the complete PDF version my article in the March/April issue of ColorLines Magazine, "The Legacy of a Murder," about the 1959 murder of Samuel O'Quinn in Centreville, MS. You can read it in the handy viewer, embedded in this post, or you can go to the article's page on Scribd and download the PDF to your computer. (Hint: you can read the article in full browser mode by clicking on the browser icon in the top right of the scribd tool bar, below.)

[The Scribd viewer might not appear in some browsers; go to the Scribd article page if you cannot see the article here.]

In doing my work on racial violence in Southwest Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, it is exciting to get to know some of the other people doing similar work.

Syracuse University College of Law Professors Janice McDonald and Paula C. Johnson direct the Cold Case Justice Initiative, which has been playing a role in the investigation of the December 10, 1964 murder of Frank Morris in Ferriday, La.

To get to Ferriday from Natchez, MS, you just take US-84 west over the Mississippi River approximately 11 miles. The Klan faction linked to a great deal of the violence in Natchez and other towns in that part of Mississippi frequently met in Ferriday.

View Larger Map

I've therefore been having some interesting conversations with Professor McDonald, who sent me the promotional postcard for the CCJI. The front of the postcard, displayed above, says that the CCJI is:

A interdisciplinary project that engages Syracuse University College of Law faculty and students to seek justice for racially motivated murders during the Civil Rights era on behalf of the victims, their families, local communities, and society at large.

No Longer Forgotten: Frank Morris (in visor) December 10, 1964, Ferriday, Louisiana. Photo courtesy of Concordia Sentinel, Ferriday, La.

The Cold Case Justice Initiative (CCJI) was founded in response to the 1964 Ferriday, La. murder of shoe shop owner Frank Morris, which remains unsolved. Forty-four years ago, two suspected Klan members forced Mr. Morris into his shoe repair shop at gunpoint and set the store on fire. Morris died four days later of his severe burns.

The back of the postcard (not pictured here) elaborates:

Law students, under the supervision of Professors Paula C. Johnson and Janis L. McDonald, researched thousands of documents and worked with local investigative reporters which led to witnesses providing new information, to the appointment of a special agent by the FBI, and to a pledge by the U.S. attorney for a full review of the case. The students efforts ignited law enforcement investigation of additional deaths long suspected by the community to be racially motivated and committed by the Klan. Professors Johnson and McDonald developed the course, “Investigating and Reopening Unsolved Civil Rights Era Murders,” first offered during the 2007-2008 academic year. This interdisciplinary course introduces students to civil rights history, civil rights law, criminal procedure, evidence, advocacy skills, and global human rights in the context of investigating specifically assigned civil rights era murder cases in the Southeastern U.S. Overall, the course emphasizes this work as part of the social and professional responsibility of lawyers, legal educators, and law students. This ongoing project will insist on vigilant attention to these long unresolved racially motivated killings and continuing issues of racial justice. For more information visit http://coldcaselaw.syr.edu

You can learn a great deal more about the Frank Morris case and the history of Ferriday, La. in the amazing Concorida Sentinel articles of Stanley Nelson.

Muxtapes are all the rage on twitter right now, so I thought I'd make one, too. Muxtape brings the old art of making a mixtape onto the web in an interface that is so simple it might seem confusing at first.

You can get yours at muxtape.com.

The week before I was going to head to New Orleans for this year's Nonprofit Technology Conference one of my twitter friends who was also going to NTC pointed to Eboo Patel's Washington Post blog post about post-Katrina recovery in New Orleans.

Patel catalogs the devastation pretty well:

My friend Alycia drove me through the lower 9th ward in her four-wheeler, navigating the twisted, pot-holed roads like a pro. It looked basically like abandoned territory, dozens maybe hundreds of blocks of weed-filled vacant lots. Alycia slowed down, pointed out the window at vacant lot after vacant lot and said “Home, home, home, home.” Sure enough, if you looked carefully through the weeds and garbage, you could make out the foundations of what were once houses.

“Holy cow,” I said, suddenly getting it. The people I saw on TV two and a half years ago in the filth of the Superdome … they once lived here. “Where did all these people go?” I asked, absently, stupidly, insultingly.

Alycia just shook her head as if to say, “People who don’t live here just don’t get it.” And she’s right.

But seeing it first-hand at least puts a human face on the familiar litany of statistics. Almost two thousand people dead. Eighty percent of the city under water for an average of fifty-seven days. Four hundred thousand jobs lost. Two hundred and seventy-five thousand homes destroyed.

And a list of intractable problems so long that it gives you a headache. There’s soil contamination, for one, and serious safety problems with some FEMA trailers, for another. And then there’s something that a guy I met called, “the Katrina cough” – a dry heave he said his doctor couldn’t diagnose, but which just got worse and worse for the whole six months he was working in neighborhoods with severe water damage. Finally, he just had to stop. “After a while, you don’t even want to breathe, the cough hurts so much,” he said.

But Patel turns from this to embrace an optimism about proposed solutions that are harming thousands of low-income, predominantly African-American students in New Orleans.

And still, President Scott Cowen of Tulane University, who gave a remarkable afternoon keynote address at the Clinton Global Initiative, said that he’s never been so optimistic about the city. Before Katrina, it had the worst school system in America, serious crime and corruption problems, a profoundly inadequate infrastructure. And now, the city leaders along with common residents are dreaming about what a model 21st century city would look like. What kind of public education system should it have? What kind of health care delivery? And perhaps most daringly, how can all of it be done on an entirely green basis – from working-class parts of town to tourist areas.

“This is the greatest social experiment in America,” President Cowen said.

Yes there is a social experiment going on, but not one that justifies Patel's title, "New Orleans: Recover, Rebuild, Rebirth." New Orleans attorney Bill Quigley writes:

There is a massive experiment being performed on thousands of primarily African American children in New Orleans. No one asked the permission of the children. No one asked permission of their parents. This experiment involves a fight for the education of children.

This is the experiment.

The First Half

Half of the nearly 30,000 children expected to enroll in the fall of 2007 in New Orleans public schools have been enrolled in special public schools, most called charter schools. These schools have been given tens of millions of dollars by the federal government in extra money, over and above their regular state and local money, to set up and operate. These special public schools are not open to every child and do not allow every student who wants to attend to enroll. Some charter schools have special selective academic criteria which allow them to exclude children in need of special academic help. Other charter schools have special admission policies and student and parental requirements which effectively screen out many children. The children in this half of the experiment are taught by accredited teachers in manageable size classes. There are no overcrowded classes because these charter schools have enrollment caps allowing them to turn away students. These schools also educate far fewer students with academic or emotional disabilities. Children in charter schools are in better facilities than the other half of the children. These schools are getting special grants from Laura Bush to rebuild their libraries and grants from other foundations to help them educate. These schools do educate some white children along with African-American children. These are public schools, but they are not available to all public school students.

The Other Half

The other half of public school students, over ten thousand children, have been assigned to a one-year-old experiment in public education run by the State of Louisiana called the "Recovery School District" (RSD) program. The education these children receive will be compared to the education received by the first half in the charter schools. These children are effectively what is called the "control group" of an experiment Ð those against whom the others will be evaluated.

The RSD schools have not been given millions of extra federal dollars to operate. The new RSD has inexperienced leadership. Many critical vacancies exist in their already-insufficient district-wide staff. Many of the teachers are uncertified. In fact, the RSD schools do not yet have enough teachers, even counting the uncertified, to start school in the fall of 2007. Some of the RSD school buildings scheduled to be used for the fall of 2007 have not yet been built.

In the first year of this experiment, the RSD had one security guard for every 37 students. Students at John McDonough High said their RSD school, which employed more guards than teachers, had a "prison atmosphere." In some schools, children spent long stretches of their school days in the gymnasium waiting for teachers to show up to teach them.

There is little academic or emotional counseling in the RSD schools. Children with special needs suffer from lack of qualified staff. College-prep math and science classes and language immersion are rarely offered. Classrooms keep filling up as new children return to New Orleans and are assigned to RSD schools.

Many of the RSD schools do not have working kitchens or water fountains. Bathroom facilities are scandalous. Teachers at one school report there are two bathrooms for the entire school - one for all the male students, faculty and staff and another for all the females in the building.

Danatus King, of the NAACP in New Orleans, said "What happened last year was a tragedy. Many of the city's children were denied an education last year because of a failure to plan on the part of the RSD."

Hardly any white children attend this half of the school experiment.

These are the public schools available to the rest of the public school students.

I first read this passage by Bill Quigley in Steven Miller and Jack Gerson's report, "The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools," which I've posted in full, below the fold. Miller and Gerson discuss what is happening in New Orleans in detail and put in the context a dangerous national trend which is leaving our schools more unequal than ever. I urge you to read it.

[click to continue…]

"Don't worry, it's cost plus," was a saying made famous in Baghdad's Green Zone, but the deluxe war spending was pioneered in the Clinton era.

(Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 292)

While there is still some attention to Hillary Clinton's role in the 1990s US foreign policy in the Balkans, I think we ought to be discussing untruths much more significant than her fib about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire.

Clinton deserves the negative attention she is getting for her fabrication, but other lies, like the ones about her track record on economic policy, are what need ongoing scrutiny.

Sen. Clinton's other honesty problem this week came with revelations that, while she claims to have been an internal NAFTA critic in the administration, she actually gave several presentations in favor of NAFTA at the time it was passed. But, to be fair, this may not be a deception. People are often called upon to advocate for decisions in public that they opposed in private. The NAFTA controversy suggests other concerns, such as: If she were such a vehement critic, and the administration backed it anyway, how important was she? And, how can she claim credit for the good deeds of her husband's administration and yet take no responsibility for its problems?

Still, Clinton's handling of the NAFTA question certainly raises concerns. Especially troubling is her campaign's work to spread rumors of Obama sending back-channel messages to the Canadians suggesting their anti-NAFTA rhetoric was all talk -- when, according to a high-level Canadian source, her campaign had done that.

So let's go back to some other statements of Hillary Clinton and to some other features of the US military presence in the Balkans.

Last year, earlier on in her campaign, Clinton said

she would limit the Bush administration practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions and would work to boost the performance of key agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she said performed well during her husband's White House years. "People are rightly disturbed by what they see as the incompetence and corruption in this administration. And that's undermined confidence in government, which makes it very difficult for us to meet the challenges we face today," Clinton said.

As she reflects back on the US military presence in the Balkans under her husband's administration, and on her role in forming and carrying out his policies, Hillary Clinton needs to speak about the Bill Clinton administration's "practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions."

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein observes that Halliburton, with Dick Cheney at the helm, made its first major expansions in the area of privatizing government functions in the Balkans---under Bill Clinton.

In the Balkans, where Clinton deployed nineteen thousand soldiers, US bases sprang up as mini Halliburton cities: neat, gated suburbs, built and run entirely by the company. And Halliburton was committed to providing the troops with all the comforts of home, including fast-food outlets, supermarkets, movie theaters and high-tech gyms.... As far as Halliburton was concerned, keeping the customer satisfied was good business---it guaranteed more contracts, and because profits were calculated as a percentage of costs, the higher the costs, the higher the profits.... In just five years at Halliburton, Cheney almost doubled the amount of money the company extracted from the US Treasury, from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billiion, while the amount it received in federal loan guarantees increased fifteenfold. (292)

Under the Clinton administration, we also saw the privatization of information technology divisions of the US government.

In the mid-nineties, Lockheed [Martin] began taking over information technology divisions of the US government, running its computer systems and a great deal of its data management. Largely under the public radar, the company went so far in this direction that, in 2004, the New York Times reported,

Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it.... It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all of this happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft. (293)

And whom do we find on the board of Lockheed Martin during this period?

The push to expand the service economy into the heart of government was, for Cheney, a family affair. In the late nineties, while he was turning military bases into Halliburton suburbs, his wife, Lynne, was earning stock options in addition to her salary as a board member at Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor. (293)

So, yeah, I'm concerned about the "practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions"---concerned that new private corporate inroads into government functions were pioneered under Bill Clinton and expanded wildly under George Bush. I am concerned that the corporate takeover will not be reversed unless there is a formal plan to accomplish this reversal. As far as I can see, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama has such a plan.

In his Blueprint for Change, Obama champions the return of appropriate government regulatory functions, from the Labor Relations Board to the Department of Justice, but he sidesteps the new roles of private corporations in government function. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has claimed to be a standard bearer for the fight against these destructive economic policies, and it is nothing but a cynical lie.

If Hillary Clinton is going to continue to stake claims on her husband's presidential legacy, then we should be concerned that she may be as friendly to Dick Cheney's economic vision as George Bush is.

(Cross-posted on the Dollars & Sense blog.)

You've seen me mention twitter on this blog, or you've noticed twitter updates in my sidebar. Still wondering what it is? Lee LeFever can explain.

This is actually only part of what's cool about flickr. @lenedgerly points out that the video "misses power of links- Twitter as news & idea source." You might have to try it for a little while to see what he means.

My latest article, about the 1959 racial murder of Samuel O'Quinn in Centreville , MS, was published today in Colorlines Magazine. The article is not yet available online, so here's a teaser for you until I have a link to the whole thing.

The Legacy of a Murder

Racial killings from the civil rights era still haunt families and the country.
By Benjamin Greenberg
Colorlines Magazine (March/April 2008)

"I heard a scream, and I said, 'That's Mother, that's Mother.' And we all started running to look." It was August 14, 1959, near midnight, in Centreville, Mississippi. Laura O'Quinn Smith, then 33, and her brother Clarence, then 32, rushed from the house and found their father, Samuel O'Quinn, shot in the back outside of the front gate of Whitaker Plantation, the 235-acre family land.

Clarence got his mother and wounded father back into the car and drove to the Field Memorial Community Hospital. Samuel O'Quinn died en route, in the arms of his wife, Ida. He was 58 years old and the father of 11 children. No one has ever been charged with the crime.

Today, Laura and Clarence, now ages 81 and 80, are living in Springfield, Massachusetts, along with two other siblings, Phalba and Rance. They are one of numerous families who are still waiting for justice in racial murders from the civil rights era. "It would give closure for us," said Phalba O'Quinn Plummer, who is now 71. "It would really help a lot for all of us to know what happened."

The FBI is currently reviewing approximately 100 cases that it may reopen; 84 of the victims have been named, and of those, 34 are from Mississippi. The true number of unresolved cases, however, is unknown. A review of a relatively narrow set of FBI and state documents found references to at least seven murders in Mississippi that are not on the published FBI list.

The lack of justice for Samuel O'Quinn and other Blacks murdered during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s is the haunting background for current events that every so often lay bare the broken promises of a supposedly post-civil rights society: the double standard of justice meted out to the Jena 6; the vast numbers of people, overwhelmingly Black, treated as disposable during and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita; the Klan-like torture and rape of Megan Williams.

Last June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act (known as the "Till Bill"), which would allocate $13.5 million annually for a special FBI office and Civil Rights Division unit to investigate civil rights-era crimes in coordination with local and state authorities. The Till Bill passed the House in June, but Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma placed a hold on the bill, keeping it stuck in the Senate through at least the winter recess.
• • •

The O'Quinns were a prosperous Black family in 1950's Mississippi. A graduate of the Tuskegee Institute, Samuel O'Quinn was a certified plumber, electrician and carpenter. After working as the assistant town engineer and as the only plumber in Centreville, he opened O'Quinn's Café with his wife, Ida, in 1937. He also owned and operated 33 jukeboxes throughout southwest Mississippi.

In the mid-1940s, O'Quinn obtained his mortician's license and opened a funeral home. He sold the jukebox routes and invested in real estate. The O'Quinns owned most of the properties in the Quarters, which was lowincome housing for Blacks and essentially the ghetto of the small rural town of 1,200 people. They bought the Whitaker Plantation on Highway 33 in the late 1940s and farmed the land, raising and selling peppers, soy beans and cotton.

On Sundays, O'Quinn went from one church to another selling burial policies, which a person could pay into and eventually meet the cost of his or her own burial. During these visits, he also organized benevolent associations, community groups that together paid into a fund for community members when they were in need.

"It was kind of a self-help group," explained Rance O'Quinn, one of Samuel O'Quinn's sons, now 70, "but they later grew, and every time you organize people, others get suspicious."

The O’Quinns were, in fact, as well-to-do as anyone in Centreville, Black or white. The 11 O’Quinn children never had to work for whites, which was most unusual and an affront to the white supremacist mentality of the time.

On August 14, 1959, Samuel O’Quinn picked up his wife at their café, just off Main Street, as he did every night at 11:00 pm. That night, their 7-year-old son, Roy, was with Ida at the café. On the ride home, Roy stood between his parents on the front seat. As usual, O’Quinn stopped, got out of the car to open their front gate and then drove the car in. He was shot when he got back out of the car to shut the gate.

(Photo: Samuel O'Quinn, early 1950s. Courtesy of Rance O'Quinn.)

A lack of time and nothing more to add lead me to give you this one whole cloth, by dnA over at his excellent blog, Too Sense.

Anger over anti-Semitism on the American Right, when coming from the Goyim, has only to do with the fact that the vast majority of American Jews are white. It's what causes folks on the Right to sputter over Farrakhan's anti-Semitism while ignoring that of their most prominent Christianist leaders.

McCain for his part, has more than his share of avowed anti-Semites on his campaign, as opposed to critics of Israel, which is what the Right is usually referring to when they speak of "anti-Semites" on the Left.

This is not to say that there are no anti-Semites on the Left. On September 11th, a white girl told me that 9/11 was my fault because I had "killed innocent Palestinian children." I'm saying that these people do not comprise a significant part of the establishment on the Left, while the theo-cons who have endorsed McCain are mainstream enough for him to trumpet their approval without fanfare. Via Matthew Yglesias, McCain supporter Pastor John Hagee:

It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God's chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day.

Simply put, the death of six million Jews in the Shoah was our fault for not accepting Jesus.

Nothing Farrakhan has said or done is more vile than this. Yet McCain appears with Hagee on the campaign trail, while Barack Obama has to denounce Farrakhan repeatedly despite a complete lack of an association beyond race.

Gentiles on the Right don't care about anti-Semitism. They just want to hate without being hated back.

Support for Israel based on a desire to facilitate Armageddon is not "support". If Jewish "leaders" weren't as out of touch with the views of the community they supposedly represent as today's black leaders (leading blacks), they would not embrace this man.

Great clip from yesterday's State of the Black Union footage in NOLA (via Baratunde):

If you know some of my other work, you'll know why I love Gregory's quote from way back:

“If these Mississippi white Klansmen, who do not know how to plan crimes, who are ignorant, illiterate bastards, can completely baffle our FBI, what are those brilliant Communist spies doing to us?”

Bad government has been good business during the Bush administration. In 1999, nine companies had federal homeland security contracts. Today the total is over 33,000. "Much of what we've seen touted by vendors after 9/11," says security consultant Doug Laird, "is nothing more than a sales force trying to use 9/11 as the hype to get poorly advised folks to buy their products."

But mismanagement and graft are just part of the story. Telecom companies' involvement in illegal government spying, outsourcing of torture to contractors, Haliburton constructed jails for mass detentions in the event of an "immigration emergency"---are just some examples of public/private partnerships in which the private sector has a special role in advancing abuses of government power.

Matthew Rothschild's recent story in The Progressive reveals that the private sector now plays an integral role in the transformation of America into an "endemic surveillance society" (h/t Marshall Kirkpatrick).

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government ...

InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm...

“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.

“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”

In other countries, for decades, cooperation between US industries and government has gone much further. In Argentina, for example, the Ford Falcon automobile is emblematic (PDF) of government terror. In the 1970s,

the Ford Falcon was the car of choice used by police, military and paramilitaries alike. Ford’s exclusive contracts with the Argentine security forces throughout the dictatorship eventually made the Falcon the single most recognizable icon of repression, one that clearly still resonates today. “Whenever a Falcon drove by or slowed down, we all knew that there would be kidnappings, disappearances, torture or murder,” reflects renowned Argentine psychologist and playwright Eduardo “Tato” Pavlovsky in a recent article. “It was the symbolic expression of terror. A death-mobile.”

The terror has continued into the present:

At noon on March 4, 2005, a green Ford Falcon pulled up next to a woman in Centenario, a municipality of Neuquén, in southern Argentina. Three men and a woman forced her into the car and then spent the next several hours threatening, torturing and mutilating her. The victim, whose name has been kept secret, was the wife of an employee at the Cerámica Zanon tile factory, one of the flagship worker-controlled enterprises that have sprung up in Argentina since the 2001 crisis. While the Zanon workers have successfully resuscitated the plant, they have also faced growing intimidation, as exemplified by this attack. The victim’s abductors released her with the message: “This is for Zanon. Tell them that the union will run with blood…. You’re all going to have to move into the factory because we’re going to kill all of you.”

Ford in Argentina is just one example among many. Coca Cola, to name another, has a long, insidious history in Columbia of contracting paramilitary forces that have murdered and tortured union activists.

In Latin America it is clear that these partnerships are part of an explicit war on organized labor and the culture that grew from developmentalist economies (PDF) in the 1950s and 60s. And a further crackdown on US labor may also be the promise of InfraGard.

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005.... “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

Outside the US, American corporations are in many ways independent entities not bound by US laws or by the laws of the countries where they operate. Increasingly, there is a class of American citizens who enjoy similar status within the US boarders.

One of the advantages of InfraGard, according to its leading members, is that the FBI gives them a heads-up on a secure portal about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.

The InfraGard website advertises this. In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, it states: “Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.”

InfraGard members receive “almost daily updates” on threats “emanating from both domestic sources and overseas,” Hershman says.

“We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members,” Schneck says. “People are happy to be in the know.”

On November 1, 2001, the FBI had information about a potential threat to the bridges of California. The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.

“He said his brother talked to him before the FBI,” recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis’s press secretary at the time. “And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’ ”

Maviglio still sounds perturbed about this: “You’d think an elected official would be the first to know, not the last.”

Worse, there are indications that this special class of citizens may be the enforcers of martial law, with permission to shoot to kill.

One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation—and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, “Partnership for Protection.” On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

“The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage,” he says. “From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we’d be given specific benefits.” These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.

But that’s not all.

“Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.

Rothschild has substantial confirmation of this report from two other sources, as well.

Often using unreliable informants and guilt by association, the mid-20th century US government placed large numbers of its citizens on the Security Index, which qualified them to lose their rights and be rounded up and jailed en masse, upon declaration of martial law. Even if the FBI found that a subject did not qualify for the Security Index, it was nearly impossible to have one's name removed from the lists of those to be imprisoned without charges—unless one agreed to inform on others.

The canceled Security Index cards on individuals taken off the Index after 1955 were retained in the field offices. This was done because they remained “potential threats and in case of an all-out emergency, their identities should be readily accessible to permit restudy of their cases.” These cards would be destroyed only if the subject agreed to become an FBI source or informant or "otherwise indicates complete defection from subversive groups."

(Book III of the Final Report of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities, 1976)

The odd twist of InfraGard is to recruit informants through the promise of placing them above the law rather than through threatening them with a possible loss of their rights.

At least through the mid-1960s, predominantly working class Klansmen enjoyed relative impunity as they murdered, bombed, burned, raped, shot and beat Blacks and their allies to maintain a social and economic order that kept them---the violent whites---poor as well.

Today, it seems the mantle of violence with impunity is being handed to an owning class elite.

To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation....

Curt Haugen is CEO of S’Curo Group, a company that does “strategic planning, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, physical and IT security, policy development, internal control, personnel selection, and travel safety,” according to its website. Haugen tells me he is a former FBI agent and that he has been an InfraGard member for many years. He is a huge booster. “It’s the only true organization where there is the public-private partnership,” he says. “It’s all who knows who. You know a face, you trust a face. That’s what makes it work.”

It's the Good Ol' Boys Network 2.0---enlisted for the class war. Look, they're even on Facebook.

[Cross-posted on the Dollars & Sense blog.]

I've posted a couple of items in the past about the movement to stop the white corporate takeover of the Lorraine Motel Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. The tireless work of local activists, civil rights veterans, and area civil rights groups has led to the formation of the Lorraine Motel Civil Rights Museum Community Oversight Committee, which may now be able to influence the board selection process for the museum. One of the groups active in this effort, the Arkansas Delta Truth and Justice Center, is building support for nominees to the board who are historians of the Civil Rights Movement and/or participants in it, past and present.

For more information, also see:

• Gary Younge, "Thieves of Black History" (The Nation)
• The Honorable D'Army Bailey, "The Troubled Birth of the National Civil Rights Museum" (Black Agenda Report)
• Interview with The Honorable D'Army Bailey (Democracy Now!)

The following is information from the ADTJC about the new nominees to the Lorraine Motel Civil Rights Museum board and how you can show your support for them.

From: Arkansas Delta Truth and Justice Center

The Arkansas Delta Truth and Justice Center commends the nominations of civil rights movement living legend Reverend C.T. Vivian and other acclaimed civil rights movement veterans, historians, and public servants to serve on the board of the National Civil Rights Museum.

[click to continue…]

(h/t Ampersand.)

(Via P6.)