Unmasked

Rosa Clemente takes on Democratic Party

She is a South Bronx, New York, native. An American community organizer, independent journalist, and hip-hop activist who, in 2008, ran as Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney’s vice presidential running mate. Rosa Alicia Clemente is also a graduate of the University of Albany and Cornell University; and in early 2019, was engaged in doctoral studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst.   

This week she appeared on KPFA’s “Letters and Politics” with host Mitch Jeserich.

These are some of her thoughts from an earlier period.

In five years working as an aide at the New York State Assembly, Clemente wrote in 2016, “I got to know the underbelly of … New York State politics” and particularly “how the Democratic Party functioned overall.

It is not good.

Everything I had been taught about this party was a fallacy.”

In 2000 Clemente left the Democratic Party.

H

er appraisal (my minor edit)

Democrats of the 1940s were “Dixiecrats,” she recalled, who rebranded themselves in later years to appear “progressive.” The Politics of sometimes Democrat/sometimes Independent politician Bernard Sanders, though neither socialist nor progressive, fails to garner support of the party claiming “to be for the people,” the contemporary Democratic Party.

These are some of the heavy-hitters of the Party’s True Face.

President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and his “trusted advisor, confidant, crime bill proponent attacking (her words) “super-predators,” Hillary Rodham Clinton

• Pushed Democrats back to “center right” and signed “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act” (1994) ensuring imprisonment of poor people, 
• Welfare reform (1996) gutting “safety net for poor and working families”
• Deregulation of Wall Street
• NAFTA “ushering in a modern era of free trade” with disastrous consequences “for countries and people all over the world.”

President Barack Hussein Obama

• Endless engagement in war
• Increased (killer) drone use,
• Crackdown on whistle blowers,
• Failure to close U.S. Prison at Guantanamo Bay,
• Affordable Care Act leaving millions of Americans without any form of healthcare.
• Most deportations of any president in American history
• Ignored the island of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican American citizens but signed a bill “putting in place a financial control board that will stifle any opportunity for the island to rebuild its economy on its own terms”
• Substantive “silence and inaction” [not to mention incompetence and cowardice (my words)] giving rise to national “uprisings”

Presidential Candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton armed with

• Slick rhetoric coupled with
• “Strong and deep ties to the corporate and military industrial complex
• Skilled propaganda machine
• Funders and tools of war and economic suppression.

S

ome Characteristics of an improved political system 

Clemente hopes for

• Representative of by and for the people
• Parties: a creation of the people
• No kettling without escape, options, or place to go
• Open to alternative parties and movements

I do not consider Rosa Clemente a “radical,” as many others do, though I understand why the term “radical.” I consider hers an important voice, along with others, other alternative voices, in U.S. politics that should be engaged and listened to more often, given serious consideration by all sectors and varieties of U.S. inhabitants.

Sources

Wikipedia

Rose Clemente https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Clemente

Letters and Politics January 24, 2019 edition “Radical Politics in the Age of Donald Trump” a conversation with “one of the most radical activist and voices in the country” Mitch Jeserich interview with Rosa Clemente: community organizer, independent journalist, and hip-hop activist; former (2008) U.S. vice presidential running mate of Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney  KPFA, https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-january-24-2019/

“Letters & Politics,” according to its website “seeks to explore the history behind today’s major global and national news stories.” It is hosted by Mitch Jeserich. https://kpfa.org/program/letters-and-politics/

PBS Column: “The Democratic Party is Not What It Seems” – Rosa Clemente, August 17, 2016

First published by PBS NewsHour, http://rosaclemente.net/pbs-column-democratic-party-not-seems/

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Venezuelan American views US-Venezuela Relations

Pattern of Pushing Overthrow of Venezuelan Governments

E

va Winifred Golinger on Venezuela’s veteran public official, 46th President, Nicolás Maduro Moros

Eva Winifred Golinger prefaces these 2017 statements by saying that she knows Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro well, which is more than any U.S. public official can state honestly. This is some of what she had to say about Venezuela-U.S. relations in a 2017 interview.

President Nicolas Maduro “never aspired to be president. It’s not something he dreamed of or worked for his whole life.” In his position, “he’s become this international pariah in the Western world and he’s striving for legitimacy, not just amongst his own people; but also internationally. And that, unfortunately, starts with the United States.” Since 2016, they have made “all kinds of overtures to the Trump Administration… — lobbying efforts; and they even gave over a half a billion dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund.

 … [I]t’s amazing the efforts people undergo to try to get on the good side of a government that’s clearly hostile as the U.S. has been to Venezuela.”

E

va Winifred Golinger on Venezuelan Elections

In “every election the opposition has lost against the Bolivarian Revolution or the Chavez movement and now the Maduro government,” the opposition “has cried fraud. It didn’t matter how bulletproof the system was.

Now saying fraud and it may in fact be fraud, it just seems like such a loss on the government side. They should have accepted whatever numbers they had, and said, ‘Look, in the midst of all this violence and this economic crisis, we were still able to garner around 6.6 million votes.’ That should be a showing of force.”

However, concerning the opposition in Venezuela, if the violent protests that involved the burning of buildings, burning buses, burning people, often innocent people, had occurred in Washington D.C. or on the streets of New York City, they “would not have lasted more than an hour.” This is not to justify what was happening in Venezuela, Golinger said, but rather “to show a more accurate picture of what’s going on.”

Violence has occurred “on both sides and overall and the opposition leadership — the anti-government leadership in Venezuela (with which U.S. leadership has joined forces) — have been reluctant to come out and fully condemn the violent protests. In fact, they’ve been encouraging them.” 

They have seen these protests as “sort of this way to heat up the streets to pressure the government …; that is, to force Maduro to resign, force regime change….”

E

va Winifred Golinger on U.S.- Venezuela relations

“… [T]he United States funds and supports some of the worst elements of the opposition in Venezuela; (this) is a fact. There is a long history of Washington meddling in the affairs of Venezuela.”

There’s been an “ongoing escalation coming out of the United States government against the Venezuelan government since Hugo Chavez was in power.

“From the time Chavez first was elected in 1998 and those initial years when he didn’t comply with what the U.S. was looking for … having always had in Venezuela a client state; that’s when the U.S. backed a coup against Chavez in 2002.” 

Over the years the Venezuelan government “has sort of dug in deeper with their ideological model leaning more towards this anti-imperialist alliance internationally. They’ve opened more to countries like Russia and China and Iran as their trade partners” …; overall taking an “adversarial position” toward the United States.

U.S. President Barack Obama during his tenure in office “declared Venezuela an unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States and put the first sort of sanctions on Venezuela officially.”

Those sanctions “were renewed” in 2017 before President Donald “Trump really had a full understanding of what was taking place. So it’s really just been an ongoing escalation.”

There has been a definite escalation of aggression under President Trump “because the people … who are pushing this particular escalation, right now—the more reactionary sectors of the Republican Party … —have (U.S. President Donald) Trump’s ear.” And this more reactionary sector has “been looking for a way to push regime change in Venezuela.

Rising tensions between the two nations “has nothing to do with a change in policy.” It is regime change that has always been “a sort of (U.S.) state policy towards Venezuela since the Chavez government.”

But Venezuela is one of the principal suppliers of oil to the United States and the relationship between the two nations is “a commercial relationship.” Though a lot of rhetoric goes back and forth, the nations “are interdependent.”

E

va Winifred Golinger is a Venezuelan-American lawyer practicing in New York and specializing in immigration and international law. She is a writer and journalist; and since the summer of 2017, she has been a host on RT’s Spanish language television network. She has also been editor of the Correo del Orinoco International, a newspaper financed by the Venezuelan government; and a writer with Venezuelanalysis.com.

Golinger was born at Langley Airforce Base (Northern Virginia, USA) and is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and City University of New York School of Law (Juris Doctorate or JD, international human rights law.

Several of her books—published in multiple languages by different publishers in several countries— focus on

“Hugo Chavez’s relationship with the United States, based on research using the U.S. Freedom of Information Act on what she describes as links between US government agencies and Venezuelan organizations, particularly in relation to the 2002 Venezuelan coup d’état attempt.”

Major works by Eva Winifred Golinger 

• Fact Not Fiction - US Aggression Against Venezuela (February 2015), CounterPunch
• The Same Old Dirty Tactics - Venezuela: a Coup in Real Time (January 2015), CounterPunch
• La Agresión Permanente: USAID, NED y CIA, Caracas: Ministerio del Poder Poder Popular para la Comunicación y la Información, (in Spanish) (with Jean-Guy Allard), 2009
• La Telaraña Imperial: Enciclopedia de Injerencia y Subversión (Empire's Web: Encyclopedia of Interventionism and Subversion), Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, (in Spanish) 2008
• Bush Versus Chávez: Washington's War on Venezuela, Monthly Review Press, 2008
• Bush Vs. Chavez: Washington's War on Venezuela, Aakar Books, 2008
• The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela, Pluto Press, 2006

 Sources

News

RT “Maduro orders ‘total revision’ of Venezuela-US diplomatic ties after Pence calls for regime change” January 23, 2019

Vice President Mike Pence

✔

@VP

.@POTUS & the US stand w/ the Venezuelan people as they seek to regain their liberty from dictator Nicolás Maduro. For the sake of our vital interests & the sake of the Venezuelan people, we will not stand by as Venezuela crumbles. Read my op-ed in @WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuela-america-stands-with-you-11548202850 …

10.8K 8:18 PM - Jan 22, 2019

https://www.rt.com/news/449458-venezuela-maduro-us-relations-pence/

The Intercept “The Battle for Venezuela and Its Oil,” Interview by Jeremy Scahill with Eva Golinger August 12 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/08/12/the-battle-for-venezuela-and-its-oil/

Wikipedia

Eva Winifred Golinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Golinger

Hugo Rafael Chávez (July 28, 1954 –March 5, 2013) was a Venezuelan politician and 45th President of Venezuela (1999-2013). From 1997 until 2007, when it merged with several other parties to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV, Chávez was leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party. He led the PSUV until 2012. “Chávez described his policies as anti-imperialist, being a prominent adversary of the United States’ foreign policy as well as a vocal critic of U.S.-supported neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez

Nicolás Maduro Moros is a Venezuelan politician and 46th President of Venezuela (2013-); from 2006 to 2013, he was Minister of Foreign Affairs; and  from 2012 to 2013 Vice President of Venezuela, serving under President Hugo Chávez. After the 2017 Venezuelan Constituent Assembly election, the United States imposed sanctions on President Maduro, “freezing his U.S. assets,” barring him from the United States, and erroneously labeling Maduro as one of U.S. leaders’ favorite slanders, second to “terrorist,” “dictator.” Western nations and many of the Americas followed the U.S. lead, “although allies as well as China, Cuba, Iran and Russia offered support and denounced the interference in Venezuela’s domestic affairs.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Maduro

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Internal hemorrhaging by Design

Neglect, Deliberate deepening of U.S. Decline

U.S. public officials, their media and other corporate/NGO/nonprofit/”charity” partners, the loudest and most influential among them millionaires and billionaires, feed at the public trough and divide Americans over one distraction after another (a multi-billion-dollar wall of waste, endless private-profit foreign wars, more multi-billion dollar boondoggle arming of space)— the internal organs, systems and infrastructures, indeed the human relations of the United States become atrophied, cancerous, corrupt, out-of-date, in deep deterioration and decline.

The Chicago Police Department and its latest 2014-2019 case is an example of a system in critical decline for lack of essential staffing, training, retraining, in-service training, mandated regular psychological counseling, strict professional (not blue-coded) supervision, oversight, check, monitoring and correction mechanisms; as well as improved community-law enforcement relations.

W

riter on prosecutorial and policing reform Johanna Wald

Law Officer Jason Van Dyke-Civilian Laquan McDonald Case

Predictable Tragedy – A cautionary tale about the consequences of a system that fails to train its employees properly or hold them accountable for minimal levels of standards; “by not holding Van Dyke accountable for prior excesses or adequately training him to de-escalate encounters and mitigate his biases, his superiors failed to rein in his worst impulses.”

• At the time of the shooting, Van Dyke had, in his 17 years on the police force, accumulated 20 documented citizen complaints against him, mostly for excessive force.

• The Citizens Police Data Project estimates that Van Dyke had more complaints filed against him than 94 percent of other officers.

• Combining four data sets, it found that five complaints were not sustained, five were unfounded, four resulted in exoneration, five had unknown outcomes and one resulted in no action taken. … [N]one resulted in discipline or any meaningful consequence to Van Dyke.

• With no public account of supervisors giving Van Dyke a directive to moderate his actions, why should he have felt any compulsion to change his approach?

• A review conducted by Strategies for Youth found that most police officers are not trained to understand that the presence of authority figures often triggers flight/freeze/fight responses in traumatized youth, regardless of guilt.

• Studies have shown “how automatic associations, often unconscious, can warp the judgment” of officials, law enforcement officers, and others “to the point where (they) literally see what does not exist.”

Wald concludes “It is time that police training, recruitment and oversight enter the 21st century and provide officers with the skills they need to keep the community safe, and themselves out of prison.”

S

pecial prosecutor Joseph McMahon

The Sentencing Heating Concluding the Van Dyke-McDonald Case

•  “Our goal was to find the truth, present the truth and ask for justice. ... It was not revenge.”

• “It’s going to take a lot to repair the relationship with law enforcement — not just in Chicago, but across our country …. We’re not going to fix it with one case. We were not going to fix it with one sentence.…”

Sources

Commentary: “Chicago Cop Jason Van Dyke's Record Was a Warning Sign

Can the conviction of Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke finally force policing into the 21st century?” By Johanna Wald October 28, 2018 https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/10/28/warning-signs-were-clear-before-laquan-mcdonald-s-murder

Johanna Wald is a Boston-based writer on prosecutorial and policing reform, implicit bias and the school-to-prison pipeline whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Law Review, Education Week and USA Today, among others. She is the former Director of Strategic Planning at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School.

The Marshall Project: Mission Statement “a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.” Through “journalism, partnerships with other news outlets and public forums,” The Marshall Project “strives to educate and enlarge the audience of people who care about the state of criminal justice.” https://www.themarshallproject.org/about?via=navright

The Dispatch CHICAGO (AP) “The Latest: Prosecutor says goal was justice, ‘not revenge’”

(Update from “The Latest on the sentencing of the Chicago police officer who fired the shots that killed black teenager Laquan McDonald”), by The Associated Press posted January 18, 2019 https://www.dispatch.com/ZZ/news/20190118/latest-prosecutor-says-goal-was-justice-not-revenge

“Special Prosecutor Joseph McMahon said Friday while summing up the state’s case that Van Dyke’s 2014 shooting of the 17-year-old has been ‘devastating’ not just for Chicago but for the entire nation because it has further deepened the public’s distrust in the police. … A jury convicted Van Dyke of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery, one for each time the officer shot McDonald” https://www.dispatch.com/ZZ/news/20190118/latest-prosecutor-says-goal-was-justice-not-revenge

Chicago Tribune “Rulings in Laquan McDonald cases leave police reformers questioning if progress has been made” January 18, 2019

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-laquan-mcdonald-jason-van-dyke-legacy-20190118-story.html

Chicago Sun-Times “Van Dyke gets 81 months for McDonald murder, sparking praise, condemnation” “The slaying of Laquan McDonald that has roiled the city for years ended with a prison sentence Friday that only deepened the rifts, as Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke will likely serve a little more than three years in prison after shooting the 17-year-old McDonald 16 times in 2014” By Andy Grimm, Jon Seidel and Nader Issa January 18, 2019

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/chicago-police-officer-jason-van-dyke-sentenced-81-months-laquan-mcdonald/

Wikipedia

O

ctober 20, 2014: “The murder of Laquan McDonald took place in Chicago, Illinois”

·       Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke shoots and kills the 17-year-old who, reportedly, had been “behaving erratically while walking down the street, and holding a folding knife with a three-inch (7.5 cm) blade.” Internal police reports initially so-described the incident and ruled the shooting justified. Van Dyke was not then charged in the shooting.

·       Initial police portrayals of the incident prompt police supervisors to rule the case a justifiable homicide and within the bounds of the department’s use of force guidelines.
Attorneys for the estate of Laquan McDonald enter into negotiations with the City of Chicago to settle claims arising out of his death

·       April 15, 2015: Chicago City Council approves a $5 million settlement to McDonald’s family, although the family had not then filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. Part of the settlement agreement required that the video be sealed until investigations were completed.

·       Reporters note inconsistencies between the police narrative, the autopsy, and an anonymous eyewitness account before the video was publicly released.

·       A criminal investigation had begun weeks after the shooting, when the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) forwarded the case to the state’s attorney’s office and the FBI.

·       November 24, 2015: Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez announces that Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder. Van Dyke turns himself in to authorities.

·       November 30, 2015: Van Dyke is granted bail ($1,500,000; he posts $150,000, 10 percent of the bail) and is released from jail.

·       December 16, 2015, Van Dyke is indicted by a grand jury on six counts of first-degree murder and one count of official misconduct.

·       December 29, 2015: Van Dyke pleads not guilty to the charges.

·       March 23, 2017, the charges against Van Dyke are six counts of first degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery, one for each shot fired at Laquan McDonald.

·       September 5, 2018: Jury selection begins

·       September 17, 2018” Trial begins

·       October 5, 2018, Van Dyke is found guilty of second degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm; and not guilty of official misconduct.

·       January 18, 2019, Van Dyke is sentenced to 6.75 years in prison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Laquan_McDonald

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