WCRS Podcast – fightback
Fight Back March 23, 2011
Submitted by fightback on Wed, 03/23/2011 – 7:03pm
Bob Fitrakis and Connie Gadell-Newton discuss a Senate Bill that requires voters to show a government-issued photo ID at the polls with guest attorney Cliff Arnebeck.
MARCH 22
This Land is Our Land: The Fight to Reclaim the Commons
“You’ll never be the same after watching the mind-opening film This Land is Your Land because you will see the diverse wealth — the commonwealth — that you own with other Americans, how it has been seized, despoiled and corporatized. But you all still own these immense public assets and you can regain control of them for now and for posterity. David Bollier has outdone himself once again!” ~ Ralph Nader
For more than three decades, transnational corporations have been busy buying up what used to be known as the commons — everything from our forests and our oceans to our broadcast airwaves and our most important intellectual and cultural works. In This Land is Our Land, acclaimed author David Bollier, a leading figure in the global movement to reclaim the commons, bucks the rising tide of anti-government extremism and free market ideology to show how commercial interests are undermining our collective interests. Placing the commons squarely within the American tradition of community engagement and the free exchange of ideas and information, Bollier shows how a bold new international movement steeped in democratic principles is trying to reclaim our common wealth by modeling practical alternatives to the restrictive monopoly powers of corporate elites. / co-sponsored by DSCO.
Each movie begins at 7:30PM, followed by discussion
Drexel Theater 2254 E. Main Street, Bexley
Co-sponsored by the Drexel Theater, Central Ohio Green Education Fund, and the Film Council of Columbus
253-2571, truth@freepress.org
Bob Fitrakis
March 6, 2011
Senator Sherrod Brown apologized after giving a speech on the Senate floor March 4 where he stated the obvious, that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Egyptian President Mubarak all crushed independent labor unions. No need to apologize, Senator Brown. The Republicans never do, as they endorse the policies of union busters. The only thing, Senator, you should be mildly chagrined about, is failing to point out Ohio Governor John Kasich and Wisconsin Governor Walker’s similarities to Mussolini’s fascism.
As Kasich takes money from the new corporate robber barons – the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch – let’s quote Mussolini directly: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Kasich has just won his battle to privatize economic development in Ohio. Again the more accurate word would be “corporatize.”
The tyrants of the Left and Right like Stalin and Hitler had to destroy trade unionism in order to create totalitarian governments. Independent labor unions are an essential countervailing power in a democratic society. Unions allow people – be they police officers, firefighters, teachers, janitors, or auto workers – to organize and bargain collectively around their own economic interests.
Senator, you are absolutely correct that Hitler destroyed the trade unions in order to destroy democracy. When the general elections for the Reichstag of March 5, 1933 gave Hitler’s Nazi Party only 33% of the vote and his rightwing coalition government a slim majority, Hitler went after his political opponents. His brownshirt Nazi thugs destroyed the trade union association ADGB (Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) on May 2, 1933. They simply stormed union facilities, arrested and imprisoned union leaders. Other key trade unions were forced to merge into the Hitler-controlled German Labor Front.
So, first they come for the trade unionists because the labor notion of solidarity includes all people, regardless of race, creed, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, and age. Before Hitler could lock up the Jews, gypsies, gays and others, he had to shatter the one organization that sings and believes in the song “Solidarity Forever.” The unions must be destroyed because they know that “an injury to one is an injury to all” and they demand the same rights of contract protected in the U.S. Constitution and essential to corporate business. They know that united, they bargain for wages, salaries and working conditions, and that disunited they beg.
Kasich, Walker and the Koch brothers idolize a world wherein unnatural persons (corporations) control the state. This is the dream of Mussolini. It should not escape us that Kasich, Walker and the Koch brothers hate liberalism and the ideas of tolerance and reason that it has historically promoted. Let us again quote Mussolini directly: “Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposite to the doctrines of liberalism.”
If we look realistically upon what is happening in our nation – the attacks on liberalism, intolerance, imperialist occupation of Iraq, the endless war over oil in Afghanistan, a military greater in firepower than Hitler’s in 1939 according to the New York Times – why not call it what it is. Fascism.
Sure we can quibble, Senator Brown, and use Bertram Gross’s term “friendly fascism.” Writing in 1980, Gross, who had worked for the U.S. government, noted that “in the United States, it points towards more concentrated, unscrupulous, repressive, and militaristic control by a big business-big government partnership….” It exists, and “…squelches the rights and liberties of other people both at home and abroad. That is friendly fascism.”
The parallels between Kasich, who received less than a majority of the vote, and Mussolini and Hitler are all too clear. Take your meager mandate and smash the only countervailing power that middle class people have – their trade union organizations. Kasich has spent a lifetime serving wealthy and secretive interests. Earlier in his career Richard Nixon and Rev. Moon, two shadowy, paranoid figures – one willing to do anything to be president and one claiming to be the Messiah. Later in his career, Kasich served Rupert Murdoch at News Corp and the firm of Lehman Brothers which sold junk assets and made billions and helped destroy the U.S. economy before going out of business.
I think I have a reasonable compromise for Sen. Brown: agree to apologize for your references to Hitler and Stalin when Kasich agrees to quit acting like them or stop thinking he’s the reincarnation of Mussolini. Kasich’s actions are those of a fascist movement.
—
Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press and ran against Kasich for Congress in 1992. Originally published by https://freepress.org.
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
March 3, 2011
The national corporate campaign to destroy America’s public sector unions has drawn first blood in Ohio.
But a counter-attack centered on one or more statewide initiatives or constitutional amendments has become highly likely.
While thousands of protestors chanted, spoke and sang inside and outside the statehouse for the past two weeks (SB 5 Rally), the Ohio Senate voted 17-16 on Senate Bill 5, a bill that will slash collective bargaining for state workers by banning strikes and giving local officials the right to settle disputes. The bill, among other things, also eliminates all paid sick days from teachers.
The vote came amid shouts of “shame on you” and widespread booing from the diverse crowd of teachers, police, firefighters, construction workers, state employees and more.
The bill decimates a legal framework in place since 1983. The vote was surprisingly close as six Republicans joined ten Democrats in opposition. The seventeen yes voters were all Republicans.
In order to vote the bill out of committee, Republican Senate President Tom Niehaus had to remove two key Republican senators who opposed the bill from crucial committees. Both Senators Scott Oelslager of Canton and Bill Seitz of Cincinnati were yanked from their posts. The removal of Seitz broke a committee stalemate and allowed the bill to come to the floor with a 7-5 vote.
Ultra-conservative Senator Timothy Grendell of rural Chesterland, Ohio demounced the bill as “unconstitutional” pointing out that it prohibits union members from talking with elected public officials during negotiations and labels such activity as an unfair labor practice. Seitz echoed this theme: “It’s an unfair labor practice if they exercise their First Amendment right to call up their Councilman.”
The bill now goes to the Ohio House, where it is fast-tracked and anticipated to pass by mid-March. In the House, the passage is being orchestrated by House Speaker Bill Batchelder. The
Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates describes CNP members as not only traditional conservatives, but also nativists, xenophobes, white racial supremacists, homophobes, sexists, militarists, authoritarians, reactionaries and “in some cases outright neo-fascists.”
The Democrats do not hold enough seats in either house to deny the GOP a quorum, as is being done in Wisconsin and Indiana.
Ohio’s multi-millonaire Governor John Kasich, who got rich selling junk assets as a managing partner for Lehman Brothers to public pensions in Ohio, will sign the bill as soon as he gets it. Kasich was selected last November with a large last-minute contribution from Rupert Murdoch. Kasich is also a former Fox news commentator, who emerged in Ohio politics as one of Richard Nixon’s freshly-scrubbed youth and was initially supported by followers of Reverend Moon.
Kasich has blamed budget problems on state workers. But a rich person’s repeal of Ohio’s estate tax has cost the state a long-standing multi-million-dollar revenue stream. Like Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Kasich also has rejected a big federal grant ($400 million) to upgrade the state’s passenger rail system, which would have created at least a thousand direct jobs and thousands more indirectly, along with a jump in state tax revenue.
Kasich meanwhile has given his chief of staff a substantial pay hike over that his predecessor. He has hired at least four commissioners to sit on a “job creation” panel with annual salaries of roughly $150,000 each. The commission has been structured to operate without formal accountability to the legislature or taxpayers of the state. Kasich has already succeeded in privatizing the state’s department of development.
Kasich tried to ban the media and the public from his inauguration. He has warned opponents that they had better “get on the bus or get run over by the bus.”
Unlike Wisconsin, Ohio has no recall law. The only apparent route to overturning this union-busting legislation may be with a statewide initiative or a constitutional amendment. As the statehouse filled with union protestors, talk spread of how and when that might be done.
Polls are showing overwhelming support for public workers, in part due to the blatant attack on Ohio’s police and firefighters who are now barred from negotiating on safety issues. The bill bans binding arbitration used in the past to settle negotiations, and instead allows management to pick the settlement it wants.
Ohioans may also consider a constitutional amendment to guarantee hand-counted paper ballots. Electronic voting is dominated here by the successor to the Ohio-based Diebold corporation and the ES&S corporation, and other Republican-controlled voting machine companies. The privatization of Ohio’s voting and voter registration rolls corresponded with a 5.4% shift to the Republican Party not predicted by the exit polls in the 2010 election. Exit polls showed Kasich losing the election.
Overall the architectural map of the Ohio election system appears to give private voting companies contracted to the Secretary of State’s office—currently headed by John Husted, a Republican—the ability to electronically select state office winners in a matter of a few minutes on election night. Husted has already introduced legislation to restrict voting rights through demands for photo ID and other measures aimed at students, the elderly, poor and other Democrat-leaning citizens. Without universal voter registration and hand-counted paper ballots, the Ohio Democratic party has little chance of winning statewide office for the foreseeable future, or of turning back legislative union busting.
Key to the national corporate strategy now playing itself out in Ohio is the destruction of the Democratic Party’s traditional base. It is also about trashing teachers, firefighters, police and other citizens who choose to work for the general good rather than individual profit. As Nina Turner, a Senate Democrat told the New York Times, “This bill seeks to vilify our public employees and turn what used to be the virtue of public service into a crime.”
It’s widely believed Kasich will next assault Ohio’s pubic school system, whose funding mechanisms have been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional by state courts. Kasich is a cheerleader for private charter schools. The GOP is expected to push a voucher program that would use taxpayer money to subsidize private schools for the rich.
David Brennan, owner of White Hat Management, a chain of private charter schools, has consisting been the leading donor to the Ohio Republican candidates. Former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray filed a legal complaint against Brennan alleging that “White Hat’s management agreements with the schools are invalid because the public charter schools handed over nearly all funding – 96 percent – to White Hat and were given essentially no accountability or transparency as to how the funds were spent.”
Kasich and the GOP have already moved to gut environmental regulations and turn the state’s park system over to corporate extractors. He is also expected to attack legislation mandating advances in renewable energy while pushing for a new nuclear plant to be built in southern Ohio by corporations poised to cash in on massive federal subsidies being proposed by President Obama (Nuke giveaway).
While the mood of demonstrators yesterday at the statehouse was angry and defiant, there are no illusions about the stakes in this battle. Governor Kasich and his wholly owned Republican legislature are born of unlimited Citizens United corporate cash and rigged electronic voting machines.
It’s thus no surprise that the first serious blood drawn in this latest corporate campaigns to finally wipe labor unions off the American map has come in the Buckeye State.
The question now: can the unions effectively fight back, in Ohio and nationwide?
—
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection at https://freepress.org/store.php, where Bob’s Fitrakis Files books appear. Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States is at https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/harvey-wasserman’s-history-of-the-united-states/. Originally published by http://www.freepress.org
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
February 21, 2011
The escalating confrontations in Wisconsin and Ohio are ultimately about preventing the United States from becoming a full-on fascist state.
The stakes could not be higher—or more clear.
As defined by its inventor, Benito Mussolini, fascism is “corporate control of the state.” There are ways to beat around the Bush—Paul Krugman has recently written about “oligarchy”—but it’s time to end all illusions and call what we now confront by its true name.
The fights in Wisconsin, Ohio, and in numerous other states are about saving the last shreds of American democracy. They burn down to five basic realities:
1) The bulwark of modern democracy is the trade union. This has been true since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. All social programs can trace their roots to union activism, as can the protection of our civil liberties.
The first Germans Hitler put in concentration camps were neither Jews nor gypsies—they were trade unionists.
The attacks on state workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere have nothing to do with balancing budgets. That could easily be done without destroying collective bargaining.
For the hard-right, this is about busting unions, the last organized force standing in the way of total corporate control of the United States by the rich and richer.
2) The material essence of fascism is the extreme separation of rich and poor, a massive transfer of wealth from those on the bottom to those on the top.
The unbalanced budgets in Ohio and Wisconsin are rooted in huge tax cuts given to the rich at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Widespread poverty among those who might otherwise rebel is essential to fascist control of a government.
A largely ignored aspect of this fight is the hundreds of billions of dollars currently locked up in union, government and Social Security pension funds. With unions destroyed, this huge cache of dollars will fall quickly into corporate hands. The additional “benefit” for the financial elite will be tens of millions of impoverished elders desperate for low-wage jobs in virtual slave labor situations.
3) The crisis crippling states everywhere is directly related to the massive destruction of social resources by war. Since the end of the New Deal and World War II, the American elite have engineered the biggest dump of material wealth by military means in human history.
The trillions of dollars of pure martial waste poured into the Cold War and those in Southeast Asia, central America, the Middle East, Southwest Asia and elsewhere could easily have clothed, housed, fed, educated, and provided otherwise decent lives for all human beings the world over.
Instead, poverty, desperation and stratification have been guaranteed.
The entire economic crisis now gripping the United States can be directly traced to the military budget, which exceeds the sum of what’s being spent by all other nations combined. In a brilliant recent column, Robert Greenwald points out that the entire alleged shortfall in Wisconsin could be covered by bringing just 180 troops home from Afghanistan.
But the purpose of that deployment is to undermine national security, not to protect it. A frightened, impoverished, insecure nation is one dependent on its fascist elite.
Democracy demands and protects true material security among the people as a whole. That’s what’s really at stake in the battle to cut the military budget. The fights in Ohio and Wisconsin are surface manifestations of that bigger battle.
4) Mussolini also made it clear that corporate control of the media is essential to fascist rule. Whoever would seize power first took the radio stations, then the television stations. Now the internet is under attack. The free flow of information is fascism’s ultimate enemy.
So the relentless Foxist portrayal of the battles in Wisconsin and Ohio as pitting “responsible, austerity-minded” governors versus “lazy, irresponsible state workers” is utterly predictable.
So is the appearance of the media-created Tea Party “movement” on the side of the corporations. It’s standard corporate procedure to invent a faux “grassroots” to fight unions and working people. So finding phony corporate “populists” like Sarah Palin and New Jersey’s Chris Christie in the right-wing media limelight is utterly predictable.
5) It is no accident that the “job loving” union-hating governors of Wisconsin and Ohio (along with Florida) have rejected billions in federal funds for re-building passenger rail service that would create thousands of jobs.
A corporate state relies on central of energy. Rail service threatens the power of the oil and auto lobbies. Renewable energy would replace centralized fossil/nuclear sources with decentralized solar panels, bio-fuels, windmills, increased efficiency and the like. The push for federal nuclear loan guarantees is central to the corporate state.
The anti-union governor of Ohio is strongly focused on killing not only train service but all incentives for renewable energy. His energy plan is for extreme right-wing nuke-based monopolies like FirstEnergy to run the show. Atomic power is the ultimate weapon against community control.
For decades the term “fascist” has been dismissed from use in this country, and perhaps rightly so. Corporations have been dominant in the US since the 1880s, but we have managed to maintain a modicum of democracy.
It’s hard to see that happening if the remnants of the organized labor movement are crushed in Wisconsin and Ohio. Both states have long, important traditions of union activism.
In the wake of Citizens United, with the courts, media, Congress and presidency firmly in corporate control, we see no easy road to victory for working people.
“Vote the bastards out” has become a pipedream in the age of electronic voting machines. Especially in Ohio, a reliable electoral vote count is a thing of the past.
We also have a president who was elected with strong labor support and who is now genuflecting toward the unions. But US history is filled with Democrats who have betrayed their working-class backers, and this one may prove no exception.
So in the long run, we have only ourselves to rely on. The way to survival is not clear.
Ultimately, as Martin Luther King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
But from time to time, it does break. If these uprisings in Wisconsin and Ohio fail, there will—literally—be hell to pay.
Somehow, we must find a way to make sure they don’t.
—
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, which are at www.freepress.org, where Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES also appear. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE US is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH. Originally published by https://freepress.org.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2011
7:30PM
Free Press Free Film Night
THE POLITICAL PROSECUTIONS OF KARL ROVE by Project Save Justice
In the hands of renowned filmmaker John McTiernan, director of the Hollywood blockbusters, Predator, The Hunt for Red October, and the Die Hard trilogy, The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove offers a documented record of the pervasive misuse of the Justice Department.
Sadly, as the film documents, Democrats were targeted at all levels of the system and in many states across the country. The film reveals startling evidence supporting the use of the U.S. Department of Justice to create a permanent Republican majority. In fact, statistics show that in the 15 months leading up to the 2008 general election, indictments of elected Democrats increased by nearly 50%.
The soul-stirring documentary offers convincing evidence to indicate that a vigorous and comprehensive strategy was pursued to attack lower levels of the Democratic Party designed to completely uproot and undermine any challenges to Republican political power.
Brought to you by the Free Press, the Drexel Theater, and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund.
Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St. Bexley
truth@freepress.org
253-2571
Bob Fitrakis
February 7, 2011
In the United States, a country with the greatest spying apparatus in world history, 80% of it used against its own people without “probable cause,” Reagan’s legacy as a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) snitch known as “T-10” must be honored. Having our very own “first snitch” is something to be proud of in a nation dedicated to surveillance and a security-industrial complex unmatched by any Constitutional government.
We should also pay homage to Reagan for all he did to advance the rights of unnatural corporate persons. His days as a corporate shill for General Electric when the company was engaged in massive price-fixing in violation of the free market and fundamental principles of capitalism have to be acknowledged.
Reagan and his former CIA director George Herbert Walker Bush both were elected in 1966 for the first time. They both sided against natural born black citizens by adopting the racist rhetoric of “state’s rights.” So while the Kennedys and King fought for natural people, Reagan’s record demonstrates a shining commitment to Jim Crow in the U.S. and in support of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa.
On the hundredth anniversary of Reagan’s birth we must enshrine in our hearts where Reagan kicked off his campaign on August 3, 1980 in his first post-convention speech after being nominated for president by the Republican Party. He proclaimed, “I believe in state’s rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi. This quote should be played everywhere, must like his Mr. Gorbachev “Tear down this wall” quote.
The public needs to view the Gipper mouthing gibberish about state’s rights a few miles from where the three civil rights martyrs James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and left in a swamp.
Reagan’s words were not lost on Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke who announced that Reagan’s platform sounded like it was written by a Klansman.
To be fair to Reagan, it was not simply racism he embraced with enthusiasm during the height of the civil rights movement. His hatred of the student movement and the “hippie movement” was equally intense. In 1966, as he ran for office, he displayed that legendary Reagan wit in what was considered a real knee-slapper of a joke. He’d break the ice before rabid right-wing crowds by saying “What is a hippie? A hippie talks like Tarzan, looks like Jane, smells like Cheetah.”
Here, perhaps we should defer to Reagan because of his co-starring with the chimp Bonzo, in one of his few leading roles.
In the same way Reagan launched his presidential campaign with a direct appeal to racist southern white Dixiecrats, his 1966 campaign for governor of California targeted the University of California Berkeley free speech and peace activists. Because 18, 19 and 20-year-old students demanded First Amendment rights. Reagan’s campaign rhetoric demanded that they be punished: “Get them out of there. Throw them out. They are spoiled and don’t deserve the education they are getting.”
In the infamous clash at People’s Park where students had taken over a vacant field to plant food and flowers, Governor Reagan intervened by sending in the National Guard. On “Bloody Thursday” in May of 1969, Reagan got his highly-sought “bloodbath” when 13 people were hospitalized with shotgun wounds, three with punctured lungs, one with a shattered leg, and one James Rector shot to death while watching the riot from a rooftop. Instead of tearing down a wall, Reagan and his co-horts erected a chain-link fence to protect the Park from the hippies. One thousand demonstrators were arrested and 200 were charged with felonies.
Reagan was a snitch, a corporate shill, and represented a reactionary backlash against the civil rights and students’ rights movements. Yet, that’s the most impressive part of his legacy.
As President, he represents other even more devastating accomplishments. His policies in Central America targeted the rape of nuns and the assassination of Catholic priests who opposed fascistic pro-U.S. governments in Guatemala and El Salvador. During Iran-Contra he backed the vicious and violent former Somoza guardsmen known as the Contras. Reagan proclaimed them the moral equivalent of our founding fathers as they ran planeloads of cocaine into America’s inner cities.
At the same time, Reagan forced the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression by squeezing the money supply in 1981-82 and destroying what little remained of America’s industrial base in places like Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland and Youngstown.
Reagan was “Mr. Outsourcing.” He loved sending jobs to Mexico and China while hiding behind the American flag. And while calling himself a fiscal conservative, he tripled the debt of the United States, which was $800 billion – from George Washington to Jimmy Carter. He did this by doubling military spending and destroying the industrial tax base in the country while giving unprecedented tax breaks to his multimillionaire buddies.
Reagan did have one policy for the inner cities. He would release moldy old cheese infested with rat feces, if you were willing to wait in line for hours in Detroit and other distressed areas.
To cap his presidential regime, Reagan would promote the rise of jihadi-ism and Islamic fundamentalism by secretly backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
To truly honor Reagan, we must pay him his due. He is the founder of Al Qaeda, the father of the most extensive military-industrial complex on the planet, and the creator of the prison-industrial that imprisons in the U.S. a quarter of the people on Earth.
While the Soviets tore down their wall and outlawed the death penalty, Reagan led the U.S. into a racist, class-based ethnic-cleansing he called the “war on drugs.” So, while his Contra friends ran cocaine and the afgani opium warlords brought unprecedented heroin traffic to the U.S., anyone with a joint risked imprisonment and losing their financial aid, under Ronald Reagan.
When you honor Reagan, you honor this legacy.
—
Dr. Bob Fitrakis is Editor & Publisher of The Free Press (https://freepress.org), which first published this article.
Bob and Connie discuss the state of the union, police brutality and racism in Columbus and how the media portrays conspiracy theorists.
And they talk about up coming Case University Conference with Mark Crispin Miller.
Discussion of the death of Vang Pao and how the New York Times ignored the fact he was a major drug dealer, the shootings in Tucson, and other related politics by Bob Fitrakis and Connie Gadell Newton
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New York Times obit fails to mention that Vang Pao was one of the world’s most notorious drug dealers
January 18, 2011
The New York Times, self-proclaimed “paper of record,” failed to record that General Vang Pao, who died Thursday, January 6, was a wretched drug dealer who targeted U.S. troops in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines for drug sales.
Let’s go over the bizarre, Soviet-style, Times obit entitled “Gen. Vang Pao, Laotion Who Aided U.S., Dies at 81.” In their ideological analysis, Pao was a “…charismatic Laotian general who commanded a secret army of his mountain people in a long, losing campaign against Communist insurgents.” The Times goes on to say he had “almost kinglike status.”
They quote a Hmong refugee in California saying “He is like the earth and the sky.” They throw in the following quote of the general to his Hmong troops: “If we die, we die together. Nobody will be left behind.”
In the New York Times fantasyland, Vang Pao was a patriot and an anti-communist hero. The Times glosses over the fact that Vang Pao was discredited in Laos because he was perceived as a lackey and a tool of French imperialism. He was a sergeant in the French colonial army, the Times tells us, and then he went on to work directly for the CIA.
Here are the facts that the Times ignored.
Pao was reportedly born in December 1929 and began serving as an interpreter to the French forces in what was then called Indo-China. Following World War II, the French were desperate to hold together their crumbling empire and turned to the opium trade in order to hire Hmong mercenaries to fight Laotian national liberation forces.
From 1946 through 1954, the French allowed the so-called Operation X to run heroin labs on the lower Mekong River in Indo-China. Ho Chi Minh, like the Chinese in the 19th century rallied the people of Vietnam against the French by pointing out the insidious nature of the opium trade. Like the British opium wars in the 19th century, the French became drug pushers to control the people of Indo-China.
Pao, a self-titled general among the Hmong clans of the Laotian highlands, was the bagman for Laotian crowned prince Sopsaisana. Pao bought the locally-grown opium from the Hmong and helped process it into high-grade heroin.
In 1963, one of those rare moments in history occurred when Anthony A. “Tony Poe” Poshepny became Vang Pao’s case officer for the CIA in Laos. Poe, legendary figure who was often viewed as the model for Marlon Brando’s character Kurtz in the movie “Apocalypse Now,” initiated a program where he would pay the Hmong warriors cash for the ears of Pathet Lao communists.
According to Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in their book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press, Poe progressed from ears to paying for “entire heads” claiming that he “preserved them in formaldehyde in his bedroom.”
In Richard Ehrlich’s obituary of Poe in the Asian Times, Poe “…dropped decapitated human heads from the air on to communists and stuck heads on pikes.”
Poe claimed that he was booted out of Long Tieng in 1965, the CIA’s “secret” airbase in Laos, because he objected to the CIA’s facilitating Vang Pao’s drug trafficking. In the Frontline documentary “Guns, Drugs, and the CIA,” Poe said, “He [Pao] was making millions. He had his own avenue for selling heroin.”
Long Tieng was the fabled site of the Air America airlines, the stuff of TV land and Hollywood legend. Later, many of these Air America drug runners would emerge around Southern Air Transport in the Iran-Contra cocaine scandal of the 1980s.
“Vang Pao controlled the opium in the plain of Jars region of Laos. By buying up the one sellable crop, the general could garner the allegiance of the hill tribes as well as stuff his own bank account. He would pay $60 a kilo, $10 over the prevailing rate, and would purchase a village’s crop if, in return, the village would supply recruits for his army,” Cockburn and St. Clair write.
So blatant was Vang Pao’s drug running and his use of American helicopters to buy opium to turn into heroin to sell to U.S. soldiers that the CIA created a fictional front airline to distance themselves from the heroin trade. In 1967, the CIA and USAID procured two C-47s for Pao so that he could operate Zieng Khouang Air. But, it was better known by the CIA assets and drug runners who drank at the Purple Porpoise as “Air Opium.” Infamous CIA agent Ted Shackley oversaw the creation of Air Opium.
In 1975, Pao settled in the United States at a ranch in the Missoula, Montana area. At the end of his life he spent time in southern California and among the Hmong ethnic community in Minnesota. He died at the age of 81 in Clovis, California.
To really understand the death of one of the CIA’s favorite drug runners, Albert McCoy’s book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia remains an essential source. As for the New York Times obituary, it simply should have read “Gen. Vang Pao, Laotian who Aided Heroin Addiction Among U.S. GIs, Dies at 81.”
—
Dr. Bob Fitrakis is Editor of The Free Press (https://freepress.org).
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Dr. Robert Fitrakis
December 28, 2010
The giant headline proclaimed “Mr. Ohio.” On Sunday, December 12, the Columbus Dispatch spun a fawning Orwellian tale of George V. Voinovich as he retires from the Senate. One of the many incidents they missed was the part about the then-Governor Voinovich fleeing town after nearly being indicted by a grand jury for money laundering into his campaign.
The fact that Central Ohio’s daily monopoly remains silent to this day on one of the most corrupt administrations in the history of the Buckeye State should come as no surprise. Even when Gov. Voinovich’s Chief of Staff Paul Mifsud was charged with three felony counts and three misdemeanors, their reporting was apologetic and meager. The Dispatch’s Joe Hallett, Jack Torry, and Jonathan Riskind lionize the childhood of Voinovich and speak glowingly of his roots in the Collinwood neighborhood in Cleveland.
What the Dispatch always fails to point out, although it was originally leaked to me from a Dispatch reporter, were the ties Governors Voinovich and James A. Rhodes had to the mob. It’s not that Voinovich ever really hid those connections. He attempted to appoint a long-time friend, Ray Gallagher to an $80,000 a year state job after Gallagher had been convicted of theft in office.
Another of George’s buddies, Booker Tall, was indicted for writing checks to three nonexistent state employees. And who can forget his attempt to appoint alleged mobster and Teamster official Carmen Parisi to the Ohio Turnpike Commission?
But hooking up old friends was nothing compared to the real gangsters he hung around with in corporate Ohio. In one of the blatant and obvious pay-to-play schemes in the nation, Voinovich took $100 thousand from the Lindner family of Chiquita banana fame for his re-election campaign after approving $8.7 million of state funds to the family during his first term as governor.
Perhaps my favorite quote in the Dispatch article comes from Curt Steiner, the Communication Director and Chief of Staff during Voinovich’s first term as governor: “If Jim Rhodes was the Babe Ruth of Ohio politics, then George Voinovich is the Hank Aaron.” Rhodes, as FBI files show, was a small-time bookie who ran numbers and sold porn films in the OSU area prior to becoming governor. And Voinovich is the architect of Ohio’s prison industrial complex – much of it built by his own family business.
To understand Ohio, you need to recall that Speaker of the House John Boehner used to regularly publish the “Washington Union Boss Watch.” In one issue during the mid-90s, he alleged “close links between a labor leader and both the Clintons and organized crime.” Shocking, eh? What Boehner and the Dispatch missed is that when Voinovich was mayor of Cleveland, he gave the eulogy for Teamster mob boss Jackie Presser. At the Berkowitz-Cumin Memorial Chapel on July 12, 1988, Mr. Ohio said “He was a man who loved his fellow man. He made a difference in my life. I will miss him and pray for him.”
So like Rhodes before him, Voinovich did little to hide his organized crime ties. A re-reading of a Life magazine from May 2, 1969 entitled “The Governor…and the Mobster” should shed some light on how Ohio politics is done. The state is sort of like New Jersey without the glamour, and Snooki.
Remember, Voinovich’s spokesperson Michael Dawson called reputed mobster Carmen Parisi “A very good friend of the governor.” When Parisi failed to get appointed to the Turnpike Commission, the governor chose another interesting character, Umberto Fedeli.
Voinovich, as governor and senator, liked to make a public demonstration of his religious faith. He apparently knew the Lord’s Prayer, since he appeared to be the good shepherd to every reputed gangster, and made sure they shall not want.
One of my favorite quotes from the governor’s good friend Parisi, was an infamous uttering caught on tape. Parisi told Teamster driver Jerry Lee Jones: “The day after this [Teamster] fucking election, you motherfucker, no one’s going to bust your fucking head but me, from here down to your prick….Every time you turn around I’ll have someone give you a fucking beating. You understand me?”
Oh, and what about Umberto? Turned out while he was the chair of the Ohio Turnpike Commission, he was also the sole owner of the Fedeli Group Insurance Company, and those who got contracts to do business with the Turnpike coincidentally liked to do business with the Fedeli Group.
Yet, the largest story ignored by the Dispatch was the steering of prison and jail contracts to the Voinovich family business. Sure, the governor’s brother tried to hide it by changing the business’ name from the Voinovich Company to the V Group. The man who tried the blow the whistle on it, Joseph Gilyard, a Voinovich cabinet member in charge of the criminal justice system, was disparaged by the Dispatch and run out of office. And when the Inspector General David Sturtz began to look into the allegations, Voinovich fired him.
This is how Voinovich really played the game. His chief gubernatorial fundraiser, chair of his transition team and his chief of staff (who would later serve time), was the Voinovich Company’s executive vice president, Paul Mifsud. V Group lobbyist and former Company vice president Phil Hamilton coordinated personnel appointments for the newly election Voinovich administration.
So blatant was the governor’s brother Paul Voinovich’s involvement in pay-to-play politics, his older brother George had to promise in his initial 1990 gubernatorial campaign that “Pauly” would not be allowed to bid on state contracts. This promise was easily circumvented when Voinovich decided to give state monies directly to city and county governments, which allowed the V (Voinovich) Group to secure local government contracts funded by the state.
Also, Voinovich ran as a self-proclaimed “environmental governor” in 1990, even posing for a propaganda ad in a canoe. That didn’t stop him from immediately pushing for one of the world’s largest toxic incinerators, WTI in East Liverpool, Ohio. Not surprisingly, the money for the incinerator was linked to the notorious criminal enterprise known as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and the owner of record turned out to be Von Roll, Ltd. of Switzerland, the company that tried to sell the nuclear supergun to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The governor’s brother Pauly emerged as the go-between between the criminal conspirators at WTI and the Voinovich administration.
In late August 1998, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Cincinnati sent grand jury evidence to Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien concerning money laundering involving Governor Voinovich’s 1994 gubernatorial re-election campaign. Two complaints were filed against the Voinovich campaign involving money laundering and illegal and improper use of corporate funds for political purposes.
Voinovich narrowly missed being indicted by the Cincinnati grand jury after his treasurer swore under oath that he had told Voinovich about the illegal money laundering involving his brother. Voinovich explained to the grand jury that he had his hearing aid turned off, because he’s a vain man, when the money laundering was revealed to him by his treasurer.
It also helped that a key witness, Nick Mamias, a reputed “bagman” who laundered $60,000 from WTI into a joint venture company ECIC, Inc. with the V. Group, tragically died after slipping on the ice in 1997.
Mimi Myers, ECIC’s former office manager, testified under oath that her company functioned as a corporate shell in order to pay kickbacks to the V Group. Records show that ECIC paid the V Group $114,500 between April 1994 and September 1996. As Myers explained it, “Well, I always thought that it was returning a portion of the money that Mr. Fabiano was receiving as a lobbyist for WTI, which the V Group and Frank Fela got WTI as a client for Fabiano and Associates, and that this was paying them back for doing that.”
Can you say kickback?
The real legacy of George V. Voinovich is one of systemic pay-to-play corruption, kickbacks, and cronyism. Mr. Ohio, indeed.
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Bob Fitrakis is the author of The Fitrakis Files: The Brothers Voinovich and the Ohiogate Scandal, which includes the article “The V Report” voted the Best Coverage of Government from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists in 2000.