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Friday, June 22 2012 - 12:15 PM
The '92 riot: Revisiting a dark day in LA history
The ‘92 riot: Revisiting a dark day in LA history
’People had had enough’
Updated: Friday, 27 Apr 2012, 8:16 AM CDT
Published : Friday, 27 Apr 2012, 8:16 AM CDT
AMY TAXIN and JOHN ROGERS,Associated Press
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Henry Keith Watson remembers April 29, 1992, as if it happened just last week. History won’t allow him to forget it.
It was a day that marked the beginning of one of the deadliest, most destructive race riots in the nation’s history, and one in which Watson’s spur-of-the-moment decision to take part made him one of the enduring faces of the violence.
Photos: The LA Riots
He was at home that day like thousands of others when he heard the news that was racing across Los Angeles: A jury with no black members had acquitted four police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black man stopped for speeding nearly 14 months before.
“I got caught up in the emotions like everyone else,” Watson says 20 years after a riot that would leave 55 people dead, more than 2,300 injured and himself forever recognized as one of the attackers of white truck driver Reginald Denny, who himself became the enduring image of the innocents victimized during the chaos.
South Los Angeles, where the riot began, has changed considerably two decades later, as has Watson. But many things remain the same.
While racial tensions fanned by the verdict and the general feeling of disenfranchisement and distrust of police among LA’s black population have moderated, residents of the city’s largely black and Hispanic South Side complain that the area still is plagued by too few jobs, too few grocery stores and a lack of redevelopment that would bring more life to the area.
One place in particular that time seemingly forgot is the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where Denny was attacked on that dark day the riot began. It remains a gritty corner that’s home to gas stations where men rush up to incoming cars and pump fuel for spare change, as well as a liquor store with more foot traffic than any other business in sight.
“Have things changed? Not really. People are just more mellow these days,” Frank Owens says with a smile. The unemployed landscaper sat on a bus stop bench near the intersection recently, visiting with friends before going across the street to buy lottery tickets at the liquor store and joke with its owner, James Oh.
Much like Los Angeles as a whole, the neighborhood’s Latino population has grown while the black population has declined.
In this part of town, high school dropout rates are higher than for the city as a whole, and only 8 percent of the area’s residents have college degrees, compared with 30 percent for all residents of Los Angeles, according to American Community Survey estimates from 2006 to 2010.
More than three times as many households in the area reported yearly incomes of less than $20,000 during the same period than homes with yearly incomes of more than $100,000. That’s in stark contrast to the city as a whole, where there were more households with incomes above $100,000 than those with incomes of less than $20,000.
Manuel Pastor, professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California, said economic distress caused by the departure of manufacturing industries and high unemployment and widespread distrust of the police department set the stage for the outrage following the King verdict.
“It’s a question of if you throw a match and there’s no tinder there will be no fire. If there’s a lot of tinder you need a match. And there was lots of tinder,” Pastor said. “There was lots of economic frustration, there was racial tension in the air.”
Then word of the acquittals set it off.
“People had had enough,” said Connie Rice, a director of the civil rights group Advancement Project and an attorney who has brought numerous civil rights lawsuits against the Los Angeles Police Department.
As the liquor store at the intersection of Florence and Normandie was being looted and white passersby were fleeing a barrage of rocks and bottles, Denny stopped his big rig to avoid running over someone.
He was quickly dragged from the cab and nearly beaten to death by Watson and a handful of others. As the attack unfolded on live TV, Watson stepped on Denny’s head after Damian Williams smashed the trucker’s skull in with a brick.
Rioting spread across the city and into neighboring suburbs. Cars were demolished and homes and businesses were burned. Before order was restored, more than 1,500 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Almost a quarter century had passed since the tumultuous urban riots of 1968, and even longer since LA’s Watts rioting in 1965. The magnitude of this new racial paroxysm shocked a nation that thought it had moved on.
Today, Watson still struggles to explain why he took part in the destruction. Known as Keith to his family and “KeeKee” to friends, he was a 27-year-old ex-Marine with a wife and a job who came from a good family. His father had been his neighborhood’s block captain, no less, and he acknowledges his family didn’t raise him to be a troublemaker.
“I guess you could say, you know, looking at my background and whatever, how could I have gotten
caught up in it?" he mused on a recent sun-splashed morning as he sat on the front porch of the home he grew up in, located just a few blocks from the intersection.
After a long pause and a sigh, he continues: “You know, honestly, it was something that just happened, man. I never even knew Reginald Denny. Just the anger and the rage just took hold to where I nor anyone who was out there that day was in their right frame of mind.”
Watson was convicted of misdemeanor assault and sentenced to time served for the 17 months he spent in jail before his case was resolved.
But that day was a rage, he and others in the community say, fueled by years of high unemployment, abuse and neglect by police, and rising tension with recently arrived Korean store owners.
“We wanted jobs around here, we wanted respect and we didn’t get none of that. And then the police just harassed us all the time,” says Sharon McSwain, who for 22 of her 45 years has lived within walking distance of the intersection where Denny was attacked. He was saved by a black truck driver who rushed out to help after seeing the brutal beating on television.
Tensions in the community had been running high before the riot, fueled in part by the case of a Korean grocer who shot to death a black teenager she had accused of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. The grocer, Soon Ja Du, was convicted of manslaughter for killing 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, but received a sentence of only probation and community service.
Like King’s beating, the shooting had been captured on videotape, by Du’s store surveillance camera. The images stoked the anger.
The store shooting occurred just two weeks after George Holliday stood on the terrace outside his San Fernando Valley home and videotaped four LAPD officers kicking King, using stun guns on him and delivering more than 50 blows from their police batons.
On April 29, 1992, it seemed Holliday’s videotape would be the key evidence leading to a guilty verdict against the officers. When they were instead acquitted, violence erupted immediately.
Police, seemingly caught off-guard, were quickly outnumbered by rioters and retreated. As the uprising spread to the city’s Koreatown area, shop owners armed themselves and engaged in running gun battles with looters.
“I think we did the right thing,” says attorney David Kim, who had gone on Korean-language radio to encourage people to take up arms because the police weren’t protecting them.
Not that violence had been totally unexpected.
In the weeks before the verdict, nearly a dozen black community leaders had been meeting regularly with then-Mayor Tom Bradley, discussing what to do if there was an acquittal, the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray recounts.
When the verdict was announced, some 150 volunteers fanned out across the city, urging calm, says Murray, retired pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church and now a religious studies professor at the University of Southern California. They were successful in some instances and likely would have been more so if police had backed them up, he says.
King himself, in his recently published memoir, “The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption,” says FBI agents warned him a riot was expected if the officers walked. They advised him to keep a low profile so as not to inflame passions.
He did until the third day, when he went on television and made an emotional plea for calm, famously asking, “Can we all get along?”
In the aftermath, much of the blame was placed on Police Chief Daryl Gates, who resigned under pressure soon after.
Before the uprising, Gates had been hailed in national police circles as an innovator, widely credited with helping pioneer both the modern police special weapons and tactics team and the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program that partners police with schools.
Until his death in 2010, he angrily defended his actions, accusing his officers of failing to carry out a plan he said was in place to stop any trouble. He was particularly critical of his command staff for leading the retreat.
“The captain, lieutenant, deputy chiefs, commanders — they all screwed up in my judgment,” Gates, who had been chief for 14 years, told The Associated Press in 2002.
Whoever was to blame, Gates remains a polarizing figure in LA’s black community, where words like Gestapo, Nazi and racist are routinely used to describe the way he ran the LAPD.
After the riot, a number of reforms were instituted, including limiting a police chief to a maximum of two five-year terms. Stricter guidelines in the way the LAPD investigates civilian complaints and disciplines its officers were also implemented after both federal officials and an independent review board concluded the department had for years been guilty of a pattern of civil rights abuses.
Anger toward the department as a whole is less intense now.
“Cops are still cops,” says Marqueece Harris-Dawson, president of the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles. "They do
lots of things we don’t like but this idea you’re under threat of assassination or torture or beating, it’s just not as present anymore."
“There is no figure on the scene in this region that has the vitriol, the racism and the open disregard for the citizens of this city that Darryl Gates had,” Harris-Dawson adds.
Violent crime fell citywide by 76 percent between 1992 and 2010, according to Los Angeles police statistics.
Meanwhile, tensions between the black and Korean communities have lessened over the years, according to both sides. Rioters targeted and caused $400 million worth of damage to Korean-American businesses, many of them liquor stores that residents said were blights on the community. Language barriers and cultural differences were also key.
Tom’s Liquor, on the corner of Florence and Normandie, was once notorious in the neighborhood for selling hardly anything but booze and for allowing drunks to congregate out front.
The Korean-born Oh, who took ownership three years ago, says he has gone out of his way to treat all his customers as special and to learn the names of his regulars.
“It’s just common sense to communicate with people, to understand each other, to know each other’s cultures,” Oh says.
Since taking charge, Oh says, he has asked the drinkers to leave, painted over the graffiti and expanded his inventory to include a selection of food, baby items and other goods he says people have told him they are hard-pressed to find in the neighborhood.
About a mile from Florence and Normandie things have gotten better. A popular strip mall has sprouted, developed by Magic Johnson and others. It boasts a Starbucks, a grocery store, several name-brand shops and a Jamba Juice where $4 fruit smoothies were selling fast on a recent day.
Many problems still persist in nearby neighborhoods, however.
Some businesses never returned after they were destroyed, including Maria Muniz’s father’s welding workshop. Unable to buy new equipment, he never reopened. Eventually her parents divorced and her mother took a job in a sweatshop.
“I don’t know what would have been of our lives if the riots hadn’t happened,” says Muniz, who now works for Community Coalition.
Watson, meanwhile, has gotten on with his life. He’s become a successful businessman, having “taken lemons and made lemonade,” he likes to say with a laugh.
He has two daughters in college and for years has operated his own limousine business. Following a drug possession bust a few years after the riot he has stayed out of trouble and now helps keep watch on his neighborhood, just as his late father once did. He has spent most of his life in the neighborhood, returning to the house he grew up in last year to care for his elderly mother.
His limo customers, he says, have included everyone from a Saudi Arabian princess he chauffeured last year to people from the neighborhood celebrating birthdays and weddings and, as more Hispanics have moved into the area, quinceaneras.
“You get a sense of pride and accomplishment when you can help a person’s evening or event and you see the smiles and the love and the joy on their faces,” says the burly Watson, breaking into a smile himself.
Asked if he feels badly about what he did to Denny, he says simply that what happened to the trucker that day was “unfortunate.”
“But I can’t take it back. There’s nothing I can do.”
Watson did apologize personally to Denny some years ago, the only one of his attackers to do so. Another time he offered to send a limo to pick him up and take him to Florence and Normandie, then somewhere afterward where the two could have a drink and talk.
He says Denny, who lives quietly in Arizona these days, declined. The trucker has shunned interviews for years, and repeated attempts to contact him by mail, phone and in person for this story were unsuccessful.
“He chooses to remain in private,” Watson said. “And we respect his privacy. So be it.”
Copyright Associated Press, Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
‘People had had enough’
Updated: Friday, 27 Apr 2012, 8:16 AM CDT
Published : Friday, 27 Apr 2012, 8:16 AM CDT
AMY TAXIN and JOHN ROGERS,Associated Press
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Henry Keith Watson remembers April 29, 1992, as if it happened just last week. History won’t allow him to forget it.
It was a day that marked the beginning of one of the deadliest, most destructive race riots in the nation’s history, and one in which Watson’s spur-of-the-moment decision to take part made him one of the enduring faces of the violence.
Photos: The LA Riots
He was at home that day like thousands of others when he heard the news that was racing across Los Angeles: A jury with no black members had acquitted four police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black man stopped for speeding nearly 14 months before.
“I got caught up in the emotions like everyone else,” Watson says 20 years after a riot that would leave 55 people dead, more than 2,300 injured and himself forever recognized as one of the attackers of white truck driver Reginald Denny, who himself became the enduring image of the innocents victimized during the chaos.
South Los Angeles, where the riot began, has changed considerably two decades later, as has Watson. But many things remain the same.
While racial tensions fanned by the verdict and the general feeling of disenfranchisement and distrust of police among LA’s black population have moderated, residents of the city’s largely black and Hispanic South Side complain that the area still is plagued by too few jobs, too few grocery stores and a lack of redevelopment that would bring more life to the area.
One place in particular that time seemingly forgot is the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where Denny was attacked on that dark day the riot began. It remains a gritty corner that’s home to gas stations where men rush up to incoming cars and pump fuel for spare change, as well as a liquor store with more foot traffic than any other business in sight.
“Have things changed? Not really. People are just more mellow these days,” Frank Owens says with a smile. The unemployed landscaper sat on a bus stop bench near the intersection recently, visiting with friends before going across the street to buy lottery tickets at the liquor store and joke with its owner, James Oh.
Much like Los Angeles as a whole, the neighborhood’s Latino population has grown while the black population has declined.
In this part of town, high school dropout rates are higher than for the city as a whole, and only 8 percent of the area’s residents have college degrees, compared with 30 percent for all residents of Los Angeles, according to American Community Survey estimates from 2006 to 2010.
More than three times as many households in the area reported yearly incomes of less than $20,000 during the same period than homes with yearly incomes of more than $100,000. That’s in stark contrast to the city as a whole, where there were more households with incomes above $100,000 than those with incomes of less than $20,000.
Manuel Pastor, professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California, said economic distress caused by the departure of manufacturing industries and high unemployment and widespread distrust of the police department set the stage for the outrage following the King verdict.
“It’s a question of if you throw a match and there’s no tinder there will be no fire. If there’s a lot of tinder you need a match. And there was lots of tinder,” Pastor said. “There was lots of economic frustration, there was racial tension in the air.”
Then word of the acquittals set it off.
“People had had enough,” said Connie Rice, a director of the civil rights group Advancement Project and an attorney who has brought numerous civil rights lawsuits against the Los Angeles Police Department.
As the liquor store at the intersection of Florence and Normandie was being looted and white passersby were fleeing a barrage of rocks and bottles, Denny stopped his big rig to avoid running over someone.
He was quickly dragged from the cab and nearly beaten to death by Watson and a handful of others. As the attack unfolded on live TV, Watson stepped on Denny’s head after Damian Williams smashed the trucker’s skull in with a brick.
Rioting spread across the city and into neighboring suburbs. Cars were demolished and homes and businesses were burned. Before order was restored, more than 1,500 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Almost a quarter century had passed since the tumultuous urban riots of 1968, and even longer since LA’s Watts rioting in 1965. The magnitude of this new racial paroxysm shocked a nation that thought it had moved on.
Today, Watson still struggles to explain why he took part in the destruction. Known as Keith to his family and “KeeKee” to friends, he was a 27-year-old ex-Marine with a wife and a job who came from a good family. His father had been his neighborhood’s block captain, no less, and he acknowledges his family didn’t raise him to be a troublemaker.
“I guess you could say, you know, looking at my background and whatever, how could I have gotten
caught up in it?" he mused on a recent sun-splashed morning as he sat on the front porch of the home he grew up in, located just a few blocks from the intersection.
After a long pause and a sigh, he continues: “You know, honestly, it was something that just happened, man. I never even knew Reginald Denny. Just the anger and the rage just took hold to where I nor anyone who was out there that day was in their right frame of mind.”
Watson was convicted of misdemeanor assault and sentenced to time served for the 17 months he spent in jail before his case was resolved.
But that day was a rage, he and others in the community say, fueled by years of high unemployment, abuse and neglect by police, and rising tension with recently arrived Korean store owners.
“We wanted jobs around here, we wanted respect and we didn’t get none of that. And then the police just harassed us all the time,” says Sharon McSwain, who for 22 of her 45 years has lived within walking distance of the intersection where Denny was attacked. He was saved by a black truck driver who rushed out to help after seeing the brutal beating on television.
Tensions in the community had been running high before the riot, fueled in part by the case of a Korean grocer who shot to death a black teenager she had accused of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. The grocer, Soon Ja Du, was convicted of manslaughter for killing 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, but received a sentence of only probation and community service.
Like King’s beating, the shooting had been captured on videotape, by Du’s store surveillance camera. The images stoked the anger.
The store shooting occurred just two weeks after George Holliday stood on the terrace outside his San Fernando Valley home and videotaped four LAPD officers kicking King, using stun guns on him and delivering more than 50 blows from their police batons.
On April 29, 1992, it seemed Holliday’s videotape would be the key evidence leading to a guilty verdict against the officers. When they were instead acquitted, violence erupted immediately.
Police, seemingly caught off-guard, were quickly outnumbered by rioters and retreated. As the uprising spread to the city’s Koreatown area, shop owners armed themselves and engaged in running gun battles with looters.
“I think we did the right thing,” says attorney David Kim, who had gone on Korean-language radio to encourage people to take up arms because the police weren’t protecting them.
Not that violence had been totally unexpected.
In the weeks before the verdict, nearly a dozen black community leaders had been meeting regularly with then-Mayor Tom Bradley, discussing what to do if there was an acquittal, the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray recounts.
When the verdict was announced, some 150 volunteers fanned out across the city, urging calm, says Murray, retired pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church and now a religious studies professor at the University of Southern California. They were successful in some instances and likely would have been more so if police had backed them up, he says.
King himself, in his recently published memoir, “The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption,” says FBI agents warned him a riot was expected if the officers walked. They advised him to keep a low profile so as not to inflame passions.
He did until the third day, when he went on television and made an emotional plea for calm, famously asking, “Can we all get along?”
In the aftermath, much of the blame was placed on Police Chief Daryl Gates, who resigned under pressure soon after.
Before the uprising, Gates had been hailed in national police circles as an innovator, widely credited with helping pioneer both the modern police special weapons and tactics team and the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program that partners police with schools.
Until his death in 2010, he angrily defended his actions, accusing his officers of failing to carry out a plan he said was in place to stop any trouble. He was particularly critical of his command staff for leading the retreat.
“The captain, lieutenant, deputy chiefs, commanders — they all screwed up in my judgment,” Gates, who had been chief for 14 years, told The Associated Press in 2002.
Whoever was to blame, Gates remains a polarizing figure in LA’s black community, where words like Gestapo, Nazi and racist are routinely used to describe the way he ran the LAPD.
After the riot, a number of reforms were instituted, including limiting a police chief to a maximum of two five-year terms. Stricter guidelines in the way the LAPD investigates civilian complaints and disciplines its officers were also implemented after both federal officials and an independent review board concluded the department had for years been guilty of a pattern of civil rights abuses.
Anger toward the department as a whole is less intense now.
“Cops are still cops,” says Marqueece Harris-Dawson, president of the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles. "They do
AMY TAXIN and JOHN ROGERS,Associated Press
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Henry Keith Watson remembers April 29, 1992, as if it happened just last week. History won’t allow him to forget it.
It was a day that marked the beginning of one of the deadliest, most destructive race riots in the nation’s history, and one in which Watson’s spur-of-the-moment decision to take part made him one of the enduring faces of the violence.
Photos: The LA Riots
He was at home that day like thousands of others when he heard the news that was racing across Los Angeles: A jury with no black members had acquitted four police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black man stopped for speeding nearly 14 months before.
“I got caught up in the emotions like everyone else,” Watson says 20 years after a riot that would leave 55 people dead, more than 2,300 injured and himself forever recognized as one of the attackers of white truck driver Reginald Denny, who himself became the enduring image of the innocents victimized during the chaos.
South Los Angeles, where the riot began, has changed considerably two decades later, as has Watson. But many things remain the same.
While racial tensions fanned by the verdict and the general feeling of disenfranchisement and distrust of police among LA’s black population have moderated, residents of the city’s largely black and Hispanic South Side complain that the area still is plagued by too few jobs, too few grocery stores and a lack of redevelopment that would bring more life to the area.
One place in particular that time seemingly forgot is the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where Denny was attacked on that dark day the riot began. It remains a gritty corner that’s home to gas stations where men rush up to incoming cars and pump fuel for spare change, as well as a liquor store with more foot traffic than any other business in sight.
“Have things changed? Not really. People are just more mellow these days,” Frank Owens says with a smile. The unemployed landscaper sat on a bus stop bench near the intersection recently, visiting with friends before going across the street to buy lottery tickets at the liquor store and joke with its owner, James Oh.
Much like Los Angeles as a whole, the neighborhood’s Latino population has grown while the black population has declined.
In this part of town, high school dropout rates are higher than for the city as a whole, and only 8 percent of the area’s residents have college degrees, compared with 30 percent for all residents of Los Angeles, according to American Community Survey estimates from 2006 to 2010.
More than three times as many households in the area reported yearly incomes of less than $20,000 during the same period than homes with yearly incomes of more than $100,000. That’s in stark contrast to the city as a whole, where there were more households with incomes above $100,000 than those with incomes of less than $20,000.
Manuel Pastor, professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California, said economic distress caused by the departure of manufacturing industries and high unemployment and widespread distrust of the police department set the stage for the outrage following the King verdict.
“It’s a question of if you throw a match and there’s no tinder there will be no fire. If there’s a lot of tinder you need a match. And there was lots of tinder,” Pastor said. “There was lots of economic frustration, there was racial tension in the air.”
Then word of the acquittals set it off.
“People had had enough,” said Connie Rice, a director of the civil rights group Advancement Project and an attorney who has brought numerous civil rights lawsuits against the Los Angeles Police Department.
As the liquor store at the intersection of Florence and Normandie was being looted and white passersby were fleeing a barrage of rocks and bottles, Denny stopped his big rig to avoid running over someone.
He was quickly dragged from the cab and nearly beaten to death by Watson and a handful of others. As the attack unfolded on live TV, Watson stepped on Denny’s head after Damian Williams smashed the trucker’s skull in with a brick.
Rioting spread across the city and into neighboring suburbs. Cars were demolished and homes and businesses were burned. Before order was restored, more than 1,500 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Almost a quarter century had passed since the tumultuous urban riots of 1968, and even longer since LA’s Watts rioting in 1965. The magnitude of this new racial paroxysm shocked a nation that thought it had moved on.
Today, Watson still struggles to explain why he took part in the destruction. Known as Keith to his family and “KeeKee” to friends, he was a 27-year-old ex-Marine with a wife and a job who came from a good family. His father had been his neighborhood’s block captain, no less, and he acknowledges his family didn’t raise him to be a troublemaker.
“I guess you could say, you know, looking at my background and whatever, how could I have gotten
caught up in it?" he mused on a recent sun-splashed morning as he sat on the front porch of the home he grew up in, located just a few blocks from the intersection.
After a long pause and a sigh, he continues: “You know, honestly, it was something that just happened, man. I never even knew Reginald Denny. Just the anger and the rage just took hold to where I nor anyone who was out there that day was in their right frame of mind.”
Watson was convicted of misdemeanor assault and sentenced to time served for the 17 months he spent in jail before his case was resolved.
But that day was a rage, he and others in the community say, fueled by years of high unemployment, abuse and neglect by police, and rising tension with recently arrived Korean store owners.
“We wanted jobs around here, we wanted respect and we didn’t get none of that. And then the police just harassed us all the time,” says Sharon McSwain, who for 22 of her 45 years has lived within walking distance of the intersection where Denny was attacked. He was saved by a black truck driver who rushed out to help after seeing the brutal beating on television.
Tensions in the community had been running high before the riot, fueled in part by the case of a Korean grocer who shot to death a black teenager she had accused of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. The grocer, Soon Ja Du, was convicted of manslaughter for killing 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, but received a sentence of only probation and community service.
Like King’s beating, the shooting had been captured on videotape, by Du’s store surveillance camera. The images stoked the anger.
The store shooting occurred just two weeks after George Holliday stood on the terrace outside his San Fernando Valley home and videotaped four LAPD officers kicking King, using stun guns on him and delivering more than 50 blows from their police batons.
On April 29, 1992, it seemed Holliday’s videotape would be the key evidence leading to a guilty verdict against the officers. When they were instead acquitted, violence erupted immediately.
Police, seemingly caught off-guard, were quickly outnumbered by rioters and retreated. As the uprising spread to the city’s Koreatown area, shop owners armed themselves and engaged in running gun battles with looters.
“I think we did the right thing,” says attorney David Kim, who had gone on Korean-language radio to encourage people to take up arms because the police weren’t protecting them.
Not that violence had been totally unexpected.
In the weeks before the verdict, nearly a dozen black community leaders had been meeting regularly with then-Mayor Tom Bradley, discussing what to do if there was an acquittal, the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray recounts.
When the verdict was announced, some 150 volunteers fanned out across the city, urging calm, says Murray, retired pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church and now a religious studies professor at the University of Southern California. They were successful in some instances and likely would have been more so if police had backed them up, he says.
King himself, in his recently published memoir, “The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption,” says FBI agents warned him a riot was expected if the officers walked. They advised him to keep a low profile so as not to inflame passions.
He did until the third day, when he went on television and made an emotional plea for calm, famously asking, “Can we all get along?”
In the aftermath, much of the blame was placed on Police Chief Daryl Gates, who resigned under pressure soon after.
Before the uprising, Gates had been hailed in national police circles as an innovator, widely credited with helping pioneer both the modern police special weapons and tactics team and the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program that partners police with schools.
Until his death in 2010, he angrily defended his actions, accusing his officers of failing to carry out a plan he said was in place to stop any trouble. He was particularly critical of his command staff for leading the retreat.
“The captain, lieutenant, deputy chiefs, commanders — they all screwed up in my judgment,” Gates, who had been chief for 14 years, told The Associated Press in 2002.
Whoever was to blame, Gates remains a polarizing figure in LA’s black community, where words like Gestapo, Nazi and racist are routinely used to describe the way he ran the LAPD.
After the riot, a number of reforms were instituted, including limiting a police chief to a maximum of two five-year terms. Stricter guidelines in the way the LAPD investigates civilian complaints and disciplines its officers were also implemented after both federal officials and an independent review board concluded the department had for years been guilty of a pattern of civil rights abuses.
Anger toward the department as a whole is less intense now.
“Cops are still cops,” says Marqueece Harris-Dawson, president of the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles. "They do
lots of things we don’t like but this idea you’re under threat of assassination or torture or beating, it’s just not as present anymore."
“There is no figure on the scene in this region that has the vitriol, the racism and the open disregard for the citizens of this city that Darryl Gates had,” Harris-Dawson adds.
Violent crime fell citywide by 76 percent between 1992 and 2010, according to Los Angeles police statistics.
Meanwhile, tensions between the black and Korean communities have lessened over the years, according to both sides. Rioters targeted and caused $400 million worth of damage to Korean-American businesses, many of them liquor stores that residents said were blights on the community. Language barriers and cultural differences were also key.
Tom’s Liquor, on the corner of Florence and Normandie, was once notorious in the neighborhood for selling hardly anything but booze and for allowing drunks to congregate out front.
The Korean-born Oh, who took ownership three years ago, says he has gone out of his way to treat all his customers as special and to learn the names of his regulars.
“It’s just common sense to communicate with people, to understand each other, to know each other’s cultures,” Oh says.
Since taking charge, Oh says, he has asked the drinkers to leave, painted over the graffiti and expanded his inventory to include a selection of food, baby items and other goods he says people have told him they are hard-pressed to find in the neighborhood.
About a mile from Florence and Normandie things have gotten better. A popular strip mall has sprouted, developed by Magic Johnson and others. It boasts a Starbucks, a grocery store, several name-brand shops and a Jamba Juice where $4 fruit smoothies were selling fast on a recent day.
Many problems still persist in nearby neighborhoods, however.
Some businesses never returned after they were destroyed, including Maria Muniz’s father’s welding workshop. Unable to buy new equipment, he never reopened. Eventually her parents divorced and her mother took a job in a sweatshop.
“I don’t know what would have been of our lives if the riots hadn’t happened,” says Muniz, who now works for Community Coalition.
Watson, meanwhile, has gotten on with his life. He’s become a successful businessman, having “taken lemons and made lemonade,” he likes to say with a laugh.
He has two daughters in college and for years has operated his own limousine business. Following a drug possession bust a few years after the riot he has stayed out of trouble and now helps keep watch on his neighborhood, just as his late father once did. He has spent most of his life in the neighborhood, returning to the house he grew up in last year to care for his elderly mother.
His limo customers, he says, have included everyone from a Saudi Arabian princess he chauffeured last year to people from the neighborhood celebrating birthdays and weddings and, as more Hispanics have moved into the area, quinceaneras.
“You get a sense of pride and accomplishment when you can help a person’s evening or event and you see the smiles and the love and the joy on their faces,” says the burly Watson, breaking into a smile himself.
Asked if he feels badly about what he did to Denny, he says simply that what happened to the trucker that day was “unfortunate.”
“But I can’t take it back. There’s nothing I can do.”
Watson did apologize personally to Denny some years ago, the only one of his attackers to do so. Another time he offered to send a limo to pick him up and take him to Florence and Normandie, then somewhere afterward where the two could have a drink and talk.
He says Denny, who lives quietly in Arizona these days, declined. The trucker has shunned interviews for years, and repeated attempts to contact him by mail, phone and in person for this story were unsuccessful.
“He chooses to remain in private,” Watson said. “And we respect his privacy. So be it.”
AV Town Crier says...
I worked for the LAUSD and the next day, I had volunteered (months before)to work a week at a personnel office just one black from the corner of Florence and Normandie. I was afraid. But the neighborhood was spik and span. The yards were kept up. A lady was sweeping the sidewalk and gutter in front of her house. Nowhere in that neighborhood was there one item of trash.
Yes, it was a black neighborhood.
Let’s not use to wide a paintbrush here when we want to paint one group or another. Yes, there are assholes in every group.
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Martel says...
Cagy Like you I was there,One of my best buddies was stranded at his house downtown and I went to get him .Needless to say I was heavily armed,I remember thinking to myself that it was ten times worse in person than on the tube.I did get my friend and we got out without any trouble. I was luckly that i knew my way around downtown i had to take back streets to avoid the mobs.A terrible day indeed and i hope we dont ever see that type of thing again.
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Cagy Wolf says...
AVTC and Martel you will see more of those kind of days as this administration seems more interested in dividing america and not uniting it. The riots didn’t scare me but I was quite leary being armed only with a knife but like I said most blacks just told me to get some loot for myself and stopped others from bothering me. I just wish I had some money to buy tennis shoes from the guys in the truck at 7/11 at Palmdale Blvd. and Sierra Hwy, like I said at first we looked at each other as three black guys approached us, but all they wanted to do is sell us some shoes for gas money.
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marino says...
Sell you some stolen shoes for gas money? Or sell you some stolen shoes, compliments of the L.A. riots, for crack?
Does Vegas have odds on a riot somewhere in the U.S. if Obama loses the election? I pay 2 to 1.
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Martel says...
cagy I admit I was scared every minute and I got there and out brfore it really spread. I was able to take 3rd to wilshire towards hollywood and I did see buildings on fire the mob was basically behind me or in other parts.In any event I did not like it and hope never to see it again.
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Sovereignty Soldier says...
It was reported yesterday that the true father of Obama is none other than communist propagandist Frank Marshal Davis. Already there is numerous sites with photos of both as well as Obamas mother with Frank. There are also pics of Obama as a child visiting Mr. Davis and neighbors say he visited about three times a week. Obviosly being tutored in Mr. Davis’ political ideology.
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marino says...
Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis Communist Pedophile.
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Cagy Wolf says...
Frank Marshal Davis is Obama’s daddy, no wonder Obama is a traitor to america and americans. There isn’t one communist worth two dead flies or one live one, they are all the same. Troble making liars who want what you have and don’t want to work, like Marsh who finally got his wish and doesn’t work.
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Cagy Wolf says...
In his biography of Barack Obama, David Mendell writes about Obama’s life as a “secret smoker” and how he “went to great lengths to conceal the habit.” But what about Obama’s secret political life? It turns out that Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist.
In his books, Obama admits attending “socialist conferences” and coming into contact with Marxist literature. But he ridicules the charge of being a “hard-core academic Marxist,” which was made by his colorful and outspoken 2004 U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes.
However, through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his “poetry” and getting advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father,refers to him repeatedly as just “Frank.”
The reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist who belonged to a party subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a CPUSA member. What’s more, anti-communist congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations.
Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand-based libertarian activist, researcher and blogger, noted evidence that “Frank” was Frank Marshall Davis in a posting in March of 2007.
Obama’s communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S. presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.
AIM recently disclosed that Obama has well-documented socialist connections, which help explain why he sponsored a“Global Poverty Act” designed to send hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.
But the Communist Party connection through Davis is even more ominous. Decades ago, the CPUSA had tens of thousands of members, some of them covert agents who had penetrated the U.S. Government. It received secret subsidies from the old Soviet Union.
You won’t find any of this discussed in the David Mendell book, Obama: From Promise to Power. It is typical of the superficial biographies of Obama now on the market. Secret smoking seems to be Obama’s most controversial activity. At best, Mendell and the liberal media describe Obama as “left-leaning.”
But you will find it briefly discussed, sort of, in Obama’s own book, Dreams From My Father. He writes about “a poet named Frank,” who visited them in Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of “hard-earned knowledge” and advice. Who was Frank? Obama only says that he had “some modest notoriety once,” was “a contemporary of Richard Wright and
Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago…” but was now “pushing eighty.” He writes about “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self” giving him advice before he left for Occidental College in 1979 at the age of 18.
This “Frank” is none other than Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist writer now considered by some to be in the same category of prominence as Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. In the summer/fall 2003 issue of African American Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University reviews a book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas, about Davis’s career, and notes, “In Davis’s case, his political commitments led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War II-even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership.”
Tidwell is an expert on the life and writings of Davis.
Is it possible that Obama did not know who Davis was when he wrote his book, Dreams From My Father, first published in 1995? That’s not plausible since Obama refers to him as a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes and says he saw a book of his black poetry.
The communists knew who “Frank” was, and they know who Obama is. In fact, one academic who travels in communist circles understands the significance of the Davis-Obama relationship.
Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, talked about it during a speech last March at the reception of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University. The remarks are posted online under the headline, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party.”
Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 “at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson,” came into contact with Barack Obama and his family and became the young man’s mentor, influencing Obama’s sense of identity and career moves. Robeson, of course, was the well-known black actor and singer who served as a member of the CPUSA and apologist for the old Soviet Union. Davis had known Robeson from his time in Chicago.
As Horne describes it, Davis “befriended” a “Euro-American family” that had “migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.”
It was in Chicago that Obama became a “community organizer” and came into contact with more far-left political forces, including the Democratic Socialists of America, which maintains close ties to European socialist groups and parties through the Socialist International (SI), and two former members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), William Ayers and Carl Davidson.
The SDS laid siege to college campuses across America in the 1960s, mostly in order to protest the Vietnam War, and spawned the terrorist Weather Underground organization. Ayers was a member of the terrorist group and turned himself in to authorities in 1981. He is now a college professor and served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago. Davidson is now a figure in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an offshoot of the old Moscow-controlled CPUSA, and helped organize the 2002 rally where Obama came out against the Iraq War.
Both communism and socialism trace their roots to Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, who endorsed the first meeting of the Socialist International, then called the “First International.” According to Pierre Mauroy, president of the SI from 1992-1996, “It was he [Marx] who formally launched it, gave the inaugural address and devised its structure…”
Apparently unaware that Davis had been publicly named as a CPUSA member, Horne said only that Davis “was certainly in the orbit of the CP [Communist Party]-if not a member…”
In addition to Tidwell’s book, Black Moods: Collected Poems of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis’s Communist Party membership, another book, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946, names Davis as one of several black poets who continued to publish in CPUSA-supported publications after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. The author, James Edward Smethurst, associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says that Davis, however, would later claim that he was “deeply troubled” by the pact.
While blacks such as Richard Wright left the CPUSA, it is not clear if or when Davis ever left the party.
However, Obama writes in Dreams From My Father that he saw “Frank” only a few days before he left Hawaii for college, and that Davis seemed just as radical as ever. Davis called college “An advanced degree in compromise” and warned Obama not to forget his “people” and not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that ####.” Davis also complained about foot problems, the result of “trying to force African feet into European shoes,” Obama wrote.
For his part, Horne says that Obama’s giving of credit to Davis will be important in history. “At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack’s memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis’ equally affecting memoir, Living the Blues and when that day comes, I’m sure a future student will not only examine critically the Frankenstein monsters that US imperialism created in order to subdue Communist parties but will also be moved to come to this historic and wonderful archive in order to gain insight on what has befallen this complex and intriguing planet on which we reside,” he said.
Dr. Kathryn Takara, a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who also confirms that Davis is the “Frank” in Obama’s book, did her dissertation on Davis and spent much time with him between 1972 until he passed away in 1987.
In an analysis posted online, she notes that Davis, who was a columnist for the Honolulu Record, brought “an acute sense of race relations and class struggle throughout America and the world” and that he openly discussed subjects such as American imperialism, colonialism and exploitation. She described him as a “socialist realist” who attacked the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Davis, in his own writings, had said that Robeson and Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and a secret member of the CPUSA, had suggested that he take a job as a columnist with the Honolulu Record “and see if I could do something for them.” The ILWU was organizing workers there and Robeson’s contacts were “passed on” to Davis, Takara writes.
Takara says that Davis “espoused freedom, radicalism, solidarity, labor unions, due process, peace, affirmative action, civil rights, Negro History week, and true Democracy to fight imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. He urged coalition politics.”
Is “coalition politics” at work in Obama’s rise to power?
Trevor Loudon, the New Zealand-based blogger who has been analyzing the political forces behind Obama and specializes in studying the impact of Marxist and leftist political organizations, notes that Frank Chapman, a CPUSA supporter, has written a letter to the party newspaper hailing the Illinois senator’s victory in the Iowa caucuses.
“Obama’s victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle,” Chapman wrote. “Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary ‘mole,’ not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through.”
Let’s challenge the liberal media to report on this. Will they have the honesty and integrity to do so?
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About the author
Cliff Kincaid
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. Disqus.
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A Like Reply 3 weeks ago 0 Like
F .
A Like Reply 3 weeks ago 0 Like
F .
I have some of the more pertinent PDF transcript files of the actual 1935 hearings on this fascist overthrow stopped by Marine General Smedley Butler. He also wrote a book called ‘War is a Racket’.
http://www.warisaracket.com/ [War is a Racket]
http://warisaracket.org/ [SMEDLEY BUTLER SOCIETY]
It’s an amazing true story of the same fascist corporatism we see today in what some say is George Bush’s completion of what his grand daddy attempted to do during the 1930s.
I’ll bet few if any of the far right cult wing nuts here know the republican party in 1940 received the majority of its campaign financing from Hitler’s Nazi Party. I also bet few if any know that Herbert Hoover, ex republican president, conspired in Germany with Hitler’s Nazis to again overthrow FDR in 1940. I also bet few to none know an Italian fascist era ‘Freemason’ attempted to assassinate FDR a few months before he was inagurated in May 1933…
A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
F .
Right wing 1934 Fascist coup plot
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/Plot1.html
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/morgan1.htm [Morgan’s Fascist Plot]
IN FACT this very same AIM group Kincaid uses as a far right wing tool of McCarthyism was also used by McCarthy’s Unamerican Activities Committe to disseminate right wing propagandist lies back then.
“The entire story circulated by Romerstein, a former employee of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and Accuracy in Media, the right wing pressure group, is scurrilous and false.” [Proven False claims made about Izzy Stone working for and with the Soviet Union and the KGB]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.F.Stone
A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
F .
Fascist right wing coup
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/Plot1.html
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/morgan1.htm [Morgan’s Fascist Plot]
This very same AIM group Kincaid uses as a far right wing tool of McCarthyism was also used by McCarthy’s Unamerican Activities Committe to disseminate right wing propagandist lies back then.
“The entire story circulated by Romerstein, a former employee of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and Accuracy in Media, the right wing pressure group, is scurrilous and false.” [Proven False claims made about Izzy Stone working for and with the Soviet Union and the KGB]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.F.Stone
A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
F .
Continued to Joe T and all the other uniformed believers of imaginary US communists and any imaginary sky gods backing our fiat money system…
re. Forgive me if I am not as smart as you, and your liberal friends, but I guess I missed a few days of U.S. History in high school.
Don’t patronize or condescend me with that irrelevant BS…
re. When exactly was the ‘planned and financed the overthrow of American democracy from the assassination of FDR in order to install a fascist dictatorship more to the liking of US industrialists’? I don’t remember that part of U.S. History.
Perhaps you were busy bullying other kids like you have instigated here still acting like a child. Are too stupid to click on the links I provided? This is a documented fact the was predominantly covered up by the House Unamerican Activities Committee to investigate this attempted fascist coup. The same committee that later became McCarthy’s tool to harass imaginary US communists.
A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
F .
Continued to Joe T and all the other uniformed believers of imaginary US communists and any imaginary sky gods backing our fiat money system…
re. Forgive me if I am not as smart as you, and your liberal friends, but I guess I missed a few days of U.S. History in high school.
Don’t patronize or condescend me with that irrelevant BS…
re. When exactly was the ‘planned and financed the overthrow of American democracy from the assassination of FDR in order to install a fascist dictatorship more to the liking of US industrialists’? I don’t remember that part of U.S. History.
Perhaps you were busy bullying other kids like you instigate here still as a child. Are you so ignorant or just too stupid to click on the links I provided? This is a documented fact the was predominantly covered up by the House Unamerican Activities Committe to investigate this attempted fascist coup. The same committee that later became McCarthy’s tool to harass imaginary US communists.
IN FACT this very same AIM organization Kincaid uses as a far right wing tool of McCarthyism was also used by McCarthy’s Unamerican Activities Committe to disseminate right wing propagandist lies in attempting to indict the imaginary communists created by the far right back then.
A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
F .
Continued to Joe T and all the other uniformed believers of imaginary US communists and any imaginary sky gods backing our fiat money system…
re. Forgive me if I am not as smart as you, and your liberal friends, but I guess I missed a few days of U.S. History in high school.
Don’t patronize or condescend me with that irrelevant BS…
re. When exactly was the ‘planned and financed the overthrow of American democracy from the assassination of FDR in order to install a fascist dictatorship more to the liking of US industrialists’? I don’t remember that part of U.S. History.
Perhaps you were busy bullying other kids like you instigate here still as a child. Are you so ignorant or just to stupid to click on the links I provided? This is a documented fact the was predominantly covered up by a committe formed in the House to investigate this attempted fascist coup called the Unamerican Activities Committe that later became McCarthy’s tool to harass imaginary US communists. IN FACT this very same AIM organization Kincaid uses as a far right wing tool of McCarthyism was also used by McCarthy’s Unamerican Activities Committe to disseminate right wing propagandist lies and attempt to indict the imaginary communists created by the far right back then.
http://www.clubhousewreckards.com/plot/plottoseizethewhitehouse.htm
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/Plot1.html
http://www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/whitehouse.html
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/morgan1.htm [Morgan’s Fascist Plot]
I have some of the more pertinent PDF transcript files of the actual 1935 hearings on this fascist overthrow stopped by Marine General Smedley Butler. He also wrote a book called ‘War is a Racket’.
http://www.warisaracket.com/ [War is a Racket]
http://warisaracket.org/ [SMEDLEY BUTLER SOCIETY]
A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
F .
re. Joe T in “Amazing how my defending McCain as being born on American soil is interpreted as “fool” hearted attempt to support what you call ‘American fascist imperialism’.
You have failed to comprehend what you read. I did not question your defense of McCain as a legal resident or where he was born, but I did question your inclusion of only the surface story behind the Panama Canal history.
re Joe T in “Your lack on intelegence to see my stating that that Panama Canal Zone was U.S.A. territory is expounded by your obvious socialist/communist rhetoric about American imperialism.”
And here we go with the childish personal attacks again when I politely only attacked what you presented on Panama Canal history as the mere surface of what factually happened. So listen up closely you ignorant sleazy low life uniformed or ignorant shite for brains – Like most all citizens of the US, I am not, nor do I support socialism or communism that does exists only in your far right pea brained christian cult relgious right tiny beast brain otherwise known as the ‘subcortex’ [also called the lizard brain where these emotive ad hominem attacks stem from]…
A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
F .
re. Joe T in “Amazing how my defending McCain as being born on American soil is interpreted as “fool” hearted attempt to support what you call ‘American fascist imperialism’.
You are failing to Comprehend what you read Joe T. I did not question your defense of McCain as a legal resident or where he was born, but I did question your inclusion of only the surface story behind the Panama Canal history.
re Joe T in “Your lack on intelegence to see my stating that that Panama Canal Zone was U.S.A. territory is expounded by your obvious socialist/communist rhetoric about American imperialism.”
And here we go with the childish personal attacks again when I politely only attacked what you presented on Panama Canal history as the mere surface of what factually happened. So listen up closely you ignorant sleazy low life uniformed or ignorant shite for brains – Like most all citizens of the US, I am not, nor do I support socialism or communism that does exists only in your far right pea brained christian cult relgious right tiny beast brain otherwise known as the ‘subcortex’ [also called the lizard brain where these emotive ad hominem attacks stem from]…
re. Forgive me if I am not as smart as you, and your liberal friends, but I guess I missed a few days of U.S. History in high school.
Don’t patronize or condescend me with that irrelevant BS…
re. When exactly was the ‘planned and financed the overthrow of American democracy from the assassination of FDR in order to install a fascist dictatorship more to the liking of US industrialists’? I don’t remember that part of U.S. History.
Perhaps you were busy bullying other kids like you instigate here still as a child. Are you so ignorant or just to stupid to click on the links I provided? This is a documented fact the was predominantly covered up by a committe formed in the House to investigate this attempted fascist coup called the Unamerican Activities Committe that later became McCarthy’s tool to harass imaginary US communists. IN FACT this very same AIM organization Kincaid uses as a far right wing tool of McCarthyism was also used by McCarthy’s Unamerican Activities Committe to disseminate right wing propagandist lies and attempt to indict the imaginary communists created by the far right back then.
http://www.clubhousewreckards.com/plot/plottoseizethewhitehouse.htm
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/Plot1.html
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Coup.htm
http://www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/whitehouse.html
http://threeworldwars.com/world-war-2/ww2-background.htm
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/morgan1.htm [Morgan’s Fascist Plot and How It Was Defeated]
A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
F .
Joe T in “Amazing how my defending McCain as being born on American soil is interpreted as “fool” hearted attempt to support what you call ‘American fascist imperialism’. Your lack on intelegence….
Comprehend what you read – I did not question your defense of McCain as a legal resident or where he was born, but I did question your inclusion of only the surface story behind the Panama Canal history.
Your lack on intelegence to see my stating that that Panama Canal Zone was U.S.A. territory is expounded by your obvious socialist/communist rhetoric about American imperialism.
And here we go with the childish personal attacks again when I attacked only what you presented on Panama Canal history as the mere surface of what factually happened. So listen up closely you ignorant sleazy low life, uniformed shite for brains – Like most all citizens of the US, I am not, nor do I support socialism or communism that exists only in your far right pea brained christian cult relgious right tiny beast brain otherwise known as the ‘subcortex’ [also called the lizard brain where these emotive ad hominem attacks stem from]…
re. Forgive me if I am not as smart as you, and your liberal friends, but I guess I missed a few days of U.S. History in high school.
Don’t patronize or condescend me with that irrelevant BS…
re. When exactly was the ‘planned and financed the overthrow of American democracy from the assassination of FDR in order to install a fascist dictatorship more to the liking of US industrialists’? I don’t remember that part of U.S. History.
Perhaps you were busy bullying other kids like you instigate here still as a child. Are you so ignorant or just to stupid to click on the links I provided? This is a documented fact the was predominantly covered up by a committe formed in the House to investigate this attempted fascist coup called the Unamerican Activities Committe that later became McCarthy’s tool to harass imaginary US communists. IN FACT this very same AIM organization Kincaid uses as a far right wing tool of McCarthyism was also used by McCarthy’s Unamerican Activities Committe to disseminate right wing propagandist lies and attempt to indict the imaginary communists created by the far right back then.
http://www.clubhousewreckards.com/plot/plottoseizethewhitehouse.htm
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/Plot1.html
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Coup.htm
http://www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/whitehouse.html
http://threeworldwars.com/world-war-2/ww2-background.htm
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/morgan1.htm [Morgan’s Fascist Plot and How It Was Defeated]
I have some of the more pertinent PDF transcript files of the actual 1935 hearings on this fascist overthrow stopped by Marine General Smedley Butler. He also wrote a book called ‘War is a Racket’.
http://www.warisaracket.com/ [War is a Racket]
http://warisaracket.org/ [SMEDLEY BUTLER SOCIETY]
It’s an amazing true story of the same fascist corporatism we see today in what some say is George Bush’s completion of what his grand daddy attempted to do during the 1930s.
I’ll bet few if any of the far right cult wingnuts here know the republican party in 1940 received the majority of its campaign financing from Hitler’s Nazi Party. I also bet few if any know that Herbert Hoover, ex republican president, conspired in Germany with Hitler’s Nazis to again overthrow FDR in 1940. I also bet few to none know an Italian fascist era ‘Freemason’ attempted to assassinate FDR a few months before he was inagurated in May 1933…
What you all are vilifying in imaginary US communism today are the proven evil deeds and history of the republican party in cahoots with Nazis, fascism and corporate America… What all the brainwashed cult of the Christian Right here condemns as the evil of authoritarian communism is likewise found in authoritarian right wing fascism they apparently NEED.
Why don’t any of you even consider the opposite of authoritarianism found in Libertarianism regardless if iit’s left or right? Do you all so need this controlling gov’t daddy ruling over just you like you need that imaginary sky daddy?
A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
F .
Joe T, I think you’re just as smart as that person is. It’s just you don’t hate the USA like he does.
Seriously, if I hated the USA as bad as Adnihilo does, I’d get the hell out right now. He/she is like so many enemies that were educated here in the USA that didn’t get the right teachings and then spew nothing but hatred to those who don’t think as he/she does.
A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
F .
Adnihilo,
Amazing how my defending McCain as being born on American soil is interpreted as “fool” hearted attempt to support what you call “American fascist imperialism”. Your lack on intelegence to see my stating that that Panama Canal Zone was U.S.A. territory is expounded by your obvious socialist/communist rhetoric about American imperialism. No matter how the Canal Zone became U.S. soil, it was just that U.S. soil, and McCain was born on U.S soil.
Forgive me if I am not as smart as you, and your liberal friends, but I guess I missed a few days of U.S. History in high school. When exactly was the “planned and financed the overthrow of American democracy from the assassination of FDR in order to install a fascist dictatorship more to the liking of US industrialists”? I don’t remember that part of U.S. History. Oh well, who needs the truth when your a ranting on about American imperialism.
I love your quoting Charles Higham and Christopher Hedges. Higham a film critic that has written one book unrelated to Holloywood, and you cite it – very interesting source. And, Hedges a senior fellow at The Nation Institute (publisher of The Nation – the self described “flagship of the left”).
Impressive how you rant and rave about American Imperialism when that was not even the topic of conversation. I guess you could not defeat any of the Democratic Party – Communist Party links, so attack the “right” as facists with inaccurate information and cites from socilist/leftists.
Oh now to William Blum, a low-level computer programmer in the State Department that became disallusioned witht the Vietnam War. A self confessed “socialist” that founded the Washington Free Press. The WFP has editors like Kjartan who writes about how Castro enviornmental policies in Cuba are “great”.
Your just a marxist/communist liberal leftist that can’t say anything about the Democratic Party ties to Communism, so you attack.
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Greg,
Communism is not a political system; it is an economic system. A political system describes the way the people in the political unit are governed: e.g., 1) dictatorship and monarchy, in which the people are governed by a single individual; 2)oligarchy, in which the people are governed by a small group of people; 3) plutocracy (a form of oligarchy), in which the people are ruled by the very rich; 4) democracy, in which the people are ruled by themselves. Democracy is divided into A)representational democracy (which is the ostensible form of the US government, though the political power of big business in the US brings it closer to being a plutocracy), in which the people vote for people to represent them (e.g., presidents, vice-presidents, senators, representatives, etc.) in making laws and otherwise governing them and B) participatory democracy, in which the people themselves vote on issues of governance (e.g., as in a plebiscite); 5) anarchy, in which the people are not governed by anyone. An economic system describes the way wealth in the economic unit is distributed: e.g., 1) feudalism and slavery, in which a small group owns, controls, and receives most of the economic benefit of the unit’s resources, including the workers themselves; 2) capitalism, in which those who own the unit’s non-human resources receive most of the benefit therefrom; and 3) socialism and communism, in which all the people in the unit jointly own and benefit from the unit’s resources (somewhat as shareholders under capitalism jointly own and benefit from a company). The Soviet Union, which I presume you are taking as your model of “communism” was politically a dictatorship. Economically, it was not a true communist system, whatever it called itself, because the people did not share equally in the resources and benefits of the economic unit; the politically powerful reaped the major benefits of the unit. However, it was more communist or socialist than a comparable hybrid capitalist-socialist system like the US or Canada in that it did provide as far as possible after the politically powerful had taken their share of the unit’s resources for the basic economic needs of all the people, which hybrid capitalist-socialist systems do not necessarily do (health care is an example in the US). The nearest to units which have a purely communist or socialist system are found in religious groups such as convents, monasteries, and Old Order Amish and Hutterite communities. (Incidently, a number of socialists and communists, such as George Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey, regarded Christ as the first communist. They based this on the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, when Christ decided that all the people should have enough to eat, not just those who owned the bread and fish. In many countries, socialist elements, such as social security and national health care, were introduced by Christian socialists, often ministers themselves, who believed that Christ would not want old people to starve when they could no longer work or people to die of diseases that could be cured). Despite the model of the Soviet Union, socialist or communist economic systems need not be dictatorships. A number of economically socialist governments have been democratically elected under political participatory democracy systems. I am thinking here of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile or the current government in Venezuela. Neither of them are/were purely economically socialist of communist; both permit(ted) the existence of private property, though they nationalize(d) major national resources for the benefit of the people within the economic unit. Just as there are no pure socialist or communist economic systems today, there are also no pure capitalist ones. The nineteenth-century Western world provided the nearest to that: no social security, little regulation of such matters as food quality (i.e., if I sold you meat adulterated with arsenic, you would have little recourse), no help for the poor, even in times of famine, except that provided by private charities (that’s why 1 million Irish died in the Famine of the 1840s; many more, at least another million or more, more would have died without private assistance). Still even the nineteenth century was not purely capitalist. There were such socialist (i.e., for the benefit of all people, whether they paid for it or not) programs as a police force and public sanitation. There is a difference, Greg, between political and economic systems nor matter how much those in power, whether politically or economically or both, find it to their advantage to blur the line between them to persuade people to accept the advantages of those in power.A Like Reply 4 years ago 0 Like
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re. Joe T in “The land in which the Canal was built was given to the United States as compensation for the U.S.A. helping Panama gain its independance from Colombia. (Not only that, the U.S. then paid Colombia for the value of all of Panama because of our efforts).”
You’re simplistic version of the Panama Canal story leaves out many pertinent facts. The Panama Canal story is a classic example of American fascist imperialism that has directly and indirectly overthrown a host of sovereign nations to satiate unending and unregulated American corporate greed Joe here fool heartedly attempts to support.
The book, “How Wall Street Created a Nation” describes the journalistic saga that unmasked the true story of how the United States obtained the rights to build the Panama Canal. In 1908, Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, the New York World, accidentally got a tip that a secret Wall Street syndicate headed by J.P. Morgan and a foxy lawyer, William Nelson Cromwell of Sullivan & Cromwell, conspired to buy the shares of the then-defunct French Panama Canal Company and then convinced Teddy Roosevelt to buy the rights to build the Panama Canal or the concessions from the French for multiples of what they had paid. When Colombia got in the way by rejecting the Canal Treaty, this American capitalist plotted, fomented and financed a revolution in the then-province of Panama with J.P. Morgan’s money, and the help of Teddy Roosevelt’s warships, and ensured for themselves an enormous fortune.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Wall-Street-Created-Nation/dp/1568581963
That same ‘House of Morgan’ with the Duponts and a host of corporate American leaders also planned and financed the overthrow of American democracy from the assassination of FDR in order to install a fascist dictatorship more to the liking of US industrialists.
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/noon.html
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/53-index.html
These Corporate American Nazi Fascists were also the primary source of funding behind a host of Christian Identity Fascist groups that existed in the 1930s that our present day far right Christian hate groups have evolved from.
[Sources: “Trading with the Enemy”, Charles Higham, Barnes & Noble 1983, “American Fascists”, Chris Hedges Free Press, c2006, “Roosevelt and Hitler; Prelude to War” Robert Herzstein, Paragon]
“From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist [democratic] movements fighting against intolerable [right wing] regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.” William Blum, Former State Department employee leaving in 1967 due to his opposition to the Vietnam War.
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Hey Tyrone. McCain was born in the United States. To bad you don’t undertand that the Panama Canal and the military base he was born on were American soil. The land in which the Canal was built was given to the United States as compensation for the U.S.A. helping Panama gain its independance from Colombia. (Not only that, the U.S. then paid Colombia for the value of all of Panama because of our efforts). Then the U.S. funded the complete construction of the canal. So, that was part of the U.S.A., well at least until the peaNUT! farmer Carter gave them away to the communists. Oh wait, another Democratic Party Communist link.
Carter give Panama the canal back, they turn it over to Hutchison Whampoa, a Hong Kong-based shipping concern whose owner, Li Ka Shing, is the wealthiest man in China. HW is so in bed with the Peoples Liberation Army it has been accused at times of being a front company that is controlled by them. So, Carter turned the Panama Canal over to the Chinese Communist Army.
Oh, here is another Democratic Party – Communist link. Li Ka Shing, and all his friends are the ones believed to be behind the funding of the election of President Clinton. You do remember all those non-U.S citizens from China that kept giving millions to Bill. Communist Red Army ties!!!!
Oh, and lets not forget Obama’s campaign funding. You know those record numbers that he is pulling in now. Under the new rules – anything under $250 does not have to be reported as to who donated the money. That is why the average donation is $190 for Obama. All his communists friends have to do is make 100s of small donations, and he does not have to report where the money came from.
I will leave with one last thougth about Obama being a communist.
“You Americans! *You are so gullible! *We do not have to invade the United States! *We will destroy you from within! *And we won’t have to fire a shot! *Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. *We will bury you by the billions! *We’ll spoon feed you socialism until you’re Communists and don’t even know it! *Each year, humanity takes a step toward Communism. *We assist your elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of Socialism, until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism. *Maybe not you, but at all events the day will come when your children and your grandchildren will surely live under communism!”
- Nikita Krushcev, Russian Premier
1956 “Shoe Pounding” incident to the United Nations
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Hey Sagacious,
I guess you were kidding when you wrote,
“At least Hitler took care of his own people.”
But if not, could you expand on that one please?
David Hurley
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JimR in “Very well put Pete but you left out one thing. Don’t forget gun control. You must first outlaw all guns before the socialist/communists can take over without any problems.”
A bold faced LIE is very well put? Perhaps for scoundrels and those that support them….
Gun control has nothing to do with your oversimplified “left vs right’ economic view of the political landscape. The left to right political continuum deals with economics ONLY. Gun control is a social issue of government control on the authoritarian to libertarian vertical continuum. There are many liberals, democrats and libertarians that support gun control as strongly as any given republican claims to support it.
The reality is any given authoritarian govt, be it communist left or fascist right, will attempt to take away the more powerful weapons of its populace they rule over from fear of overthrow if pushing their despotic centralized control too far. Hence what republican authoritarian Bush did in his executive order expanding marshall law that takes away all weapons of the populace during a declared ‘emergency’.
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re. PeteCD in “Nihilst, interesting choice of screen names – one who believes in nothing.”
Wrong on both counts. Nihilist is not my screen name and the definition of modern nihilism is ‘faith’ in nothing, not belief in nothing.
re. PeteCD “Several problems with your uninformed statements. First of all, you presume that America is only comprised of the United States. Not so. You are ignoring Canada, Cuba, Haiti, the D.R., Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatamala, Nicaragua, Belize, etc. There are socialists running in the countries that have presidents, such as El Salvador.”
Don’t play a smart alec game of semantics with me. You know what is meant by America, short for the United States of America or USA by Americans living it. What do you think the ‘A’ is for in USA? I didn’t say president of the plural ‘Americas’, I said America, which is a common reference for the US by AMERICANS living in it. Canadians don’t call themselves ‘Americans’ now do they? Mexicans don’t call themselves ‘Americans’ do they. Cubans don’t call themselves Americans. Only Americans refer to themselves ‘Americans’ from a direct referene to the name of this country in the United States of America.
re. Then you have the Cuban regime that is clearly Communist and with, no doubt, elections coming to determine the proper successor to Fidel.
Irrelavant due to your fraudulent use of semantics having nothing to do with anything relevant.
re. Secondly, you are not up on the elections in the U.S.
Based on what, you’re meaningless and unknowing opinon of how much I’ve read the news on the US election?
re. Brian Moore is the Socialist Party USA nominee to the presidency.
You fully know I was referring to in the 2 party system of Dems and Republicans in the US since all others aren’t allowed on the ballot of most all states in the US. Since these 3rd party candidates are kept off the ballots in every state by the Dems and the GOP, and most don’t even get included in anything close to a majority of the states, none of these 3rd party candidates can be considered viable for any Presidential election much less elections to Congress. Although there’s a few Senators and House Reps in 3rd parties, but it’s so few, it’s of no consequence.
Like most of all of US in the US, I’m not up on the ‘green party’ or the socialist party like you are, or up on who’s endorsed who in either since irrelevant to this 2 party system forced upon us here in the US of AMERICA. I know little to nothing of what you rant on about regarding wholly irrelevant 3rd parties in the US as they are inconsequential to any election except in taking minor voting percentages from either Democrats or republicans in ‘some’ states.
re. PeteCD in “Surprising that the Green Party has endorsed him and his issues are largely the same as those of the democratic party.
That’s a bold faced LIE there PeteCD. Brian Moore and the democratic socialist platform of his party ARE NOT LARGELY or even partially the ‘same’ as the THIS democratic party of the US.
This US democratic party is so wishy washy they don’t even have a 2008 platform yet, but you can download their 2004 platform on their web site: http://www.democrats.org/a/party/stand.html
In the only Demoratic platform found on the internet, the only point I could find of those 36 that is mutually inclusive to both the Socialist USA party and the Democratic party is universal health care. http://www.democrats.org/pdfs/2004platform.pdf
re. PeteCD “For those who do not believe the democratic party is socialist, check this out”
Have you been hypnotized from watching the Fascist Fox-Fed Fake news station? Of all of those 36 points you’ve listed, the only one that could be construed as ‘mutually inclusive’ to the Democratic Party of this US is again Universal Health Care according to the only platform available they have out yet here: http://www.democrats.org/pdfs/2004platform.pdf
To put it bluntly PeteCD, you’re so full of shite I can smell it on your breath from where I’m sitting.. You’are a blatant liar by direcly claiming those 36 points from the Socialist USA party are ‘largely’ the same as the Democratic party of THIS US of A.
re. PeteCD in BTW, here is the link, in case you wish to read it for yourself:
Put down that crack pipe Pete ‘cause it has to be something like that that makes you so goofy and so incredibly delusional. Copy pasting a US socialist party platform from their website does NOT make it the same as this US Democratic party platform.
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The diference between give and take is the same as communism the political and communism the economic that MSGH referred to above (#46). What kind of an idiot would want such crap as the above agenda shoved down his throat? Some seem to think it would be good for me, or them, or the world. Anthills are known as pismires, since Americans don’t care to live that way, I trust in their good sense and the constitution. Besides, I’m too old for the draft.
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Very well put Pete but you left out one thing. Don’t forget gun control. You must first outlaw all guns before the socialist/communists can take over without any problems.
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Nihilst, interesting choice of screen names – one who believes in nothing. Why do you even have a vote, then? You have not kept up with the election. You claim “[t]here’s NOT a socialist or communists [sic] running for president in America.” Several problems with your uninformed statements.
First of all, you presume that America is only comprised of the United States. Not so. You are ignoring Canada, Cuba, Haiti, the D.R., Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatamala, Nicaragua, Belize, etc. There are socialists running in the countries that have presidents, such as El Salvador. Then you have the Cuban regime that is clearly Communist and with, no doubt, elections coming to determine the proper successor to Fidel.
Secondly, you are not up on the elections in the U.S. Brian Moore is the Socialist Party USA nominee to the presidency. Surprising that the Green Party has endorsed him and his issues are largely the same as those of the democratic party. For those who do not believe the democratic party is socialist, check this out:
1) Stop The War in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring the American troops and reconstruction companies home immediately;
2) Implement a national health care system to include comprehensive health, dental and mental health care for all residents, foreign and domestic.
3) Initiate a guaranteed income for all American families, working or not, at a level of $35,000 per year per adult (2008 Cost of Living levels)
4) Nationalize Oil Industry, Pharmaceutical Industry, Banking and Insurance Industry, Railroad and Automotive Industries, and Entertainment and Sports Industries
5) Phase out all nuclear power plants, shut down waste incinerators, landfills and open-pit mining.
6) Call for unconditional disarmament by the U.S.
7) End U.S. Cuban Embargo and the occupation of Guantanamo, Cuba, and return entire U.S. property to the country of Cuba
8) Call for immediate 50% cut in the military budget, with additional 50% over the next 10 years
9) Call for treaty outlawing all weapons of mass destruction
10) Abolish CIA, NSA, Homeland Security Agency and all other covert warfare institutions
11) End Israeli occupation of West Bank-East Jerusalem/Gaza; cease all U.S. aid to Israel—-as precondition for peace.
12) Disband NATO
13) Cut off all U.S. military aid to Colombia
14) Close all U.S. military facilities that train foreign military and paramilitary personnel.
15) Initiate Worldwide war on poverty and global illnesses, especially in third and fourth world countries;
16) Establish Public ownership and democratic control of all natural resources to preserve wilderness areas and restore environmental quality.
17) Support Kyoto Protocol and lead in controlling global warming and cleaning up of toxic wastes, protect workers and communities from all harmful products
18) Cap and reduce corporate profits and excessive executive salary levels while fostering transfer of corporate ownership and control to workers.
19) Mandate right of employees for access to chose labor union representation to assure fair salaries and benefits.
20) Implement a national housing plan for all Americans
21) Legislate a 30 hour work week, six weeks annual paid vacation and a full pension
22) Provide equal rights to all immigrants; recognize their presence due to unfair U.S. economic policies, war, famine, or bad working conditions
23) Opposes Capital punishment
24) Cease construction of all new prisons nationwide; institute full range of rights and rehabilitation for prisoners;
25) Conduct Massive Rebuilding of United States infrastructure of bridges, railroad lines, major highways and subway systems and rural communities.
26) Reinforce and enhance government and private support of the arts, sports and culture.
27) Assure equal rights of all citizens, in gender, race, age, sexual preference or religion. Eliminate special privileges for all interest groups.
28) Stop America’s participation in NAFTA, CAFTA, WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION, WORLD BANK, IMF, etc.
29) Stop the gauging and rip-offs of consumers by legislating limits and caps for costs in services and products in the market place.
30) Abolish poverty in all its forms in America by assuring every American family with the basics in income, health and housing.
31) Promote a more equitable society by enhancing citizens rights and participatory control
32) During transition to full worker control, require private sector to implement a fairer economic system of consumer costs, profit-margins and regulation of services and products.
33) Reduce Defense spending significantly in the areas of high tech and military equipment and weaponry while enhancing protections and benefits for the common soldier.
34) Promote universal access to education on the college and vocational school level. Promote liberal arts, along with engineering and science, in colleges and universities. Remove the influence of corporate and military entities on our higher institutes of learning.
35) Promote a multi-party system, fair access to debates, universal ballot access, proportional representation and public funding of all elections.
36) Support a woman’s right to choose in matters of abortion; and oppose all restrictions on access to abortion.
Seems to me that the democratic and socialist parties are one and the same.
BTW, here is the link, in case you wish to read it for yourself:
http://www.votebrianmoore.com/issues.htm
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Correction – first sentence above should read “There’s NOT a socialist or communists running for president in America”
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re. Vic in No self-respecting male or female would knowingly vote for a socialist/communist!
First there’s socialist or communists running for president in America… I won’t vote for anyone that’s running since all Dem candidates left, including Obama, are right wing authoritarians.
According to Obama and Hillary’s congressional voting record, speeches and platform they are conservative at best as firmly in the right wing authoritarian quadrant [fascist] and NOT anything close to left authoritarian [communist] and more importantly NO candidate is anything close to libertarian..
Look for yourself here http://politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008
re. complicity/blessing of the MSM.
What’s MSM – MicroSoft Media?
re. It speaks volumes about self-respect.
What does any of that have to do with ‘self-respect’?
re. It speaks volumes about whether or not the USA should be dragged into a world government movement run by United Nations Marxist idealogs for the sake of undefined “CHANGE”.
No candidates propose dragging the US into a world govt except perhaps that NAFTA and pan american highway supported and advanced by Bush-GOP…
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Statement:
No self-respecting male or female would knowingly vote for a socialist/communist!
The statement speaks volumes about moley leftist candidates hiding in the closet with the complicity/blessing of the MSM.
It speaks volumes about self-respect.
It speaks volumes about whether or not the USA should be dragged into a world government movement run by United Nations Marxist idealogs for the sake of undefined “CHANGE”.
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A. Clawson,
I went back and read Jean’s post. I agree with you. Talking the talk is a dangerous metric for picking political leaders to give great power to.
I personally have been deeply upset about the way Obama has won this primary. Yes, I support Hillary, and I do it proudly. I to am about 70 but I agonize over the way the media has supported the new kid on the block over the Senator with true experience.
Obama’s far left leanings, which are influenced by such marxist based paradigms as black liberation theology and Saul Alinsky style organizing which promotes aggitation and class struggle, quite frankly scare me to death. Watching the talking heads on TV tonight after the candidates gave their speeches was hard to take. If Hillary helps him, I think Barack will be elected. May God help us to find a reasonable path toward “change.”
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Jean,
For an 80 year old I would think you would know better. How sad that you are willing to vote for someone with no experience, who has no respect for America, and “hope” they will take care of you simply because they “talk the talk”. We are in for a world of hurt if you and your kind are successful. I am only 10 years your junior, but I do have to give myself credit for having a little more insight into what is going on around me.
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Hey Cliffy [article author] – in your 21st century version of McCarthyism, in regard to that last sentence – what exactly is this liberal media that you speak of? Is it the same liberal media across America that aided and abetted the Bush cabal into lying this nation into war?
Just before she died in 1963, Franklin’s wife Eleanor wrote on the last page of her last book, Tomorrow Is Now:
“Long ago, there was a noble word, LIBERAL, which derived from the word FREE [libre]. Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word. Indeed, there was a time—a short but dismaying time—when many Americans began to distrust the word which derived from FREE. One thing we must all do. We must cherish and honor the word FREE or it will cease to apply to us.”
“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.” Henry A. Wallace, 33rd US Vice President and 10th Secretary of Commerce, both under Roosevelt.
“From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist [democratic] movements fighting against intolerable [right wing] regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.” William Blum, Former State Department employee leaving in 1967 due to his opposition to the Vietnam War.
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i don’t think he will get my vote and as many as i can let know about this website he wiil be another hitler he hate america and so does his wife. and hitler said he was a christian god help us if obama get in office with the hate they have in that church they must plan to do us like the jews. so wake up people if your not black they must have something planned. rev wright will be his vice lol
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Aside from ‘thanking god’ for life in some other backwards bible belt state than Texas, does Wyatt Power also ‘thank god’ for such vile white supremacist racist attitudes of hate and bigotry toward a ‘racefucker’ [race mixing]? Is it this invisible ‘god’ that has turned Wyatt Power into such a scoundrel and sad excuse for a human being inhuman?
And Mike, if a sexual preference for being ‘gay’ is “a gift from God” as you claim, is it really plausible that all that vile hate, bigotry and violence towards gays from exclusively ‘god fearing’ Christians also a ‘gift from god’?
It sounds to me like this ‘god’ you all insist on using as a reason for your mutual hate, bigotry and violence toward each another either lives exclusively in your demented, delusional minds or this ‘god’ is terribly cunning and evil. Which do YOU think it is – an imaginary god that exists solely in your minds or a real [yet invisible] god that’s the very definition of evil?
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Vickie from Texas is proof that even the Democratic party has a nutjob in it here & there.
She’s a white woman who shamelessly states she’s from Texas—a fact nobody in their right mind would ever admit unless they wanted to be thought of as a rightwing whackjob as nutty as Ted Nugent, Tom DeLay, or that despicable stupid failure and chronic liar who’s in illegal occupation of our White House. I may live in a state known to be conservative, but thank God I’m not from Texas!!
She then goes on to actually ADMIT that she married a black man. How disgusting! Why this isn’t a crime punishable by years of hard labor is beyond me. Maybe it’s because she box became so stretched out from having so many foreign and vibrating objects placed in it over the years that it became so loose that she could then only be satisfied with the black man’s larger appendage. Or maybe it’s because these white women who are guilty of committing treason against their race are almost always obese and have asses so big that they can’t do anything other than lay in bed and shovel more food into their mouths.
Either way, the fact that Vickie from Texas couldn’t find a white man to marry and instead willingly chose to settle for a black one and then with aforethought and malice towards her race chose to defile her body and entire race is sickening beyond words. I have to laugh at those who think that just because someone is gay that they only have buttsex, yet they never seem to be outraged at the thought of an interacial couple having sex through vaginal penetration, not to mention the freaks and racial monsters produced by such abhorrent acts. These same people are probably just as against abortion too, yet never give a thought to the fact that this race-traitor Vicky has assassinated every potential white child that her bloodline could have produced, but instead will now create racial monsters for the rest of time.
The thought of a White woman shitting out these freaks is beyond repugnant. Chances are she’s too fat to work herself and the black man she was married to was most likely an ex-con, unhirable, lazy, shiftless, too stupid or careless to use any form of birth control, and had no more than a sixth grade education. So both were probably on welfare and AFDC and had nothing to do other than lay around and do their dirty, filthy acts with each other all day, producing another mutant racial freak every nine months for which they were then entitled to more government money.
What is most sickening is that this racefucker is actually proud of her detestable and hideous acts of having shat out three bi-racial monsters and forever polluting her bloodline. If she had any intelligence whatsoever, she’d hide each of her affronts to all humanity, place each mutant offspring in a potato (“potatoe” if you’re a Republican, as per Dan Quayle) sack along with a heavy rock, toss each over the side while in the middle of a large body of water, and resolve to never again #### out any more of these creatures. But being that she’s from Texas, I guess we couldn’t really expect her to have any intelligence now, could we?
I shudder when I think of the unforgivable crimes her perverted acts have done to her race and the little monsters she’s forced upon the world and how they can never be undone. Her stupidity will now multiply over and over and over again as the years roll by, forever staining the white race with the insidious sludge of non-white blood.
Her fam
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Cagy Wolf says...
sorry copied and pasted more than I wanted but some of the comments are amusing.
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marino says...
Haha…my attention span is about one page.
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Cagy Wolf says...
Towards the end it gets pretty funny as the nutjobs flap their lips, one guy sounds like Cyberidiot with his love of communism.
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Cagy Wolf says...
I was there the first night of the riots,a girl I knew needed to get to Burbank Airport for a flight to her parents house for the summer. She got me as outrider on my Harley and I rode up ahead and bypassed areas on the way to Burbank, stopping for gas on Sierra Hwy and Palmdale Blvd. (7/11) we saw a full truck of tennis shoes, they were hanging off the sides even and we were told to head to LA, and get in on the looting. Man there were four of us guys and we weren’t too worried but at the hotel she rented for the night the LAPD were in the parking lot all night and there were fights,looting, etc in Burbank. The next day after she caught her flight I decided to go check on Mrs. Riggio my ex mother in law, by that time Hollywood Blvd. looked like a war zone, looting and robbing was going on while I was getting gas. I went and Joan told me that she was going across the street most of the people on the block had their guns ready since it was only one block south of Sunset. And of course my Harley at a gas station decided it wanted to not start, LAPD was going though the area yelling over aloud speaker that a curfew was in effect at dusk and that anyone out would be arrested. The LAPD and the National Guard came over where I was changing spark plugs in an effort to get the bike started. I explained the problem and was told to leave the area ASAP as it was dangerous. I told them I had almost been mugged two times while I was trying to get the bike started. It was a real fun day, I assure all of you. I got to admit when the National Guard showed up in groups on each corner is when the looting atopped in Hollywood. You could see fires everywhere, even Fredricks of Hollywood was looted and set on fire.But for a very tense day with me in the exact area of rioting that was still going on, I made it though in one piece. At one time or two I had my buck knife out telling them that while they might get me down and what little money I had I said there will be a few dead bodies with me.I was asked for money constantly by roving looters and they all got the same answer, I am poor. Some woud cuss me and others would say go get ya some stuff man. There were some people who were black that saw I was broke down told them to leave me alone, so in part I owe those people for less problems then I might have had.
Remind me all to tell about the SLA shoot out, I was close enough to hear the shooting and the block was closed off.
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