=By=
Jack Burns

The mainstream media’s thought police are no longer hiding their movements as they patrol what readers can and cannot read, possess, or access. Chris Cuomo now even says as much.

The high society’s veteran news anchor of the Cable News Network, which many critics jokingly refer to as the “Clinton News Network,” told viewers Wednesday, “Remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents,” he said referencing WikiLeaks’ latest hacked emails, apparently trying to scare the general public away from searching WikiLeaks’ database.

The stern warning coming from Cuomo no longer disguises what the mainstream media has been doing for decades: control information to which viewers and readers have access. Cuomo continued, “It’s different for the media, so everything you learn about this (latest WikiLeaks’ revelations) you’re learning from us.”

On Monday, Reuters reported Zaman Almanya (Zaman Germany) intends “to continue publishing an opposition daily in Germany…” According to its editor-in-chief Sueleyman Bag, as of Monday, March 7, “we are printing a version of Zaman that has nothing to do with Zaman” in Turkey. Its first edition featured a black front page, headlining “(t)he constitution is abolished.”

But don’t hold your breath at the notion reporters like Cuomo and news organizations like CNN will do their jobs and delve into the WikiLeaks database to uncover any scandalous information which could possibly paint the Clintons in a bad light.

If you don’t know already, as The Huffington Post reported, Time Warner, parent company of CNN, is one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest supporters, having already given Clinton’s campaign over $400,000. And that’s what we know.

But it’s not just money CNN gives Clinton, it offers up a healthy platter of good press as well. The HP reported CNN played politics with its own polls, polls which showed Sanders having bested Clinton in at least one of the debates, polls which were quickly replaced by a message stating, “Clinton triumphs in Democrat debate as rivals compete to lose.”

As the Free Thought Project has reported numerous times in the past, Clinton’s friends in the corporate media will go so far as to cut their own reporters off the air who dare portray her in a negative light.
But it’s not just CNN the Clintons are in bed with. As reported in July, when WikiLeaks leaked their first batch of DNC emails, it was revealed the Democratic National Committee appeared to have a cozy relationship with NBC’s Chuck Todd. The relationship was so cozy that DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz called Todd by his first name and demanded an end to bad press. Schultz, in an email to Todd, wrote in the subject line, “Chuck this must stop.”

The head of the DNC addressing Todd by his first name was enough for critics to put two and two together to see what was going on, and they’ve concluded the Democrats have the mainstream media in their pocket.

And now, it seems, they don’t want you poking your nose around within the contents of WikiLeaks’ database, which happens to be a searchable database that anyone, including the Free Thought Project’s readers, can easily navigate.

Judging from just the leaks the Free Thought Project has discovered, it is entirely clear why CNN would attempt to scare people into not reading the emails. But if Cuomo thinks warning and advising viewers to get all of their information about WikiLeaks from CNN will work, he really has no idea how powerful the free thought movement really is. And free thinkers are tired of being told what to think, and who to vote for, as if voting for billionaires, and propped-up candidates funded by multi-billion dollar corporations will change anything, let alone make America great again.

No, true and lasting change happens when people have all the facts, and begin to demand change. And for far too long, those facts have been hidden, spun by the media, and downplayed. A free-thinking movement and awakening appears to now be at work, and so If you’d like to search through the DNC emails, John Podesta’s emails (HRC’s Campaign Manager), and Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 emails (illegal to delete btw, Mr. Cuomo), by all means, you may do so by clicking here (link to WikiLeaks).

In the Land of the Free, the media has officially declared transparency — illegal.

Jack Burns writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

=By= Patrick Cockburn

It is fortunate for Saudi Arabia and Qatar that the furore over the sexual antics of Donald Trump is preventing much attention being given to the latest batch of leaked emails to and from Hillary Clinton. Most fascinating of these is what reads like a US State Department memo, dated 17 August 2014, on the appropriate US response to the rapid advance of Isis forces, which were then sweeping through northern Iraq and eastern Syria.

At the time, the US government was not admitting that Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies were supporting Isis and al-Qaeda-type movements. But in the leaked memo, which says that it draws on “western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region” there is no ambivalence about who is backing Isis, which at the time of writing was butchering and raping Yazidi villagers and slaughtering captured Iraqi and Syrian soldiers.

The memo says: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region.” This was evidently received wisdom in the upper ranks of the US government, but never openly admitted because to it was held that to antagonise Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Pakistan would fatally undermine US power in the Middle East and South Asia.

For an extraordinarily long period after 9/11, the US refused to confront these traditional Sunni allies and thereby ensured that the “War on Terror” would fail decisively; 15 years later, al-Qaeda in its different guises is much stronger than it used to be because shadowy state sponsors, without whom it could not have survived, were given a free pass.

It is not as if Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and the US foreign policy establishment in general did not know what was happening. An earlier WikiLeaks release of a State Department cable sent under her name in December 2009 states that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan].” But Saudi complicity with these movements never became a central political issue in the US. Why not?

The answer is that the US did not think it was in its interests to cut its traditional Sunni allies loose and put a great deal of resources into making sure that this did not happen. They brought on side compliant journalists, academics and politicians willing to give overt or covert support to Saudi positions.

The real views of senior officials in the White House and the State Department were only periodically visible and, even when their frankness made news, what they said was swiftly forgotten. Earlier this year, for instance, Jeffrey Goldberg inThe Atlantic wrote a piece based on numerous interviews with Barack Obama in which Obama “questioned, often harshly, the role that America’s Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign policy orthodoxy compels him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally”.

It is worth recalling White House cynicism about how that foreign policy orthodoxy in Washington was produced and how easily its influence could be bought. Goldberg reported that “a widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as ‘Arab-occupied territory’.”

Despite this, television and newspaper interview self-declared academic experts from these same think tanks on Isis, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are wilfully ignoring or happily disregarding their partisan sympathies.

The Hillary Clinton email of August 2014 takes for granted that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding Isis – but this was not the journalistic or academic conventional wisdom of the day. Instead, there was much assertion that the newly declared caliphate was self-supporting through the sale of oil, taxes and antiquities; it therefore followed that Isis did not need money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The same argument could not be made to explain the funding of Jabhat al-Nusra, which controlled no oilfields, but even in the case of Isis the belief in its self-sufficiency was always shaky.

Iraqi and Kurdish leaders said that they did not believe a word of it, claiming privately that Isis was blackmailing the Gulf states by threatening violence on their territory unless they paid up. The Iraqi and Kurdish officials never produced proof of this, but it seemed unlikely that men as tough and ruthless as the Isis leaders would have satisfied themselves with taxing truck traffic and shopkeepers in the extensive but poor lands they ruled and not extracted far larger sums from fabulously wealthy private and state donors in the oil producers of the Gulf.

Going by the latest leaked email, the State Department and US intelligence clearly had no doubt that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding Isis. But there has always been bizarre discontinuity between what the Obama administration knew about Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and what they would say in public. Occasionally the truth would spill out, as when Vice-President Joe Biden told students at Harvard in October 2014 that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates “were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world”. Biden poured scorn on the idea that there were Syrian “moderates” capable of fighting Isis and Assad at the same time.

Hillary Clinton should be very vulnerable over the failings of US foreign policy during the years she was Secretary of State. But, such is the crudity of Trump’s demagoguery, she has never had to answer for it. Republican challenges have focussed on issues – the death of the US ambassador in Benghazi in 2012 and the final US military withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 – for which she was not responsible.

A Hillary Clinton presidency might mean closer amity with Saudi Arabia, but American attitudes towards the Saudi regime are becoming soured, as was shown recently when Congress overwhelmingly overturned a presidential veto of a bill allowing the relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government.

Another development is weakening Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies. The leaked memo speaks of the rival ambitions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar “to dominate the Sunni world”. But this has not turned out well, with east Aleppo and Mosul, two great Sunni cities, coming under attack and likely to fall. Whatever Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the others thought they were doing it has not happened and the Sunni of Syria and Iraq are paying a heavy price. It is this failure which will shape the future relations of the Sunni states with the new US administration.

Source: The Independent via Znet.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

Henry A. Giroux
Cultural Critic and Public Intellectual

[Photo: Prisoners in debtors prison in Philadelphia.]

If one important measure of a democracy is how a society treats its children, especially poor youth of color, there can be little doubt that American society is failing. As the United States increasingly models its schools after prisons and subjects children to a criminal legal system marked by severe class and racial inequities, it becomes clear that such children are no longer viewed as a social investment but as suspects. Under a neoliberal regime in which some children are treated as criminals and increasingly deprived of decent health care, education, food and  housing, it has become clear that the United States has both failed its children and democracy itself.

Not only is the United States the only nation in the world that sentences children to life in prison without parole, the criminal legal system often functions so as to make it more difficult for young people to escape the reach of a punishing and racist legal system. For instance, according to a recent report published by the Juvenile Law Center, there are close to a million children who appear in juvenile court each year subject to a legal system rife with racial disparities and injustices. This is made clear by Jessica Feierman, associate director of the Juvenile Law Center in her report “Debtors’ Prison for Kids? The High Cost of Fines and Fees in the Juvenile Justice System.” In an interview with the Arkansas Times, Feierman said:

Racial disparities pervade our juvenile justice system. Our research suggests that we can reduce those disparities through legislative action aimed at costs, fines, fees, and restitution … In every state, youth and families can be required to pay juvenile court costs, fees, fines, or restitution. The costs for court related services, including probation, a “free appointed attorney,” mental health evaluations, the costs of incarceration, treatment, or restitution payments, can push poor children deeper into the system and families deeper into debt. Youth who can’t afford to pay for their freedom often face serious consequences, including incarceration, extended probation, or denial of treatment — they are unfairly penalized for being poor. Many families either go into debt trying to pay these costs or forego basic necessities like groceries to keep up with payments.

According to the report, sometimes when a family can’t pay court fees and fines, the child is put in a juvenile detention facility. Such punitive measures are invoked without a degree of conscience or informed judgment as when children are fined for being truant from school. In her article in Common Dreams, Nika Knight pointed to one case in which a child was fined $500 for being truant and because he could not pay the fine, “spent three months in a locked facility at age 13.” In many states, the parents are incarcerated if they cannot pay for their child’s court fees. For many parents, such fines represent a crushing financial burden, which they cannot meet, and consequently their children are subjected to the harsh confines of juvenile detention centers. Erik Eckholm has written in The New York Times about the story of Dequan Jackson, which merges the horrid violence suffered by the poor in a Dickens novel with the mindless brutality and authoritarianism at the heart of one of Kafka’s tales. Eckholm is worth quoting at length:

When Dequan Jackson had his only brush with the law, at 13, he tried to do everything right. Charged with battery for banging into a teacher while horsing around in a hallway, he pleaded guilty with the promise that after one year of successful probation, the conviction would be reduced to a misdemeanor. He worked 40 hours in a food bank. He met with an anger management counselor. He kept to an 8 p.m. curfew except when returning from football practice or church. And he kept out of trouble. But Dequan and his mother, who is struggling to raise two sons here on wisps of income, were unable to meet one final condition: payment of $200 in court and public defender fees. For that reason alone, his probation was extended for what turned out to be 14 more months, until they pulled together the money at a time when they had trouble finding quarters for the laundromat.

Not only do such fines create a two-tier system of justice that serves the wealthy and punishes the poor, they also subject young people to a prison system fraught with incidents of violent assault, rape and suicide. Moreover, many young people have health needs and mental health problems that are not met in these detention centers, and incarceration also fuels mental health problems.

Suicide rates behind bars “are more than four times higher than for adolescents overall,” according to the Child Trends Data Bank. Moreover, “between 50 and 75 percent of adolescents who have spent time in juvenile detention centers are incarcerated later in life.” Finally, as the “Debtors’ Prison for Kids Report” makes clear, kids are being sent to jail at increasing rates while youth crime is decreasing. The criminal legal system is mired in a form of casino capitalism that not only produces wide inequalities in wealth, income and power, but it also corrupts municipal court systems that are underfunded and turn to unethical and corrupt practices in order to raise money, while creating new paths to prison, especially for children.

Debtors’ prisons for young people exemplify how a warfare culture can affect the most vulnerable populations in a society, exhibiting a degree of punitiveness and cruelty that indicts the most fundamental political, economic and social structures of a society. Debtors’ prisons for young people have become the dumping grounds for those youth considered disposable, and they are also a shameful source of profit for municipalities across the United States. They operate as legalized extortion rackets, underscoring how our society has come to place profits above the welfare of children. They also indicate how a society has turned its back on young people, the most vulnerable group of people in our society.

There is nothing new about the severity of the American government’s attack on poor people, especially those on welfare, and both political parties have shared in this ignoble attack. What is often overlooked, however, is the degree to which children are impacted by scorched-earth policies that extend from cutting social provisions to the ongoing criminalization of a vast range of behaviors. It appears that particularly when it comes to young people, especially poor youth and youth of color, society’s obligations to justice and social responsibility disappear.

Modeling Schools After Prisons

We live at a time in which institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect young people from the excesses of the police state and the market have been either weakened or abolished. The consequences can be seen clearly in the ongoing and ruthless assault on public education, poor students and students of color. Schools have become, in many cases, punishment factories that increasingly subject students to pedagogies of control, discipline and surveillance. Pedagogy has been emptied of critical content and now imposes on students mind-numbing teaching practices organized around teaching for the test. The latter constitutes both a war on the imagination and a disciplinary practice meant to criminalize the behavior of children who do not accept a pedagogy of conformity and overbearing control.

No longer considered democratic public spheres intended to create critically informed and engaged citizens, many schools now function as punishing factories, work stations that mediate between warehousing poor students of color and creating a path that will lead them into the hands of the criminal legal system and eventually, prison. Under such circumstances, it becomes more difficult to reclaim a notion of public schooling in which the culture of punishment and militarization is not the culture of education. Hope in this instance has to begin with a critical discourse among teachers, students, parents and administrators unwilling to model the schools after a prison culture.

Many schools are now modeled after prisons and organized around the enactment of zero tolerance policies which, as John W. Whitehead has pointed out, put “youth in the bullseye of police violence.” Whitehead argues rightfully that:

The nation’s public schools — extensions of the world beyond the schoolhouse gates, a world that is increasingly hostile to freedom — have become microcosms of the American police state, containing almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.”

Not only has there been an increase in the number of police in the schools, but the behavior of kids is being criminalized in ways that legitimate what many call the school-to-prison pipeline. School discipline has been transformed into a criminal matter now handled mostly by the police rather than by teachers and school administrators, especially in regard to the treatment of poor Black and Brown kids. But cops are doing more than arresting young people for trivial infractions, they are also handcuffing them, using tasers on children, applying physical violence on youth, and playing a crucial role in getting kids suspended or expelled from schools every year.

The Civil Rights Project rightly argues that public schools are becoming “gateways to prisons.” One estimate suggests that a growing number of young people will have been arrested for minor misbehaviors by the time they finish high school. This is not surprising in schools that already look like quasi-prisons with their drug-sniffing dogs, surveillance systems, metal detectors, police patrolling school corridors, and in some cases, police systems that resemble SWAT teams.

While there has been a great deal of publicity nationwide over police officers killing Black people, there has been too little scrutiny regarding the use of force by police in the schools. As Jaeah Lee observed in Mother Jones, the “use of force by cops in schools … has drawn far less attention [in spite of the fact that] over the past five years at least 28 students have been seriously injured, and in one case shot to death, by so-called school resource officers — sworn, uniformed police assigned to provide security on k-12 campuses.”

According to Democracy Now, there are over 17,000 school resource officers in more than half of the public schools in the United States, while only a small percentage have been trained to work in schools. In spite of the fact that violence in schools has dropped precipitously, school resource officers are the fastest growing segment of law enforcement and their presence has resulted in more kids being ticketed, fined, arrested, suspended and pushed into the criminal legal system.

In 2014 over 92,000 students were subject to school-related arrests. In the last few years, videos have been aired showing a police officer inside Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina throwing a teenage girl to the ground and dragging her out of her classroom. In Mississippi schools, a student was handcuffed for not wearing a belt, a black female student was choked by the police, and one cop threatened to shoot students on a bus.

Neoliberalism is not only obsessed with accumulating capital, it has also lowered the threshold for extreme violence to such a degree that it puts into place a law-and-order educational regime that criminalizes children who doodle on desks, bump into teachers in school corridors, throw peanuts at a bus, or fall asleep in class. Fear, insecurity, humiliation, and the threat of imprisonment are the new structuring principles in schools that house our most vulnerable populations. The school has become a microcosm of the warfare state, designed to provide a profit for the security industries, while imposing a pedagogy of repression on young people.

According to the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, a disproportionate number of students subject to arrests are Black. It states: “While black students represent 16% of student enrollment, they represent 27% of students referred to law enforcement and 31% of students subjected to a school-related arrest.”

Too many children in the Unites States confront violence in almost every space in which they find themselves — in the streets, public schools, parks, and wider culture. In schools, according to Whitehead, “more than 3 million students are suspended or expelled every year.” Violence has become central to America’s identity both with regards to its foreign policy and increasingly in its domestic policies.  How else to explain what Lisa Armstrong revealed in The Intercept: “The United States is the only country in the world that routinely sentences children to life in prison without parole, and, according to estimates from nonprofits and advocacy groups, there are between 2,300 and 2,500 people serving life without parole for crimes committed when they were minors.”

The predatory financial system targets poor, Black and Brown children instead of crooked bankers, hedge fund managers, and big corporations who engage in massive corruption and fraud while pushing untold numbers of people into bankruptcy, poverty and even homelessness. For example, according to Forbes, the international banking giant HSBC exposed the US financial system to “a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing … and channeled $7 billion into the U.S. between 2007 and 2008 which possibly included proceeds from illegal drug sales in the United States.” Yet, no major CEO went to jail. Even more astounding is that “the profligate and dishonest behavior of Wall Street bankers, traders, and executives in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis … went virtually unpunished.”

Resisting Criminalization of School Discipline and Everyday Behavior

Violence against children in various sites is generally addressed through specific reforms, such as substituting community service for detention centers, eliminating zero tolerance policies in schools, and replacing the police with social workers, while creating supportive environments for young people. The latter might include an immediate stoppage to suspending, expelling and arresting students for minor misbehaviors. Legal scholar Kerrin C. Wolf has proposed a promising three-tier system of reform that includes the following:

The first tier of the system provides supports for the entire student body. Such supports include clearly defining and teaching expected behaviors, rewarding positive behavior, and applying a continuum of consequences for problem behavior. The second tier targets at-risk students — students who exhibit behavior problems despite the supports provided in the first tier — with enhanced interventions and supports, often in group settings. These may include sessions that teach social skills and informal meetings during which the students “check in” to discuss how they have been behaving. The third tier provided individualized and specialized interventions and supports for high-risk students — students who do not respond to the first and second tier supports and interventions. The interventions and supports are based on a functional behavior assessment and involve a community of teachers and other school staff working with the student to change his or her behavior patterns.

Regarding the larger culture of violence, there have also been public demands that police wear body cameras and come under the jurisdiction of community. In addition, there has been a strong but largely failed attempt on the part of gun reform advocates to establish policies and laws that would control the manufacture, sale, acquisition, circulation, use, transfer, modification or use of firearms by private citizens. At the same time, there is a growing effort to also pass legislation that would not allow such restrictions to be used as a further tool to incarcerate youth of color. In short, this means not allowing the war on gun violence to become another war on poor people of color similar to what happened under the racially biased war on drugs. And while such reforms are crucial in the most immediate sense to protect young people and lessen the violence to which they are subjected, they do not go far enough. Violence has reached epidemic proportions in the United States and bears down egregiously on children, especially poor youth and youth of color. If such violence is to be stopped, a wholesale restructuring of the warfare state must be addressed. The underlying structure state and everyday violence must be made visible, challenged and dismantled.

The violence waged against children must become a flashpoint politically to point to the struggles that must be waged against the gun industry, the military-industrial-academic complex, and an entertainment culture that fuels what Dr. Phil Wolfson describes in Tikkun Magazine as “fictive identifications” associated with “murderous combat illusions and delusions.” Violence must be viewed as endemic to a regime of neoliberalism that breeds racism, class warfare, bigotry, and a culture of cruelty. Capitalism produces the warfare state, and any reasonable struggle for a real democracy must address both the institutions organized for the production of violence and the political, social, educational and economic tools and strategies necessary for getting rid of it.

Americans live at a time in which the destruction and violence pursued under the regime of neoliberalism is waged unapologetically and without pause. One consequence is that it has become more difficult to defend a system that punishes its children, destroys the lives of workers, derides public servants, plunders the planet and destroys public goods.  Americans live in an age of disposability in which the endless throwing away of goods is matched by a system that views an increasing number of people — poor Black and Brown youth, immigrants, Muslims, unemployed workers and those unable to participate in the formal economy — as excess and subject to zones of social and economic abandonment. As Gayatri Spivakrightly observes, “When human beings are valued as less than human, violence begins to emerge as the only response.” At issue here is not just the crushing of the human spirit, mind and body, but the abandonment of democratic politics itself. Violence wages war against hope, obliterates the imagination, and undermines any sense of critical agency and collective struggle.

Sites of Resistance

Yet, resistance cannot be obliterated, and we are seeing hopeful signs of it all over the world. In the US, Black youth are challenging police and state violence, calling for widespread alliances among diverse groups of young people, such as the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), worker-controlled labor movements,  the movement around climate change, movements against austerity, and movements that call for the abolition of the prison system among others. All of these areconnecting single issues to a broader comprehensive politics, one that is generating radical policy proposals that reach deep into demands for power, freedom and justice. Such proposals extend from reforming the criminal legal system to ending the exploitative privatization of natural resources. What is being produced by these young people is less a blueprint for short-term reform than a vision of the power of the radical imagination in addressing long term, transformative organizing and a call for a radical restructuring of society.

What we are seeing is the birth of a radical vision and a corresponding mode of politics that calls for the end of violence in all of its crude and militant death-dealing manifestations.  Such movements are not only calling for the death of the two-party system and the distribution of wealth, power and income, but also for a politics of civic memory and courage, one capable of analyzing the ideology, structures and mechanisms of capitalism and other forms of oppression. For the first time since the 1960s, political unity is no longer a pejorative term, new visions matter and coalitions arguing for a broad-based social movement appear possible again.

A new politics of insurrection is in the air, one that is challenging the values, policies, structure and relations of power rooted in a warfare society and war culture that propagate intolerable violence. State violence in both its hidden and visible forms is no longer a cause for despair but for informed and collective resistance. Zygmunt Bauman is right in insisting that the bleakness and dystopian politics of our times necessitates the ability to dream otherwise, to imagine a society “which thinks it is not just enough, which questions the sufficiency of any achieved level of justice and considers justice always to be a step or more ahead. Above all, it is a society that reacts angrily to any case of injustice and promptly sets about correcting it.”

It is precisely such a collective spirit informing a resurgent politics within the Black Lives Matter movement and other movements — a politics that is being rewritten in the discourse of critique and hope, emancipation and transformation. Once again, the left has a future and the future has a left.

Henry A. Giroux, Contributing Editor

Currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: American at War with Itself,  Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Land 2011), On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013). Giroux’s most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). He is also a Contributing Editor of Cyrano’s Journal Today / The Greanville Post, and member of Truthout’s Board of Directors and has his own page The Public Intellectual. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

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=By= Gilbert Doctorow

Rushing to war – justified by half-truths and propaganda – is a story as old as written history and the topic of great novelists like Leo Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina offers lessons for today’s stampede toward WWIII, says Gilbert Doctorow.

Russian literature is too important to be left to professors of Comp Lit or to Slavic Departments at our universities, as is so often the case with the novel that I propose to examine here, Leo Tolstoy’s, Anna Karenina. Great literature is great precisely because of its multi-layered construction and the timelessness of the issues and considerations that constitute its substance.

Like War and Peace, Karenina has been the subject of many films going back to 1911, running through the 1930s with two classic versions featuring the legendary Greta Garbo and right up to time present and the widely discussed version released in 2012.

The novel has a core triangle, the relations between the heroine, her unloved and unloving husband who is 20 years her senior, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, and her lover, Prince Alexei Vronsky, for whom she gives up everything but does not find happiness or inner peace, seeing instead that her only way out is suicide. It is about love and passion, about the basic building block of all societies, the family.

This side of Anna Karenina has been especially highlighted in the film versions, being universally appealing and not tedious in the least. Indeed, the first (silent) Garbo film was entitled Love. The novel’s basic narrative is also about the relations between the sexes. The issues surrounding feminism, aired at length throughout the development of the core plot, speak to our present day with perfect clarity notwithstanding the passage of 140 years from the time the words were written.

It is easy to understand the feeling of any film director taking in hand this magnificent novel with its splendid story line and turning literature into cinema. However, what Tolstoy produced may also be described as a piece of documentary film-making as we understand the profession today. The side plots, the relief to the main plot, are not just ballast. They are the result of the author’s going through salons and clubs in Moscow and St. Petersburg, going through the meetings of the nobility among themselves in corpore at their assemblies and individually over tea at their country estates, going through the interchanges between these landlords and their peasants over how to use the new farm machinery they have introduced and how to split up the profits, these and many other topics of the day as if with a team of cameramen and sound operators who record every word.

The whole of Russian society was “tape recorded” by Leo Tolstoy and its thinking on a great variety of subjects was set out in Karenina for our perusal.

Tolstoy’s enthusiasm for his role of public chronicler was such that he ignored the rules of the novel and continued the narration for more than 50 pages beyond the suicide of his heroine. It is to those last pages of the novel that I direct attention today, because the issues and the thinking about those issues recorded by Tolstoy parallel what we see around us today in the United States as we head into what may well be World War III.

Anna Karenina was written over the course of five years, from 1873 to 1877 and during that time the topics which predominated in the salons Tolstoy visited changed from domestic concerns like the effectiveness of the institutions of local self-government and justices of the peace introduced with the Great Reforms of the 1860s, the viability of noble estates as agricultural units in an age of railway construction and industrialization to one topic of international relations and Russia’s standing in the world.

The Slavophile movement was gathering speed and reached its culmination in the final year that Tolstoy wrote his novel, when, in the context of brutal massacres of Bulgarians, Serbs and other peoples in the Balkans seeking to cast off the Ottoman yoke, Russian civilians were volunteering in the hundreds and thousands to join their Slavic brethren for a decisive fight against the Turks.

Enthusiasm for Battle

The enthusiasm for battle in Russian liberal society, what we can the “country party,” was viewed skeptically, like any popular movement outside its control, by the tsarist authorities and their loyal supporters, whom we shall call the “court party.” This distrust on the part of authorities was all the more keen as it infringed on the monarchy’s key role of managing foreign and defense policy.

And, in the end, this distrust was well placed because the popular enthusiasm ultimately engaged the Russian imperial forces in a new war with the Ottoman Empire in 1877-78 which, though victorious on the battlefield, ended in a humiliating setback to Russia’s international standing when mediated by the Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin.

What occurred in 1878 was not a mere historical curiosity, but instead was a “dry run” for the conflict 36 years later which we all know as World War I. In 1914, as well, the “country party” and the “court party” were divided over the inevitability and desirability of the coming war with Austria-Hungary and its ally Prussia.

If I may change labels, it was the Realists (or court party) against the Romantic Nationalists (the country party) who were under the spell of ideology. This question has been examined in magisterial fashion by historian Dominic Lieven in his recent book The End of Tsarist Russia.

In Anna Karenina, the stormy debates between conservative monarchist and progressive noble elites over what should be done in the Balkans are embodied by his characters. The second or third most important personage in the novel, Prince Vronsky, is shown departing for Serbia together with a squadron of soldiers under his protection. His enthusiasm for the South Slav cause is shown to be an accidental consequence of his loss of Anna and of all reason to live.

By the same token, the volunteer soldiers boarding their train to the south for transfer to Serbia are depicted as drunkards, failed gamblers and other marginal persons in what is a clear tip-off of Tolstoy’s own feelings about war in general and this war in particular. But there is no reason to guess, Tolstoy’s views of the forces leading to war are expressed most clearly through the voices of his alter-ego, Konstantin Levin, the forever naïve and self-questioning hero of the novel, a provincial farmer-nobleman, and his father-in-law, Prince Shcherbatsky, the representative of an older generation raised under pre-Reform values.

When history repeats itself, the parties to conflicts do not necessarily occupy the same sides of a given argument. In the 1870s, Russian liberal society was deeply moved by the notion of humanitarian intervention, virtually in the same sense as this has become a fixture of the American political establishment and driver of foreign policy since Bill Clinton’s presidency in the U.S.

The voice for humanitarian intervention in Anna Karenina is Levin’s half brother, Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev, a Moscow intellectual, for whom the Pan-Slav cause has given him a preoccupation to fill his days and sense of purpose.

Below is the argumentation adduced in favor of the intervention in the Southern Balkans by the “country party” through Sergei Ivanovich. If we put aside the Christian factor, which today is so scorned in our  politically correct multiculturalism, you will find points very similar to what is today being adduced by American and European commentators in their expressions of horror over the Syrian-Russian bombing of east Aleppo and their urgent calls for humanitarian action:

“There is no question here of a declaration of war, but simply the expression of human Christian feeling. Our brothers, one with us in religion and in race, are being massacred. Even supposing they were not our brothers nor fellow-Christians, but simply children, women, old people, feeling is aroused and Russians go eagerly to help in stopping these atrocities. Fancy, if you were going along the street and saw drunken men beating a woman or a child – I imagine you would not stop to inquire whether war had been declared on the men, but would throw yourself on them, and protect the victim.”

To which, Sergei Ivanovich adds: “The people have heard of the sufferings of their brethren and have spoken.”

Levin casts the first stone against this blanket assertion: “Perhaps so,” he said evasively, “but I don’t see it. I’m one of the people myself, and I don’t feel it.”

Self-Interest for War

The old prince Shcherbatsky drives home the point: “I’ve been staying abroad and reading the papers, and I must own, up to the time of the Bulgarian atrocities, I couldn’t make out why it was all the Russians were all of a sudden so fond of their Slavonic brethren, while I didn’t feel the slightest affection for them. I was very much upset, thought I was a monster, or that it was the influence of Carlsbad on me. But since I have been here, my mind’s been set at rest. I see that there are people besides me who’re only interested in the yoke of Russia, and not in their Slavonic brethren.”

They ask a peasant standing by, Mihalich, about his views on the subject. Of course, Mihalich has no views, deferring to whatever position the tsar may hold, and Levin presses on:

“That word ‘people’ is so vague,” said Levin. “Parish clerks, teachers, and one in a thousand of the peasants, maybe, know what it’s all about. The rest of the eighty millions, like Mihalich, far from expressing their will, haven’t the faintest idea what there is for them to express their will about. What right have we to say that this is the people’s will?”

To this, Sergei Ivanovich responds in a way that lays bare what “public opinion” is all about. In my view, the exchange of opinions have direct relevance to where we, in American society, find ourselves today over the prosecution of our “humanitarian intervention” and “values guided” foreign policy in Syria at a moment when a great hue and cry has gone up over the killing in east Aleppo:

Sergey Ivanovitch: “let us look at society. … All the most diverse sections of the educated public, hostile before, are merged in one. Every division is at an end, all the public organs say the same thing over and over again, all feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them and is carrying them in one direction.”

“Yes, all the newspapers do say the same thing,” said the prince.

“That’s true. But so it is the same thing that all the frogs croak before a storm. One can hear nothing for them.”

“Frogs or no frogs, I’m not the editor of a paper and I don’t want to defend them, but I am speaking of the unanimity in the intellectual world,” said Sergey Ivanovich, addressing his brother.

“Well, about that unanimity, that’s another thing, one may say,” said the prince, continuing: “So it is with the unanimity of the press. That’s been explained to me: as soon as there’s a war their incomes are doubled. How can they help believing in the destinies of the people and the Slavonic races … and all that?”

In effect, what Tolstoy was describing in these passages is precisely the “group think” of his day, when all of educated society and all the arbiters of public opinion in the print media were whipping up a pro-war fury that no one could publicly resist. So it is now, with the calls of our newspapers of record, of our major media and of the leading candidate for the presidency of the United States demanding a show of force in Syria, under the innocuous terms of imposing a “no-fly zone” and setting up “safe havens for refugees,” to put a halt to the killing in east Aleppo being perpetrated by the Syrian armed forces, in close collaboration with the Russian air force and Iranian fighters on the ground.

These voices of the Western establishment make these calls, willfully ignoring the plainly stated warning of the chief of Russian operations in Syria that the newly installed air defense systems will shoot down any unidentified planes or cruise missiles entering Syrian air space, even at the price of heading us into World War III.

The Western media and politicians today are all croaking like frogs before the storm. And the American public is as ignorant about the background issues to the present crisis in Syria, about the nefarious activities of their own and allied forces in support of the Islamic jihadist rebels controlling east Aleppo, just as Mihalich was ignorant about the issues surrounding the coming Balkan war. This “ostrich effect” is the true nature of modern day isolationism in the United States.

I close this review of the highly relevant exposition of reasoning about drivers of foreign policy in Anna Karenina by quoting Tolstoy’s recommended cure for the war fever of the arbiters of public opinion:

“I would only make one condition,” pursued the old prince. “Alphonse Karr said a capital thing before the war with Prussia. ‘You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all’!”

“’A nice lot the editors would make!’ said Katavasov, with a loud roar, as he pictured the editors he knew in this picked legion.”

To update this proposal, I believe that our special forces operating illegally on the ground in Aleppo for the coordination and technical support of the jihadist rebels and “moderate opposition” to President Assad will very willingly trade places with an incoming special regiment of storm troopers drawn from the likes of Robert Kagan, William Kristol and Victoria Nuland, the irresponsible loudmouths who claim to speak for the American people and who are in fact leading us to collective suicide.

Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord. His most recent book, Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016

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By Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez for DemocracyNow!

[Photo: Lawyer on mic, and Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana. (of the Central Park Five) at a presentation in 2012. Credit: Maysles Cinema.]

From DemocracyNow!, (October 14, 2016)

In 1989, Yusef Salaam and four other African-American and Latino teenagers were arrested for beating and raping a white woman in New York City’s Central Park. They became known as the Central Park Five. Donald Trump took out full-page ads in New York newspapers calling for their execution. Then, in 2002, their convictions were vacated after the real rapist came forward and confessed to the crime and his DNA matched. By then, the Central Park Five served between seven and 13 years in jail for the assault. The city settled with them for $41 million. But as late as last week Donald Trump still claimed they were guilty. We speak with Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, who writes in The Washington Post that “Donald Trump won’t leave me alone.”

TRANSCRIPT

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: If Donald Trump had his way, our next guest would have been executed over two decades ago. In 1989, Yusef Salaam and four other African-American and Latino teenagers were arrested for beating and raping a white woman who was jogging one evening in New York City’s Central Park. They became known as the Central Park Five.

AMY GOODMAN: Media coverage at the time portrayed the teens as guilty, used racially coded terms like “wolf pack” to refer to the group of boys accused in the attack. Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four city newspapers. The ad was said, “Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police!” The ad went on to read in part, quote, “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” end-quote. In an interview with CNN later the same year, Trump defended the ad.

DONALD TRUMP: I am strongly in favor of the death penalty. I’m also in favor of bringing back police forces that can do something instead of just turning their back because every quality lawyer that represents people that are in trouble say the first thing they do is start shouting police brutality, etc. … I’m not prejudging at all. I’m not, in this particular case. I’m saying, if they’re found guilty, if the woman died, which she hopefully will not be dying, but if the woman died, I think they should be executed. … The problem with our society is that the victim has absolutely no rights and the criminal has unbelievable rights. Unbelievable rights. And I say it has to stop. That’s why I took the ad. And I have to tell you, that ad, I have never done anything that’s been so positively received.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Yusef Salaam and the four others teenagers ended up spending between seven and 13 years in jail for the assault. Then, in 2002, the convictions in the Central Park Five case were vacated after the real rapist came forward and confessed to the crime. DNA evidence confirmed that he was the sole attacker. The story of the Central Park Five was chronicled in the 2012 film The Central Park Five, directed by famed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and his daughter Sarah.

COMMISSIONER RICHARD CONDON: Last night, a woman jogger was found unconscious and partially clothed in Central Park. She was beaten and sexually assaulted.

ED KOCH: A woman jogging in Central Park. Central Park was holy. It was the crime of the century.

COMMISSIONER RICHARD CONDON: Five youths were arrested on 96th Street, all between 14 and 15 years of age.

ED KOCH: They got ’em!

SAUL KASSIN: You can only imagine the pressure to have this crime solved and solved quickly.

KEVIN RICHARDSON: First we was all together. Then they started to put us in different rooms, separately.

YUSEF SALAAM: “What did you do? Who were you with? Who did you come with?” The tone was very scary. I felt like they might take us to the back of the precinct and kill us.

KOREY WISE: You’re not going to go home until you give up a story.

RAYMOND SANTANA SR.: I told my son, “Go to the park,” that night. I feel guilty.

KEVIN RICHARDSON: I’m telling the guy, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” They’re getting a little angry.

RAYMOND SANTANA: And they’re like, “You know you did it. Didn’t you?”

UNIDENTIFIED: He had been interrogated for over 24 hours. That amounts to pressure.

NATALIE BYFIELD: These young men were guilty. It was almost unquestioned.

LYNNELL HANCOCK: The police controlled the story. They created the story.

CALVIN O. BUTTS III: They seized on the fears of the people. “Wilding,” the bestial characterization of the black man.

MICHAEL WARREN: There’s no DNA match whatsoever to any of these boys.

RONALD GOLD: I was going nuts. No blood on the kids. Nobody could identify them. But if they confessed, they confessed, and that was that.

JIM DWYER: A lot of people didn’t do their jobs—reporters, police, prosecutors, defense lawyers.

UNIDENTIFIED: This was institutional protectionism.

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: We falsely convicted them, and we walked away from our crime.

UNIDENTIFIED: This is the ultimate siren that says none of us is safe.

AMY GOODMAN: The trailer to The Central Park Five documentary. In 2014, the City of New York agreed to pay $41 million to the five men wrongfully convicted.

As for Donald Trump, he’s never apologized. In fact, he still claims they were guilty. In a statement to CNN last week, Donald Trump said, quote, “They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same,” he said.

Well, we are going now to Atlanta to speak with Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five. His recent piece for The Washington Post is headlined “I’m one of the Central Park Five. Donald Trump won’t leave me alone.”

Yusef, thanks so much for joining us on Democracy Now! Donald Trump, as early as last Thursday, continues to say that you are guilty. What do you say to him?

YUSEF SALAAM: You know, first, thanks for having me on your show.

Donald Trump has the absolute, ultimate ability to fact-check everything about this case. I mean, in the trailer, one of the things that’s really surprising is that you have one of the jurors saying, you know, he was going crazy, there was no evidence, no blood on the guys, but they confessed, and so that was that, you know. But when you look at the nature of the confessions, when you look at the nature of what happened to get the confessions, how these confessions didn’t match anything that the other guys were saying, you know, and then all of a sudden, 13 years later, the truth comes out, and here you have a guy who talks about what happened at the crime scene, talks about when he struck the woman over the head with a tree branch, talks about dragging her into the woods—and key evidence that no one else had mentioned is that she was tied up with here own jogging outfit—you know, Donald Trump has the ability to look at all of this stuff and to put the truth out there.

But I think that it’s more attractive to him to be divisive, to be negative. He’s calling it a positive thing that he did back in 1989. I mean, we’re talking about—this crime happened April 19, 1989. On May 1st, Donald Trump had already taken out the ads. It was being ran in New York City’s newspapers, calling for the death penalty to be reinstated. What was happening was that we were given a social death. We were being tried in the media, and they were getting ready to lynch us, in public and through the court system. You know, if I had a show, I would tell Donald Trump he was fired. All of the things that he’s exhibiting today is very, very disturbing. Nobody who is seeking presidency should even have any kind of shady, dark past like Donald Trump. He’s definitely not the man for these United States of America.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you refer, as we have, to the—those full-page ads that he took out back then. You were one of the few accused who actually was able to get out on bail shortly after the arrests. What was your reaction? And what was the reaction in the city? Because I remember it well, because I covered the trial of several of you during that time. What was the reaction in the city and the climate, especially fueled by Trump’s ads?

YUSEF SALAAM: You know, it was very negative. If you look at the campaigns that Donald Trump has gone around the country to, you know, bolster up the people to follow him, then you have on one side people opposing this and campaigning against Donald Trump, campaigns—Donald Trump’s followers have physically assaulted some of these individuals who have been there peacefully protesting Donald Trump’s presidency. In 1989, when I was bailed out, we were the pariahs. It was such a negative energy, such a negative place. I mean, we could not turn anywhere, without the exception of our mothers’ or our parents’ arms, and find safety. It was one of the most dangerous places to be. And when I look back at that time, I mean, we couldn’t do anything other than put one foot in front of the other and continue to live out whatever this life was that we were being given, you know. But—

AMY GOODMAN: Yusef, how many years did you serve?

YUSEF SALAAM: I served seven years in prison, about—well, about seven years in prison.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Raymond Santana, when he was on Democracy Now!, another of the Central Park Five. This was in 2012 we spoke to him.

RAYMOND SANTANA: I served almost seven years. And so, what happened was that, you know, I tried to get my life back together and put one foot in front of the other, but I didn’t—you know, I didn’t realize the social death that we were given as a sentence. You know, this wasn’t a five to 15 or five to 10; this was a life sentence, a death sentence, in a sense, because, you know, when I came home, I couldn’t get employment. You know, I tried out—filled out numerous applications. And, you know, I had to register as a sex offender. You know, my whole neighborhood looked at me, you know, kind of strange. You know, you get the “Hi, how are you doing?” but, you know, you always have that bullseye on the back, you know, that says, someway, somehow, I’m Raymond Santana from the Central Park jogger case.

AMY GOODMAN: And I want to play a comment from a juror who served on the 1990 jury that convicted Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, as well as you, Yusef Salaam, in the case. We interviewed Harold Brueland in 2002 after new evidence emerged that prompted him and many others to question if justice was served. This was his response.

HAROLD BRUELAND: Let’s put it this way. I don’t have a clear notion of what happened. I certainly know that you cannot convict on what you—on uncertainties. You must let someone go, if you have reasonable doubt. I have very much reasonable doubt now.

AMY GOODMAN: So that was one of the Central Park Five jurors, very interesting. And, Yusef, we’ve spoken about this on a panel, aside from covering this case. The man who ultimately confessed, Matias Reyes, in prison, and his DNA matched—the DNA never matched any of you, any of the Central Park Five—he ultimately was caught because he raped a woman in my building, the woman who lived below me. And she came out screaming. And so, finally—but his MO, as he went around all of the upper part of Central Park, was the same as what happened to this—the horror show of what happened to the Central Park jogger. He would rape women. He would attack them. He would attack them in front of their children. And the police were so intent on getting the five of you, that this man, who was committing these crimes at the time, who was sent to prison for these crimes, was never in any way linked, because of their blindness in this case.

YUSEF SALAAM: Yes, yes. And, you know, the worst part about it is, like you said, their blindness, their rush to judgment, their wanting to solve this crime and solve it quickly. They dropped the ball. I mean, they dropped it in the worst way. The young woman that you speak of that was his last victim, she was a pregnant young Latina woman who he raped while she—you know, her children were in the next room. He raped her, and then he murdered her. And, I mean, that right there is a terrible—

AMY GOODMAN: She was a woman before—right, she was a woman before, so he continued his murder and rape spree—

YUSEF SALAAM: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —as the police focused on the five of you.

YUSEF SALAAM: Yes, indeed. Worst situation in the world. And the worst part about it, as well as this, the way that the police went after us and the reports that began to filter from the police department through the media began to paint a picture that we were the ones that the media—I mean, that the public needed to hang for this crime.

And like I said, that same kind of thing plays out today. There’s still this murkiness, because the truth of the story that was told back then wasn’t really the whole truth. And so, people today still feel like something about that case just—you know, the DA at the time said there was DNA evidence. And then, when the DNA evidence didn’t match, they quickly just quieted that and then moved on with the case. And the worst part about it is that that left a negative residue in the minds of many people, because the only thing that they remembered was there was something about DNA in this case.

The false confessions were even worse, because here it was, we were explaining witnesses—eyewitness testimony to what we had seen but had not participated in, and they flipped it around on us and said, “Well, the reason why they didn’t rape the Central Park jogger was because they were beating up other people in other parts of the park.” And the reality is that there were people who had been arrested and got convicted for assaulting those individuals in Central Park. They never became known as Central Park Five members.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Yusef, I wanted to ask you, as you’re hearing now in this presidential—in this presidential campaign all the allegations of sexual assault against Donald Trump himself by women coming forward and his own caught-on-tape admissions of participating in sexual assaults, although he then claimed it was just locker room banter, what’s your reaction now to what Trump is facing?

YUSEF SALAAM: You know, he definitely sounds like a sexual predator. This is absolutely absurd. This is not a 12-year-old hanging out in a locker room talking about something that he wants to do, not even a 20-year-old hanging out in a locker room, so to speak, talking about something that he has done or his sexual exploits or things like that. This is a person who’s on the cusp, if not already being 60 years old. This is a person who’s—everything about him is part of his fiber, the fiber of his life and the fabric of who he actually is. So, for him now to come back out and say, “Uh-oh, I got caught. Let me see how I can spin this,” and then say, “Oh, it was just locker room banter”—you mean to tell me that you were talking about assaulting women, sexually depraved acts, going after them in this kind of—what’s the word that he said? He said he was a B-I-T-C-H, you know. You know, when you think about the nature in what he’s saying, it’s absurd that people will dismiss it and say, “Yeah, he was just—he was just talking—talking the talk.”

AMY GOODMAN: It was not only—it was not only these women who have come forward—and seems every day or every other day now more women are coming forward—his own wife, Ivana Trump, accused him of rape, as well.

YUSEF SALAAM: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Yusef Salaam, final comment? Are you calling for an apology from Donald Trump? The city settled with you and the four others, who together are called the Central Park Five, for $41 million, New York City?

YUSEF SALAAM: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: What are you asking from—for Donald Trump right now?

YUSEF SALAAM: Well, you know, I mean, I don’t necessarily know if I’m asking for an apology from Donald Trump, because, quite obviously, I really don’t believe he’s going to give us an apology. You know, it would great for him to show the human side of him, more of a humanity, and say, “You know what? I was wrong.” I mean, he tried to say that he was wrong with regards to this information that came out about him, but he’s continued to harp on this same line and say that he was not wrong. The reason why he believes that he was correct is because what the police department said. But it was found that what they said and how everything was put together was completely unfactual. I mean, back in 1989, you know, you had these false confessions that the public had viewed. It was almost like you would turn on the news, and every single day there was this new report about something about the Central Park jogger case, you know.

Best thing that happened was that when Ken Burns revisited this in 2012, and he had Raymond Santana read his false confession on video. Now, mind you, Raymond was 14 years old at the time, but in 1989 people absolutely believed what he was saying. And here he is, an adult, reading his 14-year-old false confession—and, of course, this is not the exact same words that he used, but it was something like, you know, “At approximately 9:00 p.m., me and a group of my colleagues begin to walk south.” And he looks up and says, “What 14-year-old boy talks like this?”

You know, Donald Trump needs to be fired from this presidency—fired from running for president of the United States, fired—maybe—we need to send him to another planet.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Yusef Salaam, I want to thank you for being with us. We will link to your piece in The Washington Post headlined “I’m one of the Central Park Five. Donald Trump won’t leave me alone.” Thanks so much for being with us. Yusef is chief executive officer of Yusef Speaks. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We’ll be back in a minute.

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