CUBA'S GET RICH QUICK SCHEME: RETURN AMERICAN FUGITIVES FOR THE REWARD MONEY

The Coming Race War Begins In Cuba, Not South Carolina

Optics of USA’s Killers Returning Home Is Not A Good One

The View From The U.S. Virgin Islands

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

Virgin Islands Free Press

 

Charles Manson wanted to start a race war in America by directing his “family” to mass murder people and then try to put the blame on black folks. Last week, confessed mass murderer Dylann Storm Roof was accused of trying to put the country at odds against itself over race.

 

But someone who took substantive steps to do just that is former Cuban President Fidel Castro who favored black fugitives over white ones when race relations were touch and go in the early 1960s.

 

Cuba has provided safe haven to American criminals since then. In 1961, a black militant leader from North Carolina accused of kidnapping a white couple during a racial disturbance evaded the FBI and arrived in Havana.

 

By 1968, United States fugitives were arriving like clockwork, often aboard hijacked airplanes. Many were members of self-proclaimed revolutionary groups who carried out their political agenda with bombings, bank robberies and murder of police officers drawn by Cuba’s open embrace of anyone who claimed to be carrying out “armed struggle” against non-communist governments.

 

“We understood that if anything ever happened in the U.S. and we had to leave, the best thing was to come to Cuba,” explained Charlie Hill, a member of a militant group called the Republic of New Africa that wanted to form an independent black nation in the American South.

 

Hill and two other members hijacked a plane to Cuba after shooting and killing a New Mexico police officer who wanted to search their car, which was loaded with guns and dynamite. His comments were made to Teishan Latner, a research fellow at NYU’s Center for the United States and the Cold War, whose 2013 book, “Irresistible Revolution: Cuba and American Radicalism, 1968-1992,” offers a revealing look at the Cuban government’s treatment of the fugitives it deemed to be genuine revolutionaries.

 

The Castro regime gave them ration cards and free housing. One large Havana home became known as the “Hijack House” because so many of its occupants arrived on pirated aircraft. Neighbors referred to another as Casa de las Panteras for the all the fugitive Black Panthers living there.

 

These revolutionary pilgrims got many privileges not available to ordinary Cubans, including the loan of AK-47 rifles for hunting expeditions. To be fair, Castro came to regret that one when his relations with exiled Black Panther chief Eldridge Cleaver — who fled to Cuba after a shootout with Oakland police — went south.

Cleaver chillingly reminded the government he had guns. After a tense standoff of several weeks, there was mutual agreement that Cleaver would move on to Algeria.

 

For more labile fugitives, the rewards were bounteous: college educations and cushy jobs. Some worked at propaganda stations beaming revolutionary rhetoric at the United States. Others taught English at elite Havana schools.

William Lee Brent, a Black Panther who hijacked a plane after shooting three San Francisco cops, was a Cuban emissary to the left-wing government of Grenada during the 1980s before his death from pneumonia. Assata Shakur (Tupac’s godmother), a member of the cop-killing Black Liberation Army convicted of murder in the death of a policeman during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike, became a hostess for delegations of international visitors.

 

As recently as the 1990s, the FBI had a list of 91 fugitives from terrorist-type charges living in Cuba. But age and disillusionment have taken a toll, and researcher Latner believes there are no more than two dozen left, perhaps only half that.

 

Still, they include some big names: Ishmael LaBeet, one of five men convicted of the infamous Fountain Valley Massacre, a racially-tinged 1972 armed robbery in St. Croix, Virgin Islands that turned into mass murder, with eight dead. William Morales, the master bomb-maker of the Puerto Rican separatist group FALN, which set off 140 or so blasts around the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, killing at least six people. Victor Gerena, an armed robber working for another Puerto Rican separatist group, who is believed to have taken the proceeds of a $7 million heist to Cuba with him.

 

The biggest of all remains Shakur. Even the act of naming her reveals the depth of the schism. Law enforcement calls her JoAnne Chesimard. Her supporters know her by her chosen name, Assata Shakur. If the name rings a bell to the apolitical, it is likely because she is the godmother and aunt of slain rap star Tupac Shakur.

 

Thirty years ago, Shakur fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum by Fidel Castro. There she has remained. U.S. law enforcement has repeatedly sought her extradition, and the FBI has placed her on its “Top Ten Most Wanted Terrorists” list. Information directly leading to her apprehension carries a $2 million reward.

 

The question now: What becomes now of  Shakur?

 

She used to be a star attraction on the Cuban government’s cultural reception circuit, but has virtually disappeared in recent times.

 

“I think they are definitely worried about bounty hunters trying to grab her,” says Latner. Maybe President Obama’s easing of travel restrictions to Cuba will have a silver lining after all, at least for the FBI.

 

To law enforcement, Shakur is the killer convicted in the execution-style slaying of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973. She is the Black Liberation Army leader busted out of prison by her comrades two years into a life sentence, a domestic terrorist implicated in a string of crimes and a key part of organization that waged war on police.

 

To her supporters, Shakur has been persecuted by the same corrupt and racist justice system that they say persecuted Michael Brown and Eric Garner. During the protests in Ferguson, Mo., her name became a rallying cry. She has long been a revolutionary symbol, a radical black female often described as “the ultimate fugitive from injustice.”

 

Immediately after the president’s mid-January announcement, the New Jersey State Police issued a statement saying the move to normalize relations with Cuba presents an opportunity to bring Shakur back to finish her sentence in Foerster’s murder.

 

“We stand by the reward money and hope that the total of two million dollars will prompt fresh information in the light of this altered international relationship,” said State Attorney General John J. Hoffman, adding that his office would be working with federal authorities to find a way to “return her to her rightful place in a New Jersey prison.”

 

Jeff Rathke, a spokesman for the State Department, said the decision to drop Cuba from the state sponsor of terrorism list it has occupied since 1982 “reflects our assessment that Cuba meets the statutory criteria.”

 

“While the United States has significant concerns and disagreements with a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions, these fall outside the criteria relevant to the rescission of a state-sponsor-of-terrorism designation,” Rathke said.

 

President Obama was forced to release a Cuban spy who was also serving two life sentences for conspiracy to commit murder — in order to reach the point diplomatically that we’re at now.

 

Maybe Cuba doesn’t meet the strict standards of a state sponsor of terrorism, but if a planeload of lionized black militants comes back from Havana to the United States to face murder charges – it will be a public relations nightmare the likes of which this country has never seen.

 

But as President Obama is going late into the lame duck phase of his second term, it is unlikely that the State Department would allow it to happen during this administration.

 

If I were Chris Christie, I’d ask Hillary Clinton what she would do as president if this were the first crisis she faced. Pardoning mass murderers or even garden-variety murderers is not an option.

 

When this air sequel to the Mariel boatlift happens, it is likely that Fidel Castro will ignore his health regimen for one day, look out on the beach his home is situated on (it has a view of the Bay of Pigs) and smoke a cigar and have a few jolts of Chivas Regal, thinking about this long-playing hand he has dealt us.

 

John McCarthy publishes the Virgin Islands Free Press at: http://vifreepress.com

True Blue Americans Seeing Red Over Public Displays of Rebel Flag

SUPPORT FOR THE STARS AND BARS IS FLAGGING, EXCEPT IN:

GEORGIA, MISSISSIPPI, ARKANSAS, FLORIDA, ALABAMA

THE VIEW FROM THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

Virgin Islands Free Press

 

 

One of the things to come out of the debate over what is wrong with South Carolina after nine African-American citizens were massacred Wednesday in an historically black church is the symbolism of the Confederate flag flying in public places in the American South.

 

It has been argued that there are more important issues at stake such as racism and gun control. Republican presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the American public should blame confessed killer 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof – not the Confederate flag being proudly displayed in South Carolina. For people like Graham the flag stands for southern tradition – not racism.

 

When Adolf Hitler took power in 1930s Germany, the first law he brought to fruition was national legislation that made burning the German flag a crime punishable by imprisonment. In China, you will do three years in prison for burning their flag. Two other countries punish flag desecration: Iran and Cuba.

 

I was half paying attention to CNN this afternoon when someone defended the flying of the Confederate flag in front of the South Carolina statehouse because it represented “history.” The argument being that the people who object to the Confederate flag flying aren’t thinking about the 20,000 South Carolinian soldiers who died during the Civil War.

 

"It's a symbol of family and my ancestors who defended the state from invasion. It was about standing up to a central government," Chris Sullivan, who is a member of the Sons of the Confederacy, told CNN. "The things that our ancestors fought for were not novel and they really are the same issues we have today."

 

The problem with that argument is that South Carolina batteries started the Civil War on April 12, 1861 by firing on Fort Sumter. The result was that 620,000 people died nationwide in the war – the people who started the war lost 20,000 of that total. So if the purpose of the Confederate flag is to remember the history – that is the bigger picture of the “history” that needs to be remembered.

 

The primary reason South Carolina gave for leaving the “union” in 1861 was that for 25 years the United States had failed to enforce the “Fugitive Slave Act” and that the election of Abraham Lincoln meant that slavery would be abolished. The elected leaders in Columbia saw “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery” and declared that their membership in the United States of America was “hereby dissolved.”

 

Certainly nobody in South Carolina today could say that the United States government is not living up to its financial obligations to the state. According to an Atlantic Monthly study, South Carolina nets $7.87 for every dollar in pays in to the federal treasury – the highest rate of return in the country.

 

Another problem with the Confederate flag is – even if it is eventually removed from the Civil War memorial in front of the statehouse in the capitol city of Columbia – the flags will still be flying on Fort Sumter (if history is the main reason for the flags remaining – doesn’t it confuse the issue of who actually won knowing that the Stars and Bars fly on the fort where shots were first fired during the war?)

 

And South Carolina’s current state flag is a blue version of the red Sovereign-Secession Confederate flag from the Civil War. Five other states, including Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida and Alabama put Neo Geo spins on their state flags to try to confuse the issue about what their flags most look like. (Or, in the case of Mississippi, maybe not so confusing – as the Confederate battle flag is incorporated lock, stock and barrel into its own state flag.

 

And yet they say symbolism is not important. But if it is not important – then why are these six states still clinging to the rebel flag – the dynamic artistic representation of the dissolution of U.S. constitutional law? Some have pointed out that the United States flag and the current blue rebel flag of South Carolina are flying at half mast, while the red Confederate flag flies high atop its pole at full mast? The answer is clear if you look closely. The Confederate flag is clipped in place and cannot be lowered – no doubt to keep some well-meaning citizen from taking it down some night.

 

The display of the Nazi flag is not just illegal in Germany, it is also illegal in France. In fact, in areas of Europe where the Nazi flag cannot be legally displayed, neo-Nazis use the Confederate flag in its place. However, in the United States and Israel, it is not illegal to display the Nazi flag.

 

Two years ago, the German painter and sculptor Jonathan Meese was brought up on federal charges that he used the “symbols of unconstitutional organizations” by giving the Nazi salute twice during a public discussion about art for Der Spiegel magazine that veered off into performance art. Meese faced three years in prison for the salutes, but was eventually acquitted of all charges because what he did was judged to be “art.”

 

The modern-day people of South Carolina have taught us a lot about what to do in the face of tragedy and injustice. And what is going on in Charleston today has everything to do with knowing that we are all stakeholders in this great nation that we are all proud to call our own. These good people need new symbols to represent their new spirit.

 

What is artless is the specious argument that the Confederate flag still needs to be displayed, especially if it represents is schism and racism. One only has to look at the photos of “Peter” – released in 1863 during the height of the Civil War – to know which side we should come down on when it comes to the symbols of hate that divide us.

 

John McCarthy is the publisher of the Virgin Islands Free Press at http://vifreepress.com

A MASS MURDERER, A CARPETBAGGER AND A STATE

A Schizephrenic Southern Splinter State

The Confederate Flag Flies At Full Staff

The View From The U.S. Virgin Islands

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

Virgin Islands Free Press

 

There’s no denying it.

 

South Carolina has a violent and racist past, with some tolerance mixed in.

 

The mere name “South Carolina” – suggests that it broke away from a larger Carolina – and that would be true.

 

The name Carolina is Latin for “Charles land” and goes back to 1629 when Britain’s King Charles I gave all of the southern colonies to Britain’s Attorney General Robert Heath. In 1663, Charles’ son King Charles II gave eight wealthy English aristocrats (mostly migrating from their sugar cane plantations in Barbados) a royal charter to settle Carolina because they had helped him regain his throne.

 

The Carolina coast was originally founded by the Spanish, but they were forced to leave due to violence from Native Americans and a lack of provisions. From the beginning of colonization, blacks outnumbered whites in South Carolina and that would remain so up until the turn of the 20^th century.

 

Carolina originally split in 1719, when southern settlers seized control from its proprietors. In 1729, Carolina became two royal colonies, North and South Carolina.

 

Farmers from inland Virginia grew tobacco in North Carolina, while the fertility of the low country and its natural harbors, such as in Charles Town, later Charleston, allowed South Carolina to prosper.

 

Slaves were imported from the rice-growing regions of Africa, who created the dams and canals used to irrigate rice and indigo as commodity crops. South Carolina tolerated religious freedom and allowed French Huguenot and Sephardic Jewish communities from London to be merchants in the growing economy.

 

The Stono Rebellion of 1739, resulted in the colony no longer allowing African slaves to be imported through Charleston for ten years, as they believed the less-seasoned slaves to be more likely to seed rebellions than the Caribbean slaves who had grown up on plantations.

 

Although its name comes from an English king, South Carolina became the first republic in America when it adopted its own constitution on March 26, 1776. It was also the first state to adopt the Articles of Confederation, the initial governing document of the United States.

 

In 1822, following discovery of a conspiracy for a slave rebellion led by freed slave Denmark Vesey, the state passed the Negro Seaman Act, which prohibited foreign and northern black sailors from interacting with people in South Carolina ports. As the act violated international treaties, it was declared unconstitutional by Supreme Court Justice William Johnson. But Johnson’s ruling was not enforced.

 

South Carolina responded by passing the Ordinance of Nullification in 1832, declaring unconstitutional and null the federal tariff laws of 1828 and 1832, and prescribing that those laws would not be enforced in the state after February 1, 1833.

 

The seventh U.S. President Andrew Jackson, a native of the Waxhaws border region between the Carolinas, ended the crisis through the Force Bill that allowed the federal government to use military force to enforce federal law in South Carolina. It is considered the first law of the land ever to deny individual states the right to secede.

 

Which brings us to last night and 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof of nearby Lexington, South Carolina who is accused of killing nine people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston – a church Vesey helped found and which was burned to the ground by white supremacists in 1822 – the same year he and 34 other black men were hanged after being found guilty of the alleged slave revolt plot in a secret trial.

 

Asked today by Democracy Now! co-host Nermeen Shaikh on PBS if there has been any precedent “for this kind of violence” in South Carolina, Dr. Lonnie Randolph, Jr. said: “yes.”

 

“Unfortunately the answer is yes,” Randolph said. “And we don’t have a history of being a leader in this country on human rights. And unfortunately it brings us to reality … a reminder of the way South Carolina got to be South Carolina, the things that South Carolina has done throughout history.”

 

Randolph then referenced when Rep. Preston Brooks (D-SC) entered the U.S. Senate chamber in 1856 and used his gold-tipped cane to beat Sen. Charles Sumner (R-MA) nearly to death for his abolitionist views. Following the beating, in which Sumner lived after sustaining a brain injury, Brooks was forced to resign his seat, but returned home to South Carolina for a hero’s welcome.

 

Everyone knows that the Civil War (officially called by the federal government “The War Between The States”) began when Confederate batteries began shelling Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, but how many remember 620,000 Americans died for that South Carolina-driven, eight-year experiment in political limbo?

 

You would have to be a student in Civil War-era flags to know that the current South Carolina flag is an updated blue and white version of the rebel red Sovereignty-Secession flag from the Confederacy of States of America.

 

Now that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has announced his intentions to be the second POTUS from South Carolina and the first bachelor in the White House since James Buchanan in 1857, how would he explain in a debate why South Carolina still allows the “Stars and Bars” to fly in front of its statehouse?

 

As a follow-up, someone might ask Graham why the United States flag and the South Carolina flag atop the statehouse flies at half mast today, but the Confederate flag in front of the building on a Civil War monument flies at full mast?

 

The symbolism is important, unless you forget your history.

John McCarthy is the Publisher of the Virgin Islands Free Press at: http://vifreepress.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNDERAGE CUBAN ILLEGALS KEPT AS SEX SLAVES IN ST. THOMAS BY U.S. "ICE"

CHARLOTTE AMALIE – Juan José Santovena flew out of Cuba on a plane bound for Panama one day in March, the beginning of a long journey to rejoin his son, Hansell, who lives in Hialeah, Florida.

Santovena is now stranded in the Virgin Islands, one of 20 Cuban migrants whose travel documents were delayed by American officials because the Cubans allegedly refused to cooperate with a migrant trafficking investigation.

On Friday, Santovena detailed the saga of the Cubans during a lengthy telephone interview with el Nuevo Herald from St. Thomas — part of a strategy to pressure U.S. immigration authorities to supply them with travel documents known as paroles. Without the paroles, the Cuban migrants cannot board planes to travel to South Florida where most of them have close relatives.

Santovena’s son, Hansell, and Claudina Lambert, aunt of a young woman in the group, Yubisnei Franco — deemed the alleged denial of paroles as an illegal pressure tactic. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has said it cannot comment on the case because it is under investigation.

While parole delays for Cuban migrants have occurred before, this is the first that a large group of island migrants has complained publicly about the problem.

The case made headlines last month when one of 20 Cubans contacted el Nuevo Herald to denounce U.S. immigration authorities for the delay in granting the paroles. That person asked that his name not be published and provided only a bare outline of the group’s journey to the Virgin Islands.

Santovena, in his interview Friday, added richer detail to the account. It’s clear that the 20 Cubans left their country separately and only met each other for the first time after they gathered on the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean and boarded the boat that took them to the Virgin Islands.

At 59, Santovena is the oldest of the 20 Cubans — most of whom are men and women in their 20s and 30s. Two are twin sisters who are 17.

Santovena began his trip March 24 when he boarded a jetliner at Havana’s José Martí International Airport bound for Panama City. There, Santovena boarded a flight to Guyana where he switched to a plane bound for Barbados. From Barbados he flew to nearby St. Lucia.

Though none of the 20 Cubans knew each other before they boarded the boat that transported them, all of them — including Santovena — knew that boats left St. Lucia with Cuban migrants for the U.S. Virgin Islands. Cuban migrants who have no U.S. visas, can — nonetheless — stay in the United States if they manage to reach U.S. soil under the wet-foot/dry-foot policy. Cuban migrants interdicted at sea are generally returned to the island.

He said that the two twin teen sisters have been held separately in another part of the detention facility and are visited often by male ICE officers -- a source of great concern because the females are underage and vulnerable.

“I had been told that in St. Lucia Cubans were contacted to undertake that type of journey [to the Virgin Islands],” said Santovena. "But I never thought that the U.S. government would try to keep us trapped here indefinitely -- I especially worry about the two minors and their treatment."

At 7 p.m. one day in late March, Santovena and 19 other Cuban migrants gathered at a marina and later that night sailed on a boat to the Virgin Islands — a distance of about 400 miles.

“When we hit the beach, everybody ran away from the boat,” Santovena recalled. “I couldn’t even walk because when we jumped off the boat and hit the water I twisted one of my ankles.”

At any rate, the Cubans were not detected by immigration authorities when they landed late one night. The boat that transported them turned around and left in a hurry, Santovena said.

As a result, he added, no one really got to know the captain and none of the Cubans knew who organized the trip. The boat left the Cubans on the island of St. John, across the bay from St. Thomas.

At daybreak, the group walked to the marina to take a ferry to St. Thomas so they could report to immigration authorities and claim status under the Cuban Adjustment Act.

“The first ferry left at 5 a.m.,” recalled Santovena. “Then we took a bus to the immigration office and we sat down in the parking lot to wait for the office to open.”

Once the office opened, an immigration official told them to return the next day. Santovena said that when the group returned, they were put off yet again because of Holy Week.

After Holy Week, said Santovena, group members were given forms to fill out with biographical details. Then they were told to set up individual appointments through an immigration Internet system.

Once Santovena showed up for his appointment, he was told to come back about 12 to 15 days later so he could answer questions about his life in Cuba. At that appointment, he said, an immigration official showed him what he said was his parole document.

“I asked him when I would get the parole and he said, ‘I don’t know. I have to wait for authorization,’” said Santovena.

About 10 days later, Santovena was summoned to another interview at immigration.

He said they asked him whether he could identify the captain, and he replied that he could not because the captain left them on the beach and left. Santovena did not receive his parole.

Seven people in the group are believed to have received paroles because they answered questions to the satisfaction of immigration officials, said Santovena.

“We have been here in the Virgin Islands almost three months and we still don’t know when we’re going to be able to leave,” said Santovena. “Now we hear nothing from immigration officials. They are totally silent.”


To read more please go to: http://vifreepress.com

 

What Happens When You Supersize The G.O.P. Presidential Nomination Race?

WHY CHRIS CHRISTIE WILL BE THE NEXT POTUS

A SUPER TUESDAY AWAY FROM DOUBLE DIGITS

THE VIEW FROM THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

Moderate Voice Columnist

 

The eighteen Republicans running for president in 2016 are wise to try to make foreign policy the lead issue in the next POTUS election.

 

Not because Hillary Clinton is especially vulnerable on Benghazi, but because what most people would consider to be her strong suit – foreign policy due to her four years as Secretary of State – is actually her biggest weakness.

 

If you had to put one person from the United States in a locked room with President-For-Life Vladimir Putin and see who comes out alive – how many of us would chose Hillary Rodham Clinton?

 

Although Clinton and Putin are in the same height and weight class (Hillary is actually three centimeters taller than Vladimir), the next leader of the free world needs to be someone who really could be locked in a cage with a wild coyote for a week ala the late German artist Joseph Beuys.

 

When it comes to the high-stakes world that the next POTUS will inherit, ISIS will be ruling the roost in modern-day Babylon, a Charles Mansonian vision of interracial and police-state relations will be the order of the day in the United States – and who did America last elect to the highest office in the land the last time its cities were burning on TV in class warfare? Answer: Richard Milhouse Nixon.

 

To say Chris Christie’s career resembles Tricky Dick’s at this nascent stage is an insult to the statesman Nixon who brokered détente with the former Soviet Union with an historic anti-ballistic missile treaty, opened the door to Red China with Deng Xiaoping and late in life predicted that the Middle East would erupt in religious fervor once the United States won the Cold War and was reduced to lone superpower status.

 

The difference is that Nixon already had one term under his heavyweight belt before the Committee to Re-Elect the President or C.R.E.E.P. started its political dirty tricks program that would eventually lead to his resignation from office because of the Watergate scandal.

 

But the similarities are there as well, Nixon and Christie were each people with significant prosecutorial skills. Richard went after Communists such Alger Hiss in the “Pumpkin Papers” during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings as a young congressman and Christie went 130-0 as a federal prosecutor stamping out political corruption, sexual slavery, arms trafficking and racketeering in a six-year career as the U.S. Attorney of New Jersey.

 

The fact that Christie was undefeated as a federal prosecutor used to be plainly visible on Wikipedia a year ago, but to find such information today one has to Google “Chris Christie’s record as a federal prosecutor and go to the biography.com website.

 

Which only goes to show you that although Nixon did not survive Watergate, Christie thus far has not only outlasted the Bridgegate scandal (officially the “Fort Lee Lane Closure Scandal” on Wikipedia) but has dusted himself off briskly and is grandly taking the national stage with a slugger’s swagger that only a heavyweight champion of the world can muster.

 

All the most trusted indicators suggest that the American economy will be in better shape for Hillary Clinton’s second candidacy than it was when President Obama ran for a second term in 2012, meaning that “it’s the economy, stupid” isn’t likely to be the game changer it was for George Herbert Walker Bush – in any potential campaign by Jeb.

 

But that only means that foreign and domestic policy matters – in terms of homeland security – will be even more at the forefront. And a milquetoast Jebby-Come-Lately like John Ellis Bush isn’t anyone’s first pick to clean up in that department. A former federal prosecutor who went 130-0 against the bad guys certainly has a track record of performance that could lend an ear in an ultimate prize fight along those lines.

 

The nation is in the middle of a sense of malaise it has not seen since the days of President Jimmy Carter in the 1970’s – essentially the fallout from the Nixon years with a double whammy of OPEC oil prices that sent gas prices soaring and Iranian hostage-taking that made the American public feel helpless and hopeless.

 

“Hope” was the prominent word in the campaign poster for Barack Obama that led the most unlikely of presidential candidates from the South Side of Chicago to the right side of the Oval Office and is the place in Arkansas that President Bill Clinton is famously from, but if recent elections are a two-point statistical indicator of where the United States might turn in 2016 – it is unlikely that a Bush or a Clinton will fit the presidential bill.

 

Chris Christie was most recently quoting as saying that he is tired of hearing about the minimum wage and the mere fact that the two-term New Jersey governor can even utter such a statement is even more proof that the economy will be less of an issue in the upcoming election than even Democrats can imagine.

Christie is not afraid of the New York Daily News reporting that he makes $700,000 per year and is mocking “16.5 million Americans working for minimum wage. “His own bank account is well-padded – as is his rear end,” the Daily News opined. But what that says to me is not so much that the governor is bucking to be neighborhood bully, so much as that he is fighting mad about not yet being taken seriously as one of the most lethal candidates in presidential politricks today.

 

Hillary Clinton has a certain aura about her, based on the fact that she was First Lady, Senator of New York and Secretary of State, but she lacks the gravitas that allows someone to win a fight without actually having to fight it – because the opponent fears the contender. Just wait until Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump have to go toe-to-toe with Christie on the debate stage. Hang on to your comb-over!

 

It will not be a fair fight and it is likely that Christie will be the rare political opponent who could win the argument with his mouth or his fists, although no one is likely to take the former football player (just like Nixon) up on the latter. No one will even question Christie’s gravitas – especially Putin when he tries to make another land grab in Eastern Europe.

 

So in a fight to the finish in the death-cage match that is real-world geo-politics, the main event question is: who do we want in our corner? Someone who can ensure our existence for another 250 years? Or someone who could lead to our ultimate downfall?

 

Prize fights are rarely scored fairly, no matter how distinguished the ringside judges are for the bout.

 

Good thing it will ultimately be the ballot box that determines the winner in American politics, not who looks best on a horse bare-chested in winter

PUTIN'S HARD HAT OF INDIFFERENCE

BALLOON PAYMENT FOR SOCHI OLYMPICS

INVADE NOW FOR BEST FINANCING TERMS

THE VIEW FROM THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

Moderate Voice Columnist

 

     Remember when the worst thing we had to fear from Vladimir Putin was another garish bare-chested, bareback photo opportunity?

     There had come a time in the career of President Putin when he was even taking flack from Pussy Riot band members and seemed destined for irrelevance.

     Not any more.

     The erstwhile and current president always wanted us to look at him as a tough guy (what’s a former KGB guy supposed to do?) hence the pictures of him in black belt karate gear, on horseback as a half-suit Lord Godiva and supine in the snow with his big dogs and guns.

     Putin wasn’t eligible to run for a third consecutive presidential term in 2008, so he did the next best thing, put in a puppet (Dmitry Medvedev) to run for president and win in his place and then have him appoint himself (the former president) as “Prime Minister” for the next four years.

     Vlad the Deplaner put up with Pussy Riot’s taunts in the days leading up to his coming out party at the Sochi Olympic Games this year – because he wanted to appear statesmanlike in the international press – and because he knew he was planning something even bigger at the conclusion of the sporting contests.

      Four days after the closing ceremonies of the $50 billion Russian-sponsored Olympic games, Putin marched his troops less than 300 miles away from Sochi into Crimea and seized 233,090 square miles of beachfront property and 45 trillion cubic meters of strategic gas reserves – it’s the kind real estate deal that you won’t see on Million Dollar Listing.

      At the beginning of the year, Putin was on the verge of going the way of Yeltsin and Gorbachev, but the patina of a successful Olympic games put his name back in the news rundowns as a bear claw to the rainbow community and possible exterminator of wild dogs.

     Now, the parallels to Adolf Hitler and the appeasement that the 1936 Olympic Games represented – seem ominous – you don’t have to look twice to see Putin’s Yeti-like cojones. Vlad had to pay for the Olympics somehow – how else are you going to raise $50 billion in five months?

     The question is: what are we going to do about it? President Obama was out front on stepped up economic sanctions against Russia when he got the news live via telephone from his presidential peer that “someone” had taken down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. Sanctions have never kept any nation from doing what it felt it was autonomous to do.

     At the beginning of the year Putin faced political oblivion with a trending loss of support at home. What he needed to keep ordinary Russians from wondering if their lives had improved under him was a wag-the-dog-type diversion. He’s definitely got that and more now.

     According to Gallup polls, Putin’s popularity rating had sunk to an all-time low of 54% last year. In April of 2014, after the Olympics and Crimea – his popularity had tied for his highest ever mark at 83 percent approval.

     Meanwhile, the EU leaders who are doing everything right by international law standards have seen their popularity ratings fall beyond low into single digit numbers. And President Obama’s Gallup poll numbers have also tied for a notable mark – in his case a low point of 38 percent approval tying him with August 2011 polling numbers – and a recent Quinnipiac University poll that rated him the worst American president since 1945.

     It’s OK to keep talking about increasing economic sanctions against Russia in the summer of our discontent, but when winter approaches, there are 18 nations that get five to 100 percent of their gas from Moscow. Thirty percent of Europe depends on Russia for oil.

     Ultimately, the international community must galvanize one and all to oppose Putin in a way that not only hurts his bank account – but most importantly – his pride.

     No amount of black market Viagra will be able to lift his swelling pride if it is unmistakable to his people.

     That means the international community should call on FIFA to take away the World Cup Games from Russia in 2018.

     Failing that, a boycott of the upcoming FIFA World Cup Games is in order for all nations that value the rule of law – just as the United States did in 1980 with the Moscow Olympic Games.

     The Carter and Obama administrations have been tagged with the “malaise” label, it’s time we passed the uneasiness buck to where it belongs – back to Putin.

     Right now he’s riding high on his horse and preaching to the choir. A national tide of rising pride is not likely to diminish in the next four years if the status quo is maintained.  People who supply irresponsible people with surface-to-air missile systems and then train them to shoot down passenger planes must pay a meaningful price.

     Photo ops never showed if Putin plays an instrument.

     It’s time we teach him how to play taps on his home turf.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is a reporter, fine artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

A GENERATIONAL SLAP IN THE FACE

BETTER THAN THE TWINKIE DEFENSE

THE COBB COUNTY CRUCIBLE ON HLN

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

TMV Columnist

If the O.J. Simpson trial was the crime of the last century, then the “hot car death” of Cooper Harris is the “alleged” murder of the new century.

H.L. Mencken called the kidnapping and murder trial of the Lindbergh baby’s killer in 1932 “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”

The trial of 33-year-old Justin Ross Harris promises to not be all that, but it may be a bag of chips for the cable TV news networks and their endless 24-7 cycle seeking to replace Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 as the new “go to” story.

The differences in the three crimes of the last two centuries are telling: 1) Charles Lindbergh was the biggest celebrity in America at the time his 18-month-old child Charles Jr. was stolen from his home in East Amwell, New Jersey. 2) “OJ” was a known AVIS rental car spokesman and ABC sports commentator, but merely part of the ensemble casts in “Towering Inferno” (1974) and “Airplane” (1980). His alleged victims Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were not celebrities. 3) Harris is a web designer for Home Depot by trade and only came to prominence with his arrest last month in Marietta, Georgia.

If the national news media builds the Harris Hot Car Death into the “Crime of the Century” it will give Andy Warhol’s fabled “15 minutes of fame” even more credibility because neither Justin or his son Cooper were celebrities before Cobb County Police identified Mr. Harris as a cold blooded killer. German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann became a celebrity when he was arrested two years after the Lindbergh baby disappearance and was then executed by the electric chair two years after his conviction.

In modern-day America, O.J. Simpson was released after his double murder trial ended in a not guilty verdict so that he could commit other sports memorabilia felonies in Las Vegas 14 years after his initial arrest, including armed robbery and kidnapping. In 1971 (three years before “Towering Inferno,” Charles Manson was convicted for masterminding the Tate-LaBianca murders. But a year later the California Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment.

The Cooper Harris murder trial represents the constantly shifting paradigms of American society, from West Coast to Southern industrial dominance; and geographically America’s population is moving westward and southward, just as the trial of OJ was in LA, the new showstopper is in ATL - which is known affectionately as "Hot-lanta." We have gone from Baby Boomers on ordinary trunk land lines in 1994 to Generation Y, the so-called “Millenials” sex text messaging, or “sexting” in 2014.

The current group, Generation Z, aka the “Homeland Generation” or “digital natives” not only are too young to remember the Lindberg baby kidnapping, but likely don’t even know who Johnnie Cochran was, after all – they weren’t even born when Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered in Brentwood. And the generational gap represented by these three or four Crimes of the Century was never more obvious than when watching Headline News network last night.

The cheerleading style of nightly justice outrage was stoked to a fever pitch by “Nancy Grace” who used a full-screen Chyron graphic to illustrate not only that Harris was sexting six women at the same time he was supposed to be watching his son, but that one of them was only seventeen years old. The opening act for Grace is Jane Velez-Mitchell’s show. Velez-Mitchell came to prominence as a commentator during the Michael Jackson sexual abuse trial and apparently developed an affinity for Jacko’s style of plastic surgery following that 2003 media circus.

Velez-Mitchell emphasized almost as many times as Nancy Grace, that when Harris was texting his six sextuplets, he was sending along pictures of his “erect penis” to his chosen few. Grace, who was thrust into national prominence first on Court TV as a reporter when ratings soared on the glovetails of the O.J. Simpson trial, mentioned “erect penis” at least five times during her hour-long show.

Grace, in her visibly-angered persona looking scarier than Bruce Nauman in full “Clown Torture” video mode, showed that the 22-year age difference between her and the accused is significant. Because that generational gap was never more apparent than when she and near sexogenarian Velez-Mitchell were gagging on the “erect penis” pictures that they said Harris was including in text messages to his “friends with benefits.” Presumably, the two women would have been equally upset if Harris had jaywalked with his child – but sexted at the same time.

The voice of reason came when the 55-year-old Dr. Drew Pinsky was included in a telephone beeper on Velez-Mitchell’s “Issues” show. Substance abuse expert Dr. Pinsky stated that if Harris had gotten drunk and run over Cooper, everyone would have understood it as an accident. “Dr. Drew” said the line of reasoning that best fits Harris’ crime is that the Alabama-born father is a “sex addict.”

And the sexual perversion angle is not just important to Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell and their respective shows' ratings, it was also important to Harris before going to court yesterday. Because Mr. Harris chose Maddox Kilgore as his defense attorney, a lawyer who has never before represented a murder defendant - Kilgore has typically defended sexual predators and people accused of harboring child pornography in the past.

As the prospect of a Justin Ross Harris capital murder trial is dangled in front of a federal grand jury, prosecutors must now come to grips with the fact that it is inconsistent to argue on the one hand that Harris was distracted by titillating pictures of six women other than his wife – while at the same time saying the negligent father coldly, analytically plotted to kill his baby son by leaving him unattended in that hot car.

The balding, pasty-white, morbidly-obese Cobb County Chief Magistrate Judge Frank R. Cox told his standing-room-only courtroom that there was not only probable cause to bind Harris over for trial, but that sufficient evidence might exist for the death penalty to come into play.

Cobb County Police Detective Phil Stoddard had argued that Harris’ sexting suggested that the defendant was living a criminal “double life” and should not be set free on bail. Prosecutors also said that Harris researched hot car deaths on the Internet just five days prior to Cooper dying of hypothermia.

Court testimony revealed that the Harris’ purchased a $25,000 life insurance policy on Cooper in 2012. An additional $2,000 life insurance policy was included in Harris’ compensation package as a Home Depot employee.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys will be able argue whether or not Harris intended to kill his son on that fateful 18th day in June.

What is not debatable is that cable TV news networks see the case only as a distraction until they can cut to more commercials.