The unvaccinated: picked-on victims of prejudice

"He's going to get caught, just you wait and see.

'Why is everybody always picking on me?'"

                         The Coasters, "Charlie Brown," 1959 

The unvaccinated feel picked on.

Vaccinations got defined as a matter of identity grievance, not a communicable disease.

They are victims, so they can't be dangerous. Right?

Sign at a New York restaurant

A lot of people feel they face prejudice: Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, homosexuals, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, trans, seniors, the obese, and others. There is one new group: The unvaccinated.

Green Bay Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers is in the news this weekend. He is unvaccinated, having skirted NFL rules to protect the team and league by stating that he "was immunized." He said he didn't lie exactly; he just defined immunity in his own terms. He said his "immunity" consisted of following advice he got from Joe Rogan, which was to be in good shape, to take zinc and ivermectin, and to let your natural immune system protect you.

He tested positive for COVID. He is lashing back at the criticism he is getting for endangering his teammates and others. He said he is the victim of a "witch hunt," and is being put into a "cancel-culture casket."

Look, I'm not some sort of anti-vax, flat-earther. I am somebody who is a critical thinker, you guys know me. I march to my own drum. . ..

I realize I’m in the crosshairs of the woke mob right now. . .. I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and ability to make choices for your body: Not have to acquiesce to some woke culture or crazed group of individuals who say you have to do something.

I hear from readers of this blog who struggle to understand why people have dug in their heels on COVID vaccination. After all, those resisters have almost certainly been vaccinated against smallpox, polio, measles, chicken pox, rubella, hepatitis, and more. Why the resistance here?

Aaron Rodgers and the sign at the restaurant help explain it. The unvaccinated and their enablers are making a category error.  Early messaging from Trump changed the category of COVID from one of the many communicable, infectious diseases, in which one's behavior is a matter of injury or death to others, into the category of identity and private choice, like race, religion, and sexual orientation. Trump's early messaging defined COVID as "just the flu" and warned not to let the cure be worse than the disease. Trump defined efforts to control spread as oppression from the dominant group--i.e. the government infectious disease worry-warts. American culture has an existing mental template for this: Prejudice. People on both left and right are alert for discrimination, adverse profiling, aggressions and micro-aggressions. It is an idea out there in the zeitgeist. Victims of prejudice have a language of push-back: "pride," "identity," "autonomy," and "privacy."

A majority of White Americans, and White Evangelicals especially, tell pollsters they feel themselves to be victims of prejudice. They complain the whole culture defines them as racists, as superstitious, as homophobes, as deplorable. They entered the COVID era already unhappy about government affirmative action programs. COVID protocols fell into that frame, bossy government picking on "normal" people like them.

KDRV-TV-Medford protest supporting un-vaccinated nurses

Seen as victims, vaccination refusers get an excuse from the patriotic duty of care for fellow Americans. Victims are weak. Weak people aren't predators, selfishly endangering others. We do not see street protests on behalf of spouse batterers and kidnappers, people who are exercising their individual autonomy to endanger others. They are understood to be anti-social and strong, i.e. criminals. But we do see gatherings on behalf of nurses who wish to continue doing their hands-on work on fragile patients while being unvaccinated. They are a different mental category: The unvaccinated nurses are victims, victims of prejudice. How can they be dangerous?

In the song Charlie Brown, we know that the deep voice of "Charlie" is blind to his own guilt when he asks "Why is everybody always picking on me?"

Who's always writing on the wall who's always goofing in the hall?
Who's always throwing spit balls guess who (who me – yea you)?

 Aaron Rodgers is blinded by his sense of victimhood: He's the good guy here, being picked on. He was also exhaling up close to others in the huddle calling plays and breathing deep in the locker room. His teammates trusted him. COVID is a communicable disease.

 

 

The Flags of Eastern Oregon

Eastern Oregon is Trump Country

One can guess it from the geography. One can see it in the flags.

Oregon is a big place. The Portland-area part of Oregon is yet another west coast deep blue urban place. 

Some of Oregon is a mix of rural and urban in the inland valleys that lie along Interstate 5. Those are characterized by urbanized places with hospitals, businesses, and colleges. They are surrounded by farmland on the valley floors, and huge forested areas that show green on the map below. The urbanized places show on this map as cities on or near the north-south Interstate: Salem, Corvallis, Eugene, Medford, and Ashland.

About 85% of Oregon's population lives close to I-5, either in Portland or one of those cities to the south.

The biggest part of Oregon is the Oregon that barely registers in the popular imagination of "Oregon." It is 15% of the population and 60% of Oregon's land mass. It is the area east of the green national forest land marked on the map, an area that is generally dry and very rural. Geographically and politically, it is part of the Mountain West, more like Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas than it is the rainy, politically-blue Oregon. 

Like most rural places in America now, Eastern Oregon is Trump country. Tam Moore visited it two weeks ago and the flags he saw there caught his eye.

Tam Moore

Tam Moore is a lifelong journalist, who worked in television in his early days and then in print, writing for the Capital Press, a regional newspaper focusing on the agricultural industry. In the mid-1970’s, Moore served as an elected Jackson County Commissioner in southern Oregon. He was elected as a Republican in 1974, back at a time when Oregon Republicans were progressive on civil rights, when there were pro-choice Republicans elected locally and statewide, and when Republicans supported cleaning up the environment.

Guest Post by Tam Moore

There are a host of ways to measure the polarization gripping our country these days. Google tells us 192,000 scholarly papers on the subject are posted on the Internet. Then there’s the world of political polls – they abound – and of cartoons.

During a late October trip across state to visit a long-time friend living in Jordan Valley, the flags of Eastern Oregon tell stories.

The American Flag is flying in Eastern Oregon, just as surely as the American Flag was a visible fixture in many of those images of the January 6 insurrection mob storming the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C.

In the 1960s, waving the flag became a symbol of the divide between “doves” and “hawks” over our continuing war in Vietnam. The late William Rehnquist, writing as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court said, “throughout more than 200 years of our history (the flag) has come to be the visible symbol embodying the Nation.”

 

There’s a thread of nationalism in the politics which emerged in 21st Century America. Flags help tell that viewpoint. It wasn’t an accident that red from the flag came to be the red of “Make America Great Again” caps and apparel in the 2016 and 2020 Donald Trump election campaigns. 

Over lunch at the Big Loop Pizza in Jordan Valley (population 179) while watching the constant stream of Amazon semi-trailers coming from an Idaho warehouse to destinations in Oregon, we talked politics. My friend observed that someone had said to him “Trump is an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.” In the election one year ago, the Jordan Valley precinct –much larger than the small town itself – recorded seven votes for Joe Biden, 154 for Donald Trump.

 

A frequent alternate to the U.S. flag is the rattlesnake-on-yellow banner attributed to Christopher Gadsden flown in the American Revolution. In 21st Century America the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag emerges as an expression of personal freedom and individualism, to quote one modern dictionary.

These are prosperous and independent people flying their flags. In Jordan Valley the economy is based on cattle ranching with grazing and feeding on deeded land in the winter. Most of the cattle graze public lands for half the year while hay for winter feeding grows on the deeded lands. Another part of the local economy comes and goes with mining of silver and other precious metals in nearby mountains. Both sectors of the economy – and elsewhere in Eastern Oregon you can add in timber, mostly grown on public lands – bring friction between residents and federal land managers. People talk politics because livelihoods depend on continuing relations with the federal government, and how the government and courts interpret environmental laws.

One year after the presidential election which replaced Donald Trump, a “Trump 2024” flag flew in the precinct of North Lake County where Trump polled 77 votes in 2020 – that was 71 percent of the votes cast. There’s a new slogan on the 2024 flag: Make votes count again.

 

It’s not all politics with the flags of Eastern Oregon. This banner configured to recite the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution flies over over a gate east of Christmas Valley in North Lake County. It's a precinct where last November’s vote was Trump 42, Biden zero.

But flying from both gateposts are two more flags. Both fan-flags for the Seattle Seahawks. You can imagine the folks at the other end of the long ranch road would as soon talk about the fortunes of Quarterback Russell Wilson as those of the divided country in which we live.

The infrastructure bill and the Democratic bench

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg had an opportunity to be a strong contender on the Democratic bench.

He is at home on paternity leave. It signals the wrong thing for him--and for Democrats.

What does anyone know about the infrastructure bill?  We know it's a lot of money. We hear about price but not about the benefits--the bridges, tunnels, highway bypasses, and broadband coming our way. Democrats are making the number one classic mistake in sales: letting the focus be all about price, not benefits.

Why aren't people barnstorming the country, selling infrastructure? Their not doing so sends a message of Democratic dysfunction. 

Pete Buttigieg's biggest political branding problem isn't his homosexuality. It is that he is the exemplar of the White liberal upscale meritocracy wing that is pushing working people of all races away from Democrats. He could use this opportunity to re-focus his brand, and that of Democrats. Infrastructure is built by working people. It is hands-on and physical. Workers get dirty. These are the people Democrats are losing. Buttigieg could be doing a “50 states in 50 days” tour, selling the infrastructure bill in each of the 50 states. Someone needs to do it, and who better than the Secretary of Transportation?

Iowa corn kernel straw poll

Americans accept the idea that "it takes a thief to catch a thief." Trump said he could drain the swamp because he knew the swamp. FDR was a supposed "traitor to his class." A Harvard Rhodes Scholar can be the meritocracy "insider” who understands all too well the insularity of the professional classes, the impossibility of everyone going to graduate school, and the failure of trickle down. He could run against privilege, legacy admissions, good old boy networks, and tax-free inherited wealth. 

In a “50 states in 50 days” tour Buttigieg could be praising Biden's steady leadership. Biden needs somebody to do that, and the infrastructure package gives Buttigieg an example of "Scranton Joe" Biden's practical empathy for working people. Buttigieg makes himself look good by making Biden look good, because Buttigieg has the rhetorical ability to tie things together in an overarching message of progress--something beyond Biden's skillset. Biden isn’t out selling. Harris isn’t doing it, either. Schumer and Pelosi are busy doing legislative sausage-making. Buttigieg would be the visible articulate Democrat on a national stage telling the Democratic story. That makes him Biden's heir. 

I like maternal and paternal leave. It is compassionate. It is necessary in many cases. Buttigieg should praise it--and then not have taken much of it. Two months of paternity leave is not a requirement. It's an option. His country called. He has a mission of national importance on hold.  

His paternity leave sends an indelible message. He could have spent these two months getting to a different state four days a week. Sure, be home weekends and hold your babies. But then go back out on the road to tell the nation what it is getting from its trillion-dollar investment. People in our armed forces sacrifice family time, away for a year at a time. Truck drivers go on the road. Construction workers go away on jobs. Front-line people in "essential" jobs had to scramble with day care and children at home during this COVID era. Juggling work and family is what working people do. 

Instead, Buttigieg demonstrates the life that prosperous, privileged elites get to live. He has a prestigious job that pays well that he can do by phone and video from home, where he knows the boss personally, and the boss says "ok, sure.” Having an indulgent boss is a privilege. Working remotely is privilege. To the working people drifting from the Democratic Party, two months paternity leave is unmistakable body language of elite privilege. That marks him as "other." 

Oregon

I love how Buttigieg handles himself on Fox News. He is an extraordinary talent. But he had a job to do being a national spokesperson for the most popular thing Democrats are doing, and he isn't out there--a big lost opportunity for him.

Neither is anyone else--a big lost opportunity for America.

Taxing carbon to save the planet

Tax carbon, then rebate the money. 

The idea is out there and we will be seeing more of it.

The idea is to get people to use less fossil fuel by making it more expensive, and then to rebate the money to everyone equally. Two birds with one stone: Save the planet and distribute money from rich energy users to the energy-thrifty poor.

It might backfire, It might damage the economy. People may hate it. Or it might work and save the planet.

Stodder

Economist Jim Stodder looks at arguments both for and against a carbon tax/rebate plan. He finds fault with three of them. He teaches international economics and securities regulation at Boston University, with recent research on how carbon taxes and rebates can be both income equalizing and green. He was a college classmate, then received a Ph.D. from Yale in economics. His website is: 

www.jimstodder.com

Guest Post by Jim Stodder

     "You will hear some bad arguments."

First, let’s hear from the Right:

Bad Argument Against:  A carbon tax/rebate plan is pointless because it will hurt us and China won't go along.

Carrots and sticks can make them. We do have to make this work because China pumps out about twice the CO2 emissions as the U.S. (10 billion vs 5 billion metric tons per year). They have about 4 times as many people, however, so China’s rate per-capita is half of ours (7.4 vs 14.8 metric tons).  

Per Capita Emissions

But they do deserve some carrots. “OK, you in the West got to loot and pollute the earth for 200 years to build up your wealth. We've just got started and now we have to pay the same tax rate as you?” That’s going to be the response of most of the world’s population. Good luck on getting them to think otherwise.

The good news is they can pay the same carbon tax and get a rebate. This is basic economics. As long as the rebate is based on something independent of their CO2 output--like an equal global per-capita rebate--then it has no effect on how much they pay per ton of CO2 this year. That tax still goes up with every extra ton. Plus, most educated Chinese recognize that heavy pollution is killing millions of their people. I have spoken with parents in Shanghai and Beijing who are worried sick about this.

But what if they won’t play along--what’s the stick? Yale’s William Nordhaus (an old teacher of mine) has the answer. The rich countries can put a unified tax on carbon and tax the imports of any country that won’t joint them. The EU has agreed to do this. If the other rich countries agree, that will make it in China’s and other countries' interest to tax themselves. That way the tax will do less harm to their GDP than having it all lumped onto their exports. You can see Nordhaus’s Nobel Prize lecture.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2018/nordhaus/lecture/

Another Bad Argument Against: It's not fair to the U.S. working class because a carbon tax is regressive.

That’s correct, it would be – if there were no rebate. An energy tax is regressive, meaning lower income families pay a larger portion of their income. The “yellow vest” movement in France was based on this, and almost brought down President Macron’s government. “Macron worries about the end of the world,” they said. “We just worry about the end of the month!”

But the same argument for redistribution to poorer countries works for poorer families. The rich consume more energy per-capita, so an equal per-capita rebate winds up highly progressive, and makes low income households net winners. An economics prof at University of Massachusetts wrote a book on it: Boyce

What about our friends on the Left? They have been seduced by the following siren song.

Bad Argument For a carbon tax/rebate: The cost of renewable energy has plummeted, and green energy is more labor intensive. Therefore, the green transition will be a productivity revolution and raise everyone’s living standards.  

That first sentence is completely correct but – the second doesn’t follow, at least not on any time-scale that’s politically relevant. As political columnist Fareed Zakaria has pointedly argued, a Green Transition poses huge macroeconomic risks. A carbon tax high enough to be effective will mean most of that fossil fuel still in the ground has to stay there, forever. In energy-company speak, that means “stranded assets” – things we invested in yesterday for a high return but are just stuck with today.  

But it’s not just Big Energy that’s hurt by a carbon tax. (If only!) It’s all the companies that service it and its regions and all the people who’ve invested there.  

My pessimistic view on the Green Transition is still a minority position among most US economists. (See Paul Krugman’s optimistic take, for example.) But I have good company like Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. There is a way through, but let’s recognize the economic headwinds we’re facing.   

This summer I made a presentation at a conference to lay out the case that the U.S. will need massive stimulus expenditures to ease these necessary birth pains. My 15-minute talk is in “Panel I” (the third YouTube clip) and starts at 16 minutes and 20 seconds.  

We do have to do this. I think we can ultimately get most conservatives on board when they recognize our duty to conserve the earth for future generations--an ethical and spiritual duty. But we won’t do that with the cop-out Right pessimism about why it’s all (#1) hopeless or (#2) so unfair. And we won’t make it easier by a comfy Left optimism that it’s going to be (#3) just a nice walk on a sunny day.

 

We have met the enemy

I am on a Facebook diet. 

I don't blame Facebook for being toxic. I blame Americans--me included--for wanting toxic stuff. 

I still look at a few Facebook posts that involve fall colors, vacations, and pictures of children, happy stuff. Stuff from junior high classmates. But then I leave without looking around. It's a bad neighborhood.

The media is full of news about how Facebook manipulates us by referring things that reinforce our anger, insularity, outrage, and tribal ignorance. We liked "civic low quality news," because it made us angry. It was like eating Red Hots candies. It hurts, and for some reason we like to savor the hurt.

I don't blame Facebook. They aren't a mental health fiduciary. They are a merchant. Merchants display and stock what people want to buy. 

Facebook is on us. 

Let me continue in that vein. 

I don't blame Big Oil, either. My friends on the environmental left are angry with oil companies and blame them for the climate crisis. I don't. I blame us. We Americans are dependent on electricity, most of which is generated with fossil fuels of one kind or another, still mostly coal. We built interstate highways and live in single-family houses in spread out neighborhoods, so of course we are dependent on cars. Or actually trucks. The most popular vehicles in America are the Ford F150, the Chevy Silverado, and the Dodge Ram.

Big Oil gives us the fuel we need to live our lives. If fueling stations stopped selling gasoline and diesel today, by the second day the country would be in panic, with people stranded and trucks parked on the side of roads. By the fourth day we would need martial law. We couldn't get anywhere and neither could people we depend on for food, power, water--for everything. We would freeze to death in the dark if roving gangs of people desperate for food, water, and whatever gasoline we still had in our tanks didn't kill us first. 

Blaming oil companies for climate change is hypocritical. It displays our moral blindness. How can we condemn the people who sell us what we demand?  Climate change isn't on Big Oil. It is on us.

I don't blame Biden. Progressive Democrats are disappointed that he is not delivering transformational change. Give him a break. He doesn't have the votes in the senate. Progressives think their policies are popular but they didn't elect progressive Democrats in swing states and House Districts. Progressive Democrats talk like they deserve the fruits of victory because they came close to a majority and their cause is righteous. That is the same error Trump's supporters make, thinking they deserve the presidency because they came close in 2020 and they think Trump righteous. Progressives turned off a lot of voters--incredibly enough, about as many as Trump turned off. They failed themselves. 

I don't blame Joe Manchin, either. He told liberals an unpleasant truth, that he has never been a liberal nor pretended to be, which is why he is a Democrat who gets elected in West Virginia. Liberals should quit complaining about Manchin and start wondering why they lose White working class voters by four-to-one margins, then do something to fix that. It isn't happening and it's getting worse. The results in Virginia indicate that the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe, lost western rural counties, the ones adjacent to West Virginia, by a margin of five-to-one.  

No one, including myself, likes thinking that the problem is with oneself. It is more pleasant to blame Facebook, the oil companies, Biden, and Manchin for some of the frustrations we feel. The most psychologically pleasant thing to do would be to add a comment to a Facebook post that complains about the climate crisis saying the whole thing is because Biden is weak and Manchin is a jerk from a coal state and he should be primaried. 

Democrats need to reconnect with working Americans, most of whom are patriotic, religious, protective of their families, resentful at being called racist, and suspicious of people making top-down rules that appear to bear harder on themselves than it does on the rule-maker. 

Crazy and extreme and dangerous as the Trump-ified GOP has become, and as much as voters don't like them, it turns out that in Virginia, and lots of other places, voters seem to dislike and distrust Democrats even more.

The troubling history of the U.S. in Ghana

Ghana's first President, Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown in a CIA-backed military coup.

Former CIA intelligence officer John Stockwell wrote about it.

Americans worried about Donald Trump's anti-democratic activities are whipsawed. U.S. intelligence apparatus--the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, even the military--have been whistleblowers and resisters to Trump. They have been seen defending democratic rules. The anti-war good-government Left finds itself in a strange place, defending institutions it spent a century calling out for misdeeds and hypocrisy. 

American history is complicated and troubling, and how schools should teach it is a top issue in current politics, including an election in Virginia today. Recent posts here looked at America's covert work in Haiti and Guatemala. Today we look at Ghana, from the eyes of someone who did charitable work there.

Coster

John Coster trained as a construction electrician, electrical engineer, and contractor. Over his 40+ year career he has managed huge electrical projects for Fortune 100 companies in over 30 countries. Over the years, he has volunteered on numerous energy, water and community development projects for Christian charitable organizations throughout Africa and Latin America. 

Guest Post by John Coster



Like many from the 1960’s, I learned about U.S. History through a distinctly patriotic lens. The Boston suburb where I grew up was settled in 1655 and its early residents were part of the American Story. We even had a Minuteman Militia complete with period costumes and musket rifles. They would march in the July 4th parade, fire their guns and stage reenactments of the battles at Lexington and Concord. We learned about Manifest Destiny in school in a positive light. Most men I knew were WWII veterans. Television shows like The Rat Patrol, Combat – and even Hogan’s Heroes--celebrated Americans as courageous, strong, clever and of course, virtuous.

Laying Cable in Ghana

“Americans as the good guys” was the accepted storyline for me, but as I started traveling abroad in the late 1980s, I began to see a more complex and disturbing narrative emerge. Here is one example. About 15 years ago I was walking with one of my business partners past the Ghanaian Embassy in D.C., and we discovered that we had each lived in Ghana. Mine was for charitable work, but his father worked for the CIA, and had been involved in the 1966 overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah’s presidency.

This was astonishing news. During my time in Ghana, I had wondered why the much-beloved Nkrumah, with streets, buildings, and monuments with his name, would be driven out? My colleague’s comments got me researching, and it turns out there are many books and articles written about this with declassified documents readily available online. I came across this article, which I think does a credible job synthesizing what I had been able to stitch together over years of my amateur research. Click: Ghana

Kwame Nkrumah

Nkrumah, a Ghanaian, was a U.S.-educated Pan African Black Nationalist - who envisioned a unified post-colonial Africa. He was Ghana's first democratically elected president, serving from 1960-1966. He also saw that hydro-power potential from the Volta River and abundant deposits of bauxite could allow Ghana to flourish as an international aluminum producer. His vision was promising because of Ghana’s relative wealth from their cacao industry and because the population was largely literate. Nkrumah appealed to then President Eisenhower--who in turn referred him to Kaiser Industries which was building industrial plants globally. Kaiser ended up structuring a joint venture agreement with ALCOA and Ghana. But the complex deal structure favored Kaiser’s fortunes and Ghana never realized the jobs and economic prosperity that the project promised. Kaiser was wary that Nkrumah’s more socialist philosophy might result in nationalization of their smelters and supply chain, so they mostly used abundant and low-cost power from the Lake Volta dam project.

His socialist leaning meant Nkrumah was in regular dialog with people like Ho Chi Minh, the President of North Viet Nam. Nkrumah miscalculated the extent to which the U.S. would go to thwart the development of a Ghanian socialist economy. With LBJ’s knowledge and consent, Nkrumah scheduled a meeting with Ho Chi Minh as a diplomatic envoy on behalf of the U.S. to attempt to halt escalation of the Viet Nam War. During Nkrumah’s three-day meeting in Hanoi, the CIA pulled the trigger on the coup plans and over 1,600 Ghanaians died in the violence. Nkrumah was exiled to Conakry Guinea, and never returned to Ghana before his death. Ghana has struggled with seven more coups and when I was there in 1990 had little running water, open sewers and garbage heaps in the middle of Accra, the capitol. While Ghana is reported to be one of the most peaceful countries today , according to 

Heritage, even after more than half a century it ranks 101st in economic freedom.

We can speculate what might have happened if the U.S. had brokered an honest deal with Nkrumah or had not been so frightened of socialism. I have come to believe that people and systems are inherently flawed as well as capable of achieving good and noble things. And if we are honest, we should call out both.

Why Immigration Reform Eludes Us, Part Two

"That overthrow was the work of the CIA."

         Herb Rothschild

Political flash point: Central Americans are crowding at our southern border. What makes anyone think that the USA has any responsibility for the mess they have down there?

I asked Herb Rothschild to return with a followup guest post. His comments on Haiti reminded readers of some uncomfortable history at a time when teaching students uncomfortable history regarding slavery and racism is yet another political flash point. Americans won't understand some of the intractable problems we have until we face up to how those problems came to be. 

Rothschild is a retired professor of English. During his working years he was a political activist on behalf of world peace and civil rights for Black Americans. He is still doing that work, advocating for peace and justice. He lives in Talent, Oregon.

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

Herb Rothschild

Guatemala: Another story of suffering, death, and hypocrisy

In a guest column that Peter published Sunday, I maintained that there cannot be comprehensive immigration reform until the U.S. reforms its conduct in Central America and the Caribbean. In support of that assertion, I argued that for more than 100 years our use of force to guarantee that the wealth of those nations enriches U.S. corporations and banks has created the endemic poverty and violence that the migrants coming to our southern border are fleeing. 

I also said that the list of our invasions, occupations and subversions is far too long to recount in a guest blog, and pointed readers to a website that lists them. (https://yachana.org/teaching/resources/interventions.html). As a relevant example, though, I used our maltreatment of Haiti—relevant because of the large number of people from that country who arrived in Mexico across from Del Rio, Texas this September. Let me now recount our behavior toward Guatemala, another major source of immigrants.

The numbers from Guatemala were especially high between 1983 and 1986. They were fleeing from their government’s violence. From 1981 through 1983, the military, right-wing paramilitaries and death squads killed about 200,000 people, mostly indigenous people living in the highlands (indigenous represent 60% of the population). However, the agitation for justice they were suppressing began in the 1950s, following the 1954 overthrow of democracy and its replacement by a series of military dictators. 

That overthrow was the work of the CIA.  

Until 1944, Guatemala had been ruled by military dictators that the U.S. supported because they made sure that the major portion of Guatemala’s agricultural land was owned by U.S. corporations and the nation’s wealthy elite. That year, Guatemala held its first elections and chose a reform-minded president, Juan José Arévalo. His minister of defense was Jacopo Arbenz Guzman, who played a critical role in foiling an attermpted military coup in 1949. Two years later, after Arévalo died, Arbenz was elected president. He persuaded the Guatemalan congress to pass a law ordering the expropriation of all land larger than 600 acres that wasn't under cultivation. Of the country's 341,000 landowners, only 1,700 fit the law. The owners were to be compensated based on the currently assessed value of their land and paid with 25-year government bonds. The confiscated lands were to be distributed to landless peasants. 

Sam Zemurray

Samuel “Sam the Banana Man” Zemurray was not happy. His corporation, United Fruit Company, owned some 600,000 acres, mostly uncultivated. In 1911, without U.S. government help, Zemurray had overthrown Honduran president Miguel Dávila, installing former president Manuel Bonilla, who had been living in exile in New Orleans, Zemurray’s own place of residence. This time, though, he had a sympathetic ear in Washington. John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and John’s brother Allen, director of the CIA, had been partners in the law firm that represented United Fruit. They persuaded Eisenhower to greenlight the removal of Arbenz. 

The CIA chose Guatemalan colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to lead the coup, armed and trained his rebel army in Nicaragua, and supported the invasion with CIA-piloted airplanes. That was the end of Guatemalan democracy for four decades. It was not the end of U.S. involvement in the repression. We provided arms and training to the Guatemalan military and even helped plan operations against the rebels. During the 1980s, our mainstream media toed the White House line on the repression and wholesale murder in Guatemala by presenting it as a civil war with bad behavior on both sides. The 1999 UN Truth Commission, however, found that 83% of casualties were indigenous Maya, and 93% of the human rights violations were perpetrated by state military or paramilitary forces. 

John Foster Dulles

Since many readers find personal notes of interest, I’ll tell two. I was born and raised in New Orleans, and for a time went to school with Sam Zemurray, grandson of the Banana Man, who was still alive then. In the mid-80s I was close to a teenager from Guatemala who had entered the U.S. illegally. He had fled his country after his parents were murdered. He was a gentle, sweet young man. After two years he left Baton Rouge for Canada on the underground railroad moving illegals. I don’t know what happened to him . . . nothing but good things, I hope.