Redeye 2/24/16

Racist frame-ups on the rise
NYT, 2/4 — A record 149 people in the United States were found in 2015 to have been falsely convicted of a crime…nearly four in ten were exonerated of murder.
The review by the National Registry of Exonerations said the inmates had spent more than 14 years behind bars on average, with some serving more than three decades….
The annual tally of false convictions has more than doubled since 2011….recording 1,733 exonerations since 1989….
The bulk…came from…Texas, where 54 people were cleared, and New York with 17….
Official misconduct played a role in 65…and false confessions…in 27. The most common reason inmates ere cleared, in 75…cases, was that no crime had even been committed….
The registry found that more than two-thirds of those exonerated in 2015 were minorities and half were African-American. Five defendants had death sentences.
CIA backed terror in Guatemala
GW, 2/5 — First the army came for….fifteen Mayan peasant leaders…in eastern Guatemala…[who] were…killed or forcibly disappeared….
…[Then] they came for the women. Soldiers raped them in front of their children, burned down their houses and crops, stole their meager belongings and made them move into shacks outside a military base….where they were forced to cook, clean and submit to systematic rape….It was 1982…as counter-insurgency operations against ethnic Mayans intensified under the rule of the military dictator and evangelical Christian, Efrain Rios Monti….
The 1960-1996 civil war was triggered by a CIA-backed coup after an elected president promised land reform. Monti justified the violence by claiming the victims were communist guerrillas. But army actions were largely about protecting the interests of rich landowners.
Racist system’s poisons children
NYT, 2/7 — …The lead poisoning of children in Flint, Mich. [is] an outrage…called “state-sponsored child abuse.”
But lead poisoning goes far beyond Flint, and in many parts of America seems to be even worse.
“Lead in Flint is the tip of the iceberg,” notes [a]…former director at the Centers for Disease Control….
In Flint, 4.9 percent of children tested for lead…have elevated levels….In New York State outside of New York City, the figure was 6.7 percent. In Pennsylvania, 8.5 percent. On the west side of Detroit, one-fifth of the children tested in 2014 had lead poisoning. In Iowa for 2012….32 percent of children tested had elevated lead levels….
Across America, 535,000 children ages 1 through 5 suffer lead poisoning….
…A professor…at Mount Sinai [NY City said] “Lead poisoning continues to be a silent epidemic in the United States.”
…Flint…is particularly horrifying because it was delivered by the government through the municipal water system even as state officials scoffed at the local outcry….
Some 24 million homes in America have deteriorated lead paint….If a toddler regularly breathes lead-contaminated dust…that child may suffer lifelong brain damage….
Lead poisoning is an old problem…diagnosed…first…in 1994….
Yet the lead industry ferociously fought attempts at regulation….Millions of children continue to suffer brain impairment because of the greed of the lead industry….
Today the continuing poisoning of half a million American children is tolerated…because the victims often are low-income children of color.
Greece: ‘radical left’ attacks workers
GW, 1/29 — One year after taking power, Greece’s prime minister. Alexis Tsipras, has embraced wholesale the austerity measures that he once decried….
Tsipras has jettisoned his radicalism to stay in power at all costs….He has adopted a harsh policy,…raised taxes and sold off Greek banks to speculative funds, privatized airports and ports, and is about to slash pensions….
[Tispras’s party] Syriza…has not simply failed to deliver on its promises but…adopted the program of the opposition wholesale.
Israel: the fraud of ‘democracy’
GW, 2/5 — Netanyahu’s…government [is] intent upon suppressing anti-occupation views….
…Israel invented an intricate military-legal system for regulating its control over the Palestinian population living in the lands occupied in 1967 precisely in order to entrench separate systems for Israelis and Palestinians….
Breaking the Silence, an organization of former [Israeli] soldiers who…speak out about their service in the occupied West Bank, has been banned from speaking in high schools and to soldiers, and there is now a proposal to outlaw them….
Being anti-occupation is…deemed…with being anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, an enemy of the state. Working to end Israeli occupation, or even just exposing its facts, makes you a target….
For most of its existence, Israel has been providing democratic cover for an undemocratic reality….Israel…cannot be a democratic, liberal and free society while it exerts control over millions of people….
No amount of name-calling, intimidation or violence can ever change that reality.