REDEYE 3/21/18

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Election Interference? The CIA Anti-Communist Specialists Outdo the Russians

(Editor’s Note: The Russians may have learned something about foreign election interference from U.S. rulers, the masters at it. Quoted entirely from the NY Times, Feb. 18.)

Bags of cash delivered to a Rome hotel for favored Italian candidates. Scandalous stories leaked to foreign newspapers to swing an election in Nicaragua. Millions of pamphlets, posters and stickers printed to defeat an incumbent in Serbia.

The long arm of Vladimir Putin? No, just a small sample of the United States’ history of intervention in foreign elections….

Steven Hall, retired…after 30 years at the C.I.A., where he was the chief of Russian operations….[said] The United States “absolutely” has carried out such election influence operations historically…and I hope we keep doing it.”

Loch Johnson, the dean of American intelligence scholars…says Russia’s 2016 operation was simply the cyber-age version of standard United States practice for decades, whenever American officials were worried about a foreign vote.

“We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947….We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash….

The C.I.A. helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and backed violent coups in several other countries in the 1960s. It plotted assassinations and supported brutal anti-Communist governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia….

A Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov Levin, has scoured the historical record for both overt and covert election influence operations. He found 81 by the United States and 36 by the Soviet Union or Russia between 1946 and 2000….

His findings underscore how routine election meddling by the United States — sometimes covert and sometimes overt — has been….established in Italy with assistance to non-Communist candidates from the late 1940s to the 1960s. “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians to defray their expenses,” said Mark Wyatt, a former C.I.A. officer….

Richard Bissell, who ran the agency’s operations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote…of exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the outcome in an election.” A…report on the C.I.A.’s work in Chile’s 1964 election boasts of the “hard work” the agency did supplying “large sums” to its favored candidate and portraying him as a “wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” [Pinochet] while painting his leftist opponent as a “calculating schemer.”

C.I.A. officials told Mr. [Loch] Johnson…that “insertions” of information into foreign news media…sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day. In the 1990 election in Nicaragua, the C.I.A. planted stories about corruption in the leftist Sandinista government, Mr. Levin said. The opposition won….

The hand of the United States reached boldly into a Russian election. American fears that Boris Yeltsin would be defeated for re-election as president in 1996 by an old-fashioned Communist led to an overt and covert effort to help him, urged on by President Bill Clinton. It included an American push for a $10 billion International Monetary Fund loan to Russia for four months before the voting….

In recent decades, the most visible American presence in foreign politics has been taxpayer-funded groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute…which teach basic campaign skills…and train election monitors….

In 2016 the Endowment gave 108 grants totaling $6.8 million to organizations in Russia for…”engaging activists” and “fostering civic engagement….”

What the C.I.A. may have done in recent years to steer foreign elections is still secret and may not be known for decades.

W. Virginia teachers strike inspired by ‘mine wars’
NYT, 3/3 — …Tired of low pay and costly health benefits….teachers have refused to work in all 55 counties, shutting down every school in the state.
The teachers disregarded their own union leaders’ advice to return to work earlier this week, opting instead for a thunderous showdown with members of the state’s increasingly conservative leadership….
Smaller walkouts began in early February, organized by the sons and daughters of coal miners who stood on the picket lines themselves. “When I was in diapers, he was involved in a mine strike,” Justin Endicott, 34, a fourth-grade teacher…said of his father….
It is not a surprise to anyone here that the first teacher strikes came out of coal country. This was the battlefield of…a series of deadly battles in the early 20th century between coal miners and armies of law enforcement and company-hired soldiers. Among the people who fought in these wars was the great-grandfather of Brandon Wolford, a major organizer of the strikers in Mingo County.
In 1920, thousands of miners faced off in the five-day Battle of Blair Mountain against armed strikebreakers and government forces in one of the largest labor uprisings in American history.
(NYT, 3/2) — Kate Endicott, H.S. English teacher: “I live paycheck to paycheck….We come from an area that is known for standing up for what [we] believe in. The union wars, they originated in Mingo County.
“We believe we’re following in their footsteps. We believe the movement was started years ago through the mine wars. We’re just reviving the movement that was started years ago.”
South Africa: New millionaire ruler over Apartheid regime
NYT, 2/16 — …Furious street protests…have swept the nation [under] an economy that long funneled most of the spoils to a narrow, predominantly white slice of the populace….
Despite the formal eradication of apartheid, South Africa remains a land of stark economic inequalities that break along racial lines. Within the nation of 55 million people, just a tenth of the population, mostly white, controls more than 90 percent of the wealth….The vast majority of the rest owns nothing at all.
Roughly half the country lives in poverty. The official unemployment rate sits above 27 percent. And in the townships ringing cities, where the apartheid-era government forced black people to live,…two-thirds of young people are jobless. There, families hunker down in shacks lacking toilets and clean water….
…After a 2012 police massacre of striking platinum miners that killed 34 people….[current President Cyril] Ramaphosa occupied a seat on the board of Lonmin, the company that owned the mine….A day before the police opened fire, Mr. Ramaphosa had been urging senior government officials to take strong action to end the strike….
Beyond its systemic discrimination against black people, apartheid….ensured that huge numbers of black South Africans were available at poverty-level wages within…mining, agriculture and textiles….
…Ramaphosa…achieved extraordinary affluence by running South African companies with interests in mining, banking, real estate and telecommunications. His fortune has been estimated at $450 million.
Wage slavery rules Church hierarchy exploiting nuns
NYT, 3/2 — ROME — Sister Marie told of nuns who worked long hours to cook and clean for cardinals and bishops, without being asked to break bread at the same table.
Sister Paule pointed out that many nuns did not have registered contracts with the bishops, schools, parishes or congregations they worked for, “so they are paid little or not at all.”
Sister Cécile said that “nuns are seen as volunteers to have available at one’s calling, which gives rise to abuse of power.”
These stories…were revealed Thursday in an exposé about how nuns are exploited by the leaders and institutions of the Roman Catholic Church….
Though convents also depend on the money generated by the sisters living there, many nuns, unlike priests, are not paid, or are poorly paid, when they attend conferences or when they preach….
“Behind all this is still the unfortunate idea that women are worth less than men, and above all that the priest is everything while sisters are nothing in the church,” Sister Paule said.
Coal bosses profit; miner’s black lung disease on the rise
NYT, 2/23 — …Investigators…identified the largest cluster of advanced black lung cases ever officially recorded….A new black lung epidemic is emerging in central Appalachia….
Across the coal belt in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia, “there’s an unacceptably large number of younger miners who have end-stage disease and the only choice is to get a lung transplant or wait it out and die,” [said David Blackley, an epidemiologist at OSHA].
Scientists have linked the new wave of lung disease to miners breathing in more silica dust....[which] can damage lungs faster than coal dust alone. Modern machinery, insufficient training…and longer work hours may also contribute to increased dust exposure….
A survey of clinics in 2016 has unofficially recorded nearly 2,000 cases over a similar period of time….
…Lowered dust exposure limits…[were] challenged by coal industry groups as costly….