The Black Commentator - July 6, 2006

A new hue has been added to the list of America’s color coded “terrorist alerts.” It’s black. As last week’s BC cover story pointed out, the indictment of seven black Miami residents for allegedly conspiring to blow up the Sears Tower and according to US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez wage a “full ground war” against the United States was a sort of homecoming reunion between the racist demonizations of foreigners as “terrorists” and traditional American invocations of the black boogeyman in political season.

No reasonable person doubts that Miami is the terrorist capital of North America. But its resident and reigning terrorists are not indigent black dreamers dependent on helpful federal agents to furnish them with boots and rental cars to case their purported targets. The real terrorists in Miami are well armed and well heeled Cuban exiles, responsible for hundreds of murderous provocations over the last four decades, and endorsed by every president, Republican and Democrat alike over that time. Orlando Bosch, one of the principals involved in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner with 73 innocent civilians aboard, including Cuba’s entire Olympic fencing team lives openly in Miami after receiving a presidential pardon from the first President George Bush.

Hundreds of other local residents are active participants in dozens of organizations which make up the logistic, financial and political sinews of these officially tolerated terrorist networks. And make no mistake about it, these networks are officially tolerated because their targets are Cuban civilians, leftish dissenters within the Cuban American community and the occasional outsourced mercenary gig. Luis Carilles Posada, who the FBI has also linked to the deadly bombing of the Cuban airliner, also boasts of having a hand in the Washington DC assassinations of former Chilean ambassador to the US and his American co-worker.

In the 1990s, loyal Cubans infiltrated some of these networks. They succeeded in gathering information which enabled the Cuban government to thwart several bombings and attacks on lives and property in Cuba. By 1998, on their own initiative, they contacted the FBI to share the fruits of their investigations, including evidence that US based terrorists had violated and conspired to violate numerous US and international laws. For their trouble, the Cubans were arrested for espionage, held in solitary confinement for 17 months and tried before biased judges and juries in Miami. One drew 15 years, another 19 years imprisonment. Two got life, and one got a double life sentence. Outside South Florida, the US media rarely discuss the case, but the rest of the world knows them as the Cuban Five, and acknowledges them as political prisoners.

As in the case of Mumia Abu Jamal, after whom the street leading to France's largest sports stadium is named, parliamentarians in other countries regularly pass resolutions and appeals to US authorities to reconsider or pardon the Cuban Five. The view from outside the reality-distorting US media bubble is apparently much clearer.

Dot, a BC reader opines:

I don't know all that you do about the guys in Miami, as you have probably looked into who they were and what they were really up to. All I know is what I saw on TV and it was clear that bust was bogus. That is one reason the story did not hang around on the TV for very long. It was entirely too ridiculous for even the corporate media to swallow and regurgitate. No one, but the dumbest of red-necks and brain-dead Bush followers, believes that the men we saw on TV were the slightest danger to the Sears Tower. The whole story stunk to high heavens.

Reminds me a little of the anthrax attacks.

So if you’re young and black, and dumb enough to murdermouth in the presence of federal agents in an election year, you will be a poster boy for the administration’s never ending war on terror and in line to receive up to 75 years in prison. If you expose real terrorists operating from American soil you could get life or double life. But if you’re a real, live rocket launching, hotel bombing, civilian killing Miami-based terrorist you get what? A Bush presidential pardon, a big house and an OK life.

The Next Digital Divide

The next digital divide won't be between well to do Americans who can afford broadband and those who cannot. It will be between the US, where the Internet backbones are privately owned and moderately fast access is delivered only to those who can pay premium prices, and advanced nations like France, Japan and South Korea where universal access to broadband is public policy.

Back in the 1980s cable companies promised universal access for every household in the nation, 500-plus channels including plenty of community based and educational TV programming, multiple cable providers to choose from in every market and low, low rates in return for access to the public rights of way, big subsidies and tax breaks, and regulations that prevented the emergence of any competition. They pocketed the subsidies and tax breaks. They balked at delivering any service at all to poorer areas, and forced communities to fight tooth and nail for severely limited community and public access programming, and maintained monopolies or duopolies in every market.

After spending billions of federal dollars developing the Internet the government sold its backbones to telco corporations for a song. The telcos promised universal high speed broadband access for every school classroom in America early in the first decade of the 21st century. They were granted enormous subsides, colossal tax breaks, and allowed to charge ratepayers the highest phone and Internet bills on the planet to finance the wiring of every school, home and business in the nation with fiber optic cable, and to develop and implement the new technologies that would have made this possible. Like their cable cousins, the phone companies lied about their intentions, put the subsides, tax breaks and higher phone bills in their pockets and did not deliver.

The inherent limitations in the speed and versatility of DSL technology, which allowed delivery of a relatively slow and limited version of broadband, were well known in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But foisting DSL on American consumers let them put the hundreds of billions in tax breaks, subsidies and extra-high rates they received to rewire the national information infrastructure into corporate pockets. Hence the US now offers the slowest Internet service in the industrialized world to the smallest cross section of its population. We are 16th in broadband household penetration, behind Japan, South Korea and all of Western Europe, according to Dr. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, and between 12th and 19th and falling in the cost per megabit/second of broadband access.

When Internet speeds of 1000 megabits per second are delivered to homes, schools and commercial users, it turns out this is the most efficient way to deliver hundreds of channels of cable TV, multimode teleconferencing, and phone service to end users, with space left over for other applications we cannot even imagine. Singapore and South Korea will be the first to deliver such service to their populations, before the end of the decade. “Fast” broadband access in major US cities is presently only 1.5 megabits per second for downloads and a fraction of that for uploads. The cutting edges of innovation and development of new products and services deliverable over 21st century digital networks are fleeing the US for Europe and Asia, where high throughput speeds and universal access are the rule. Caving in to the short sighted greed of the telecommunications companies is already creating the next global digital divide, and US citizens and businesses are on the short side of this one.

The Internet was developed with public dollars. Its inherent possibilities for commerce, for education, and for community itself are a public good for the public to determine, the common property and responsibility of all. But this is called a capitalist system for good reason. The voices of the owners of invested capital are louder in the ears of the US House and Senate than those of the people. The telecommunications corporations may have more lobbyists in DC than there are members of Congress, and are spending tens of millions per month in advertising, wining and dining key legislators over and above the other tens of millions they have forked out in campaign and charitable contributions.

The fact that US Senate's Commerce Committee split on network neutrality 11 for to 11 against, in spite of the unprecedented full court press against network neutrality, and in the complete absence of coverage of the issue in the mainstream news speaks to the power of public opinion focused upon them thus far. If readers have already visited savetheinternet.com, if you have already signed the petition and contacted your member of the House when the COPE bill was being considered there, it is now time to contact both your state's members of the US Senate, and tell them how important this is to you.

In a foretaste of what's coming for US ratepayers when network neutrality ends, the Canadian phone monopoly is adding a 25% tax for users of Vonage, a popular service that routes long distance phone calls over the Internet. The telco argument is that the tax is needed to make up for the cost of guaranteeing the quality of service Vonage needs to operate. But in fact, it is as simple and blatant an act of piracy as one of those armed roadblocks you see in so-called “failed states” where thugs with guns peer into your car and demand you give them something in order to pass on your way. This is where the unencumbered rule of greedy corporations leads. Not to competition, creativity and innovation, but to Internet roadblocks and simple piracy.

Posting and viewing your wedding or family reunion pictures, using the Internet as a tool to get the local and international news you won't see on TV, or to get the word out in your town about local happenings, to create and share content, to download and sample music – all this will be in the past if network neutrality goes down the drain. Even folks who use low cost long distance phone cards will see these services disappear if network neutrality is not enforced by law. If the US Senate and House do nothing, FCC rulings have already granted phone and cable companies the right to restrict traffic any way they see fit over the parts of the Internet they control. The train is moving up the track. But it still can be stopped. It's up to us.

BC Editor Bruce Dixon is available at [email protected].