November 13, 2020
John Jiggens, Greg Chipp (Drug Law Reform), James Baldwin (Essayist), and Barack Obama speak about the American Dream.
This week’s Paradigm Shift features a 1965 speech by James Baldwin at the Oxford University Union where he presages the current racial crisis in the US . He accurately predicts the election of a African American President (Obama) almost down to the year but cautions us on what it may deliver.
Or Listen at http://ondemand.4zzzfm.org.au/paradigm-shift
Playlist
The Songs of Tom Smith – The Lord is King, He knows I’m a Queen
The Peace Pilgrims – Drone Lament
Sue Monk and Sergio Aldunate – Strike the Beast Hard (from Living in the Colonies)
Marketed as a simple cotton-farmer, Carter had been an engineer on a nuclear sub.
As a State Senator in Georgia, he cosied up to the Coca-Cola Corporation and the Augusta Golf Club.
When Chase Manhattan’s David Rockefeller set up his Trilateral Commission in 1973, Coke’s President, Robert W. Woodruff got Carter appointed to the U.S. division. Those years became his post-grad course in how to manage the U.S. Corporate-warfare state.
When he made his run for Democratic nomination, its Committee knew that their trillions would be in a safe pair of hands.
Throughout 1979, Rockefeller pressured Carter to grant asylum to the Shah of Iran. At first, Jimmy kept saying: ‘Fuck the Shah.’ He surrendered to the argument that abandoning the Shah would deliver a body blow to the confidence of the network of dictators that sub-contracted who kept the U.S. imperium on top.
From the West Coast, another oil czar, Steve Bechtel, whose corporation engineered the world, raged against the loss of his Iranian assets. He and his associates moved from backing Reagan as governor of California to funding his drive to the White House. One employee, McCone, had been Director of the CIA; two other Bechtel executives, Caspar Weinberger and George Schultz, served in Reagan’s cabinet as Secretaries for Defence and State respectively. As Secretary of Commerce for Nixon, Schultz had been Hawke’s golf buddy.
Humphrey McQueen
31 Dec 2024
Jimmy Carter (1924-2024) was the first and only former American president to Israel an apartheid state. According to Carter, Hamas was democratically elected in a free and fair election in Palestine in 2006 ( they had Netanyahu’s approval back then). How does the old saying go: “No war without Egypt, no peace without Syria”. Jimmy Carter presided over the Camp David accord between Egypt and Israel in 1979. This Accord was signed by Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin.
US Presidents who lost the support of the military usually lost the Presidency … LBJ and Nixon because of their failure in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter’s presidency (1977-81) was marked by his failures in Iran hostage crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, the Nicaraguan Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Some of the most successful Presidents threw the United States into military adventures like Vietnam and Afghanistan). It was the Presidents who were in power defeats in these conflicts (Viet Cong, Taliban) that were impeached (Nixon, Trump)
Yet, in 1979, his administration normalised the coup in Chile against the democratically elected Salvador Allende. The Pinochet regime in Chile was supported by the Carter Presidency despite its dictators abusing human rights, torture of thousands, and even the killing of an American diplomat.
Carter also wrote a fictional account of the American War of Independence from a Southern perspective. From memory it was quite an interesting book because it portrayed the interests of Imperial Spain and France as well as England . Jimmy Carter was a former governor of Georgia.
Ian Curr
31 December 2024