It's become fashionable in some circles this week to denounce the newly buried George. H.W. Bush as a war criminal, but that seems gratuitous. After all, from a technical standpoint, what American president isn't a war criminal? It's probably a short list.

Thanks to the invasion(s) of Iraq, the bombing of civilians in places like Cambodia and Laos, Guantanamo Bay/torture, the overthrow of numerous democratically elected foreign regime, and support of repressive states like Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, "war criminal" is kind of a weak accusation to throw at a commander-in-chief.

We've had a few presidents that would have proudly tattooed the term on their pecs or had it emblazoned on their limo flags. In this sense, George H.W. "Poppy" Bush didn't particularly stand out, compared to his son least of all.

If anything, the defining characteristic of the elder Bush is that he didn't really have one - at least, not as a politician. There's evidence that as a Navy pilot he showed considerable bravery and ingenuity. He came from a generation when children of the very rich still fought in the wars their parents arranged to enter, and Poppy flew real combat planes by the age of 19, escaping probable death by cannibalism in one remarkable episode. > He also supposedly had a legit 11 handicap, which isn't bad for a president. Only Jack Kennedy and, oddly enough, Donald Trump are said to have better scores. (Trump is actually a crack golfer despite an even-for-presidents bad rep for cheating.)

For most of his political life, George Herbert Walker Bush was basically the unimaginative proxy for other powerful interests. He was always the front man for the fellas at the club, be it Skull and Bones or the CIA (he retains the dubious distinction of being the only spy head to become president). He excelled in this brute-behind-the-scenes role.

But once fashioning himself as something other than Ronald Reagan's wingman, politics demanded he offer the national public glimpses of his personality. Sadly, he was president before he found out he didn't really have one.

This would have been fine, if he'd been a more confident person. But Bush was not satisfied to be remembered as a dull imperial steward, and his flailing efforts to carve out a macho personal myth on par with Reagan or Kennedy marred both his presidency and large swaths of the planet.

Unable to let insults stand, he dreamed up stunt after stunt in an attempt to counter Heathers-style media taunts that grew out of inside jokes circulated in Washington during the Reagan years.

His presidency turned into an endless cycle: Bush would do something goofy/out of touch, the press would bash his brains in for it and he'd overreact, often by having someone bombed or jailed.

Here are the top five moments in this progression:

1. The "manhood problem"

In the age of Trump, it looks like a misdemeanor, but people forget Poppy was a pioneer of fake news. A key moment came in his October 12th, 1984 debate against congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro.

Bush seemed to resent being thrust into the role of first male to debate a woman on the presidential stage. A Bonesman to the core, that wasn't the history he wanted to make. He was hyper-aggressive throughout, and in a key moment, over-reached factually. Referring to the deaths of Marines in Beirut at the hands of terrorists, Bush said:

"For somebody to suggest, as our two opponents have... these men died in shame - they better not tell the parents of those young Marines."

But neither Ferraro nor Walter Mondale had ever uttered anything of the sort. Ferraro pounced, saying, "No one has ever said that those young men who were killed through the negligence of this Administration and others ever died in shame."

Mondale labeled the accusation "unpardonable" and demanded an apology. The take-cornered Veep refused.

The day after the debate, Bush gave an address to a bunch of longshoremen in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was overheard saying, "I tried to kick a little ass." If you believe Kitty Kelley's account in The Family, this is what happened next:

Hours later his staff showed up on the press plane wearing buttons that said, "We kicked a little ass." Some reporters started calling the Vice President "Kick-Ass George," others wore hats made of jockstraps.

A few days later, Barbara Bush, while engaged in what the New York Times described as "banter" with reporters, said Ferraro was a "four-million-dollar - I can't say it, but it rhymes with rich." Poppy's press secretary, Peter Teeley, said Ferraro was "too bitchy."

It was absurd enough that the former Yale first baseman fled to the company of longshoremen after his debate with Ferraro, but things got even sillier when he told the press the "kick a little ass" remark was an "old Texas football expression" that he and his children (remember that part) used "all the time."

After all this, Mondale decided to take a shot at Bush, right in the jockstrap. He said Bush >"doesn't have the manhood to apologize."

A few weeks later, the Doonesbury comic strip - which was a big deal in an age when everyone read newspapers - ran a cartoon playing on the theme of Bush's "manhood problem." Cartoonist Garry Trudeau had newsman character Roland Hedley Jr. doing a standup outside the White House, announcing, "In a White House ceremony today, Bush will formally place his embattled manhood in a blind trust."

The legend of Bush's "manhood problem" had begun. It's impossible to tally the final consequences of this series of events, but it's not crazy to suggest that our ongoing bombing of the Middle East three decades later is due at last in part to it. Because of...

2. The "wimp factor"

The Bush family never got over the Doonesbury thing. "He's been reduced to a cartoon," fumed son Jeb in a 1987 Newsweek cover story called "BUSH BATTLES THE WIMP FACTOR" that, to be fair, was one of the all-time lows in campaign journalism. The Newsweek piece was one of the worst examples of a type of campaign reporting that involves pundits formalizing the inane Beltway caricatures of politicians.

Bush throughout Reagan's presidency had been the target of razzing depicting him as a lackey, Reagan's brown-nosing yes-man, or worse. There were a lot of jokes playing on the theme of Bush "serving under Ronald Reagan," and some suggested he should add Reagan UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick to his ticket to add "machismo" for his 1988 run.

President George H.W. Bush poses for photographers after making an address to the nation on the civil disturbances in Los Angeles, California following the Rodney King verdict from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC.

After the "Wimp" cover, Doonesbury doubled down - among other things, depicting Bush as literally invisible, which caused the Bushes to overreact in historic fashion. Bush himself admitted in an interview that he wanted to "kick the hell" out of Trudeau dating back to 1984, and his sons George and Jeb actually reached out to the cartoonist, who was a Yale classmate of W. This is in Poppy's recollection:

″Trudeau says to our son, 'Well, I hope your family doesn't take this personally.' And George says, 'They don't take it personally, but my brother (Jeb) wanted to come up and kick your ass all over New York."

This all seems absurd now, but Bush spent the rest of his political career beating back the wimp/manhood thing.

He made sure the press saw him eating pork rinds on the campaign trail. He had himself photographed in a nuclear bomber. An infamous exchange with Dan Rather in January 1988 was informed by the "wimp" subtext. Rather was pursuing a legitimate line of questioning about why Bush had gone along with the monstrous Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages plan, when Bush lashed out.

"I don't think it's fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran," he said. "How would you like it if I judged your whole career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?"

Bush was referring to Rather's infamous tantrum-walkout after the CBS Evening News was shortened to finish a U.S. Open broadcast.

After the exchange with Rather, Poppy tore off his earpiece, but his mic was still on. "That guy makes Lesley Stahl look like a pussy," he barked, nonsensically, referring to the CBS journalist. He seemed to be reaching for some other insult.

Bush went on to get elected, among other things, thanks to the media deciding to launch an even more asinine "wimp" campaign against Mike Dukakis. The Duke's crime was being a small Greek man who allowed himself to be photographed in a tank.

Without the triple foils of Rather, Dukakis and "Veepette" Dan Quayle (Quayle was often depicted as a Himbo, which might have been part of the reason he was picked), George H.W. Bush might have struggled to get elected.

This was the ultimate example of how the press screws itself with its own phony narratives. Instead of answering questions about Iran-Contra and other serious issues, Bush got to run, successfully, against his own concocted "wimp" image.

In this, he was aided by speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who composed Bush's hyper-manly 1988 nomination acceptance address. Bush's speech was basically a long-winded promise to kick more little asses, but with real arms this time.

"Weakness tempts aggressors. Strength stops them," he growled. "I will not allow this country to be made weak again. Never."

His image rose with male voters after this address. Then he got elected, and started picking fights all over the place.

3. The "rite of passage"

After Bush's election, Doonesbury infuriatingly refused to stop depicting him as invisible. What the hell? Wasn't being president enough to end this intransigence?

In December 1989, Bush invaded Panama, ostensibly to capture former American client/human rights monster Manuel Noriega. The New York Times cheered Bush for going through the "rite of passage" of the presidency, which involved "a need to demonstrate the willingness to shed blood."

The paper was one of many to describe the invasion as a triumph over both Newsweek and Doonesbury:

For President Bush... a man still portrayed in the Doonesbury comic strip as the invisible President - showing his steel had a particular significance.

The Ottawa Citizen ran a typically Canadian series of articles about the military action, focusing as foreigners sometimes do on things like the deaths of actual people. "Fearful civilians run for cover," read one December 21st, 1989 headline, describing "women and children" out on the streets fleeing in terror during shoreline bombing. At the bottom of the page there was a blunt picture of Poppy over the caption: "Wimp label gone."

But bombing a few Panamanians wasn't enough. People simply refused to forget certain episodes, like the time Poppy was overheard asking for just another "splash" of coffee. His efforts to "rub off" what the New York Times euphemistically called "the Patina" never stopped.

Even within his own party, Bush was still getting it, even after Panama. In 1990, columnist George Will accused the Bush administration of "intellectual and moral flaccidity" and worried about "the sagging of America into a peripheral role abroad."

George Will using the words "flaccid" and "sagging" is about as profane as country club Republicanism used to get. In a later insult, Will's brother-by-another-overused-Thesaurus, William Safire, ripped an insufficiently aggressive Bush address about the collapse of the Soviet Union as the "Chicken Kiev" speech.

Bush then invaded Iraq. In an act of breathtaking pettiness and self-involvement, he chose Newsweek as the venue to explain to Americans why their sons and daughters were being sent to get shot halfway around the world. "Why We Are In The Gulf," was published in November 1990, about 10 months after George Will metaphorically accused him of having a soft penis. About half-a-year later, the president appeared at the Malibu home of Jerry Weintraub, producer of The Karate Kid. He also played a round of golf that day with his ex-boss Reagan at the Sherwood Country Club, where, as the Times noted, "the tee markers are little brass archers." After the game, he told reporters he was still pissed about the Newsweek thing.

"You're talking to the 'wimp,'" he said. "You're talking to the guy that had a cover of a national magazine, that I'll never forgive, put that label on me."

In the end, Bush finally got some pop culture credit for being a mean dirtbag. The Simpsons had him wrestling Homer in a drain pipe, with Bush saying: "If he thinks George Bush will stay out of the sewer, he doesn't know George Bush!"

Bush once sent a poor black kid to a real prison for real years for the crime of being a political prop.

In the summer of 1989, while vacationing avec speedboat in his Kennebunkport, Maine, estate, Bush came up with the brilliant idea, or at least acceded to one dreamed up by aides. He would do a live address to the country while holding up a bag of crack that had been sold just outside the White House. The idea was to show that crack could "be bought anywhere."

The problem was, nobody sold crack in Lafayette Square near the White House, which is where Bush aides wanted the crack found. There is a long backstory here that involves administration officials tasking the DEA with securing a bust near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They ended up having an undercover agent contact an 18-year-old named Keith Jackson from a poor neighborhood in southeast Washington. He was asked to bring his wares to the White House.

"Where the fuck is the White House?" he asked.

"We had to manipulate him to get him down there," a DEA agent later admitted. "It wasn't easy."

Bush ended up doing his idiotic address to the nation about the dangers of crack. It had pretty much the opposite effect of what he intended.

Almost immediately, Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live did a mock Oval Office speech that savaged Bush, prefacing the crack tale by telling audiences he'd been "doing loop-de-loops" in his speedboat in Kennebunkport and not catching anything while fishing ("not... the... point!" Carvey quipped). Carvey then pulled out a giant bag of "coke" which, he joked, had been sold "three feet from this desk."

I had to research this incident for a book about the late Eric Garner called I Can't Breathe (Garner was also busted for crack dealing around that time), and one of the amazing and underreported aspects of this case was that Jackson, who was clearly entrapped in the most absurd fashion, ended up doing eight years in prison so that Bush could have his stupid photo op.

The federal judge in the case, Stanley Sporkin, wanted desperately to not impose a stiff sentence on Jackson, but - in a problem none of the Bush aides who cooked up this dumb scheme thought of - mandatory sentencing laws handcuffed Sporkin. So the kid was sentenced to 10 years (he was later paroled). Sporkin, a former CIA general counsel appointed by Reagan, suggested Jackson ask Bush for a pardon:

"He used you, in the sense of making a big drug speech... But he's a decent man, a man of great compassion. Maybe he can find a way to reduce at least some of that sentence."

Bush blew that off and instead issued pardons to six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Day in 1992.

5. The apple

It is absolutely logical to blame George H.W. Bush for the catastrophes of his son's presidency.

For one thing, Poppy surely helped get Bush The Younger elected, by being part of a narrative that made W look human. A lot of the male campaign reporters liked W because, as a reporter put it to me once in '04, "Hey, the guy had a dick for a father."

If you want an example of how that reality impacted the thinking of even Bush's harshest critics, watch Oliver Stone's W. By the end, the film has you rooting for the try-hard cheerleader forced by fate to swim upstream against King Daddy's sneering disdain over things like not being able to hold down a real job before the age of 40. The opening line of the W. trailer is Poppy's voice, played by master character actor James Cromwell, sneering at his disappointing heir, "If I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job."

George W Bush on Inauguration Day talking with his father, George HW Bush in the Oval Office of the White House.

"Hey, I can be a crappy president, too!"

As bitterly as W wanted to outdo his Dad - particularly by winning re-election and conquering all of Iraq - he had been even more offended by the "Wimp Factor" piece than his father. When the Rather episode happened in 1988, young W reportedly stormed into his Dad's campaign headquarters yelling, "Macho! Macho!"

When he himself became president, W basically set fire to the Middle East in defiance of "moderates" like Colin Powell, in order to show everyone how not-flaccid the Bushes were. The fact that Saddam Hussein "tried to kill my Dad" was somehow openly a factor in all of this.

W's belief that his father's failure to take Baghdad and topple Saddam had cost him re-election in 1992 - ironically, Bush's own son believed his Dad to be a wimp about that - was a major reason we ended up occupying the whole country, for years, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives at the very least.

The younger Bush - said to be aggrieved both by the "Wimp Factor" charge and by Daddy's vacillating stances between gunboat diplomacy and a "kindler and gentler" nation - made being "decisive" the cornerstone of his moronic presidency.

We now know his father disagreed with his son about Iraq. Characteristically he was too passive-aggressive to confront him head-on, reportedly using a Brent Scowcroft editorial to express his doubts about junior's military misadventures.

Years later, we not only are still in the Middle East, but have a Star Wars-style permanent garrison of bases with which we've droned and bombed the region more or less uninterruptedly since the early 2000s.

Poppy's last act, in death, was to be elevated to icon status by the same Democrat-neocon alliance that turned the funeral of John McCain into something like a national religious rite.

Since one of Donald Trump's defining characteristics is his lack of reverence for anyone who's not himself, the establishment-in-exile has made Trump's lack of public prostration before Poppy's corpse another unforgivable blow to the dignity of Washingtonhood.

Brian Krassenstein of the flying #Resistance Krassensteins notes that Poppy once cursed at the TV at the sight of Trump, so "I like George H.W. Bush even more now." (Why did you like him before?)

And the Washington Post went ape because Trump didn't recite the Apostles' Creed as part of the interminable Soviet-style funeral ceremonies of this week.

The paper said Trump stood, "lips not moving," while all the other dignitaries paid homage to the fallen patriarch. This was likely because Trump is an ignoramus and didn't know he was supposed to read, or maybe he's not actually religious, or maybe he was thinking about his next cheeseburger - whatever, it became a thing. Once again, Poppy was elevated by a less-popular foil.

Bush the elder had some decent qualities, or at least relatable ones. He served his country bravely and was famous for the thoughtful notes he sent to almost everyone, demonstrating a memory for people that would be commendable in the social director of a cruise liner, or the president of a charity.

Bush's problem was that he was totally ruthless about pursuing real power without much of a clue why - "the vision thing." To win an election he sank to Trumpian lows with the Willie Horton episode, even as his reasons for running seemed elusive.

He's being elevated this week, among other things as a way of taking a shot at Trump by comparison. But let's not confuse that with George H.W. Bush being a great president. He was kind of a hack, actually. In fact, maybe the most special thing about him was a lack of a sense of humor so extreme, people may have lost their lives to it.

(c) 2018 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

In the spirit of a new year and a new Congress, 2019 may well be our best and last opportunity to steer our ship of state away from the twin planetary perils of environmental chaos and militarism, charting a course towards an earth-affirming 21st century.

The environmental crisis was laid bare by the sobering December report of the UN Climate panel: If the world fails to mobilize within the next 12 years on the level of a moon shot, and gear up to change our energy usage from toxic fossil, nuclear and industrial biomass fuels to the already known solutions for employing solar, wind, hydro, geothermal energy and efficiency, we will destroy all life on earth as we know it. The existential question is whether our elected officials, with the reins of power, are going to sit by helplessly as our planet experiences more devastating fires, floods, droughts, and rising seas or will they seize this moment and take monumental action as we did when the United States abolished slavery, gave women the vote, ended the great depression, and eliminated legal segregation.

Some members of Congress are already showing their historic mettle by supporting a Green New Deal. This would not only start to reverse the damage we have inflicted on our collective home, but it would create hundreds of thousands of good jobs that cannot be shipped overseas to low wage countries.

Even those congresspeople who want to seriously address the climate crisis, however, fail to grapple with the simultaneous crisis of militarism. The war on terror unleashed in the wake of the 911 terrorist attack has led to almost two decades of unchecked militarism. We are spending more money on our military than at any time in history. Endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere are still raging, costing us trillions of dollars and creating humanitarian disasters. Old treaties to control nuclear arms are unraveling at the same time that conflicts with the major powers of Russia and China are heating up.

Where is the call for the New Peace Deal that would free up hundreds of billions from the overblown military budget to invest in green infrastructure? Where is the call to close a majority of our nation's over 800 military bases overseas, bases that are relics of World War II and are basically useless for military purposes? Where is the call for seriously addressing the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons?

Demonstrators highlighted the enormous and negative impact of the U.S. military during the 2014 People's Climate March in New York City.

Environmentalists need to contest the Pentagon's staggering global footprint. The US military is the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and the largest source of greenhouse gasses, contributing about 5 percent of global warming emissions. Almost 900 of the EPA's 1,300 Superfund sites are abandoned military bases, weapons-production facilities or weapons-testing sites. The former Hanford nuclear weapons facility in Washington state alone will cost over $100 billion to clean up.

If climate change is not addressed rapidly by a Green New Deal, global militarism will ramp up in response to increases in climate refugees and civil destabilization, which will feed climate change and seal a vicious cycle fed by the twin evils militarism and climate disruption. That's why a New Peace Deal and a Green New Deal should go hand in hand. We cannot afford to waste our time, resources and intellectual capital on weapons and war when climate change is barreling down on all of humankind. If the nuclear weapons don't destroy us than the pressing urgency of catastrophic climate will.

Moving from an economic system that relies on fossil fuels and violence would enable us to make a just transition to a clean, green, life-supporting energy economy. This would be the quickest and most positive way to deal a death knell to the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about so many years ago.

Chicago's movement against official lawlessness has found they have no choice but to challenge virtually the whole Black Democratic establishment for collaborating with police oppression.

Chicago plans to show the nation how to combine grassroots militancy and strategic electoral campaigns in the fight against police tyranny and impunity. It is a struggle that requires direct confrontation with an entrenched and infinitely corrupt Black Misleadership Class that, in Chicago as elsewhere in Black America, has shamelessly collaborated with the Mass Black Incarceration State.

Black activists and their allies aim to channel the momentum of their stunning success in gaining a second-degree murder conviction against the cop that killed 17-year old Laquan McDonald, into a renewed campaign for community control of the police. At present, only one member of the 50-person Chicago board of alderman -- Carlos Ramirez-Rosa - supports creation of C-PAC, an entirely Civilian Police Accountability Council to be elected by the people of the city's 25 police districts. But, rather than despair at the Black and Latino Caucus's betrayal, the mass movement is launching a campaign to eject them from office in next year's elections. "We're gonna change that city council," said Frank Chapman, head of the Chicago branch of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. "They are so entrenched, they are so corrupted by the system, that they don't believe it can be changed. They've been completely won over by the ruling class in this city. The only way to wake them up is by defeating them," Chapman told Black Agenda Radio.

Chapman's Alliance and its allies in Black Lives Matter and other grassroots mobilizers believe the time is ripe to throw out the collaborators and to "take the power from the police and put that power in the hands of the community." Officer Jason Van Dyke's October 5 conviction for pumping 16 bullets into Laquan McDonald "gives the people hope," said Chapman. "In the history of Chicago this is the first time that a white police officer has been charged and convicted for murdering a Black person, while on duty.... It lets people know that we can bring about a change in the power relationships in the system between the oppressor and the oppressed, if those of us who are oppressed get together, get united and fight. We needed a victory like this to give some encouragement and hope, so we can keep this motion going on."

The C-PAC legislation would empower the elected police district representatives to:

* Re-writing the police 'rulebook' deciding what Chicago police can do on the streets.

* Appoint the Superintendent of Police.

* Investigate ALL complaints, including all police shootings, all allegations of police misconduct and violations of the U.S. Constitution and Human Rights Law.

* Refer cases to U.S. Federal Grand Jury and U.S. Attorney seeking indictments of cops for the crimes they commit, circumventing the closed loop of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office and the Chicago Police Department.

* Decide the rules of investigations and change the way police crime victims and family members are treated, increasing speed and transparency.

"As of right now we have over a dozen candidates for city council that are running as C-PAC candidates. We believe that by January we can have this number up to 70. There are 200 candidates running, all told. We think we can get 70 of them to support C-PAC."

The Chicago Teachers Union "is one of our big supporters." Said Chapman. "They endorse our campaign for C-PAC, and we endorse their campaign for community control of the board of education." The United Electrical Workers and SEIU Local 73 "have been behind us," but "there's a lot of others that are on the fence. The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists is behind us in words. I wish they would do more in terms of actually putting some pressure on the aldermen."

In general, Big Labor has been a disappointment to the Black movement. "In spite of what [AFL-CIO president Richard L.] Trumpka said during the Ferguson uprising, about how the unions should be supportive of the Black Liberation Movement, we haven't seen any evidence of that here in Chicago with the Chicago Federation of Labor," said Chapman. "They haven't come out in support of us because the Fraternal Order of Police.is part of that federation, and they're using that union card to paralyze the rest of the trade union movement from supporting us."

The Black grassroots movement takes credit for discouraging Mayor Rahm Emanuel from seeking another term in office. For 400 days, Emanuel hid the existence of video tapes that ultimately convinced the jury that Officer Van Dyke deserved to be convicted of murder. Chapman blames the bulk of the board of aldermen for collaborating in the mayor's cover-up. "We have one of the most corrupt city councils in this nation, and the Black aldermen are included," he said.

"There are 34 alderpeople who were all part of the conspiracy to hide the video," Black Lives Matter activist Aislinn Pulley told Black Agenda Radio. Black Lives Matter's Chicago chapter is committed to the electoral campaign. Some other Black Lives Matter chapters across the country have not joined with similar efforts to create community-empowering bodies to assert control over the police, instead advocating de-funding and abolition of the police. Chapman has a response to that position. "I'm a communist," he says, "so I believe in the abolition of the state. But that's not gonna happen right now, but they're killing us right now. And so, we can share the vision with them of abolition. But they need to share the struggle with us, right now, to shift the power relationship between the police and our communities, by demanding community control of the police. That's a democratic demand, and we can't put it off until the future. We've got to fight for it right now."

What Chapman and Pulley did not say, but is central to the dilemma, is that all of these collaborators and allies of the police are Democrats. The Black Mass Incarceration State, erected as the ruling class answer to the Black Liberation Movement's self-determinationist demands, has been relentlessly reinforced by a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats. In the cities where most Black people live, it is largely Black Democratic administrations that have enforced the mass Black incarceration regime for two generations, as documented by James Forman Jr's indispensable book, Locking Up Our Own. In 2014, just weeks before Mike Brown was murdered by a Ferguson, Missouri, cop, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus -- all Democrats - voted to continue the Pentagon's infamous 1033 program that has funneled billions of dollars in battle-grade weapons and military gear to local police departments. Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president, increased the Pentagon's militarization of local police 24-fold between 2008 and 2014.

The advent of the Black Lives Matter movement had no meaningful effect on Black Caucus. In May of this year, 75 percent of the Black lawmakers voted for the Protect and Serve Act of 2018, a "Blue Lives Matter" bill that makes cops a "protected class" and defines assaults on police as "hate crimes" carrying additional prison time.

Donald Trump has branded himself the "law and order" president, but clearly, there can be no reversal of the mass Black incarceration regime -- a human rights abomination that has created the world's biggest police state and mangled social relationships beyond measure in Black America - without an all-out struggle against the enemy within the Black community. And they are all Democrats. If electoral strategies are to have any usefulness to the Black Liberation Movement, it must be understood that the white corporate ruling class has thoroughly infiltrated Black politics through the mechanisms of the Democratic Party, which has annexes in Black civic associations, fraternities and sororities, and the churches. You can't fight The Man or his police unless you neutralize and defeat his Black henchmen and women.

Frank Chapman gets it. If virtually the entire Chicago board of aldermen is in league with the enemy, then they all have to go. Liberation is an ambitious goal. The alternative is continued police impunity and community powerlessness. "So long as we allow police tyranny and terror to exist in our communities, for that period of time we will not be able to effectively organize the Black Liberation Movement. All we'll be doing is participating in nostalgia about how great it was yesterday." said Chapman. "If we don't stop this, it's gonna choke us out."

From The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin 2003)

Of the thousands of bless you and f- you messages that arrived at The Guardian papers after we broke the Florida vote swindle story in November 2000, none ruffled my editors' English reserve but one: a letter demanding we retract the article or else. It was from Carter-Ruck, a law firm with the reputation as the piranhas of England's libel bar, a favorite of foreign millionaires unhappy about their press. Their letter stated they represented Barrick Corporation - a Canadian-American gold-mining operation that employed George Bush Sr. I apologize if this photo of a burial is not as pretty as the one afforded George H. W. Bush. The corpse was pulled from the Bulyanhulu gold mine in Tanzania where 50 "jewelry" miners were buried alive to clear the gold field for sale to Barrick Gold. Barrick had hired Bush Sr. to help seal this deal and others. This photo and video was provided by Tanzanian lawyer Tundu Lissu who risked his life to get it to me and The Guardian. Barrick particularly did not like my mention of the stomach-churning evidence that Sutton Resources, a Barrick subsidiary, had buried alive as many as fifty gold miners in Tanzania in August 1996, prior to Barrick's purchase of Sutton in 1999.

What set their complaint apart from the scores of others we receive from corporations bitching and moaning about my exposes was Barrick's extraordinary demand. They did not want their denial printed (I'd done that), nor their evidence the story was wrong (I would do that too, if they would provide it). They demanded my paper apologize and pay a tiny fortune for simply mentioning the allegations first reported by Amnesty International. And even that would not be enough. Barrick also demanded we print a statement vowing that my paper had confirmed that no one was killed at the Tanzanian site. Now, I would have been more than happy to confirm that - if I had evidence to that effect. The evidence was, in so many words, "We are billionaires-and you aren't."

Lacking a first amendment, Britain has become the libel-suit capital of the world. Stories accepted elsewhere draw steep judgments in London. The Guardian papers receive notice of legal action about three times a day - that's one thousand libel notices a year. This creates a whole encyclopedia of off-limits topics, including an admonition from our legal department not to disparage the marriage of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman - sent the day after they announced their divorce. No paper can afford to defend against all these actions. The Guardian papers operate on a small budget from a not-for-profit foundation. No doubt about it, Barrick could break us in defense costs alone.

In Canada, where libel laws are similar to Britain's, Frank magazine had picked up my story. Frank swiftly grabbed its ankles by running that incredible retraction - that no one had been "killed or injured" in the mine clearance. The editor apologized to me; they simply had no resources to fight billionaires. Who could blame them? The first report of the alleged killings in Tanzania came from Amnesty International, whom I quoted. I called their headquarters in London. Courageously, Amnesty refused to help. The organization whose motto is "silence is complicity" announced that, on advice of lawyers, they would be silent. Barrick made good use of Amnesty's self-censorship. The company told the court - and the many news outlets around the world that were sniffing around the story - that Amnesty had conducted an investigation and had concluded that "no one was killed in the course of the peaceful removal of miners." If this were true, I would have retracted the story immediately. I'm not infallible, and nothing would have made me more joyous than to find out those miners were still alive. But Barrick could not produce the Amnesty clearance - no such report could be located. Amnesty said Tanzania had barred them from investigating, so the killings remained neither confirmed nor denied - in short they had never cleared Sutton Resources. But that was off the record. Publicly, the Nobel Prize-winning organization (despite several angry calls to them from Bianca Jagger) continued to hide under a desk, knees knocking.

One excellent reporter, chosen Britain's journalist of the year, told me just to sign whatever it took to get out of trouble. "That's just how it's done here." Floyd Abrams, who defends the New York Times in the United States and Europe, explained to my astonishment that the truth alone is not a defense in English courts. Photos of dead bodies and body parts in Tanzania meant nothing in our case.

I'm not a Man for All Seasons. Honestly, I was ready to go along with some kind of bum-kissing apology to Barrick, only because at the time I was living on Red Bull, potassium powder and no sleep trying to get out the Florida vote theft story, and I sure as hell didn't need another distraction.

But I had a problem. Our paper had encouraged an internationally respected expert on human rights and the environment, Tanzanian lawyer Tundu Lissu, familiar with the allegations, to go to the mine. If Lissu said no one died, I'd sign off as Barrick requested. Instead, over several missions to his home country, he sent back more witness statements, photographs of a corpse allegedly of a man killed by police during the clearing of the site, a list of the dead - and a videotape of bones, and a worker going into one pit to retrieve bodies buried, he says on the tape, by the "Canadians". (Barrick says the bodies were not from the subsidiary's mine site or, if from the site, the deaths were not the result of the clearance of the site.) In April 2001, when Barrick found out Lissu was asking questions inside the mine site, they sent him and his employer, the World Resources Institute of Washington, DC, a letter outlining a lawsuit if he repeated the allegations concerning the removal of miners.

Then it turned grim. The Tanzanian police, we learned, were hunting for Lissu. Lissu, while in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, told officials that the allegations of deaths should be investigated. Hardly an inflammatory statement; but the Tanzanian government determined that was sufficient grounds to charge him with sedition.

That's when I lost all sense of reason. I hinted that if The Guardian fabricated a lie to save a few coins, I might take action against my own newspaper for defaming me as a journalist. I'd never do it; the threat was nuts (and not exactly a career maker), but I couldn't let Lissu go to jail by going along with an easy lie. The Guardian's good moral sense slowed the rush to the usual cheap exit from a suit. However, the money clock on legal fees was ticking, making me the most expensive journalist at The Guardian papers.

Bad news. In July 2001, in the middle of trying to get out the word of the theft of the election in Florida, I was about to become the guinea pig, the test case, for an attempt by a multinational corporation to suppress free speech in the USA using British libel law. I have a U.S.-based website for Americans who can't otherwise read my columns or view my BBC television reports. The gold-mining company held my English newspaper liable for aggravated damages for my publishing the story in the USA. If I did not pull the Bush-Barrick story off my U.S. website, my paper would face a ruinously costly fight.[1]

Panicked, The Guardian legal department begged me to delete not just the English versions of the story but also my Spanish translation, printed in Bolivia. (Caramba!)

The Goldfingers didn't stop there. Barrick's lawyers told our papers that I personally would be sued in the United Kingdom over web publications of my story in America, because the web could be accessed in Britain. The success of this legal strategy would effectively annul the U.S. Bill of Rights. Speak freely in the USA, but if your words are carried on a U.S. website, you may be sued in Britain. The Declaration of Independence would be null and void, at least for libel law. Suddenly, instead of the internet becoming a means of spreading press freedom, the means to break through censorship, it would become the electronic highway for delivering repression.

And repression was winning. InterPress Services (IPS) of Washington, DC, sent a reporter to Tanzania with Lissu. They received a note from Barrick that said if the wire service ran a story that repeated the allegations, the company would sue. IPS did not run the story.

I was worried about Lissu. On July 19, 2001, a group of Tanzanian police interest lawyers wrote the nation's president asking for an investigation - instead, Lissu's law partner in Dar es Salaam was arrested. The police were hunting for Lissu. They broke into his home and office and turned them upside down looking for the names of Lissu's sources, his whereabouts and the evidence he gathered on the mine site clearance. This was more than a legal skirmish. Over the next months, demonstrations by vicims' families were broken up by police thugs. A member of Parliament joining protesters was beaten and hospitalized. I had to raise cash quick to get Lissu out, and with him, his copies of police files with more evidence of the killings. I called Maude Barlow, the "Ralph Nader of Canada", head of the Council of Canadians. Without hesitation, she teamed up with Friends of the Earth in Holland, raised funds and prepared a press conference - and in August tipped the story to The Globe & Mail, Canada's national paper.

The Toronto-based newspaper was excited: This was big news about one of the richest men about town, Barrick CEO Peter Munk - not to mention their former prime minister Brian Mulroney, George Bush, repression, greed and blood. The rule in the news biz is, if it bleeds, it leads. So they promised Maude a front-page splash if she'd hold off on her public statement.

The Globe & Mail quickly put Mark McKinnon, their best reporter, on the case. Just as quickly, they yanked him off it and told him to fly home from Africa. From page one to page nothing. Barlow was incensed at the decision of the editor. According to Barlow, the editor pleaded that it wasn't his call - the spike came from "the highest levels."

While the big shots at The Globe & Mail dove to the mat, spunky little Frank magazine effectively retracted its retraction. They'd seen a videotape with bodies - spirited out of the country by Lissu - and would not stand silent. Barrick insisted the bodies in the films were not from the mine clearance - but Frank wasn't buying.

Meanwhile, not waiting on that palsied institution, the so-called free press, to act, I issued an alert to human rights groups worldwide. The Guardian's lawyers went ballistic: In the United Kingdom, one can't complain of being sued for libel, because under their law, a paper is guilty of defamation until it proves itself innocent. Therefore, publicly defending oneself "repeats" the libel and makes the paper and reporter subject to new damages and court sanctions. Kafka had nothing on the British court system.

The pressure was on. I'm pleased to say that my editor refused to sign the abject, lying retraction - just fifteen minutes before the court-imposed deadline. He told me these encouraging words: "We are now going to spend hundreds of thousands on some fucking meaningless point you are trying to make. I hope you are happy."