American Life, Poverty and Homelessness: Homeless Man Serving America’s Top Politicians
By Wadner Pierre
The Washington Post Catherine Rampell wrote an article picturing a 63-year-old African-American, Charles Gladden, who works at one of the nation’s most prestigious buildings, the Capitol Hill. He serves some of the country’s most powerful politicians, cleans their trash, but he is homeless and can barely afford necessary treatment for his illness.
Gladden has been spending his nights at the McPherson Square Metro Station located 2, 000 feet from the White House according to Rampell. Gladden admitted that he made mistakes in the past when he dropped out of college, and ended up in prison for breaking the law. “The reasons are complicated. He [Gladden] said he has made decisions he regrets — not least leaving George Washington University, where he’d been studying fine arts on a scholarship,” wrote Rampell.
Like millions of Americans, constantly questioning people they send to Washington to represent them, Gladden also questioned lawmakers’s knowledge on the state of poverty in America. For him, the answer is NO. “Our lawmakers, they don’t even realize what’s going on right beneath their feet,” he said. “They don’t have a clue,” he told Post reporter. Obviously, the lawmakers either know, but ignore this embarrassing fact, or they don’t. Because if they do know, what have they done to end it?
According to a 2013 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Report “…in 2013, there were 610,042 people experiencing homelessness in the United States, including 394,698 people who were homeless in sheltered locations and 215,344 people who were living in unsheltered locations.”
The Hill reported that Pentagon spent $400 billion for its costly “fleet of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.” Using the 2013 USHUD report on the state of homeless in the U.S., Think Progress states, “With the full amount spent on the F-35 at its disposal, the U.S. could afford to purchase every person on the streets a $664,000 home.” Thus, the U.S. government can end the homelessness phenomena in America.
Gladden’s story is the story of thousands, perhaps millions of hard working Americans who work two jobs and still are unable to put food on the table, afford healthcare and save to send their children to college.
Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money FromFamilies Tied To Death Squads
By
The Huffington Post
In 1983, Bill Bain asked Mitt Romney
to launch Bain Capital, a private equity offshoot of the successful consulting
firm Bain & Company. After some initial reluctance, Romney agreed. The new
job came with a stipulation: Romney couldn't raise money from any current
clients, Bain said, because if the private equity venture failed, he didn't
want it taking the consulting firm down with it.
When Romney struggled to raise funds
from other traditional sources, he and his partners started thinking outside
the box. Bain executive Harry Strachan suggested that Romney meet with a group
of Central American oligarchs who were looking for new investment vehicles as
turmoil engulfed their region.
Romney was worried that the
oligarchs might be tied to "illegal drug money, right-wing death squads,
or left-wing terrorism," Strachan later told a Boston Globe
reporter, as quoted in the 2012 book "The Real Romney." But, pressed
for capital, Romney pushed his concerns aside and flew to Miami in mid-1984 to
meet with the Salvadorans at a local bank.
It was a lucrative trip. The Central
Americans provided roughly $9 million -- 40 percent -- of Bain Capital's
initial outside funding, the Los Angeles Times reported
recently. And they became valued clients.
"Over the years, these Latin
American friends have loyally rolled over investments in succeeding funds, actively
participated in Bain Capital's May investor meetings, and are still today one
of the largest investor groups in Bain Capital," Strachan wrote in his
memoir in 2008. Strachan declined to be interviewed for this story.
When Romney launched another venture
that needed funding -- his first presidential campaign -- he returned to Miami.
"I owe a great deal to
Americans of Latin American descent," he said at a dinner in Miami
in 2007. "When I was starting my business, I came to Miami to find
partners that would believe in me and that would finance my enterprise. My
partners were Ricardo Poma, Miguel Dueñas, Pancho Soler, Frank Kardonski, and
Diego Ribadeneira."
Romney could also have thanked
investors from two other wealthy and powerful Central American clans -- the de
Sola and Salaverria families, who the Los Angeles Times and Boston
Globe have reported were founding investors in Bain Capital.
While they were on the lookout for
investments in the United States, members of some of these prominent families
-- including the Salaverria, Poma, de Sola and Dueñas clans -- were also at the
time financing, either directly or through political parties, death squads in
El Salvador. The ruling classes were deploying the death squads to beat back
left-wing guerrillas and reformers during El Salvador's civil war.
The death squads committed
atrocities on such a mass scale for so small a country that their killing spree
sparked international condemnation. From 1979 to 1992, some 75,000 people were
killed in the Salvadoran civil war, according to the United Nations. In 1982,
two years before Romney began raising money from the oligarchs, El Salvador's
independent Human Rights Commission reported that, of the
35,000 civilians killed, "most" died at the hands of death squads. A United Nations truth commission
concluded in 1993 that 85 percent of the acts of violence were perpetrated by
the right, while the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which
was supported by the Cuban government, was responsible for 5 percent.
When The Huffington Post asked the
Romney campaign about Bain Capital accepting funds from families tied to death
squads, a spokeswoman forwarded a 1999 Salt Lake Tribune article to
explain the campaign's position on the matter. She declined to comment further.
"Romney confirms Bain had
investors in El Salvador. But, as was Bain's policy with any big investor, they
had the families checked out as diligently as possible," the Tribune
wrote. "They uncovered no unsavory links to drugs or other criminal
activity."
Nobody with a basic understanding of
the region's history could believe that assertion.
By 1984, the media had thoroughly
exposed connections between the death squads and the Salvadoran oligarchy,
including the families that invested with Romney. The sitting U.S. ambassador
to El Salvador charged that several families, including at least one that
invested with Bain, were living in Miami and directly funding death squads. Even
by 1981, El Salvador's elite, largely relocated to Miami, were so angered by
the public perception that they were financing death squads that they reached
out to the media to make their case. The two men put forward to
represent the oligarchs were both from families that would invest in Bain three
years later. The most cursory review of their backgrounds would have turned up
the ties.
The connection between the families
involved with Bain's founding and those who financed death squads was made by
the Boston Globe in 1994 and the Salt Lake Tribune in 1999. This
election cycle, Salon first raised the
issue in January, and the Los Angeles Times filled out more of the record earlier this
month.
There is no shortage of unsavory
links. Even the Tribune article referred to by the Romney campaign
reports that "about $6.5 million of $37 million that established the
company came from wealthy El Salvadoran families linked to right-wing death
squads."
The Salaverria family, whose
fortune came from producing cotton and coffee, had deep connections to the
right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), a political party that
death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson founded in the fall of 1981. The year
before, El Salvador's government had pushed through land reforms and
nationalized the coffee trade, moves that threatened a ruling class whose
financial and political dominance was built in large part on growing coffee.
ARENA controlled and directed death squads during its early years.
On March 24, 1980, Oscar Romero, the
archbishop of San Salvador and an advocate of the poor, was celebrating Mass at
a chapel in a small hospital when he was assassinated on D'Aubuisson's orders,
according to a person involved in the murder who later came forward.
The day before, Romero, an immensely
popular figure, had called on the country's soldiers to refuse the government's
orders to attack fellow Salvadorans.
"Before another killing order
is given," he advised in his sermon, "the law of God must prevail:
Thou shalt not kill."
In 1984, Robert White, the former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, named two Salaverria brothers -- Julio and Juan Ricardo -- as two of six Salvadoran exiles in Miami who had directly funded death squads, repeating in sworn congressional testimony a claim he'd made earlier as ambassador. The group became known as the "Miami Six." White testified that a source close to the Miami Six had notified the U.S. embassy of their activities in January 1981.
White was pushed out of his job by
the incoming Reagan administration in 1981; he was considered insufficiently
supportive of the Salvadoran ruling class. (D'Aubuisson endorsed Ronald Reagan in
1984.) When contacted by phone recently, White reiterated his claim about the
Salaverria brothers, but said he couldn't reveal his source's identity in order
to protect the source.
"The Salaverria family were
very well-known as backers of D'Aubuisson," White told The Huffington
Post. "These guys were big-money contributors. ... They were total backers
of D'Aubuisson and the extremist solution, including death squads."
Alfonso Salaverria was a close
associate of Orlando de Sola, a leading death-squad figure, and, like him,
supported D'Aubuisson.
The Salaverria family also violently
resisted land reform efforts. When the Salvadoran government seized about 140
of the country's largest farms in March 1980, 73-year-old Raul Salaverria was
the only landowner to openly resist, the Washington Post reported at the
time. A brief exchange of gunfire between government forces and Salaverria's
people resulted in two injuries, and 1,500 weapons were allegedly found on the
property.
Eight years later, workers in an
agrarian reform co-operative whose land once belonged to the Salaverrias barely
escaped an assassination attempt. "Members of the co-op suspect the former
owners, the Salaverria family, were behind the violence," a 1988 Human
Rights Watch report said. The family denied involvement.
Francisco de Sola and his cousin, Herbert Arturo de Sola, also
invested early in Bain, according to the Los Angeles Times. Two other
members of the de Sola family were "limited partners," according to
the Boston Globe, but the Romney campaign declined to provide The
Huffington Post with their names. The de Sola family was one of El Salvador's
most powerful coffee growers and a financier of the ARENA party.
Herbert's brother was the notorious
Orlando de Sola, who resisted the peace negotiations toward the end of the
civil war. The Romney campaign acknowledges Orlando de Sola's connection to
death squads but insists he is not representative of the de Sola family
investors. While Romney told the Tribune in 1999 that the backgrounds of
the families had been checked diligently, he had explained to the Boston
Globe in 1994 that Bain's due diligence included only the backgrounds of
the individual investors, not their family members. "We investigated the
individuals' integrity and looked for any obvious signs of illegal activity and
problems in their background, and found none. We did not investigate in-laws
and relatives." Deflecting the association with Orlando, Strachan, whom
Romney had charged with vetting the investors, described him that same year to
the Globe as "the black sheep of the family. ... He was kicked out
of the family business."
Yet there is strong evidence that
Orlando was anything but a black sheep in the de Sola family. Indeed, he was a
leading public face of the Salvadoran elites in Miami, speaking, for example, on behalf of the El
Salvador Freedom Foundation, the organization which arranged a U.S. press
conference for D'Aubuisson as part of its public relations activities on behalf
of the oligarchs and ARENA. An Associated Press story from April
1981 includes Orlando de Sola and Alfonso Salaverria speaking on
behalf of the oligarchs in exile. The story also makes reference to White's
charges regarding the funding of death squads, indicating that the charges were
already well known by that point.
But the ties run deeper still. In
1990, Orlando de Sola, D'Aubuisson and founding Bain investor Francisco de Sola
allegedly assassinated two left-wing activists then in Guatemala, according to
a report by that country's government,
which cited its intelligence sources. The activists had just held a meeting
with then-Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who was attempting to broker a Salvadoran
peace deal.
Francisco de Sola later pleaded his and his cousin Orlando's
innocence to the U.S. ambassador. The Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights looked further into the killings and concluded that elements of
the Salvadoran right were indeed the mostly likely assassins, but said that it
couldn't confirm the guilt of the de Solas or D'Aubuisson. It deemed the
investigation incomplete and called for a deeper look. The three men were never
charged.
Francisco de Sola is now president
of the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development. His
assistant, Ada Chang, said that he was traveling and unavailable to comment,
but she confirmed to HuffPost that he had been accused of murdering the two
leftists in 1990. Whether he committed the crime or not, the fact that
Guatemalan intelligence would associate him with Orlando de Sola and
D'Aubuisson, and place them in Guatemala together, casts further doubt on
Strachan's claim that Orlando de Sola was merely a "black sheep" who
had been "kicked out of the family business."
Orlando de Sola, who is serving an
unrelated prison sentence for fraud, told the Los Angeles Times that he
did not personally benefit from the Bain investments. "I would say their
relationship with Bain Capital was a step to diversify into foreign
investments," he said of his family.
Ricardo Poma was the first investor Romney thanked when he traveled to
Miami in 2007. The head of the Poma Group, he became one of the three members
of the Bain Capital investment committee, according to Strachan's memoir. The
Poma family were financiers of D'Aubuisson's ARENA party.
The Regalado-Dueñas family,
like many of El Salvador's other powerful clans, amassed much of their wealth
and political power through the coffee industry. Along with the Alvarez family,
they also helped to found Banco Comercial, one of the biggest banks in El
Salvador.
The Regalado-Dueñas and Alvarez
families were leading supporters of ARENA. Arturo Dueñas "regularly supplied"
the head of an ARENA-affiliated "paramilitary unit ... with a variety of
official Salvadoran documents," according to a redacted 1984 CIA document, which uses the euphemism
for death squad. (Salvadoran government documents were used by death squads to
assemble lists of people to kill.)
Miguel Dueñas and Ricardo Poma did
not respond to requests for comment. The Salaverria brothers are dead,
according to Ambassador White.
Jeffery Paige, author of
"Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central
America" and a professor at the University of Michigan, has studied the
political economy of Central American oligarchies. Romney's claim to have
checked out the backgrounds of the families and come away satisfied befuddles
Paige.
"These people benefited from
one of the most exploitative and repressive agricultural systems in Latin
America. That's why they had a revolution," Paige said. "This money,
certainly there wasn't much concern where it came from and what these people
had done to make that money."
Sergio Bendixen, who now does
polling for President Barack Obama, spent a significant amount of time in El
Salvador in the early '80s, doing political polling for Univision. He said that
he met D'Aubuisson on many occasions and found him to be one of the warmest,
most charming and charismatic people he has ever met. But he said D'Aubuisson
was also very upfront about what he saw as the justifiable use of death squads.
"There were 10 or 30 bodies in
the street every morning," Bendixen recalled of his time there.
"D'Aubuisson said it was necessary. The message needed to be sent [that]
if you were associated with the communists or socialists, you had to be killed.
He said it was an instrument in keeping the violence down, because others would
see the consequences."
Bendixen suggested that a cursory
look would have shown Romney what those families were involved with. "If
anybody tries to tell you there was a line, a Chinese wall, between ARENA and
the death squads, that's just not the way it was," he said.
The Salvadoran elite in Miami talked
openly at the time, he said, of supporting the death squads battling the
rebels. It wasn't a source of shame, Bendixen recalled, but a source of pride.
"They were proud of the fact that they were supporting their country
against the communists," he said.
As Romney now seeks support from the
Latino community in his campaign for president, his knowledge of Bain's
all-too-few degrees of separation from Salvadoran death squads may become a
topic of interest.
"Under Ronald Reagan, the U.S.
sent billions of dollars to the murderous regime, which utilized that aid to
fund the military and death squads in an effort to preserve the unjust privileges
of the Salvadoran oligarchy," said Arturo J. Viscarra, an immigration
lawyer, who, like many other Salvadorans, emigrated to the United States in
order to escape the civil war. He said his family left the country in 1980
after his father began receiving death threats.
"To now learn that a man that
may become president of the U.S. deserves some of his success due to the
incredible inequality that the U.S. helped to preserve in El Salvador is
ironic," Viscarra said. "It's morbidly funny.”
The U.S. involvement in the
bloodshed is now seen as a black mark on the nation's record. When President
Obama visited Central America in March 2011, he made a symbolic stop at
Romero's grave, lighting a candle for the archbishop.
Romney, however, has shown no public
remorse for signing up such investors, although the concept of culpability is
not foreign to him. When he returned to Miami in 2007, he condemned those who
had financed torture and other human rights abuses during the Salvadoran civil
war -- just not those he was connected to.
"These friends didn't just help
me; they taught me," Romney said. "Ricardo's brother had been
tortured and murdered by rebel terrorists in El Salvador. Miguel himself had
been chained to a floor in Guatemala for weeks and tortured. And their
torturers were financed by Fidel Castro. I learned from these friends about the
human cost when Castro has money."
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