Vs. the Pope and the Good Guys
Thugs are defined as bullies or depicted as street muggers. Some are more sophisticated.
Cal Thomas is one of America's most ubiquitous conservative journalists. His newspaper column is nationally syndicated by Tribune Content Agency. He is, of course, a regular on Fox News. Even America's top daily newspaper, USA Today, affords Mr. Thomas a major weekly forum. But he is, by my definition, a thug because he obviously believes there should be more inequality between the worlds rich and poor, the haves and have-nots. As far as Mr. Thomas is concerned, he believes the ultra-rich are not rich enough and the ultra-poor are not poor enough. And that's a thuggish belief...in my opinion.
Being a media insider camouflages Cal Thomas's thuggish tendencies. His nationally syndicated column on May 14-2014 erroneously and brazenly assailed Pope Francis who has, to Mr. Thomas's chagrin, famously dedicated his papacy to helping elevate the world's billions of poor people. Mr. Thomas, in the first paragraph, wrote: "...he {Pope Francis} has it backwards. Instead of taking more money from those who have earned it, he should advocate for creating new wealth." Of course, Mr. Thomas advocates creating new wealth for the already wealthy like him, not for the maligned poor majority that Pope Francis cares about.
Pope Francis was born 77 years ago in Argentina. His laudable priority to improve the lot of the world's majority poor faces many obstacles, such as the many forums provided to Cal Thomas. The world's poor will not inherit the earth but neither should they inherit scorn and disrespect from rich and powerful thugs.
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Pope Francis disagrees with Cal Thomas regarding this fact: The 85 richest people in the world have wealth equal to the poorest 3.5 BILLION people, and the chasm is widening each and every day!
Cal Thomas and Pope Francis also obviously disagree over how the extremes of massive wealth have occurred and how it perpetuates and exacerbates from generation to generation. It's often the product of a few powerful thugs assailing the backs of the majority poor...and then passing along their riches to their offspring, who replicate the practice in future generations. Did the rich man depicted above need all that money? Did the poor man depicted above deserve a livable opportunity? Cal Thomas apparently believes this rich man doesn't have enough dollars; Pope Francis obviously believes this poor man propping up the rich man deserves a living wage, especially if he has children to feed, clothe, shelter and educate.
In the U. S., Cal Thomas apparently is not concerned with this statistic.
And Pope Francis should not be assailed just because HE IS CONCERNED.
In the 1950s a few already rich Americans prompted the U. S. government to support a passel of already rich Mafia thugs as the dictators on the nearby island of Cuba. This was to enable the unholy rich to get richer and more unholier. And that's what happened, scarring future generations in both nations.
As this Batista-era photo illustrates, the wholesale pillaging of Cuba by the rich minority made the majority poor on the island very poor and then poorer. Thus, innocent families like this were left without anything resembling proper shelter, food, clothes, health care or educational opportunities.
The extreme greed and brutality of the Batista dictatorship in Cuba, made possible with the aid of U. S. tax dollars and military equipment, created a revolution. It was unique from its outset because it was spawned by the extreme bravery of the female half of the Cuban population, such as these mothers.
Three of those outraged Cuban women -- Vilma Espin, Celia Sanchez, and Haydee Santamaria -- enshrined themselves as incomparable guerrilla fighters against the supposedly unbeatable Batista-Mafia dictatorship. Then in Revolutionary Cuba -- immediately after the Batistianos and Mafiosi had been chased to safe havens like Miami -- these three women were the major factors in reshaping Cuban standards to benefit children, not their torturers. The transition was expected to be short-lived but it has survived.
Starting in January of 1959, at their first opportunity, the three greatest Cuban heroines -- Vilma Espin, Celia Sanchez and Haydee Santamaria -- created the Federation of Cuban Women as arguably the strongest and most vital addition to Revolutionary Cuba from January-1959 till this very day. The Federation of Cuban Women recognized that women were more important on the island than men because women had the primary responsibility of taking care of the island's babies and children. Thus, the Federation of Cuban Women guaranteed to the island's children free shelter, free food, free health care for life, and free educations through college. Far more astounding than the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution is the fact that the Federation of Cuban Women to this day, against insurmountable odds, maintains its dominant themes on the island while knowing a return of the Batistianos would end its reign.
The malevolent and self-serving greed and capriciousness of Revolutionary Cuba's Florida-based enemies has actually helped account for its startling longevity in the face of omnipotent forces aligned against it. The U. S. embargo against Cuba, for example, was established in 1962 for the stated purpose of starving and depriving the Cubans on the island to induce them to rise up and overthrow Fidel Castro. This was right after the 1961 military attack at the Bay of Pigs had failed miserably, making Castro even more of a revolutionary legend. And the embargo came after a multitude of CIA-Mafia-Cuban exile assassination attempts failed to kill him but did manage to greatly enhance the Castro legend and his future legacy. Thus, in a paradoxical twist of history, the Castro legend is based primarily on two factors: {1} His astute recognition that the extremes of the Batista-Mafia dictatorship had created a female force on the island that possibly could be utilized to defeat and overthrow even a U.S.-backed dictatorship; and {2} the cruelty and ineptness of his enemies have combined to provide him and his legacy with enough support on the island to fend off the combined forces of his much more powerful enemies. Since 1959, as a primary by-product or offspring of the Cuban Revolution, anti-Castro forces have controlled the Cuban narrative in the United States but not elsewhere. For example........................................................
.....this distraught Cuban girl is now an adult. Go to Cuba and tell her that Fidel Castro is the bad guy and his enemies are the good guys. This photo was taken at Jose Marti Airport in Havana on Oct. 6-1976. The girl and her mother were waiting for Cubana Flight 455 to return from Venezuela with two dozen teenage athletes, one of them the girl's brother. As this photo was taken, she and her mother had just learned Cubana Flight 455 had been blown out of the sky by a terrorist bomb. All 73 on board had been murdered. In Miami, the media reported that celebrations of the bombing included two infamous quotations: "It's the biggest blow yet against Castro" and "There were no innocents on that airplane." The euphoric quotes were lies.
Today memorials like this remind Cubans and Latin Americans that such things as the bombing of Cubana Flight 455, as well as the aftermath concerning the terrorists and their supporters, was not "the biggest blow yet against Castro" and that, indeed, civilians on a harmless airplane are, in fact, "innocents." The two infamous quotations related to Cubana Flight 455 were shoved down the throats of Americans who have been forced to swallow them. But the rest of the world hasn't swallowed them.
The greed of a few at the expense of the many created the Cuban Revolution, which shocked the world on New Years Day in 1959 by chasing the Batista-Mafia dictatorship off the island, mostly to a safe haven in nearby Miami. To this day, almost six decades and two generations later, Americans are told to accept continuous assaults on the island's majority because that mean man, Fidel Castro, deserves it while the good guys -- the Batistianos and the Mafiosi -- deserve to regain their island playpen and piggy-bank.
This Bill Gentile/Corbis photo depicts uniformed school children in Revolutionary Cuba today. Unlike the impoverished children shown in the earlier Batista-era family photo, these children in Revolutionary Cuba are guaranteed free food if needed, free shelter if needed, free health care for life and free educations through college. They also happen to live in safe neighborhoods. This is true despite the fact that the island has sustained the longest and cruelest economic embargo {since 1962} ever imposed by a powerful nation against a small nation...an embargo, by the way, that has been embellished by such things as the military attack at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, multiple assassination attempts against Cuba's revolutionary leaders, the terrorist bombing of a civilian Cuban airplane in 1976, and huge fines and other penalties levied against even friendly foreign nations and companies that do business with Cuba. The Cuban Revolution has made mistakes since 1959. But starving and otherwise abusing children is not among those mistakes. Cal Thomas disagrees. He also disagrees with the Pope's compassion.
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