Jean Seberg Commits Suicide (1979)
Thu Aug 30, 1979
On this day in 1979, actress Jean Seberg committed suicide after years of harassment, intimidation, and defamation by the FBI after she gave several donations to the Black Panther Party.
Jean Dorothy Seberg (1938 - 1979) was an American actress, supporter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) "COINTELPRO" program.
In the late 1960s, Seberg provided financial support to various groups supporting civil rights, including the NAACP as well as Native American school groups such as the Meskwaki Bucks at the Tama settlement near her home town.
The FBI became aware of several gifts Seberg had made to the BPP, totaling just over $10k in contributions. The FBI operation against Seberg, directly overseen by J. Edgar Hoover, began to harass, intimidate, defame, and discredit her.
The FBI's stated goal was an unspecified "neutralization" of Seberg with a subsidiary objective to "cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the public", while taking the "usual precautions to avoid identification of the Bureau". The FBI spread a false rumor about her pregnancy, claiming she was bearing the child of a BPP member, which was repeated frequently in the press. She was also effectively blacklisted from Hollywood films at this time.
On August 30th, 1979, Seberg committed suicide, writing "Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves". Romain Gary, Seberg's husband, called a press conference shortly after Seberg's death, publicly blaming the FBI's campaign against her for her deteriorating mental health.
- Date: 1979-08-30
- Learn More: libcom.org, en.wikipedia.org.
- Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org
While I don't necessarily agree with the first half of your sentence, as I believe it's more of an issue with human nature, than the form of government, I do agree with your conclusion. Full financial disclosure and term limits for all positions. It's going to incentivize some to be even more corrupt as the clock's ticking for enriching themselves, but I believe it's the best option for now.
That's my point, that's not a government failure thats a human failure we need to plan for and work around.
With the right form of government, though ;) I'd argue we would need to change the things you mentioned and then some, to keep politicians and lobbyists in check, but I also believe that under the -ism forms of society, this won't be possible. So we would need to try and transform into true democracies. Unfortunately, I fear in our current state of the world, the capitalism has advanced so far that those in power will not let us and we're not organized enough to start a rebellion world-wide. So far, it appears that the assholes are successful with "divide et impera" :(
Nah, ditch the lobbyists. Make election funds shared/publicly funded. If candidate A wants to spend $1m on an election, that money gets evenly distributed across all runners in the race.
There was a time in which it was thought impossible to shake off the tyranny of feudalism and monarchism.