A comment GW Bush made early in his presidency bothered me. Then he repeated it a few months later, and it bothered me much more. He said that politics would be easier if he were a dictator, but that he wasn't.
As the economy dipped further into the royal dungeon, I waited for the man who'd been handed the election by the US Supreme Court to do something dictator-like. Then, as Lincoln would say, the war came ... 9/11.
Bush has attacked the press, dared say it should shut up about what he's doing, tested the limits and crossed the lines of Congressional statutes, exposed secret agents, jailed journalists, and is now investigating a famous newspaper.
This strikes liberals as odd, leftists as treasonous, and even many on the right get tongue-tied trying to defend this strange man.
But all we need to do is look at our biggest ally and friend, our lieutenant in arms, as Gore Vidal called the island/aircraft carrier: The United Kingdom.
The UK is a constitutional monarchy. The Executive Branch, legally headed by the Queen, conventionally guided by the prime minister, has enormous wiggle room to do what it pleases without input from its legislator under something called the Royal Prerogative. War can be waged in the Falklands, and Parliament not consulted at all. It was eerie for a person in the US to watch members of Parliament ask Tony Blair if they'd be allowed to debate an Iraqi Misadventure.
This mini-lesson in the ancient royal prerogative explains GW's open contempt for the law in general and the press in particular. Bush believes he has magically, despite the US Constitution, inherited these divine rights of kings.
Day to day, the queen no longer exercises this ancient prerogative, but the prime minister does in her name. The Royal Prerogative extends to war powers, like Iraq. Peace terms. Treaties. Trade. Coinage. Diplomats. The prison system. Even when Parliament opens and when it closes. Which men and women comprise HER government. No law becomes a law without the queen's approval, not by signing her name but with the flourish la reine le veult.
The press has fewer liberties than it does in the US. The press can be restricted from reporting certain information.
Parliament, in case you didn't know, is to raise money for the Executive. The purse in modern days is the only pull the legislature would have on an executive with theoretical unlimited power. A decent legislature would use this pull. A cowardly one would buckle every time to whatever whim of the Executive Branch. Where a legislature was cowardly you might hope for an independent courts system to stand up to the Executive. Even in the UK, there is a measure of judicial review as far back as the 1600's
The US Congress is a coward. Ot is not just a purse. It is an independent branch. And it has allowed, from the appointment of George Bush to all its bluster and no bite over every abuse committed by his presidency.
It is no longer far-fetched that we may, at this rate, elect a man who would declare himself president for life and lay his hands on his favorite son as heir and our Congress knock each other over to support him.
One of White House counsel's infamous memos to the effect embraced the history of common law as giving the president his powers. Common Law. In case you didn't know this was a royal invention of Henry II where he sought to have law applied equitably in the kingdom by travelling from town to town and holding court to adjudicate.
28 June 2006
21 June 2006
Angelina Jolie, Refugees, & The Politics of Easy Answers
Actors are often not the best personalities to help us frame social issues. I don't know why this seems so, but whether it be a conservative Mel Gibson or a liberal Susan Sarandon or the irony of ironies of a life-long dope addict like Liz Taylor stomping for AIDS money, Hollywood, like its movies, can only deal best with the shallowest aspect of our world. British actress, Glenda Jackson, found the best remedy for this simplicity was to give up acting and join a socialist political party, where she today sits in Parliament. Angelina Jolie, whom I would like to play Wonder Woman if Hollywood would tire of re-makes of Superman, is stomping for the world's refugees. She herself orchestrated an interview on CNN. She has also made a name for herself adopting Third World children. And true to Hollywood form, we are getting a global pandemic framed in the most narrow way, which limits the questions we ask and the solutions we propose.
This is not Jolie's fault. The UN has a World Refugee Day. It does not have a World Dispossessed of Land Day. The UN has a Children's Fund. It does not have an agency for parents. Paulo Freire began his literacy lessons with the words "The Land belongs to the tiller." Jolie needs a lesson from the Brazilian educator, Freire.
So in light of our attention being drawn to the sorrowful plight of refugees and the needs of babies in need of food, water, and love I would like to pose some fundamental questions outside the range book-ended with dire need and Jolie herself.
[1] If these are Refugees, why aren't we asking where their homes are, their lands, their farms?
[2] Where are the parents of these orphans, and if they are no longer on this earth, where are the grandparents, aunts, uncles?
Where is the land? Some farm land in the Third World has become unfarmable. This is due to a combination of really bad colonial farming practices imposed for decades upon decades by imperial powers to extract as much wealth as fast as possible without regard to the health of the soil.
Bad land is also due to bad farming by peasant farmers themselves. You might argue they learned these worst practices from their Masters, but who knows: you can't write a law and make bad clay into good soil, so there's no use crying over that split milk.
But much of the land of the dispossessed has been confiscated by Third World governments beholden to Western Capital. They have debts to pay or they want financing, and this comes with Strings, and the Strings are to sell this, sell that, end government ownership of public utilities and allow private, Western companies to take them. And these Third World governments have used their militaries and their thugs to drive people off susbsistence farmlands to sell the rights to that land for global purposes.
Enter your refugees, framed narrowly by the camps on one side and Angelina Jolie on the other.
Orphans are just the middle step child of the Refugee Crisis. While you certainly can pinpoint cases of whole families being wiped out save a baby, these cases are the exception. What is happening is that these families - be they mother and/or father and/or grandparents - simply cannot afford another mouth to feed, since their land has been taken and they are dispersed hither and yonder in various encampments across the former colonial world. Their water rights privatized and sold to Western interests. They are no longer just poor, they are destitute, and a murderous band of thugs is at their heels driving them away from their real estate. Look at Sudan.
Look at MEXICO. The Mexican government and ruling class removed the land rights citation from the Mexican Constitution in the 1980's. Pres. Salinas signed it. It was this action that sparked the organization of the Zapatista Movement. It also drove subsistent, poorly educated farm people off their land, into the cities, where they faired no better, and eventually into the streets of the US, where they now ask for RIGHTS.
Refugees do not come from the Heavens. They come from political decisions. These aren't Refugee Crises or Orphans at all, but people being starved from the source of their lives, people who are being dropped further down the scale of the Capitalist Food Chain.
Ambassador Jolie's advocacy for them, her pleas for money, does not end that Food Chain or raise their place on it. Oscar Wilde once said you cannot end poverty by keeping the poor alive; just so, why are we fundraising to keep these desert camps operating, by definition based in areas that are unfarmable and unsaleable.
So we are evolving into a system where Poor Farmers have no land to sow, Third World women can no longer care for their babies, where Third World families cannot even give the basics, not because of some Natural Disaster but because of a Man-made one.
And Betchel's stock rises as it secures even the rights to RAIN WATER in South America!
This is not Jolie's fault. The UN has a World Refugee Day. It does not have a World Dispossessed of Land Day. The UN has a Children's Fund. It does not have an agency for parents. Paulo Freire began his literacy lessons with the words "The Land belongs to the tiller." Jolie needs a lesson from the Brazilian educator, Freire.
So in light of our attention being drawn to the sorrowful plight of refugees and the needs of babies in need of food, water, and love I would like to pose some fundamental questions outside the range book-ended with dire need and Jolie herself.
[1] If these are Refugees, why aren't we asking where their homes are, their lands, their farms?
[2] Where are the parents of these orphans, and if they are no longer on this earth, where are the grandparents, aunts, uncles?
Where is the land? Some farm land in the Third World has become unfarmable. This is due to a combination of really bad colonial farming practices imposed for decades upon decades by imperial powers to extract as much wealth as fast as possible without regard to the health of the soil.
Bad land is also due to bad farming by peasant farmers themselves. You might argue they learned these worst practices from their Masters, but who knows: you can't write a law and make bad clay into good soil, so there's no use crying over that split milk.
But much of the land of the dispossessed has been confiscated by Third World governments beholden to Western Capital. They have debts to pay or they want financing, and this comes with Strings, and the Strings are to sell this, sell that, end government ownership of public utilities and allow private, Western companies to take them. And these Third World governments have used their militaries and their thugs to drive people off susbsistence farmlands to sell the rights to that land for global purposes.
Enter your refugees, framed narrowly by the camps on one side and Angelina Jolie on the other.
Orphans are just the middle step child of the Refugee Crisis. While you certainly can pinpoint cases of whole families being wiped out save a baby, these cases are the exception. What is happening is that these families - be they mother and/or father and/or grandparents - simply cannot afford another mouth to feed, since their land has been taken and they are dispersed hither and yonder in various encampments across the former colonial world. Their water rights privatized and sold to Western interests. They are no longer just poor, they are destitute, and a murderous band of thugs is at their heels driving them away from their real estate. Look at Sudan.
Look at MEXICO. The Mexican government and ruling class removed the land rights citation from the Mexican Constitution in the 1980's. Pres. Salinas signed it. It was this action that sparked the organization of the Zapatista Movement. It also drove subsistent, poorly educated farm people off their land, into the cities, where they faired no better, and eventually into the streets of the US, where they now ask for RIGHTS.
Refugees do not come from the Heavens. They come from political decisions. These aren't Refugee Crises or Orphans at all, but people being starved from the source of their lives, people who are being dropped further down the scale of the Capitalist Food Chain.
Ambassador Jolie's advocacy for them, her pleas for money, does not end that Food Chain or raise their place on it. Oscar Wilde once said you cannot end poverty by keeping the poor alive; just so, why are we fundraising to keep these desert camps operating, by definition based in areas that are unfarmable and unsaleable.
So we are evolving into a system where Poor Farmers have no land to sow, Third World women can no longer care for their babies, where Third World families cannot even give the basics, not because of some Natural Disaster but because of a Man-made one.
And Betchel's stock rises as it secures even the rights to RAIN WATER in South America!
15 June 2006
98 Blacks Out of 4800 [the dark cream of some dark cream of a dark lense]
Ninety-eight select Black undergrads have been selected to join the incoming freshman class at a public university, University of California Los Angeles. Ninety-eight. This is the lowest number admitted to this public university since the early 1970's. The University said it is troubled by the trend and is open to suggestions. One of those publicly backed laws a few years ago prevents them from considering race in their admissions, and they admit to having turned many away as not meeting the criteria.
The Black Civil Rights Gentry have predictably come out and demanded the university bring more in anyway, that the university go back and re-assess those rejected applicants. And so just out of the gate, the discussion looks rigged to frame an education debate outside of ever discussing the state of, direction of, purpose for schooling in the US. Just so, we won't discuss the provocative things in these high school graduates they are letting loose on the streets, in the public name.
We cannot change our schools. Since we are the Greatest Country in the World, why should we? This is the brain-dead logic of an old US Civil War general. Technology has changed for better or worse in Britain's Queen's 50-year reign. At the start of her reign, she could not have imagined being able to eat her cornflakes from tupperware containers. Now she is said to enjoy them very much this way.
Our public schools are stuck in the Industrial Revolution [but so is the British monarchy!] where they no longer just miseducate our children, they are also making mules ... I mean JACKASSES of them. Rather than look at this horrific state of affairs, some want UCLA to re-assess its entry requirements.
We've been at this junction before. Richard Rodriguez, who somewhere must be penning something on this matter, one hopes, which will be ignored, one hopes not, explains what happened at the genesis of the affirmative action movement, circa 1968. Would it be numbers [bean counting, critics later called it] or would it be reforming a bad system that harmed most poor children, Black, white, Latin, Native, Asian?? Rodriguez explains in his HUNGER FOR MEMORY memoir the civil rights hegemony chose Numbers, which guaranteed that those Black children least affected by the ravages of white racism would be culled from the ghetto and placed - alone - in white schools ... where they would exist in some kind of limbo land. The Blacks danced and whites sighed with relief. Limbo meant those Blacks wouldn't go passed Human Resources Captains ... for godsake, don't let them near the Bank!
Our school system, which educator Marva Collins said was a Soviet plot done to ourselves by ourselves without Soviet direction to stupify generations of US children and guarantee that while the USSR had to change, the US ... well, we would remain in the Industrial Age and cause the inevitable fall to be from a higher ledge.
Nobody look down, please!
Don't think the other 4702 undergrads who got in to UCLA are any better off. These kids are schooled dumb but have benefitted from SAT preparation classes at $500 a session.
Los Angeles schools are the worse I have ever seen. People ask me if I think about returning to teaching, but all I need to do is look at the useless social trash these schools are making of a generation of beautiful human souls. Why would I contribute to the Mission of making young men and women socially and economically inept, let alone incapable of getting through the doors of a public university? Fifty percent of the minority kids are reported to not make it through the system. The LA Solution? Build MORE schools.
Isn't General Motors and Ford, the Laurel and Hardy of MBA's, falling ceremoniously apart from adding woe to their misery by producing more recallable steel boxes no one wants to buy?? I guess as GM goes ... but this is a punch line.
The United States slides ever so gently into becoming an international joke. We shall be lucky to pick cotton for the Chinese - the we being the graduating class of 2010 at UCLA, that is.
The Black Civil Rights Gentry have predictably come out and demanded the university bring more in anyway, that the university go back and re-assess those rejected applicants. And so just out of the gate, the discussion looks rigged to frame an education debate outside of ever discussing the state of, direction of, purpose for schooling in the US. Just so, we won't discuss the provocative things in these high school graduates they are letting loose on the streets, in the public name.
We cannot change our schools. Since we are the Greatest Country in the World, why should we? This is the brain-dead logic of an old US Civil War general. Technology has changed for better or worse in Britain's Queen's 50-year reign. At the start of her reign, she could not have imagined being able to eat her cornflakes from tupperware containers. Now she is said to enjoy them very much this way.
Our public schools are stuck in the Industrial Revolution [but so is the British monarchy!] where they no longer just miseducate our children, they are also making mules ... I mean JACKASSES of them. Rather than look at this horrific state of affairs, some want UCLA to re-assess its entry requirements.
We've been at this junction before. Richard Rodriguez, who somewhere must be penning something on this matter, one hopes, which will be ignored, one hopes not, explains what happened at the genesis of the affirmative action movement, circa 1968. Would it be numbers [bean counting, critics later called it] or would it be reforming a bad system that harmed most poor children, Black, white, Latin, Native, Asian?? Rodriguez explains in his HUNGER FOR MEMORY memoir the civil rights hegemony chose Numbers, which guaranteed that those Black children least affected by the ravages of white racism would be culled from the ghetto and placed - alone - in white schools ... where they would exist in some kind of limbo land. The Blacks danced and whites sighed with relief. Limbo meant those Blacks wouldn't go passed Human Resources Captains ... for godsake, don't let them near the Bank!
Our school system, which educator Marva Collins said was a Soviet plot done to ourselves by ourselves without Soviet direction to stupify generations of US children and guarantee that while the USSR had to change, the US ... well, we would remain in the Industrial Age and cause the inevitable fall to be from a higher ledge.
Nobody look down, please!
Don't think the other 4702 undergrads who got in to UCLA are any better off. These kids are schooled dumb but have benefitted from SAT preparation classes at $500 a session.
Los Angeles schools are the worse I have ever seen. People ask me if I think about returning to teaching, but all I need to do is look at the useless social trash these schools are making of a generation of beautiful human souls. Why would I contribute to the Mission of making young men and women socially and economically inept, let alone incapable of getting through the doors of a public university? Fifty percent of the minority kids are reported to not make it through the system. The LA Solution? Build MORE schools.
Isn't General Motors and Ford, the Laurel and Hardy of MBA's, falling ceremoniously apart from adding woe to their misery by producing more recallable steel boxes no one wants to buy?? I guess as GM goes ... but this is a punch line.
The United States slides ever so gently into becoming an international joke. We shall be lucky to pick cotton for the Chinese - the we being the graduating class of 2010 at UCLA, that is.
07 June 2006
Dateline: NBC reveals the US Police State [Child "Predators," & The US Penal Mentality]
NBC News Dateline and Chris Hansen have scored top ratings for their stings "To Catch a Predator" in which they trap Internet child predators on camera. Most of us don't condone adult sex with children - altho a recent spat of blonde female schoolteachers jaunting with their young boy students is looked upon as another case of boys will always be boys, even celebrated in a Charles-&-Diana-style interview on Larry King's CNN broadcast. Men as the adults in these realtions is viewed more serious, and the public has enjoyed watching man after man get scooped up on prime time.
Yet, I remain very troubled by this version of tv justice. Maybe it's the vast array of people from all walks of life. Actors. Clergy. Teachers. Government employees. Upper-end white-collar managers. These can be jaw-dropping moments as we scale the upper end of the class system. The poor are inbred anyway, so we expect nasty behavior from them. Ruthlessly, what we don't conclude about our social codes from this multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-class parade is troubling. When I was a first-year school teacher, I often made class rules out of a sense of frustration. Invariably, they didn't work: like, demanding absolute silence for silence sake. This is corrosive to a class. You learn as a teacher never to make a rule you cannot enforce. When rules were obviously ludicrous, a product of my naivete, the answer was not to come down harder on the rule but to do away with it and find a new way. Just so, such social codes that make masses of people criminals are equally corrosive to the community: as much as we think we know what child predators look like and have strong social rules against it, that people from literally all walks of life have been caught in NBC's sting should demand, finally, a frank discussion of sex in our society. I found it odd that these men, driving long hours to break the law, cross a line, would bring condoms. There are things here we need to discuss.
But we will not discuss anything, and this is the other most troubling thing about these programs. We enjoy watching the fantasy of the police getting their man, event after event. In the Florida shoot, the police routinely tackle the men the ground in the denouement. Nowhere in the program do we get a sociologist or psychologist speaking to any context of this problem, this crime. We have been trained not to care. We have not, thus far, even gotten a defense lawyer's stand on behalf of their clients: we do not care. This is liberal crap. What would a trial serve since these perverts are clearly guilty? This is the skew of these very, very disruptive programs: show an infraction in a social code which needs to be re-examined and then show the solution in the arms of the police force. Welcome to the makings of a police state.
Yet, I remain very troubled by this version of tv justice. Maybe it's the vast array of people from all walks of life. Actors. Clergy. Teachers. Government employees. Upper-end white-collar managers. These can be jaw-dropping moments as we scale the upper end of the class system. The poor are inbred anyway, so we expect nasty behavior from them. Ruthlessly, what we don't conclude about our social codes from this multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-class parade is troubling. When I was a first-year school teacher, I often made class rules out of a sense of frustration. Invariably, they didn't work: like, demanding absolute silence for silence sake. This is corrosive to a class. You learn as a teacher never to make a rule you cannot enforce. When rules were obviously ludicrous, a product of my naivete, the answer was not to come down harder on the rule but to do away with it and find a new way. Just so, such social codes that make masses of people criminals are equally corrosive to the community: as much as we think we know what child predators look like and have strong social rules against it, that people from literally all walks of life have been caught in NBC's sting should demand, finally, a frank discussion of sex in our society. I found it odd that these men, driving long hours to break the law, cross a line, would bring condoms. There are things here we need to discuss.
But we will not discuss anything, and this is the other most troubling thing about these programs. We enjoy watching the fantasy of the police getting their man, event after event. In the Florida shoot, the police routinely tackle the men the ground in the denouement. Nowhere in the program do we get a sociologist or psychologist speaking to any context of this problem, this crime. We have been trained not to care. We have not, thus far, even gotten a defense lawyer's stand on behalf of their clients: we do not care. This is liberal crap. What would a trial serve since these perverts are clearly guilty? This is the skew of these very, very disruptive programs: show an infraction in a social code which needs to be re-examined and then show the solution in the arms of the police force. Welcome to the makings of a police state.
04 June 2006
News Release: GAYS NOT THE CAUSE OF HIV [another typical whitewashed western redemption tale]
The whole point of a story circulating on the web, that Gays are not the cause of HIV, but rather Africa is not just the propaganda purposes to keep saying AIDS effects us all, when demonstrably it has not after 25 years; the purpose to this story is also to heap more blame on the Dark Continent, a popular and convenient receptacle: a heathen hunter/gatherer and a green monkey! And we are to believe that from this strange consummation in some other epoch, believable only and uniquely because it is AFRICA, gay men in major urban areas began a preciptous dropping off like flies in 1981.
These scientists admit to a great many holes in their theory, a great many unknowns, yet they are comfortable putting this nonsense forward probably because it plays on the West's established stereotypes about Africa. And we all know Black men are sexual predators. Unfortunately in present day, poorly educated US, Whites as much as Blacks are prone to give in to these racist assumptions. Remember the AFRICANIZED bees, courtesy not of Ghana or Angola but rather Central America?!
Another hole: why didn't the colonial masters of these African colonies get impacted first and disproportionately? The Belgians. The French. The British. They were right there at ground zero, probably bareback raping African women and African men. Why then the US, which had no colonies in Africa, and why gay men? The scientists are stupefied. No matter: blame Africa.
We have left the corridors of science long ago and have been asked to participate in Magical Thinking, not the exemplary kind of a Garcia Marquez but a remedial kind like Uncle Remus.
HIV, whatever it might be, it does not cause AIDS. That it may or may not exist in human beings along with countless other microbes the ORIGINS of which we do not yet know demonstrates how little we know at all. That HIV - and every other germ - can affect without infect is widely demonstrable: that is science 101. That AIDS happens with or without HIV is also widely demonstrable.
Ergo ... The "cause" of HIV is probably an unimportant. The cause of death, critical. It is nice for some that a coroner can list AIDS on a death certificate now and loved ones have no idea what KILLED their son, daughter, mother, father. Nice, too, that we can train our eyes off the cause of misery in the swath of the globe where these deaths occur: the colonies and its children, the poor, the outcast. Globalization that has judiciously taken lands and water rights and plunged the poor into destitution is not the Cause of Death. It is AIDS, AIDS, AIDS.
These scientists admit to a great many holes in their theory, a great many unknowns, yet they are comfortable putting this nonsense forward probably because it plays on the West's established stereotypes about Africa. And we all know Black men are sexual predators. Unfortunately in present day, poorly educated US, Whites as much as Blacks are prone to give in to these racist assumptions. Remember the AFRICANIZED bees, courtesy not of Ghana or Angola but rather Central America?!
Another hole: why didn't the colonial masters of these African colonies get impacted first and disproportionately? The Belgians. The French. The British. They were right there at ground zero, probably bareback raping African women and African men. Why then the US, which had no colonies in Africa, and why gay men? The scientists are stupefied. No matter: blame Africa.
We have left the corridors of science long ago and have been asked to participate in Magical Thinking, not the exemplary kind of a Garcia Marquez but a remedial kind like Uncle Remus.
HIV, whatever it might be, it does not cause AIDS. That it may or may not exist in human beings along with countless other microbes the ORIGINS of which we do not yet know demonstrates how little we know at all. That HIV - and every other germ - can affect without infect is widely demonstrable: that is science 101. That AIDS happens with or without HIV is also widely demonstrable.
Ergo ... The "cause" of HIV is probably an unimportant. The cause of death, critical. It is nice for some that a coroner can list AIDS on a death certificate now and loved ones have no idea what KILLED their son, daughter, mother, father. Nice, too, that we can train our eyes off the cause of misery in the swath of the globe where these deaths occur: the colonies and its children, the poor, the outcast. Globalization that has judiciously taken lands and water rights and plunged the poor into destitution is not the Cause of Death. It is AIDS, AIDS, AIDS.
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