Stranger Than Fiction: AIDS on Trial ... for real this time

In Charles Ortleb's book, The Closing Argument, he chronicles the trial of a Black man accused to have attempted murder by spreading the HIV virus through unprotected sex and puts the HIV-AIDS theory on trial by challenging the science behind it. Ortleb was the publisher of The New York Native, a writer, and printed many of the early dissident pieces from Celia Farber, who recently released Serious Adverse Events about the controversies surrounding the invention of HIV as a deadly virus.

Australia in 2006 has brought fiction to reality. An Australian, Andre Chad Parenzee, 35, has been convicted of endangering the lives of three female sex partners with whom he had "unprotected" sex. Like the lawyer in Ortleb's novella, Parenzee's lawyer turns the tables on the government's case by putting a huge question mark next to HIV's potency as a killer virus.

A recent story in The Australian provides some details.

It has been horrifying enough that sex between men is demonized and found yet another rationale to be curbed, chained, proscribed, then outright made illegal - isn't it ironic while we pretend to celebrate gay rights, we demonize gay sexuality unless it strives for "marriage" rights! But if straights are to be also convicted of the kind of sex their parents and grandparents performed, we have truly entered a tortured musical comedy.

The judge in the trial has just set aside the conviction to put essentially HIV on trial. Dr. Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a noted HIV dissident, has been flown in as an expert witness. She has been asked if HIV causes AIDS and replied in an interview that there was no such proof, and she proceeds to lay out her counter-argument.

Dr. Eleni is not alone among those in the scientific community who, from the infamous 1984 Press Conference, has resisted the HIV-AIDS link. David Rasnick is another. But the most famous is a former star and National Academy of Sciences member, Univ. of California researcher, Peter Duesberg.

The Fraud Behind US Elections

I remember growing up as a political junkie, intrigued with the drama of debates, and watching the televised presidential debates. These debates were always sponsored by what was to my young mind a strange group, The League of Women Voters. To me it sounded like a militia of warrior women defending the election system.

Whatever they were, this League crumbled when sponsorship was taken from them by the financiers of the US two-party junta.

It did not actually begin wth H. Ross Perot's invitation to join the debates, but that was the straw on the two-parties' back. The problem stirred with the historical challenge posed by Dr. Lenora Fulani, socialist, early gay-rights advocate, feminist, and presidential candidate from the New Alliance Party [in some states, aka Peace & Freedom Party]. Fulani had qualified from 1980 onward for Federal matching funds, had qualified to appear on the ballots of all 50 states, and yet was ignored by mainstream media.

She challenged the League of Women Voters to invite her to join the presidential debates, and the League refused with some garbage about her percentages not being high enough.

Enter Perot. His percentages met the League requirements, so to the chagrin of the two-party elite, he made his famous appearance between tweedle dee and tweedle dummer. But it would be the last time.

In a coups, the Democratic and Republican Parties snatched the historic debates from the League and created the Commission on Presidential Debates, which we have to this day. It should have been called the Commission to Keep the Two-Party System, because it assured no other party would grace the stage and be known to masses of people ever again.

This is YOUR democracy.

I tell this story because as we approach another election in a few weeks, we are stuck in the old narrative on national, state, and local levels.

Why bother voting when the choices given us at that critical point have been pre-screened and pre-weeded by interests diametrically opposed to working people and the poor? Fidel, after the Cuban Revolution, 1959, promised to hold elections. But when he saw what the US was planning by heavily funding candidates who would give Cuban lands back to the US, the revolutionary government cancelled the elections: he noted, in the 2nd Declaration of Havana, what elections in the West actually are: ways for the US, the monopolies, and Cuba's ruling class to offer versions of their policies and the people given the indignity to ratify them. To what end? Not to the benefit of working people certainly.

Interestingly, when Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega pondered whether to hold elections in the late 1980's after 10 years of bloody US-backed Contra war, Fidel cautioned him what would happen, and certainly did happen. The US CIA flooded Violeta Chamorro's election coffer with millions of dollars, and she handily beat Ortega and plunged Nicaragua's poor into pre-revolution poverty.

I hope Iraq's dissidents are taking note as the US tries to bring democracy there.

Green Party and Socialist Party USA candidates are being ignored by the press and excluded from televised debates all over the US. They are told that they are not known, they are told that people usually vote for Democrats or Republicans so their presence would be a distraction, they are told they are not polling high enough to qualify.

Peter Camejo, Green Party gubernatorial candidate in California, is a member of a party which has polled high enough to be recognized by California's Secretary of State [the Socialist Party USA has not]; he polled third in the infamous run-off between Schwarzenegger and Grey Davis ... and yet, he will not be covered, has not been covered by the press, and was not allowed into the debate between the current Republican governor and Democrat Phil Angelides.

Meanwhile, we are in a state of angst about Electronic Voting Machines, worried that our votes might not be fairly counted, demanding a paper receipt.

So what if they are or aren't counted when what we are being offered to vote for has been pre-treated and homogenized by corporate interests and ruling elites?

Why vote at all? Moreover, why vote when we apparently have no democracy in which to participate? I think it was Emma Goldman who said that Voting was the Opiate of the masses, and that every 4 years they doped themselves.

I cannot think of any significant social movement won at a ballot box: the abolition of chattel slavery, voting rights for women, the 8-hour work day, the minimum wage ... not even the end of the British colony soon to be known as the United States of America. None came to us by ballot but by struggle and organizing and war.

Obama, another rising and falling star ... so no blinking!

This love fest for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is interesting in that we who read history know that we have been here before, presented with a minority darling of whom we are amazed at his intelligence. The outcome to these careers is predictable. White America, by whom we really mean CORPORATE US (The CU), since whites and especially poor whites have nothing to do with this and are as forgotten a species as anyone in the working class, love this Black man who embraces the Middle. Colin Powell is preceived as another MIDDLE lover. The CU think they can safely back and fund this ethnic minority who won't tread on their tax breaks or on the role of the US government in the commercial world - their role is to open doors and where they don't open to bomb them open. This, while giving crafty lip service to the poor, is THE MIDDLE.

Where the CU err time and time and time again since Jacksonian Democracy in the US, and the Great Reform ACT in the UK, when the rabble had to be contended with for votes[!] is that Obama constituency - Blacks, minorities, progressives, the poor - will be dazzled by him at first, seeing him as one of them, but they will quickly find him more an active member of the CU and an honorary member of the Wage-Slave, beholden to the CU, making excuses for the CU and sticking it to the poor.

The poor will abandon him, his legitimacy will fall, and there goes his public career. He will remain a senator and get fat or become a senior fellow at a bourgeoise think-tank, and in between head an "Initiative" to solve some global crisis.

Fidel broke through this dilemma down pretty handily a year after the Cuban Revolution, 1959. He said he could have abandoned the reasons for the revolution for accommodation with the plantation owners and the US embassy or he could have done we he had to do to keep his promise to change Cuban society. This change could not come from United Fruit or the US military, so since both had lost both were asked to leave. Obama will not do this

NAMBLA & Rep. Foley: More Capitalist Collateral Damage

Interestingly, just before news of Congressman Foley's illicit advances toward young high school students, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured a short "expose" on the evils of NAMBLA. I daresay most people outside the above-35 gay male community don't know what NAMBLA is or why I would link it to Foley. NAMBLA is the North American Man Boy Love Association. In my younger years, just coming out, it seemed to get a lot of backpage press in alternative gay news organs - this is like off-off Broadway. Gay rights activists fought with each other whether to include or attack this entity. I remember that Harry Hay, gay civil rights activists and communist, was a lone voice not in supporting NAMBLA, but discouraging attacks from gay men as showing division to the enemy.

Not surprisingly, Oprah with her soccer-mom demographic was livid at the existence of such an organization and wondered why it would be allowed. She was given a lecture by an NBC reporter on the First Amendment: expression is one thing; an act is something else altogether, Oprah.

This seems to be Foley's defense thus far: pointing to his abuse by a church elder and checking himself into alcoholic rehab. He engaged in inappropriate internet chatter. His spokesmen have said he is not a pedophile, that he never had sex with any under-aged boys.

Oprah's Show also featured an NBC journalist who has gained note and ratings for his Dateline NBC: Catch a Predator series, where grown men are caught on camera meeting under-aged boys and girls. When they confess, they all say they have never done this before, never gone to meet an under-aged girl or boy, never had sex with a child.

This is all supposed to disturb us and we snicker as Foley's confession as we do these men who claim never to have done this before. We are supposed to be disturbed by this. It is supposed to be inexcusable, right?

Well, the thing that excuses this sort of behavior is the history of Capitalism. Wherever you have a system which unevenly distributes resources - or doesn't distribute resources at all - you set up a privileged group and another which will be preyed on. Not ironically, we are told to emulate the pirates - the privileged - and despise the prey with all kinds of names, some from the streets and many from the Academy.

This time, the prey are children.

The history of women under Capitalism has been full of predatory acts. The predator was Capitalism and men were its privileged agents. Since women were denied access to wealth - land, income of their own [it was often given to the husband by right] - they had to prositute themselves, whether with tricks or with suitor-gentlemen. In many major US cities, a single woman could not rent an apartment without her father's co-signature within my lifetime. It doesn't really matter on some level how one prostitutes.

While we would like to imagine we come from a long line of lovers, we have to face the reality that most of our grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on, and even our own mothers in many parts of the world have to marry predators - men who have been given access to even a small part of wealth where the woman has none.

Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators? She has too many preyed-upons in her audience. Will she expose the crime we do to children by divesting them of rights? Not likely.

My comparison of women to children is in their treatment. Both are marginalized not by Nature but by Law.

By legal definition, a boy has few rights. Beyond this, the boys that NAMBLA seeks are poor ones, Third World ones, who are not only with fewer rights but fewer options. The Congressional pages preyed upon by Foley will statistically go on to College and better jobs and perpetuate this Division, the poor ones will produce children who will have to hustle.

In one segment on The Oprah Show, they are shown on hidden camera to be arranging a trip to Mexico to find boys, and they boast how they money will go further their.

The other side to this is equally sad. In fact, one can go to such places as Mexico and the boys will often offer themselves to you, not for love, but for money, because they have none ... because their governments are corrupt and have taken land and water rights from them to benefit corporations or global agreements.

Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators?

Unfortunately, by legal definition, children are without power. It is over the top for even many socialists to acknowledge the sacred family unit as, like the British monarchy, a feudal institution, and needs remedy before anything meaningful happens. And until we are ready for that remedy, children WILL be preyed on and no law, no speech will stop a congressman, a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a parent from preying on and abusing a child. It's the Power, stupid.