Dec 25th attempted bombing not a systemic failure but an institutional one

I woke Dec 26th to the startling news that a terrorist attack was launched against a commercial airline. Possible links to the all-ominous "al-Qaeda" were mentioned. Nigeria linked. A plane headed for Detroit, Michigan. Yemen


It seemed a long way from 9/11 and so many suspiciously failed attempts to commit terror on US soil again, and this particular young man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the son of a prominent Nigerian banker, reportedly had the noxious ingredients to do the deed. But once again, he was foiled by his own stupidity.


At any rate, fortune, not the highly funded, bloated US security services had it that the passengers and crew arrived safely for Christmas.



Pres Barack Obama offered a mea culpa, saying this goof was a systemic failure.


But he is as wrong as US Dept of Homeland Security policy, thankfully no longer a secret from the masses after another goof published its Standard Operating Procedures on the Internet.


Inasmuch as this story of the Nigerian would-be bomber is truth, inasmuch as this was an organized terrorist attack, what this represents is an institutional failure, not a systemic one. And the only thing our defense systems are doing is keeping the population in fear so as to continue the evil Bush doctrines of robbing us of our rights in secret trials, secret prisons, renditions, and police powers.

Eight CIA agents will never again celebrate a holiday with their friends and families, and this is sad. But that they were killed in the midst of the US occupation and assault on Afghanistan and the region should give us pause. These agents weren't there to plant crops or dig ditches to install plumbing for clean, running water to the poor villages.

Conventional wisdom out of Washington says they were there protecting the US. Well, they weren't protecting our freedoms, since those seem to continue to get carved away. Wiser more astute heads will recall the history or at least know the earth has no Chosen People, not even the exceptionalist US.

But all that secrecy and why a lone, Nigerian bomber, like Abdulmutallab, (or a small cabal of them) should want to cause destruction on such a holy day must not be answered with cries that they hate our freedoms.


The more unpopular, penetrating question is how are our purportedly noble institutions creating these villains and why should they want to attack our troops, our commercial airlines, and even eight CIA agents.


Could our occupations of huge swaths of the Mideast and Asia have anything to do with it? Might the US support of brutal dictatorships who suppress the people and keep them in a virtual Dark Age of religious superstition? How about those drones who continue to bomb soft targets - that is, neighborhoods, men, women, and children noncombatants? Do these things win hearts and minds, and does the US really care about their hearts or minds unless they are splashed against bullet-riddled masonry?


I cannot intentionally say much factual about this Abdulmutallab, so I do not want to demonize him or aggrandize him into a terrorist attacker. Scores of Black and Brown and Poor people are killed daily in the US, many by the police, but these are diminished in the back pages.

I am intrigued that Abdulmutallab is not the first educated person to be swayed to the supposed Dark Side. John Walker Lindh is serving a 20-year sentence for his role. Another educated American, Anwar al Awlaki, became a convert to Islam and left for Yemen where he embraced Jihad and reportedly met with said Nigerian.

These people aren't motivated by systemic failures and goofs but rather by Western institutions, and we need to face this.

The great purge of 2010

I will give no credit to George Bush, but that he kept his base in tow seems to adhere to a basic political rule. Our new president will celebrate a year in office next month, and in this time he has managed to follow a different course. He has disenchanted, disillusioned, and frankly shat on his base of optimistic supporters.

So the whisper in the streets is that the with this base unmotivated and the right-wing energized, the Republican wing of our ONE party state will resume control of the US Congress in 2010, at minimum. Progressive forces within marginal states could face the guillotine as well.

A purge may be on the horizon in 2010.

I give no credit to Bush because even his base is a coerced concoction. Things like culture wars are set up to divide "them" against "us", satiating their taste buds with the red meat of racist, homophobic attacks. These bases - left and right - are managed with varying skill levels, and in truth do not represent the majority of voting aged in the US: those became disenchanted long ago, as was the goal of the crisis managers of democracy. They were made disenchanted to keep growing, sophisticated populations from making actual demands of their governments.

The next best thing to Siberia is to get that 50% to simply drop out of the system and ease up on the pressure.

Obama. One pundit rightly asked, "where is the community organizer?" His decision last summer to back the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was surprising even to me, who opts for queer liberation and liberation generally vs. equality with the slave, settler state. But in backing DOMA, Obama outraged even the elites of the LBGTQ community, which doesn't show much political sophistication on his part.

Even the managed minorities need red meat, and Obama has not even done this. Iraq. Afghanistan. Guantanamo. LGBT rights. Yes, there are still liberals out in the prairies who continue to sing the praises of this Goldman-Sachs candidate, hope upon hope, and admonish the critics for not "trusting" what may come at the dawn.

I find these optimists, like I find many of our hardcore religious, rather medieval and mystical in their outlook. Imagine if someone were to have said this about George Bush, war criminal: to just wait, trust that these secret prisons will turn out alright.

But I suppose we fundamentally live in a mystical country which has replaced men in priestly robes for men in suits who have bought congressional districts.

If this is true, the coming purge will be shattering to the so-called Left in the US. The gullible masses will see the End of Worlds.

Yes, the pundits will continue to chatter. One more eloquent and glamorous one will ask for the responsible bureaucrat's head on a bed of lettuce. But the base, the voters, the minor activists, the community organizers will be traumatized as Obama's remaining single term (yes) will be driven by the right, and Obama will look less and less competent to do anything but plant a garden on a superfund site.

For my part, I hope this shift drives more than the usual trickle to our active and marginalized Other Parties, like the Peace & Freedom Party, Party for Socialism & Liberation, Socialist Party USA, even the Green Party. That is but one step.

The next is to reform our ballot access and our access to broadcast, official debates, where the public at large can know we have viable, leftist candidates who will not concede the successes of the capitalist coda.

Capitalism is bad for your health, bad for your community, bad for employment. Despite what Ayn Rand told us, there is nothing heroic about the class of people who rape and pillage, literally and metaphorically, to make money off the backs of enslaved poor people. We called those bullies when I was a school teacher. And we can do quite well without these heroes.

Up to the moment, any suggestion of this is met with a corporate press and alternative party inaccessibility. Horror stories about socialism are framed with the myth that we are free and rich.

More than a working class party, the United States is desperate for working class access to the reigns of power.

Afghanistan

An official daily newspaper quoted a high-ranking official thus: "[College] students should view their degrees as an honor but not necessarily as a ticket to a professional career." While this could be a rare, honest lament of a US cabinet member it was Fidel Castro.


Why haven't our rulers made such frank assessments? Why have our public schools continued to channel the young through poor education and into the "honor" of a debt for which there are no jobs?


The answer? In Warren Beatty's monumental film, "Reds," Jack Reed answers a similar question cryptically: "Profit."


The answer is also in Pres. Barack Obama's strange television escalation. The US - true to the words of the president - is still in denial that it is a terrorist nation and will dress its foreign policy up in the sheep's clothing of "Values." I am discouraged that it will ever admit that it is a warring nation.

Not only is profit the easy answer but also that momentum - I would call it a hex - that propels this country to a contradiction of creating unemployable college educated men and women, while becoming a police state, which demands only obedience and fear.


Extraordinary renditions. Secret prisons. Show trials. Laws curbing free expression. The dismantle of public education and the construction of penal institutions.


President Obama, as CEO of the decaying empire rather than a revolutionary community organizer, is as forced and complicit as any fortune 500 company leader to send 30,000 military troops, trained to kill and destroy rather than 30,000 teachers, technicians, social workers.

Cuba, by the way, has more doctors per capita than any other developing country and exceeds the US. It also exports school teachers and technicians to poor countries to aid in social and economic development.

Compare and contrast. The well indoctrinated and disciplined will retort: "We are free," which the Western experiment has devalued exponentially.

1989 Twenty years of triumphalism and nothing to celebrate

Twenty years ago in November 1989 I had been six months a new graduate from Washington University, moved to San Francisco (on a coin toss, New York City being tails), and landed my first professional job at an international publishing company as a production editor.

Then the Wall came tumbling down and much shifted under my feet, but George Herbert Walker Bush was president, a stammering act one of the Reagan Administration. So while air flowed between the two sides of Berlin and the Bolshevik dream came to a sad end, the US was burdened not only with more of the same, but also a wretched triumphalism as if our sheer will and some green God's grace, we had crushed the red menace.



I owned a TV in 1989, which I watched if I wasn't listening to npr or Pacifica radio. I vividly remember watching one of those sober round table chat shows on public television where one of the white-haired economist cautioned US declaring victory over a Cold War we didn't see ending. He warned that the same things that brought down the USSR and the Warsaw Pact would bring down the US.



Then came the great sucking sounds: Bye bye Peace Dividend! Bye bye union jobs and military bases! Bye bye industrial base and the rationale for subsidizing the middle class as a bulwark against communist ideology. The middle class was never sustainable anyway, something many of them did not know - so they prattle about the poor having children they can not afford as if the state weren't subsidizing theirs - public hospitals, public schools, social services.

The middle class could only be sustained with socialism in policy but never in name.



Then: Bye bye international publishing company!



My graduating class of 1989 was the last that could earn a degree in anything [that publishing company didn't care] and get a decent, white-collar job. While there is still a momentum for the young to go to college or be damned, nothing awaits them except disappointment and debt. Our rulers do nothing about this scandal, and since we are the Masters of the World - the mafia crime-boss of the planet - with no USSR to compete against the poor have been left to their own devices.

Our walls are still firmly up, and Sen. Joe Lieberman one of its most prominent, ruthless, unsavory masons.



I lamented in a previous column how my present employer, the US Dept of Homeland Security, is a growth industry of managers and deputies with high salaries to police - I mean "protect"- us, while teachers are being fired and class sizes are increasing while student services are going the way of Cuba's ethical ration system: history!



That white-haired economist only said more soberly what Fidel Castro was to say in the same months of those earth-moving times, when another eminent historian informed us that history had ended. The leader of Cuba's socialist revolution asked what the US was being so triumphant about, given the sorry state of capitalism not only within the US but every place it had stepped its bloody footprint. Name one place, Fidel challenged, where capitalism had done well.



Twenty years later to the day, we must remember Fidel's admonishment as the US not only exceeds 10% unemployment nationally but also whole regions double that. What have we to celebrate about?

We must also remember that economist, whose words and tone I shall never forget.


The Godfathers of neoliberalism have sufficiently tamed and frightened the poor who are very worried. So our masters give us slogans and give the wealthy billions.

There is no option but a public option and that means a worker's party and socialism.

Reflections on a year of living with Obama's change has been a police state

I have been away for awhile, feeling as many Barack Obama supporters must: a bit disappointed to say the least. While I was admittedly not an Obama supporter but voted rather for Ralph Nader, I am equally grim about where this newest Augustus has driven this sorry, dilapidated empire.

Some promises are fulfilled, some broken, some just hot air.

When the Russian Revolution triumphed against the Czarist regime, against feudal power structures against the poor and worker, the Revolution was true to its word in re-organizing the economy and taking the new state firmly out of World War I. The USSR was the most industrializing country in the world while the West was mired in an economic 1930's Depression.
It was punished for keeping this promise to the people. Western countries invaded to re-establish not so much the quaint Czarism but feudalism and its profits. Thankfully, the West's decline had already begun and it couldn't bring down the first socialist revolt.

When the Cuban Revolution triumphed against the US-backed puppet regime, against a similarly feudal power where the best lands and wealth were taken out of the country to prop up the Metropolis, the US sustained a brutal war against it.

Cuba has been punished for 50 years for this insolence in keeping its promise to address the people's needs.

Keeping promises or showing it is a dangerous game.

Of course, many revolutions and dramatic elections passed the 20th century, and many of them deteriorated for myriad reasons into brutalizing the people on behalf of the Western Accountant, the behemoth, the Great Satan (what else would a rational person call such a parasite?). This deterioration was not unassisted by Western machinations - a sanitized way of saying assassinations, upheavals, sowing discord and watching the blood of brothers flow like rivers.

Obama, in as much as his election and Promise might be called Revolutionary, is such a traitor. History does not nuance these things. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was called a traitor ... to his class. Obama is a traitor to his - that is, the working class of his mother and father.

It's a rather dispiriting thing to see a pathetic country that can't produce anything, including decent graduates further lower the bar by saving the banks and screwing the people. It is very dispiriting to peruse job listings and forecast the state of the country.

My current employer, an aviation security arm of the federal government, is bloated with too many managers and hierarchies with inflated salaries. Meanwhile, public education has gone the way of a crackpot invention by your crazy uncle: teachers and staff are being laid off, class sizes increased, services downsized.

Like good Germans, all our managers are being obedient for a perceived, short-term benefit of a paycheck, while in the long term we send what hope we have on a night train headed for a death camp.

Could this be a civilization on the make, ready for a 21st century future or a police-slave state being solidified? Unbeknown the public at large, the federal government is growing the security field with managers and inspectors whose ultimate purpose is to tell us the sky is falling.
The state will need these teams of federal police when the only work available is part-time language tutors for autistic children, and the worker cannot pay rent.

I have heard some predictably discouraging comments from our "managers" - who are really overseers disciplining a plantation of workers, but it drives one to hopelessness to hear how deeply or wage-slaves have internalized these lessons.

And why not? They have had no teachers. They have had no history. They are secured in their foreclosed homes and unemployment with growing lists of jobs in the federal security sector, while the teachers of our young and young-adult can't get a teacher, counselor, school psychologist.

President Obama has done absolutely nothing to turn this ship away from the precipice. Not only has history shown a tough road for promise keepers, but also Obama is the Lehman Brothers Man. This would make him more a scoundrel than a coward. The failing mid-term score I gave him must be a demotion now. Send this man back to the Illinois legislature where he can do no harm.

For more info: My Socialism: Our present poverty crisis (2006) * Examiner Homepage

Westminster Ca school dstrict official leads the charge to keep US in the Dark Ages

While the Pope conspires to "poach" good Anglicans back into the Roman Catholic Church, leaving both the head of the Anglican communion, Rowan Williams, and the head of the Church of England, Queen Elizabeth II, speechless, another religious, Dark-Ages era battle looms on this side of the pond.

Westminster, Ca., is not only proving to be a small enclave of Orange County but full of small minds. Or, at least one: Judy Ahrens, a school official, has started a campaign, in 2009, to ban a Maya Angelou classic, "I Know Why the caged Bird Sings." Why? Because Angelou's autobiographical book details the rape that left her from speaking for a few years.

Bernard Shaw wrote that while the soldier says war is hell, we yet say it is a sin. And not even the good, small people of Westminster have started this campaign against the sin of war, particularly as started from lie upon lie [another sin, n'est-ce que pas?]

But we are talking, again, about Orange County, honorary member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [aka, The Inquisition] in the tarnishing state of California.

Gratuitous carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan of the nation's young in desert tombs is implicitly OK. That it be continued by the Conundrum in Chief, Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Laureate, should tell us who did what in the parlor and with which weapon.

But this continues to be besdies the point. Only off-the-grid weirdos, like San Francisco, makes stands against war crimes and give LGBTs rights.

A tiny mind in tiny Westminster takes the rostrum on behalf of our children's "innocence" to ban a book.

That such claptrap is still suffered, that this loony isn't responded to like the Black man who appeared at the LA City Council dressed in Klansman regalia, says something about the peculiar ghosts of this young nation.

The Dark Ages were hearkened precisely by such acts as the burning of libraries by the nominally "Christian" warriors.

National Equality Farce on Washington Oct 10

Equality or liberation? This weekend LGBT activists will stage a National Equality March and continue their demand to be equal to those heterosexuals so unimaginative as to continue to feudal wedding rites.


Of course, Martin's March on Washington comes to mind, an event much celebrated in our national discourse today but critiqued by leftists of the day and maligned by then-Nation of Islam spokesman, Malcolm X, as the "Farce on Washington" for its very careful stage management so not to upset the power structure. Further, Bayard Rustin was dis-invited and James Baldwin kept from view.


In seriousness, any people demanding rights of their government is not a laughing matter or a thing to be mocked. I do not. Neither should the love and partnership decisions between two people.

But anywhere else in the Dark Corners of the world such a march would be proof positive of a foreign government's worthiness of US sanctions and brow-beating. Secy of State Hillary Clinton assures us she will press the cause of human rights with her upcoming meeting with the Chinese: if only she's turn that mouthpiece of hers toward her homeland. It might have more effect since the Chinese are about ready to excavate us sorry selves and pair us with Lucy the missing link in a museum.


By our government continuing to brow-beat the dark world, which finds us fairly irrelevant, while neglecting rights issues at home puts them on the same pedestal as Bull Connor, chief law enforcer of the Old Ways. No problem here: just some outsiders stirring up trouble!


The LGBTQ community does suffer discrimination. Better than take their case to Washington, the seat of our national problems, let them take their march and a petition to the UN and World Court for a hearing. The World Court, after all, found against the US in what it ruled its terrorist attacks against Nicaragua.


But only oppressed people of those aforementioned Dark Corners do such insolent things because their own governments are unresponsive at best; lethal at worst, and for which these activists are given prizes by the former imperial powers. More jokes.


I write as a queer socialist, a former Queer Nation member, not a baroque suburban "Gay American" whose goal is to be just like the Joneses. They aren't normal, and equating myself to that wretched state would be a step down into mental illness. Demanding the Congress of Go-Slows and Do-Nothings to extend me an equal status to the Joneses is ... peculiar. But so are the poor who think that hard work and thriftiness will raise them into the 1% wealth owners.


So, why? Americans it has been said are a people without a history. This is rather cliche at this point. But the serious consequence of this is their firm belief that rights come from government - that every liberty they enjoy, from freedom from chattel slavery to the eight-hour work day to votes for women, end to child labor, have come from government waking up one frosty morning and melting the ice off the cherry blossoms with its warm heart.


LGBTQ liberation is social and economic liberation, and it demands simply universal health care, guaranteed housing, guaranteed income, publicly funded education, from kindergarten through college. Some LGBTQ activists speak about the many rights extended to married couples, and unimaginatively think the route to these rights is to extend an exclusive system to middle-class LGBTQ's. So not only do they want to emulate straight marriage but also the class stratification of capitalist society.

Is a socially just civilization possible?

Despite the real elation behind the Barack Obama presidential victory, the US has installed the Goldman-Sachs candidate to run the country: old wine in new bottles. Progressive historians will look back at this and hopefully note the real elation should be placed at the huge, diverse coalition that worked to elect this man, and not the man himself, who presently ponders how to follow the errors of the British and Russians by digging deeper in the Afghan desert. Or, the US's own error in Southeast Asia.


OK, I'm feeling pessimistic. So I've been submerging myself in my bottle-of-choice: the Pacific Ocean and my penchant for rough-water swimming. It's during these swims I can exercise my body and exorcise a few demons. Obama is not a demon. He first deeply impressed me in the LOGO channel debates in 2008, where he alone struck me as someone who spoke the LGBT language, even more than my personal favorite, Rep. Dennis Kucinich. I thought someone so versed, so exposed to the complexities of the US community was better than the parochial men of our past.


But in the several months of the Obama Administration, fair and balanced is grossly skewed to the ruling, corporate elite and not the workers, the poor, the disabled, LGBTQ community, and what Prof. Ogbe called "involuntary immigrants" - Black and Brown communities. Commentators enchant about a second Camelot, straining comparisons with John Kennedy, but this man is more comparable to Lyndon B Johnson, whose Great Society architecture was seriously undermined by our evil war against Vietnam and a federal police run by J. Edgar Hoover.


I am not a Christian but the cards dealt me were that I was born in a Christian country, and it behooves anyone so unfortunate to know the lingua franca of its master class. Yes, Christianity is essentially a rationale, a poor excuse for the Dark Age, the Inquisition, and massive ethnic cleansings. Still, it's better to know your enemy and his "good news." So on a recent swim some words from the Old Testament came to mind, from Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities."


It would be the height of arrogance to think I am the first to present a certain angle on, say, capitalism or the public option or the insidious ruling class. Like flesh, all is recycled. Marx inspired Henry George, and it was this American author of POVERTY & PROGRESS who convinced a young George Bernard Shaw to become a socialist.


At my current job, I have gotten my fill at seeing coworkers sitting on the morning shuttle deep in the pages of their Holy Bible. In private conversations, I hear them quoting passages to one another. I hear them citing with academic precision those men supposed to be the followers of the Jewish teacher who has been appropriated as a Christian prophet.


No one quotes Karl Marx. Marx being either a Hollywood comedian or an Unknown, I may see him cited only in my online life, in discussion groups of the left, progressive, and socialist/communist persuasion. Our prophets: Lenin, Stalin, the Fabian Society, CLR James, or Walter Rodney, George Bernard Shaw or Annie Besant, Emma Goldman or Rosa Luxemburg. Fidel and Che. Poor Angela Davis is not even reduced to being an iconic Afro; just another unknown.


Nearly 2,000 years of Christian doctrine and maybe 200 of communism, and where has it got us except feeling a deep, false sense of satisfaction? Where's the progress?


Is knowledge really power? History proves that in brittle minds knowledge is equal to the ashes of the burned libraries of the Dark Ages, blowin' in the wind.


What have these opposing doctrines, thoroughly studied, committed to memory, inspiring murder and revolution, brought to the final analysis of human psychology? Yes, the Christian doctrine, as it is so construed, stands opposed to communism, as it so constructed. This is not to say Jesus is at issue: I have said again and again that Jesus was not a Christian but a rabbinical social justice, communist hero.


Are human beings, Shaw queried, hopelessly depraved? He said we are certainly lazy, as we have not dared attempt to implement the Jesus Program, which would more likely be found in those ancient synagogues of East Africa, which predate Jesus, than in the palace at the Vatican. But why bother with history?!


And Marx or Marxist-Leninism or Stalinism or the Fabian Society's parliamentary socialism? The first successful socialist revolution was invaded by the Western powers and arguably not allowed to succeed or fail on its own merits. Today, Cuba is held up as further proof of the failure of communism, but to me it only proves the stubborn lengths to which the West will go to starve a whole aspiring people who want to re-order the economic order. Tropical Communism has not failed; it has never been allowed to flourish.


So communism as written by its Framers and the admonishments as spoken by Jesus, while they seem to be rigorously studied - you may see me with my worn copy of Fidel's speeches sitting next to a coworker with his worn Bible - neither civilization has been achieved.


If the US weren't on its deathbed - and it is - we could go another 200 years in this Dark Age. I do not presume its disintegration will hearken a Golden Age any more than the demise of the USSR ... for, as the Book says, there is nothing new under the sun.

An HIV vaccine raises more questions than it answers

I admit for more of my adult life I was a hardcore HIV dissident than not. Only in the last few years have I "fair and balanced" my views to complement them with Western Medicine. I have not thrown the dissident baby out with the bathwater. Western Medicine is still part and parcel to our corporate establishment, which is why - shamefully - poor communities within the West and poor countries of the Third World see deaths by easily preventable means were they able to access medicines.

So I do not rejoice too quickly at the prospect of a vaccine.

Adding to this skepticism, news reports point to the uniqueness of Thai HIV. I remember on one of my many HIV tests in the 90's, the pamphleteer [since a pamphlet was the extent of their HIV education] asked me if I had had sex with any Brazilians in the prior 6 months. I scoffed, and the pamphleteer told me to my surprise Brazil has its own special HIV.

Again, should this so-called vaccine be produced, I fear the poor communities and poor countries, like Brazil and Thailand, will be left, business as usual, to die from lack of access to the modern technology of available medicines because they are poor and structurally kept poor. We see this in Africa every day while the West wrings its hands with operatic majesty.

Second, something many dissidents queried to deaf ears a generation ago was: if such a vaccine for HIV is ever successfully created and administered, the recipient will then test POSITIVE for HIV. Since, until the coming of the human immunodeficiency virus, the presence of antibodies in the body was thought to be a good sign, a sign the body had mounted a counter attack on an imbalance.

I say again: imbalance. Our bodies are full of microbes, and despite the Western fetish for sanitizing and killing 99.9% germs, we won't live and live well if such a dream came true. Thank the gods we are fundamentally backwards.

With HIV, a positive antibody was a scourge, rightly or wrongly. Will a positive result from a purported vaccine be different?

Third, as Commerce is the West's True Religion, US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher changed the rules for private capital to access medical research and profit from it. These rules were changed at the exact time HIV was "discovered." A toxic, poisonous medicine called AZT brought back from its lethal failures in the 1960's to kill - err, I mean treat - thousands of gay men, killing many. More medicines followed: arguably life-saving medicines, less toxic but not without consequences.

Today, AZT in its pure form is once again shelved until a future generation with no sense of witch doctoring will take it for baldness and/or chronic unease about a job whose wage is low and provides no health benefit.

Since, the Reagan-Thatcher reform, there is no end to the invention of Yuppie conditions for which there is a pill, if only you talk to your doctor!

I would hope that universal, single-payer health care - the public option - would wipe the grins off pharmaceutical executives, since saving lives and treating the masses will be a priority over Big Pharm's only mandate: its fealty to the True Religion, commerce. Big Pharm is not empaneled to save the poor, reach the needy, but rather to make quarterly profits for its shareholders.

You want to see a Death Panel, look to the boardrooms of the pharmaceutical industry.

HIV is a scourge, affecting hundreds of millions. I have lost dear friends and comrades from it and from our official adherence to Commerce that denied them health care and housing. HIV is also a psychological scourge, implanted by Pres. Reagan's deafening silence while hundreds died, and pinning a truly scarlet letter on the breast of many warriors, adult and child (Ryan White's name flows like a song from our lips today, but who remembers when that child was hounded from his school?!)

A vaccine for HIV? I sincerely hope we can treat all preventable illness and launch investigations to prevent the mysterious ones, like Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer's, ALS, ... and breast cancer in women. But I believe as a socialist the first step to this is a vaccine for modern capitalism.

- This essay is dedicated to Martin Llambelis (Baba Funke), who would have celebrated a birthday today.

For more information:
Dr. Peter Duesberg's site and his book INVENTING THE AIDS VIRUS
Celia Farber's SERIOUS ADVERSE EVENTS
Celia Farber's article in Harper's magazine.

HIV vaccine reduces infection [BBC] * Researchers reports AIDS vaccine success [LA Times]

It is time to break up the Democratic Party

While the DiVinci Code's Dan Brown is on the task to uncover national secrets, he might expose the one that has kept the Democratic Party together. It is not so much a big tent as it is a sprawling concentration camp of all sorts of candidates for a eugenicist's social purification campaign: yes, of course, Jews; yes, of course, LGBTQs; yes, of course, Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, Asians ... the poor, single mothers, single fathers, grandparent/guardians, the elderly, the disabled, felons.

But the inmates don't run this camp. We are mistreated. The camp is run by Lehman Brothers and its surviving money-changers. They have most cynically gathered us together, like an arranged marriage made in the Dark Ages.

I am truly curious what drug has been put in the water supply to keep these inmates under the throes of these madmen of Commerce - white, blue eyed ones, according to a rather frank president of Brasil.

In 1984, the federal government dismantled the iconic Ma Bell - aka, AT&T, in an anti-trust assault on bringing free enterprise, commerce, and profit opportunities to the nation. These three are the hidden holy trinity of the United States of America. I await Brown's made-for-TV narrative of the nation's true religion.

But more: I hope the federal government will do to the Democratic Party what it did over a generation ago to Ma Bell: break it up.

Pres. Obama's recent rations to the camp inmates was his continuation of the antiquated blockade against Cuba. There has been plenty other poison: slapping the LGBT community in the face by defending the Defense of Marriage Act. He cleverly employed the term "universal health care," but did not mean universal health care but rather more reforms, more mandates, then the public option, which he is rather quickly taking off the table. He began his first week in the White House by bombing soft targets in the Mideast war.

He is, in short, an effective and competent head of a capitalist party.

Thinking of Pres da Silva's white, blue eyeds who caused the financial crisis, Obama seems bent on channeling those of his white ancestors in his treaty-making skills. Of the 300-odd treaties made with the various AmerIndian nations, the white man broke them all. All. Obama continues this infamous record.

Rather than suffer the irritation of watching Obama continue to break promises, as recent democrats have been wont to do, let him break away and lead a party of wanna-be progressives who make touchy-feely commercials, and steel your money, water rights, land rights, and bomb your soft-targeted neighborhoods. Much of the agony suffered by the working class right now was neatly set up not by Richard M Nixon but by William "Welfare Reform" Clinton, a presidency which literally drove me from this country in an unsuccessful and sloppy attempt to live exotically abroad.

Obama can have his own party, with Bill and Hillary. Ralph Nader perhaps another. Dennis Kucinich another. Cynthia McKinney her constituents. US Senator Olympia Snow might find better lodgings than the present Republican Party. US Senator Bernard Sanders can finally admit to being a socialist, because along with the Democratic Party there will be a Socialist Party, a Socialist Workers Party, a Socialist Labor Party, a Democratic Socialist Party, led by Cornell West and Barbara Ehrenreich.

One would hope this break up would not follow the course of the scattered AT&T, which has been reunited, or those disparate political parties go the course of the UK's New Labour in making a deep and gracious bow to the Iron Lady and taking public ownership off its platform.
The US needs a socialist, worker party, and it will never have one in this internment camp.

For more info: Socialist Party USA * Socialist Labor Party * Peace & Freedom Party * Party for Socialism & Liberation * Revolutionary Communist Party * Democratic Socialists of America

Obama sticks the middle finger to his base and keeps US blockade against Cuba

Barack Obama defied the odds and with a pertinent message to a broad, liberal and progressive base, was elected president. But what's in a message? One must be as good as any other: or so it would seem this increasingly mediocre creature, President Obama.

Liar? Maybe. Fraud? Hmmm. Yes.

I may be far to the left of Obama, embrace socialism while he embraces the Lehman Brothers. But that broad, liberal and progressive base that cast their vote for him, staunch Democrats, Independents, and Undecideds, are bewildered.

While as candiiate Obama he made such decent overtures and employed rational rhetoric when it comes to US relations with Revolution Cuba, stated he would be willing to sit down with the Cuban government, as president he has answered the left's curiosity by ... keeping the blockade firmly in place. And he has done so sounding eerily like George W Bush, another mediocre creature.

Does the country deserve this? Given the excessive self-fascination one sees ad nauseum on the social networking sites, yes: we do deserve this swamp. One message is as good as any other; no bland daily deed deserves to go unposted.

Obama has already earned an F-grade on his progress report: the war/occupation, health care, the economy, LGBT rights (audaciously he supported Defense of Marriage Act). Like a lazy student he has turned his F-grade into an academic probation, numbering the days we will further watch one of his staged theatrical pieces. His first several months are are as disturbing and unremarkable as the first months of his predecessor: remember, oldies? Those dark, impotent months before 9/11?

With Cuba, he has thrown bloody red meat to the Miami Mafia of Cubans, wretchedly anti-Castro to the point they would starve the island's 11 million workers to take pot-shots at Fidel and Raul. This should not surprise us, since this same Mafia didn't care about the workers before the Revolution - backed death squads and torture and disappearances, and did so with the vital help of the US empire.

Gloria Estefan, a prominent anticastrista who refuses to sing in Cuba until there is democracy in her Cuban homeland, is the daughter of a bad gene pool which served the dictator/murderer/thug, Fulgencio Batista, who staged a coups d'etat in 1952 and locked up the Castro brothers. Yet she has the nerve to speak on behalf of democracy!

With that broad base of liberal and progressives, Obama has thrown what? LGBT government employees may share benefits. This is such a pedestrian, shallow, cynical use of his clout.
This man hasn't an idea in his head: that's becoming clear. He deeply impressed me on LGBT issues, struck me as a man with a grasp of the advanced education he has had. But this is very different from having a Mission, a Vision.

At this writing, Obama is shelving the Public Option and keeping the corporate health pirates in place: who's going to kill Granny now? That 70% who want serious reform doesn't phase this man's political timbre, which means he has none.

With persisting the US attack on Cuba, he has pleased a base of old, backward Cubans and US elites who won't vote for him since he's a Marxist Muslim born in the Axis of Evil, while he adds more insult to the injury felt by his broad, liberal and progressive base.

You fraud.

Let all workers have tenure

The education reform debate has inadvertently pointed to a solution for all workers while it has a the same time attacked them. As Queen Marie Antoinette might say: LET THEM HAVE TENURE.

Tenure commonly refers to a secured job for life, usually applied to senior academics since their academic freedom needed to be protected. Wage security would benefit all workers, not just academics.

The education reform debate is cloaked and daggared specifically in an attack on public school teachers, their competence, their unions, and especially tenure. The Los Angeles Times, that Swine Flu of US journalism has led this charge.

Yet we do not hear these reformers storming our federal courts to end life-term appointments for judges. That is also tenure. Wealth in the US is still kept with a small gaggle of ruling families. If you think about it, this is a form of perpetual tenure, generation after generation.

But it is no mistake why our Establishment goes after the social service sector.

The LA Times, with a record at heaping vitriol on pro-public, left-of-center, populist causes as far back as the 1930's near-victory of a socialist governor in California, is probably helping produce the farce that is cleverly couched as Helping Our Kids.

Their aim is to dismantle public schools, but you can't openly attack kids. So our Establishment has implemented "Testing" to covertly punish schools with little resources by using these student assessments to take paltry resources from schools.

Schools fail and are defeathered. Teachers punished and are defrocked. Capitalism's social darwinism is victorious.

"They hang us by the neck," Fidel Castro said in a not dissimilar context, "and criticize us for not breathing." This is the dilemma the public school finds itself in.

Ironically, the Establishment. itself so opposed to labor rights anywhere, has given us the logic for giving all workers tenure.

We get a lot of this do-well-in-school lip service, and how college graduates earning power is greater than a high school graduate. But this misses the dinosaur in the room of the swathes of unemployment in all sectors, in all walks of life, but most especially among the working classes.
If the Establishment believes so much in its education, let the country stand behind it by guaranteeing all workers a wage:

* Anyone who has successfully completed an education, GED, degree, or training certificate program is guaranteed a wage by the state. The more credentials, the greater your earning potential.

* If a job is made obsolete, the worker will continue to earn his/her wage and be re-trained or re-assigned to another job. This will disincentivize throwing workers to the streets.

If this exposes the phony degree mills and financial aid scams - such as what this author suffered at an over-rated San Francisco Jesuit university, all the better. Shut them down. The state would have a greater interest in the quality and longevity of these degree programs and certifications to produce employable people.

Let the Establishment stand behind its programs, the education system it touts and funds with tax dollars (often in student loans), and guarantee tenure for all by giving all workers a living wage regardless whether the system has a plough for them to push or a paper to shred.

For more info: George Bernard Shaw makes a compelling argument for Guaranteed Wage in his The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism & Capitalism

What's wrong with our public education?

Pres. Barack Obama's Secy of Education, Arne Duncan, was formerly head of the Chicago public schools, but he persists in the cause du jour of "teacher accountabililty" for student performance. Dangerously, he now has a Hero-President and a big budget to coerce the nation's school districts, short of cash and needing federal moneys, into implementing teacher-bashing policies.

For those sincerely interested in reforming education - specifically: public education - we have replaced one Thug's No Child Left Behind with the Sheeply Clothed Throw Teachers Under the Bus.

The problem with this accountability nonsense is it is seductive to the many who long ago lost touch with our public institutions and believe in the magic of the marketplace. That is a serious problem, because when some World Bank type comes along demanding market models as the route to the Promised Land, the public - to throw in yet another metaphor - drink the Kool-Aid.

Has Pres. Obama become the Jim Jones of Public School Teachers? When he seeks to apply the magic of the marketplace to public institutions, he is a social terrorist.

The teacher accountability fix is rather like mammograms. They monitor, but they do nothing to address the problem. As gender-parity medical activists have pointed out mammograms do not cure cancer. The public may feel like something is being done, but cancer in women still remains on the rise, mysteriously.

My late grandfather, Lowell B Denny I, once defended the United States Postal Service (USPS) to me when I proposed its privatization. This man who had risen in the ranks of the USPS and raised four children schooled me on its social necessity. For one small fee, anyone in the country could send a USPS letter to anyone else, and that everyone had access to mail service.

My grandfather instructed me that were it a private enterprise, made to conform to market voodoo, the population in rural areas may or may not continue to get mail since it would be expensive to do so; and sending a letter to a grandparent in the middle of such remote areas would be equally expensive.

Imagine Grandma in the woods spending FEDEX prices to send you that holiday card!
Public schools - the mission of educating the many, the poor, is as costly but worthy an investment as the investment we put in small babies, 99.9% of whom earn nothing in return. All public institutions are public investments, for the public.

I don't know where the magic of the market is magic, but it's not in the rearing of children.
We must first expect the expense of public schools if we are to guarantee free public, k-12 schooling (insufficient in a post-industrial society) to all children.

Then we must reconcile what place it is to serve in our society. This will define curriculae and inform teachers as to their role. Remember: soldiers who don't know what they're fighting for are a pretty unreliable lot.

The larger question, the elephant in the room that our rulers do not want discussed is this: what are public schools for? What do we as a society want produced from 12 years of publicly funded education?

Our rulers do not want this discussed because their answers would diverge widely from ours. We would want well trained, literate, engaged citizens. This was always the Dream of public schooling which fled headlong into an ideologically narrow society, which wants conformity, obedience, legions of poor boys to be sent into deserts and jungles to fight and die and not question and certainly not display the cynicism toward the nation-state that our rulers do every day when they send jobs "overseas."

Don't think. Just toil. Just die. Bleed.

What is wrong with our public education is the latent class war waged within it. Only, one side doesn't know its fighting and by complicity are backing this teacher accountability attack.
Of course we should have good teachers. Of course Johnny and Susan must know how to read. But why?

Our rulers have maliciously convinced the public that the woes of our society be traced back to Johnny and Susan and their teachers, not to their poor, corrupt leadership of our society. The rulers get bailed out. Public school teachers extraordinarily rendered.

Death of a Liberal Lion but when will a worker-led party be born in the US?

The tributes have been coming from all corners of the conquering world for the late Edward M. Kennedy. The oft-noted moniker is Liberal Lion, Champion for the working class, Health Care Reformer. Defender of Children. I do not know what this must mean when I look at my country and an institution like The Kennedys.

The political structure aside for a moment, the slashing of social services of every kind, education cuts (ironic in the face of rising teacher expectations), single-payer health system (hotly debated), rising war funding (no debate there) have to speak to our national morality, or lack thereof.

Because a parent who was shown to treat his/her family like this would be locked away by the police and an intervention by Child Protective Services. This should be enough, but I know it is not, to understand why that demonized concoction called Al Quaeda does not want the West in the Middle East and why it refuses to honor our "Way of Life."

In structural terms, the United States of America is the only Western democracy [sic] without a viable political party for the working class. Instead, we have the Democrats, and we have the Republicans, two parties, as the Obama campaign showed, are largely funded by the ruling elite of this country.

Oh, yes, and we have The Kennedys.

Democrat or Republican, what we are left with in the country is to wait for our ruling elite to decide to act before action is taken. If the ruling elite want the "Internationale" to replace our national anthem, we will see flurries of news stories and features on this leading up to a seamless "democratic" process of their flunkies voting for it.

I am afraid to say that is what the two-party machine is in the US: a computer program controlled by the ruling elite. Top-down structure. The downs carry the placards printed by the tops.

Kennedy was, of course, a Democrat. His family was as close to ruling class as the average American is allowed to know. More over, he came from a family the popular culture has bestowed by divine right political ability: so at 30 he becomes a US senator. This is really funny since more than a few of that generation admonished a civil justice system for affirmatively promoting women and racial minorities, and securing their access to higher education, but who were suspected of being "unqualified."

Not The Kennedys!

In this moral swamp, I found myself asking had we a broader political class - like Europe with its working class political parties, some in power, some not, some having identity crises - where would this Liberal Lion's allegiance lay. This is not a meaningless exercise: we must know, soberly, who our allies are and what our agenda as progressives is.

Kennedy is a mystery. I noted looking over photo spreads of his "life" how easily we can make someone like Kennedy appear on the "right" side of anything.

His late brother, Robert, for example, is the darling of the liberal left, but how does his rabid anticommunism, early and key support of Vietnam invasions, and his campaigns to assassinate Fidel Castro and sabotage the Cuban Revolution by coordinating subversion play? We hear nothing about that, do we?

The Kennedy glow is too bright.

Making Kennedy a Champion of the Working Class, a Liberal Lion has set our national bar very, very low. So even to get a bit above it still puts the US in a pretty pathetic place in regards to its Western neighbors. Yes, FOX news gets its dander up when we seem to inch toward that low-hanging fruit.

For more info: LA Times coverage * BBC coverage

Republic UK campaign highlights what we all miss in populist politics

The Republic UK group may be unknown to most in the United States. This country achieved this organization's aims over 200 years ago. Republic UK wants to end the British monarchy and replace it with a democratically elected head of state, no more lords and inherited titles, no more unearned privilege. This US did most of that already. Most, not all.

Most in the United States may be fascinated with the British monarchy, a long history which pales in comparison to this country's youthful 200 years (vs. the 10th century ancestor of the present queen, King Alfred) is bound to get respect.

Lately, Republic UK has aimed its rhetorical guns on Prince Charles, who fascinates me. Republic UK knows which way the wind blows and understands the relative popularity of Queen Elizabeth II; no gun will be aimed at her. At most, they suggest she be allowed to retire.

Charles Windsor, prince of Wales, heir to that ancient throne, duke of This and earl of That, has decided to be useful and use his leverage for Charities - arguably what the Rich do as opposed to advocating an overthrow of the very system that allowed the Rich - architecture, education reform, organic, sustainable farming, the environment, and modern medicine.

At every turn he has royally pissed the Experts and some in the Establishment. Admittedly I would be less fascinated with this man were he advocating white supremacy or the sort of national socialism [Nazism] that his great uncle, King Edward VIII, liked.

I introduce this very British activist group for what is shows lacking in our conventional democratic movements.

Prince Charles and the Queen very much aside, where do these naive groups school themselves by suggesting electing a head of state ends the sort of meddling they accuse of the prince? Interestingly, they admire the queen for keeping her mouth shut, performing her ritual duties, and staying out of politics.

In the United States, a minimum of 70% of those polled want a public health care option. But this is from the start outweighed by the mighty voice of the unelected, unvetted health care industry. Our own conventional democratic movements are mute to the hands behind the clock; those who may speak of this class warfare are themselves muted by our newspapers of record.

Why have our conventional democratic movements set their guns on phantoms, like government take-over of health care bogeymen, the prince of Wales ... and not, say, Blue Cross, that crime against Nature, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, or the duke of Westminster, the wealthiest man and biggest landowner in the UK?

They fundamentally believe in capitalism with all its manifold contradictions.

Our best high school textbooks do not detail an Establishment in the US. Myth would have it that class system ended in 1776, when some white landowners prefacing Howard Jarvis, threw regulations out and the king with them.

But there is an Establishment. There is a ruling class. Their enemy since the beginning is the threat - I do not use this word lightly - of the public overtaking them in sheer numbers. So, the masses must be kept in their place. One tactic to achieve this is, again to cross the pond, launch specious attacks on a very forward-thinking prince of Wales, who launches no illegal wars, directs no dropping of carpet bombs on innocent children, does not with "votes" shred civil liberties by rendering untried prisoners to their torture.

If we want a public, social democracy, we must know who our enemies are.

For more info: Prince Charles in the Guardian UK * Preface to Shaw's THE APPLE CART * "How the Ruling Class thwarts Democracy" (Commondreams.org)

Newsflash: elite schools ranked as "Best" but fail to rank their contribution to public democracy

United Press International (UPI) has filed a strange story from US News & World Report: our elite institutions still rank themselves among themselves as surely as a chain of command exists under the British Aristocracy.

During my nearly 10 years as a public school teacher, I had to attend many in-service trainings to keep my skills as an educator sharp. One memorable in-service was about getting our kids into college. The discussion turned quickly to not only getting our kids into college but also into the "best" colleges.

The best colleges are among those listed recently by the UPI/US News story. Harvard and Princeton Universities top the list in first place. The news is they tied. But this is hardly news. Do we really care, for example, if the Pews outflank the Carnegies and have knocked the Rockefellers down a notch?

Those of us who want to be a Pew - one of our hidden, ruling families - think of nothing else.

My question at the in-service was whether the esteem we assign these schools was deserved, given their dark history where our kids specifically and our goal of a public democracy are concerned.

These elite institutions have a dark and anti-human rights history where racial and ethnic minorities are concerned, women, and the poor. It was only just yesterday they began to admit women and Blacks, opened its doors to Jews.

In 1920, Harvard launched a witch hunt to rid its halls of LGBT's.

Indeed, Harvard's reputation is directly linked to the Establishment. It is its record endowment from prominent alumni that add jewels to this undeserved, elitist crown.

Yet, the masses quiver in the marketplace at the name: Harvard!

Contrast this to our truly public universities and colleges. The community colleges, trade and technical schools, and state universities are often overlooked for their contribution to a truly civil society.

The Univ of Nebraska was one of the few universities in the Midwest that admitted Blacks in the 20's and 30's. I know this because my grandfather, Lowell B Denny, I, had to leave St. Louis to attend college there.

Where is our appreciation for Nebraska in adding to a young Black man's education?

The Establishment continue to feed us notions that their class alone is destined to govern and rule, that they themselves are the chosen people.

The contribution of this Harvard - Princeton "best" schools is part of this insidious propaganda campaign whereas a truly modern, democratic society must value most those institutions that include the whole of the public and train and educate them to be the farmers, technicians, mechanics, doctors, legal scholars, teachers, community organizers, and community contributors.

Unfortunately, as much as every institution continues to reflect our elitist heritage, the name Harvard still causes us to swoon.

2010 or 2012?

Our LGBT Establishment is in a dust up over whether to put gay marriage back on the California ballot in 2010 or 2012. This same establishment had earlier dissuaded other activists from taking their case to the US Supreme Court for fear that the august, final arbiter of the rights of runaway slaves, women, Japanese interned, might rule against the Great Cause and close the book.

While I am eternally happy when my LGBT comrades find True Love, I continue to find the agenda item of LGBT marriage a rather elitist point, made by elites and by elitist LGBT's who do not understand the political problem of the working classes, LGBT or otherwise. Raising the bar of our social and public democracy so that health care, housing, and education are public rights equally empowers the significance of LGBT equality.

Otherwise some will still be more equal than others. Equality to our fellow marginalized underclass is like demanding steerage class bunks on the Titanic.

Implicit in this current dust-up between LGBT factions, Equality California and Courage Campaign, is the delusion that rights come from governments. I've already noted the US Supreme Court's stellar record where Black slaves, women, Japanese interned during WWII. I could include war powers and the US intent to wage imperial wars whenever and wherever it wanted.

Have we lost the will to fight in our respective trenches? Imagine the labor activists who striked for our eight-hour work day petitioning bourgeois voters and our federal courts. The working class would still be warned that too much leisure would only be filled with alcoholism.

Radical Prince: The Richard Dimbleby Lecture

Has the heir to the British throne gone cuckoo and turned on his class, like a scorpion poisoning itself, or is he shining a bright light into the future?

To mention the Prince of Wales, Charles Windsor, is to stir up many reactions, especially in progressive, populist, socialist circles. Of course he is the beneficiary of an old, anti-democratic class system. He is a wealthy, large landowner, but hasn't done the sort of hard work you and I have to do to earn our way, pay our bills. His passport lists his occupation as: Prince of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

It is as hard to discern good sense from such a tangle in our purportedly democratic times as it is to sit down and listen to the confection called Al Quaeda, a conglomeration really of people who want Western imperialism to get out of their regions, homelands, communities.

James Baldwin noted we call people "terrorists," and such, in order to dismiss their humanity; we can cease listening to them. I admit my progressive peers would be just as dismissive - with good, historical reasons - of this man whose only job is to wait for his mother to die.

The problem is with Prince Charles is that we have too many things all figured out. Baldwin's "terrorist" is, in this case, "a prince." End of discussion. yes, maybe. But this cut-and-dry, knee-jerk reaction pretends we haven't benefited from class-traitors and race-traitors and gender-benders to move the needle. And these revolutionaries don't exclusively become green shoots of grass in our blessed Western democracies. Lately, we are just a vast dust-bowl in the "greatest country in the history of the world."

Prince Charles had to have caught my eye before the Facing the Future keynote speech he gave on July 8, 2009. Otherwise, I would never have watched it.

He has been first, for me, a proponent of alternative medicine (called complementary medicine in the UK), especially homeopathy. Bernard Shaw described homeopathy to a layperson as: while a modern doctor (allopath) washes the dirty cat a homeopath soils the cat so it learns to clean itself. After almost 20 years of stronger and stronger prescriptions medicines for seasonal allergies that lasted half the year, I turned to a homeopath who, in two years of treatments, cured most of my symptoms. No more sprays. No more steroids.

Prince Charles infamously hurled a criticism at some proposed improvements to London architecture, and killed the project, causing the Establishment to wail that he had crossed a line, abused his influence. He has not only advocated but provided funds to construct live-work communities, where people can walk to their jobs and where some streets are forbidden cars.

He is not only a farmer but also an organic farmer, lucid in the harms of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and an opponent of genetically modified foods.

Seeing the writing on the wall in multi-cultural Britain, he recently said as king he would like to be known as Defender of Faiths (since Henry VIII, British monarchs are known as "defender of the Faith," a title bestowed on Henry by the pope). But Charles was quickly rebuked by the country's most prominent prelate, the archbishop of Canterbury: worldly Charles was informed that the Anglican path was the only path for him as a future king, which takes a great deal of disciplined ignorance when one looks at not only modern Britain but our modern, creole, nations.

In his "Facing the Future" speech, he touches on themes that he has stirred up over the last generation and only employed new metaphors in the hope we finally get it.

So he reaches back 500 years to Henry VIII to cast him as a sort of Green King. Henry, relates Prince Charles, established the Royal Navy but understood the threat to the forests such rapid building of ships took, so a law was passed to protect forest growth in proportion to the building of that navy.

"What was instinctively understood by many in King Henry’s time was the importance of working with the grain of Nature to maintain the balance between keeping the Earth’s natural capital intact and sustaining humanity on its renewable income.

"It is this knowledge that I fear we have lost in our rush to pursue unlimited economic growth and material wealth – a loss that was never more rapid than during the 1960’s and at that time a frenzy of change swept the world in the wave of post-war Modernism."

The Establishment is correct to protest: a train wreck is in the making. The modern British monarchy has survived in part because it has stayed out of open-arena politics. What opinions does the Queen have about anything? The Establishment wonders how a King Charles is to deal with a nominally elected government, read its speeches, while he parades around the UK speaking against those very same government policies; and that he has a long record of testimony that run at cross-purposes to these policies.

What is so ironic about the Establishment's dust-up is that it is precisely what progressives find wrong with our current modern society with undue powers afforded to unelected corporations. No one elected the Establishments of the UK or US, but there they are, keeping national health care off the table and a ferocious blockade on Revolutionary Cuba. So it is interesting Charles is singled out for "undue influence," while the reactionary wing of the establishment gets a pass by the likes of the Guardian Newspaper.

Has our industrial society become a Frankenstein Monster that threatens its creators?

"Facing the future, therefore, requires a shift from a reductive, mechanistic approach to one that is more balanced and integrated with Nature’s complexity – one that recognizes not just the build up of financial capital, but the equal importance of what we already have – environmental capital and, crucially, what I might best call 'community capital.' That is, the networks of people and organizations, the post offices and pubs, the churches and village halls, the mosques, temples and bazaars – the wealth that holds our communities together; that enriches people’s lives through mutual support, love, loyalty and identity. Just as we have no way of accounting for the loss of the natural world, contemporary economics has no way of accounting for the loss of this community capital."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Like a good person of color I am supposed to celebrate the nomination and confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the nation's High Court. And I do not miss the enormous symbolism of a woman, raised largely by a single mother, working class, first-generation American, Puerto Rican being elevated to the US Supreme Court.

But I am not here to write party invitations. And, frankly, since my liberal friends cast Revolution Cuba - which I support - as some sort of racial, gender paradise, I head for the nearest door frame whenever they celebrate anything.

The election of Barack Hussein Obama started this post-racial nonsense, but easy atonement without sacrifice is a hallmark for the liberal crowd.

If liberals, moderates, conservatives of any political party think these things are turning-points in the country's long record of human rights violations codified in law and affirmed by high and low courts, I have a clunker program to sell to them.

Justice Sotomayor is an amazing, brilliant judge and legal mind. But women and especially women of color still persist in structural gender discrimination in the US, especially where wages are concerned. Ms. Sotomayor is sort of a freak of nature, not one among equals.

Puerto Rico was stolen by the US in the Spanish-American War. It remains a semi-colony of the US empire. The United Nations has demanded it be made a state, on equal footing with other US states or be allowed its independence. Its residents suffered brutal repression in the hands of the US government. Its women in the 1960's were the Guinea Pigs for female contraception [the Pill].

Over 100 years after that Conquest, the US puts one of its daughters on the High Court. One hundred years not included in most high school history books.

While Revolution Cuba in general, Fidel Castro in particular, are routinely indicted for the flight of millions of Cubans, the "flight" of Ms Sotomayor's parents with millions others from Puerto Rico goes without any comment. The early death of her father: without comment. The struggles of a single mother raising two children: without comment.

It goes without comment, that is, until it can be used to show the Horatio Alger Story, which every nominee is supposed to have fulfilled. Born on the bottom - hard work - Success. Many Americans believe this stupid story and know nothing of the structural oppression put on colonials abroad and the working class at home.

They don't know any of the famous Puerto Rican independence fighters, like the other Sotomayor: Lolita Lebron Sotomayor, who led an armed attack on Congress in 1954 for US occupation of her homeland (and because the US government had just toppled a democratically elected government in Guatemala), Mariana Bracetti, Lola Rodriguez de Tio, Blanca Canales, or Juana Colon.

Is the Nixon-Era term "Hispanic" designed to hide this history? The music term "salsa" was alleged to have been introduced around the same time to avoid references to Cuba, its primary source, which was governed by the King of Hell.

These liberal celebrants think this country has actually made a dent in the racist spirit, sexist ghosts of this country, and this is dangerous. Dangerous for them, for me, and mine. Complacency is dangerous. Lack of solid allies is distress.

I have noted over the many years of my political activism that many of these liberals can offer very cogent criticisms of US policy until one of its underclass speaks up - that is, a woman, racial minority, sexual minority. The shutters close and these liberals can become the best White Nationalist, offering cogent reasons why the US is the Great and Good.

So I'll keep my champagne bottle corked.

Ending term limits won't restore the best public democracy but build a better one

Former San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown, and I don't have much in common. I lived in San Francisco during his tenure, and witnessed the further ruination of a beautiful, multi-ethnic city - The City - I called home for 15 magical years. I could be a young working-class copy editor with many roommates and live next to a high-powered corporate lawyer, a few blocks from the Brown and Dianne Fienstein mansions, in the vicinity of Danny Glover or work as a public school teacher living in the diverse Mission District or artists, artisans, white-collar Financial District types, and LGBT's.

Willie Brown helped change all that by making the City an impossible place for the working class, which sees no color. High evictions. Higher rents. Brown's politics is a phony populism rooted in a cynical use of his blackness and underclass background to bring the shrinking and disparaged Black and working-class communities of that city to support Da Mayor's measures, which were orchestrated by Big Business.

So it might seem a relief that California only allows such a mayor only two terms in office. But it's not. Brown became mayor when he was forced to give up his California state Assembly seat because of voter-approved term limits. Brown was certainly in the pocket of Big Business then, too, but he was also a very early proponent of LGBT equal rights. For a Black, poor man from the rural South this act for LGBT's cannot be under-appreciated.

Brown and I share at least one thing of substance in common: we oppose term limits.

I went through three doctors when I moved to Los Angeles. The first, an educated, multilingual Arab seemed never to have dealt with a gay man and noticeably avoided touching me. The second only had an answering service, and I could never secure an appointment. When I ventured well beyond my Koreatown area and looked to UCLA I found the best doctor in the world.

Imagine if a law were passed to limit my visits to my current doctor to a set time.

I had to buy a car when I moved to LA. I did so reluctantly. I didn't need a car in San Francisco and most of my adult life didn't own a car. But I had to buy one, and invariably cars need repairs. Mechanics are an inconsistent lot, so when you find one that is thorough and honest, that's peace of mind. Like gold.

Imagine if a law were passed to limit my mechanic consults to a limited time.

Imagine having to set out yet again in search of a competent, honest, tolerant professionals.
In 1990, by a democratic majority of those who chose to vote, California voters imposed term limits and affirmed the constraint on themselves to re-elect competent professionals. 52%-48%.
Meanwhile, our judges serve for life.

There were no corresponding limitations on corporate powers with term limits.

No progressive taxation exists to end the inheritance of vast unearned fortunes from parent to child, even though the child has done nothing to create this wealth.

While the main artery to the public's power is severed, we have mysteriously left the other popular bogeymen unscathed, unrestrained.

I suspect this austere measure to limit the power of those the people elect is a direct attack on the people's power to wage class war. Our rulers have always - always - feared the power of the masses on the sanctity of Property. There: I said it. There is a class war, and it's mostly them against us.

When reforms were sought to ease term limits, it was predictably the Republican Party and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association who opposed it.

We need all the tools at our disposal, and this most especially includes being to elect again and again and again a pro-worker, pro-children, pro-equal rights ... pro-socialist candidate as many times as she or he might be needed.

Willie Brown may not be my role model, but he's right on this one.

Will the gay-basher in chief have a Coors beer to discuss his assault on LGBT rights?

For the 100th time, I do not share many of my LGBT comrades in my advocacy for "Gay Marriage." But as long as our civil society assigns a myriad of rights and privileges based on this useless institution, it cannot be closed to part of the population because of their sexual orientation.

It's a simple matter of equity. We deny rights and privileges to people based on due process (murderers deprived of liberty by courts of law) or age (voting age is 18 for the whole of the population). There is no racial, gender, class tests to having equal rights.

But apparently you must be a heterosexual to enjoy the rights assigned to the marriage bed.

Opponents to LGBT marriage continue to cite and lean on the Bible and Christianity, which have nothing to do with each other since the Bible and its holy folk are Jewish. Christianity has had its day in the sun, bloodied every corner of the earth, and is fading not fast enough along with the moral authority of the Western experiment (remember Gandhi's famous reply about Western civilization?).

President Barack Obama did not get my vote. Ralph Nader did. I declared my suspicion of Obama from the outset and was wrong only that he would get as far as he did, the highest office in the country.

But now in high office, he seems to have taken the Blue Pill and has back stabbed the anti-war supporters who backed him, is ready to abandon the public health care option, and dumped the LGBT community.

In the last, the Obama Administration continues Don't Ask Don't tell, and, last month, backs the Defense of Marriage Act in court. He didn't have to do this, but he did. Making Obama a gay basher in chief. Yes, that what he is, and that is exactly what my LGBT peer what call George W Bush if he made such a discriminatory move.

My more politic, LGBT comrades will certainly be more discrete, say they are disappointed but will continue to Hope and leave open the doors of dialogue.

James Baldwin defended the militant activity of the Black Panthers - an activity he himself found distasteful - noting that one can petition and petition and petition but at some point one becomes only a beggar.
And this is what the LGBT Establishment is quite satisfied being: beggars at the gate, name-dropping their personal relationships and connections, and betraying the majority of their community.

The beggar on 7th/Pacfic Coast Highway here in Long Beach, CA., who waves to me everyday does not confuse me with a personal relationship or a contact. I am just a guy in a car who waves back.

The beggars can only hope that Obama will have second thoughts and invite the LGBT establishment and some gay bashers to the White House for a Coors beer, which all indications would be the beer of choice for this bigot.

Our liberal elites in Hollywood show shallow support for progressive cause while real economy booms

The LA Times reports that the star-hosts of the reality show, "American Idol" [NBC] are in contractual negotiations for higher salaries. Paula Abdul is asking for $12 million. Ryan Seacrest for $30 million. Simon Cowell for $45 million.

Our economic system provides the logic for these TV personalities to demand higher salaries - for, to call them film or movie stars seems to lower an ambiguous bar too low. Ambiguous: Katharine Hepburn was asked which film she'd want preserved for posterity if the others were to be burned. "Burn them all," she said, as she often poo-pooed the notion of the art form.

Our economic system provides for production companies who stage the show, parent companies who manage the production companies, and megalomaniacal conglomerates with local PO Boxes but based in Delaware or some faraway island, who direct the parent companies. Anyone remember who BEATRICE is?

So, arguably, if the production companies are turning a profit, and the parent companies showing growth, and the megalomaniacs can afford to hide less of its increased cash flow, why shouldn't the man and woman worker-bee on the ground enjoy, proportionally, in this largess?

Unfortunately, this is the argument of many of our modern, de-fanged trades-unions. De-fanged at the beginning of the Cold War to purge itself of communists, their friends, and any foreign involvement in workers Over There. So much for "International Brotherhood." Their focus has been reduced to wages rather than building a truly democratic society. So we get these measures, which need to be discussed, of "living wage" ordinances, as if wages ends the social discussion, as if a living wage comes close to empowering a single parent to pay for all the socialism they now enjoy - like public libraries, public schools, public hospitals, police, fire departments, etc. A two-parent living wage household could still not afford these amenities.

The small percent who make millions of dollars - that other tier of our two-tiered, rich-and-poor country - may come close. But why only them? What these negotiations show me are two interesting, disturbing phenomena:

1. Depth of Hollywood elite's progressive politics a toddler wading pool. Compared with former Gov. Sarah Palin (who always told the truth during her VP campaign!), the Hollywood elite must seem like communists. But within the world of the left, the thing that puts them furthest to the Right is not only their wages but their investment in that wage scheme. In this respect, though it must sound rather harsh, they are no better than the French bourgeoisie who sought liberty and equality at the French Revolution only if it didn't block their trade routes or harm the profits on the theft and sale of Africans as slaves.

Revolution has its limits. I suppose when it comes to redistributing the wealth rationally we will have to take it out of their cold, dead hands.

I could imagine this Hollywood liberal elite putting these multi-million dollar salaries to better use, like funding a viable third party, backing viable third-party candidates, and beating the system at its own game. But they are too invested in the scheme, and their booster fundraiser status for the Democratic Party proves this.

With a few fangs restored in the trades-unions, this combination of International brothers and sisters, Hollywood cash, and third-party platforms would be unbeatable. Look at health care. Seventy-percent favor nationalized health care, but we lack the clout, the lobby dollars, and control of the corporate airwaves to make a dent in the argument put forth by the Establishment, of which Mr. Obama proves to be an honorary member.

Instead, this top percent of the income bracket understandably backs Democrats, the other white meat, the other capitalist political party.

2. There's Gold in the Hills and news of barrenness premature. All these profits from the megalomaniacs trickling down should alert us to the fact there is money in the economy, and that it is being told where to go and where not to go. This is called governance. To govern, one writer noted concisely, is to decide how the money is raised and how it is spent.

That the megalomaniacs are allowed multi-billion dollars per year in salary is not Divine Providence, it is not set in some natural order of things. It comes from fundamental political decisions. It comes from a value system.

Why that 70% pro-socialized medicine cannot affect this decision goes back to our lack of a viable political party. If Beatrice has one, why not Ethel and Fred? The current value system registers no irony in this disparity.

Speaking of nature, but not wanting to go too far in picking on the "American Idol" concoction, why does person A deserve to make $30 million while person B makes nothing? It is an elementary question that would seem to preface social and economic equity. But we are not allowed to ask such embarrassing questions.

July 26th

Vietnamese liberation fighter, Ho Chi Minh, said that despite the successes of the anti-imperialist movement to wear down French occupiers in Indochina, the VietCong belief in itself was at a low ebb by the late 1950's.

Then he got a boost from halfway around the world, from a Caribbean island the US founders compared to a piece of fruit to fall in the US lap.

July 26th is Cuba's July 4th. That is, it is the day a band of men and women organized and led an assault on one of the US-backed regime's fortresses. As important as what happened in the bloody aftermath is why this assault took place.

Ho Chi Minh had once believed the hype and approached Western leaders to bring Vietnam into the Western liberal democratic tradition. He perhaps didn't know the West had already by early 1900's began to deplete itself of the last dregs of its moral authority fund. In any case, he was not even rebuked. Just ignored. He was after all a subject.

Fidel Castro had come from a new class Cuban family, held nationalist aspirations, became a lawyer, and was running as a Cuban senatorial candidate. When the Orthodox Party he had joined looked sure to win a majority of seats in Cuba's legislature, the US-backed regime cancelled the elections and declared a state of emergency.

Even a new class family, like Fidel's, were going to be ignored.

Down but not out, the cast-asides carefully arranged their assault on the Moncada Garrison in Santiago de Cuba. Their plan was to overtake the garrison, take the weapons, and if need be retreat into the mountains to fight the US-backed regime of Fulgencia Batista.

Many things went terribly wrong. The assault was foiled, many of the men captured, tortured, and killed. A few others were imprisoned, among them Fidel, and his brother, Raul.

The regime released the prisoners a few years later as a goodwill gesture to garner a bit of public support. Batista, backed by the US government, was expropriating the best land profits to the US, protecting the Mafia-dominated economy, and sending death squads to crush dissenters.
Of course, Fidel and the others fled to Mexico to re-organize their assault and returned a few years later on the little yacht, Granma. Viz., Washington crossing the Potomac, I suppose.

The triumph of the Cuban Revolution came January 1, 1959. The Moncada Garrison, long a symbol of the dictatorship and brutalization of the people, was turned into an elementary school, which I visited in 1992.

Ho Chi Minh writes that he was tremendously boosted by the site of this tiny, poor island masterminding the defeat of the forces of imperialism.

Present narratives being what they are, I write of two scourges to most of you. Vietnam and Cuba. Neither part of the US. Neither connected geographically to our landmass. Yet they are each heaped by official history with terrific burdens and the sort of expectations that would, frankly, fell the US allies in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt.

But the country that turned a large army garrison into a school for young children, gave land to peasants, and produces so many medical doctors they are exported to the Third World continues to be a US enemy. A country that stubbornly refuses to believe in this magic will equally stubbornly refuse to be the aspirations in the Mid East and will continue to arm "envoys" with strange expectations.

Happy anniversary, Cuba! May you inspire more brothers and sisters.

For more info: Cuba: How the Workers and Peasants made the Revolution