Whatever the implications to judicial nominee Sonia Sotomayor, the US Supreme Court favoring the New Haven, CONN., white firefighters can be viewed as another defeat in the civil rights strategy to the lift the least affected by white racism, colonialism, imperialism into the universities, boardrooms, and public life while leaving the country's racist institutions untouched.
Besides touching on the test results favoring white firefighters over blacks and the dread this might open the city to civil rights lawsuits, news reports have focused on Federal District Court judge Sotomayor's role in supporting the city's nixing of the test results to ensure racial diversity.
But both of these points miss a greater one. Anyone seated to take such a test, black, white, or otherwise, has already surpassed some incredible odds: their physical fitness in a fat country being just one. These were rare specimens if ever there were any. Just look at any city firefighter, who are rigorously kept in peak performing form and have already passed other skills tests.
The minority test takers were cleaved from the creme de la creme of their communities. In other words, these minorities were ones who were least affected and suffered less the scourge of white racism in the United States - not a mean feat by the way given the statistics regarding black men revolving in and out our criminal justice system.
These minority test takers were the beneficiaries of a deal with the devil made a few generations ago when affirmative action was the brain child of human rights activists in this country. Like the city government of New Haven, these human and civil rights activists had nothing but good intentions.
That deal they struck basically accepted a talented tenth of minority talent in once-exclusive circles of national life, and it left the woefully neglected, racist institutions of this country unreformed and practically forgotten.
This was to create not a level playing field between aspirants to these spots. The white establishment would never accept that and has continued ever since to keep - as they used to say openly - the black man in his place.
The white establishment created an accommodation whereby certain space was allotted to a minority of the minority - be they blacks, "hispanics" (the term of art coined at that exact time), and women. Women have been the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action, but their status still desires much improvement, as our Congress, boardrooms, and public life show. This minority by being less hungry showed more prowess and could show the country had changed, when it really had not.
The more daring way to begin to address this disparity is a cradle to grave funding equity for all children, their programs, our public schools, and colleges and universities. Because as long as this country tolerates the persistence of underfunded, all-black, all-poor schools full of undernourished and malnourished children, we will continue to roll the dice as to which of those unfortunate kids will be blessed with the right combination of god-knows-what to choose one option over another, again and again until he or she is qualified to submit an application to be a public servant or enroll in a four-year university or become a union organizer to kick ass for the working class. He might even become president.
30 June 2009
23 June 2009
Progress Report: Obama abandons his base on multiple counts, earns an F grade
The forked tongue of Pres. Barack Obama is becoming a legend in these short 6 months. So the former teacher I am, I will give Obama a Progress Report:
The constituencies of these interests represented solid, high-turnout supporters among Democrats and progressives, yet Obama seems wholly disinclined to even humor them. Instead, he earns high marks from the homophobes, free-marketeers (Obama was affiliated with the University of Chicago after all, the Vatican of Milton Freidman), military-industrialists, and health-care company shareholders, who want to earn profits on death.
And five months into his change-is-coming administration, Obama has shown troubling signs towards making health care universal, has continued US occupation of Iraq including the bombing of soft targets a week into his administration (soft targets comprising neighborhoods, schools, hospitals ... noncombatant, children, women), has bizarrely defended the Clinton-Era bigoted Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which Obama himself opposed during the campaign, and he continues to remain inactive on his promise to extend collective bargaining protection to all federal workers, including officers at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). You know these workers if you've flown anywhere in the last seven years, as they -we! - are the ones who screen your baggage, you, and not only make you take your shoes off, take your tubes of toothpaste and bottles of shampoo and water, but also keep countless weapons off the flights you and your family have taken.
Mideast Occupation: F
Health care: F
LGBT rights: F
The Economy: F
The constituencies of these interests represented solid, high-turnout supporters among Democrats and progressives, yet Obama seems wholly disinclined to even humor them. Instead, he earns high marks from the homophobes, free-marketeers (Obama was affiliated with the University of Chicago after all, the Vatican of Milton Freidman), military-industrialists, and health-care company shareholders, who want to earn profits on death.
And five months into his change-is-coming administration, Obama has shown troubling signs towards making health care universal, has continued US occupation of Iraq including the bombing of soft targets a week into his administration (soft targets comprising neighborhoods, schools, hospitals ... noncombatant, children, women), has bizarrely defended the Clinton-Era bigoted Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which Obama himself opposed during the campaign, and he continues to remain inactive on his promise to extend collective bargaining protection to all federal workers, including officers at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). You know these workers if you've flown anywhere in the last seven years, as they -we! - are the ones who screen your baggage, you, and not only make you take your shoes off, take your tubes of toothpaste and bottles of shampoo and water, but also keep countless weapons off the flights you and your family have taken.
As a candidate he can put these issues squarely on the shoulders of the Establishment, critique them, show their heartlessness. Once in power, a government must act reasonably quickly and decisively to correct these horrors. Pulling immediately out of Iraq may not be possible, funding an increase in the war under different rhetoric is no better than the get-us-out-of-Vietnam candidacy of Richard M. Nixon. Obama, like Nixon, seems to be finding a way to escalate the war, therefore the casualties, therefor the loss of US soldiers, who are merely boys and girls. The blood of collateral damage from the soft target bombings is now on Barack Obama since he directed it as commander-in-chief. Bigotry toward the LGBT community is extended yet another day by his inexplicable defense of DOMA [is this a "I opposed it before I supported it" moment?]. And while it is far out of most people's radar, easing collective bargaining rights for all US workers would begin to correct much that is wrong with the economy.
That a portion of federal workers asked to protect the flying public work unprotected and at the whim of many incompetent supervisors, managers, and federal security directors who think they are running Third-World sweat shops is a disaster waiting to happen (and why would they think otherwise, when there is no law to stop them?).
So when blow-back occurs in the Mideast, as the partners of hospital patients are denied access to their lovers, some as they die, as health care is denied yet another patient when just across the northern border all workers are guaranteed access, or when an airline catastrophe happens, it will be the Obama Administration at fault.
If first impressions are meaningful, Obama is showing himself to be without much depth or substance. Simple, there is no there there, which is amusing in light of the controversial criticism against him by Mrs de Rothschild, who dared called Obama an "elitist." It would seem, like an elitist, he likes to hear the sound of his own voice regardless what it's saying and himself alone puts great weight to his thoughts and expects everyone else to follow suit.
Check out my other articles: Betrayal of LGBT elites toward its base * Phony Populism * Break workers, declare bankruptcy
15 June 2009
Obama makes overtures to the AMA while he shuts out single-payers
Pres. Barack Obama wants to solve the US health care problem by making overtures to the Sweeney Todd of Public Medicine, the American Medical Association (AMA). The AMA has long opposed national health care, and opted for our current rationing system which distributes care based on employment and wages, not based on human need.
A few months ago, when the president hosted a health care summit at the White House, congressional supporters of single-payer health care - like what Europeans enjoy - were intentionally uninvited.
For single-payer supporters, it has been an uphill battle ever since. Only the protests of supporters got us a seat at the Obama table. But the president remains compliant to keeping the for-profit model while giving lip-service to universalizing health care.
Has he not learned with all his years of schooling that public services are not longer at the public's disposal when they are controlled by for-profit interests?
We populists, progressives, liberal democrats must continue to protest. I have written and do consider that Obama might be attempting to make a speedy transition into a National Health care system by setting up a two-tiered system, by which the for-profit, rationing system, which leaves thousands uninsured and fuels bankruptcies and is supported by the AMA members will whither and die into the compost heap of history.
He might be.
Since these things are not guaranteed, and since I do not know what the intent of this man who was so heavily funded by Wall Street: we single-payer, universal health, socialized medicine advocates must barrage our legislators with threats that if they do not support a rational health system, we will vote them out and replace them with someone who will.
It is really that simple.
Obama knows as a politician and community organizer the importance of getting constituents "on board." Unlike those of us on the outside, in our armchairs, in the trenches, in our columns, Obama truly must deal with some unsavory cretins, like the AMA. We supporters of universal health do not: we can speak to our choirs.
So there is a lot to scrutinize with this president, who has already inherited the mantle of Iraqi Invader by funding US occupation rather than withdrawal; he has given raw meat to the bigots, by defending the offensive Defense of Marriage Act against the LGBT community that massively supported him, authored by the other duplicitous liberal, Bill Clinton.
But we must scrutinize our own selves. What sort of society are we really demanding, as progressives, populists, as socialists? Do we want a good life at the expense of world poverty? This is what the US military budget is partly about.
A few months ago, when the president hosted a health care summit at the White House, congressional supporters of single-payer health care - like what Europeans enjoy - were intentionally uninvited.
For single-payer supporters, it has been an uphill battle ever since. Only the protests of supporters got us a seat at the Obama table. But the president remains compliant to keeping the for-profit model while giving lip-service to universalizing health care.
Has he not learned with all his years of schooling that public services are not longer at the public's disposal when they are controlled by for-profit interests?
We populists, progressives, liberal democrats must continue to protest. I have written and do consider that Obama might be attempting to make a speedy transition into a National Health care system by setting up a two-tiered system, by which the for-profit, rationing system, which leaves thousands uninsured and fuels bankruptcies and is supported by the AMA members will whither and die into the compost heap of history.
He might be.
Since these things are not guaranteed, and since I do not know what the intent of this man who was so heavily funded by Wall Street: we single-payer, universal health, socialized medicine advocates must barrage our legislators with threats that if they do not support a rational health system, we will vote them out and replace them with someone who will.
It is really that simple.
Obama knows as a politician and community organizer the importance of getting constituents "on board." Unlike those of us on the outside, in our armchairs, in the trenches, in our columns, Obama truly must deal with some unsavory cretins, like the AMA. We supporters of universal health do not: we can speak to our choirs.
So there is a lot to scrutinize with this president, who has already inherited the mantle of Iraqi Invader by funding US occupation rather than withdrawal; he has given raw meat to the bigots, by defending the offensive Defense of Marriage Act against the LGBT community that massively supported him, authored by the other duplicitous liberal, Bill Clinton.
But we must scrutinize our own selves. What sort of society are we really demanding, as progressives, populists, as socialists? Do we want a good life at the expense of world poverty? This is what the US military budget is partly about.
14 June 2009
World's top military budgets hide the truths of Western lifestyles
A recent report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute you won't see in the papers of record finds that the United States of America leads the planet in military spending, followed by our Communist friend and nemesis, People's Republic of China (PRC), old Europe's France falls in third, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain (UK), our loyal lieutenant, fourth.
You won't find this reported in your papers of record because it might beg the obvious question: what recession?
As unemployment in the tarnished state of California climbs near 12%, as homeless encampments are being formed and torn up - even in some of our state parks I just visited, as the safety net to the poor, sick, disabled, public school students K-12, talks of furloughs and lay-offs abound, the diversion of trillions of Western tax dollars into the Ultimate Killing Machine should make a single-parent struggling to make ends meet ponder.
Pres Dwight Eisenhower called it the "military-industrial complex" and warned against its growing power in his farewell address. Some scholars Eisenhower was well placed to make such a criticism: while an agent of the imperial dominion of the US specifically and the Western world generally, as a high-ranking military man and war hero, he also had a pragmatism when it came to military matters that he saw spin out of executive control during his two terms.
But why have a Killing Machine?
My late grandfather, Lowell B Denny, I, said many, many times that the US never emerged from the Great Depression; that it was intensive military spending that artificially swelled our economy, and now - the crack addicts that we are - we cannot put down the pipe (the crack flourish is mine, not my grandfather's).
The US became an imperial power with the close of the US frontier, 1890. The economy began to dip, so what better than to wage a war with Spain and take the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and remotely Cuba.
Empires and markets are the other reason to have a Killing Machine: foreign nationals - men and women with moderate intellect - won't willingly give up their rich natural resources cheaply [oil, diamonds, gold, rubber, spices, et al]. So the West imposes military regimes and fortifies a client class of super rich to keep the masses tortured. Essentially, this is why the US is in Iraq and why Obama is so slow to pull us out.
To those of us with better sense and a bit of morality of the bonds of humanity, the suppression of our brothers and sisters is an abomination. Our populism is nothing if it does not seriously and fundamentally revolutionize our high-flying way of life. It's not only bad for the planet; its bad for our peers around the world.
But a different, albeit simpler, way of life is exactly what out papers of record cannot broadcast: their funders, the advertisers, have made big business out of shaping Western appetites to be the pigs we are.
But now I am demeaning pigs. They don't gang up and fight territorial wars.
12 June 2009
The fight against single-payer health shows the hypocrisy of the free market pirates
The opposition to single-payer health service, ie., universal health or socialized medicine, is beginning to show the gross hypocrisy of our political elite toward free market principles. Growing up, I suffered Ronald Reagan's Magic of the Marketplace to resolve any and all social problems rather than what the elites called the heavy hand of government imposing such resolutions, thereby enslaving the American people.
The heavy hand is not, however, from the left, from progressives, from socialists like me. The heavy, anti-laissez faire, centralized-planning position is coming from the right wing elites and the establishment. They do not want to relinquish private, for-profit controls over health care, despite over 70% of Americans wanting it. They do not want a marketplace of choice, where the average citizen might leave the private option for the public one. And to the extent a choice may happen, they are demanding the private option limit enrollment and/or be restricted from charging less than the pirates.
Aren't cartels, like OPEC, which jointly fix prices, illegal in the US?
Central Planning is nothing new, and I am not the first comment-monger to note this is not a purely capitalist system, nor was the USSR or Cuba purely communist. When it comes to the flow of profits, the establishment and their servants in the so-called think-tanks and in Congress, will stoop to any low.
President Obama may be more calculating than I thought. He knows a single-payer system will never leave a Congressional committee. Why he won't with the stroke of his pen eliminate the age requirement for Medicare by Executive Order perhaps has to do with the political points he will have to spend fighting the fall out. Instead, he is offering to set up an alternative system, a public health care system.
Then, by the highest, noblest principles of capitalism, the magic of the marketplace will whither and die and the Establishment can entomb in their mausoleum.
The heavy hand is not, however, from the left, from progressives, from socialists like me. The heavy, anti-laissez faire, centralized-planning position is coming from the right wing elites and the establishment. They do not want to relinquish private, for-profit controls over health care, despite over 70% of Americans wanting it. They do not want a marketplace of choice, where the average citizen might leave the private option for the public one. And to the extent a choice may happen, they are demanding the private option limit enrollment and/or be restricted from charging less than the pirates.
Aren't cartels, like OPEC, which jointly fix prices, illegal in the US?
Central Planning is nothing new, and I am not the first comment-monger to note this is not a purely capitalist system, nor was the USSR or Cuba purely communist. When it comes to the flow of profits, the establishment and their servants in the so-called think-tanks and in Congress, will stoop to any low.
President Obama may be more calculating than I thought. He knows a single-payer system will never leave a Congressional committee. Why he won't with the stroke of his pen eliminate the age requirement for Medicare by Executive Order perhaps has to do with the political points he will have to spend fighting the fall out. Instead, he is offering to set up an alternative system, a public health care system.
Then, by the highest, noblest principles of capitalism, the magic of the marketplace will whither and die and the Establishment can entomb in their mausoleum.
10 June 2009
Rosa Luxemberg's body found but capitalism's corpse has yet to be buried
More than ninety years after her brutal extra judiciary 1919 execution by German officials, the corpse of communist activist Rosa Luxemberg has been identified. Her legacy to humanity must also be recognized despite the right wing political elite's 90 year attempt to torture and dump it in the German river.
What does a corpse from nearly 100 years passed have to do with the present? I wrote a brief note in the wake of the terrible Air France crash over the Atlantic. In it I noted that the flight path was a trade route for colonial slave ships bringing their human captives to work new world plantation. These slavers often threw bodies overboard and Africans themselves often threw themselves overboard. Should their remains be found - several hundred years passed - that would be quite a funeral reckoning for the West.
"Those who do not move do not notice their chains."
So Rosa is but a yesterday, within the lifetimes of some of my own surviving family members. Her work was devoted to the working class revolution that was to replace capitalist exploitation and militarism, which she warned about. She wanted the working class to be the grave digger for the capitalist corpse.
Among her famous contributions was the Spartacus League, which became the German Communist Party, the Red Flag newspaper, leadership in the German revolution not only to get rid of the German emperor, grandson of Queen Victoria, but also to institute a social democracy.
The political elite that control the press and textbooks might have you forget this woman or say that she failed. They will not say they had her captured, tortured with the end of a rifle, shot, and dumped in the river.
A forensic crime scientist could read a lot into the manner of her murder, about what it says about the state of mind of the murderer[s]. Take note: they are our our rulers, and this is the same Social Democrat Party of Angela Merkel, German president.
Like the late communist poet, Audre Lorde, Luxemberg saw through the suggestions of reform. Unfortunately, like Che, she learned that with a revolution, one either wins or dies. Luxemberg was literally an instructor to up and coming social democrats, but when she was seen to take her ideas seriously, and they themselves turned to reformism, her pupils sent death squads to capture her and later slaughter thousands of her activist comrades who agitated for a communist revolution in Germany. Russia had just preceded them and rather than opt for reformism, the revolutionary government remained true to its word and took Russia out of war.
The German left is organizing an official burial ceremony in its "cemetery of Socialists."
"The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles ... Social democracy ... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone."
For more info: BBC report on discovery of Luxemburg * GARA (Basque) report * Granma (Cuba) Spanish translation of GARA article
What does a corpse from nearly 100 years passed have to do with the present? I wrote a brief note in the wake of the terrible Air France crash over the Atlantic. In it I noted that the flight path was a trade route for colonial slave ships bringing their human captives to work new world plantation. These slavers often threw bodies overboard and Africans themselves often threw themselves overboard. Should their remains be found - several hundred years passed - that would be quite a funeral reckoning for the West.
"Those who do not move do not notice their chains."
So Rosa is but a yesterday, within the lifetimes of some of my own surviving family members. Her work was devoted to the working class revolution that was to replace capitalist exploitation and militarism, which she warned about. She wanted the working class to be the grave digger for the capitalist corpse.
Among her famous contributions was the Spartacus League, which became the German Communist Party, the Red Flag newspaper, leadership in the German revolution not only to get rid of the German emperor, grandson of Queen Victoria, but also to institute a social democracy.
The political elite that control the press and textbooks might have you forget this woman or say that she failed. They will not say they had her captured, tortured with the end of a rifle, shot, and dumped in the river.
A forensic crime scientist could read a lot into the manner of her murder, about what it says about the state of mind of the murderer[s]. Take note: they are our our rulers, and this is the same Social Democrat Party of Angela Merkel, German president.
Like the late communist poet, Audre Lorde, Luxemberg saw through the suggestions of reform. Unfortunately, like Che, she learned that with a revolution, one either wins or dies. Luxemberg was literally an instructor to up and coming social democrats, but when she was seen to take her ideas seriously, and they themselves turned to reformism, her pupils sent death squads to capture her and later slaughter thousands of her activist comrades who agitated for a communist revolution in Germany. Russia had just preceded them and rather than opt for reformism, the revolutionary government remained true to its word and took Russia out of war.
The German left is organizing an official burial ceremony in its "cemetery of Socialists."
"The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles ... Social democracy ... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone."
For more info: BBC report on discovery of Luxemburg * GARA (Basque) report * Granma (Cuba) Spanish translation of GARA article
04 June 2009
Why the US cannot maintain an empire abroad and a democracy at home
Unless Americans were savages and relished making bloodsport of foreign nationals and sacrificing their own for such adventures, the people must be lied to, coerced, manipulated to maintain over 100 years of US empire: and this is no foundation for a democracy.
It is the foundation for feudalism.
The lies started in the yellow press of the late 19th century when the ruling class wanted to expand US power to Asia [Guam and the Philippines] and the Caribbean [Puerto Rico and Cuba]. Later, the government sent troops into Haiti and other parts of Latin America.
If I wash and wax a car with no engine, bad tires, and stolen, and sell it to you as a new, pristine car, you've made a decision based on a blatant lie and can rightfully sue for your money and possibly get me thrown in a deep dark jail.
The US government has been just this kind of creepy car salesman, and the US voter the unlikely buyer.
In California, there is a lemon law to protect consumers from this sort of thing. Democracy - if it is to mean anything - must have a lemon law as well to hold liars in high office, who may employ false pretenses to send our children to foreign deserts and jungles to die, to account for their actions.
A Truth Commission is just a beginning. A Nuremberg Trial is required. Bigots are foaming at the mouth that bourgeois lesbian and gays who want to marry will destroy Traditional Marriage. These bigots need better be concerned with the state of our democracy and less with bourgeoisie who would rather little Chinese girls sew their designer garments to keep costs low.
The list of lies the Bush Administration disseminated to manipulate the public to support the Middle East occupations is legendary. But all those administration officials walk freely while there are still captives in Guantanamo who may never, ever see the light of day. This disconnect is corrosive. The US is no better than the convict colony it started as.
The new Obama administration has not been an improvement, offering us another set of lies about how conditions keep us as an occupying force. New guidelines are thrown in our faces to keep the troops as overlords.
We hold teachers and clergy to rigorous standards because they are in positions of power and influence. Why don't we hold our elected officials to these same standards? What does our cynicism say about our own belief in the democratic process.
In a 1968 interview, former Cuban president, Fidel Castro, noted that underdevelopment is not only economic - not only lacking in resources and technical skills. Underdevelopment, he said, is also intellectual, because a free people must first believe it is within their powers to activate radical social change.
Empires, like ours, like Great Britain's, like France's, like Belgium's, like Spain's, like Portugal's, like Germany's, like the Netherlands' are built on lies, and lies will only get you bad merchandise.
It is the foundation for feudalism.
The lies started in the yellow press of the late 19th century when the ruling class wanted to expand US power to Asia [Guam and the Philippines] and the Caribbean [Puerto Rico and Cuba]. Later, the government sent troops into Haiti and other parts of Latin America.
If I wash and wax a car with no engine, bad tires, and stolen, and sell it to you as a new, pristine car, you've made a decision based on a blatant lie and can rightfully sue for your money and possibly get me thrown in a deep dark jail.
The US government has been just this kind of creepy car salesman, and the US voter the unlikely buyer.
In California, there is a lemon law to protect consumers from this sort of thing. Democracy - if it is to mean anything - must have a lemon law as well to hold liars in high office, who may employ false pretenses to send our children to foreign deserts and jungles to die, to account for their actions.
A Truth Commission is just a beginning. A Nuremberg Trial is required. Bigots are foaming at the mouth that bourgeois lesbian and gays who want to marry will destroy Traditional Marriage. These bigots need better be concerned with the state of our democracy and less with bourgeoisie who would rather little Chinese girls sew their designer garments to keep costs low.
The list of lies the Bush Administration disseminated to manipulate the public to support the Middle East occupations is legendary. But all those administration officials walk freely while there are still captives in Guantanamo who may never, ever see the light of day. This disconnect is corrosive. The US is no better than the convict colony it started as.
The new Obama administration has not been an improvement, offering us another set of lies about how conditions keep us as an occupying force. New guidelines are thrown in our faces to keep the troops as overlords.
We hold teachers and clergy to rigorous standards because they are in positions of power and influence. Why don't we hold our elected officials to these same standards? What does our cynicism say about our own belief in the democratic process.
In a 1968 interview, former Cuban president, Fidel Castro, noted that underdevelopment is not only economic - not only lacking in resources and technical skills. Underdevelopment, he said, is also intellectual, because a free people must first believe it is within their powers to activate radical social change.
Empires, like ours, like Great Britain's, like France's, like Belgium's, like Spain's, like Portugal's, like Germany's, like the Netherlands' are built on lies, and lies will only get you bad merchandise.
03 June 2009
What the office of the US presidency really thinks about the working class
Pres. Barack Obama spent a warm evening in Saudi Arabia, with a Western-installed monarch who reigns over a brutal regime that is anti-women, anti-gay, anti-infidel, anti-immigrant. He spent today in Egypt, giving an hour-long speech a country not ruled by a monarch or sheik but a president for life who silences opposition, is anti-women, anti-gay, and next to Israel - another Western crime - the highest recipient of US tax money.
When Ronald Reagan bemoaned Welfare Queens he was not speaking of Israel or Egypt, but of those within the US border, Black, Brown, and White women who were said to be cheating the US taxpayer. Black, Brown, and White sisters who make pennies on the dollar to their male counterparts.
Working class men fair little better. The class of able bodies who have been cut off from social life support continues to grow as this president fulfills the legacy of the high office in going the extra mile for the bottom line, which is not humanity.
The other day, just before the Organization of American States voted to rescind its expulsion of Cuba, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fled Honduras. She did this to avoid the embarrassment at being the only American continental government to oppose Cuba's revolution and re-inclusion into the OAS.
Pay attention to the disconnect. Obama embracing Saudi sheiks and Egyptian torturers. Clinton prattling about Cuban democracy. $30 billion to General Motors. State governments consider or are in the process of removing critical social safety nets and laying off teachers. Where's the Employee Free Choice Act?
Alone these and other officials display a bit more sense. Some can be downright compassionate. Obama, for example, as he climbed his way up the political ladder supported universal, single-payer health care. Under the spell of his Office, he continues crimes against humanity.
Class consciousness is the greatest social disease of our time. Workers would do well to know their class, their class interest, and not only throw the bums out but build jails for them.
When Ronald Reagan bemoaned Welfare Queens he was not speaking of Israel or Egypt, but of those within the US border, Black, Brown, and White women who were said to be cheating the US taxpayer. Black, Brown, and White sisters who make pennies on the dollar to their male counterparts.
Working class men fair little better. The class of able bodies who have been cut off from social life support continues to grow as this president fulfills the legacy of the high office in going the extra mile for the bottom line, which is not humanity.
The other day, just before the Organization of American States voted to rescind its expulsion of Cuba, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fled Honduras. She did this to avoid the embarrassment at being the only American continental government to oppose Cuba's revolution and re-inclusion into the OAS.
Pay attention to the disconnect. Obama embracing Saudi sheiks and Egyptian torturers. Clinton prattling about Cuban democracy. $30 billion to General Motors. State governments consider or are in the process of removing critical social safety nets and laying off teachers. Where's the Employee Free Choice Act?
Alone these and other officials display a bit more sense. Some can be downright compassionate. Obama, for example, as he climbed his way up the political ladder supported universal, single-payer health care. Under the spell of his Office, he continues crimes against humanity.
Class consciousness is the greatest social disease of our time. Workers would do well to know their class, their class interest, and not only throw the bums out but build jails for them.
02 June 2009
Break the workers, declare bankruptcy
General Motor's long day's journey into bankruptcy might be summed up by a San Francisco Bay Area city. In 2008, Vallejo, a city east of San Francisco, declared bankruptcy with the aim of breaking its union contracts and retirement plans.
What's at the source of this mess is basically two things: the United States has become a sort of colony to world finance, especially the quarterly subsidies of countries like China and Japan. These two countries top the list of those investing in our treasury bonds. The second, as I has pointed to over and over without hyperbole, is the US belief system in the aura that is Ayn Rand.
Of course one would expect Ayn Randism to pervade the business class, given their belief in themselves and capitalism. It is quite disturbing Rand seems to have passively penetrated the working class who would empty their pockets of $30 billion to fund a bankrupt company, like GM.
Or, like declaring bankruptcy, taking public funds (which seemed in short supply for homes, education, infrastructure, public health) and then forcing an end to collective bargaining contracts.
The masters of the universe badly maneuvered the United States into a country with a low savings rate, high cost of living, and hospital bills being the number one engine to personal bankruptcies. They also maneuvered us into a familiar arrangement: export raw materials and buy back the manufactured goods.
When I heard of the export/import data from the number one shipping port I knew the country had come full circle. Long Beach Port exports mostly raw materials and imports manufactured goods. My basic history directed me not to the first world but the third, to the colonies, from whence the US started.
Exporting cheap raw materials and having a captive audience to consume expensive manufactured goods was the whole point in attaining and fighting to the death by the UK's, Frances, Belgiums, Germanys, ad nauseum.
High wages are over. As long as our export/imports run at this level, the jobs created will be more low-wage jobs. This does not mean we cannot protect workers rights, cannot have decent schools, public housing, and universal health care. These needs can be met when the ghost of Ayn Rand, the doctoress of Frankenstein, is sent permanently to Hell. We must lose all faith in these masters in the business class, their doctrines about "competition," and force a rational distribution of our precious resources.
Workers of the world, beware.
For more information: The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas * BBC Story of GM * Countdown to Collapse (UK Guardian)
What's at the source of this mess is basically two things: the United States has become a sort of colony to world finance, especially the quarterly subsidies of countries like China and Japan. These two countries top the list of those investing in our treasury bonds. The second, as I has pointed to over and over without hyperbole, is the US belief system in the aura that is Ayn Rand.
Of course one would expect Ayn Randism to pervade the business class, given their belief in themselves and capitalism. It is quite disturbing Rand seems to have passively penetrated the working class who would empty their pockets of $30 billion to fund a bankrupt company, like GM.
Or, like declaring bankruptcy, taking public funds (which seemed in short supply for homes, education, infrastructure, public health) and then forcing an end to collective bargaining contracts.
The masters of the universe badly maneuvered the United States into a country with a low savings rate, high cost of living, and hospital bills being the number one engine to personal bankruptcies. They also maneuvered us into a familiar arrangement: export raw materials and buy back the manufactured goods.
When I heard of the export/import data from the number one shipping port I knew the country had come full circle. Long Beach Port exports mostly raw materials and imports manufactured goods. My basic history directed me not to the first world but the third, to the colonies, from whence the US started.
Exporting cheap raw materials and having a captive audience to consume expensive manufactured goods was the whole point in attaining and fighting to the death by the UK's, Frances, Belgiums, Germanys, ad nauseum.
High wages are over. As long as our export/imports run at this level, the jobs created will be more low-wage jobs. This does not mean we cannot protect workers rights, cannot have decent schools, public housing, and universal health care. These needs can be met when the ghost of Ayn Rand, the doctoress of Frankenstein, is sent permanently to Hell. We must lose all faith in these masters in the business class, their doctrines about "competition," and force a rational distribution of our precious resources.
Workers of the world, beware.
For more information: The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas * BBC Story of GM * Countdown to Collapse (UK Guardian)
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