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.