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.