The Marathon

Only after faced with mounting pressure and criticism did the New York mayor cancel its ancient Marathon scheduled for Sunday. It is a debacle which exemplifies my sadness for our market economy, no better or worse than any other market economy.

Hurricane Sandy was destructive. At this moment 110 people are reported to have been killed in its wake. Two young children whose mother was not permitted refuge in someone's home were swept away in the deluge. The press reports the man who refused them refuge expresses his regret but blames the mother.

That's character: US style.

A nation obsessed with Christianity and telling others what to do, both here and abroad, beating their chests at their superiority, but whose leaders think of Marathons and whose neighbors would turn away a mother and two children just as certainly as a pregnant one could not find rooms at an inn, is doomed.

I know that sounds hyperbolic, but the evidence began long before those two young boys were swept away, and it speaks for itself. Because as sad and as tragic as the deaths of those two boys, many children have preceded them in the deluge.

We are too busy making money to notice.

The coming election was not a cause for anticipation before Hurricane Sandy served us the stew we made from industrial society, hubris, and global warming. It is not a cause for anticipation in the aftermath either. I do not, like some of my country, sit watching the rising and lowering of poll numbers or ask why a certain demographic has gained or lost faith in one or the other candidate.

Both of the candidates whose Political Parties have manipulated themselves as the only viable options will not bring the transformation we need because the Market will not accept it.

The Intelligent Classes with their phony social sciences will not tell us any truths in their dissertations because our universities are corporations endowed by other corporations. If the government ever stopped siphoning billions in guaranteed student loans to these so-called schools, the jig would indeed be up, and the right-wing, antisocial think-tanks they really are would be exposed.

The Media will also adhere to the Official Doctrines and shed little light on the scam we are sold, and which is sews our destruction. Among our Media free thought ranges, as Dorothy Parker said in an oddly similar context, "a gamut from A to B."

The truth will not be advertised. A plague rages not only in New York and the Mid-Atlantic region but across this whole country. The plague is a government intent on selling us to the lowest bidder, with all this implies.

Since commerce and markets are our only holy spirits - not the lives of children, the health of our people, the viability of our communities - our elites must keep this scam going. Our Masters want us to service their adventures at the lowest possible cost.

The Market System of buying on the cheap, stealing, and selling at a profit is why even after the destruction and death of a hurricane, Michael Bloomberg, insisted the Marathon would go on. The Show Must Go On! New York must continue to look viable to the Investor.

I remember a year ago when an horrific fire burned in the hills of Los Angeles, someone with the power to do so very quickly re-tagged the inferno The Station Fire. It was not only meant to confuse, which it did: where, the people choking on the smoke must have asked, IS STATION? This obfuscation was also meant to avoid the City being in any way associated with the madness of that fire.

A burning city of Los Angeles might deter tourists and commerce. Forget the fact the city is actually and visibly rotting from the inside out.

When San Francisco continued its slide into an abyss in the early 90's, despite yet another Recovery - can we survive another Recovery? - its corporate base was shrinking.

Bank of America moved its headquarters to a right-to-work Southern state.

Then Chevron Oil Corp moved its headquarters to the other side of the bay.

If you were paying attention these were two giant corporations seeking lower-wage employees. (Before Chevron left it had already contracted its mail-room services to temporary employment agencies).

Enter Willie Brown. A Black mayor full of phony populist rhetoric on the one hand, he sought to actually manifest an extension of Silicon Valley into the heart of the city. He managed to pitch this to what remained of the working class of the City as "jobs." This was a Lie, and some of us knew it.

If this scheme had the effect of expelling and evicting many, many working-class families so their modest apartments could be converted into modest condominiums, so be it. This was the cost of being beholden to Business.

His initial efforts failed, the bubble burst. But the powers that run that city - and that run every city, including New York City, Boston, and Atlanta - could not let up. The first attempt at the dot-com recruitment blew up famously, leaving the condos and newly renovated office spaces empty. The second attempt took.

Now the city renowned for being expensive really is, to the extent the city council considers rezoning closet spaces as potential apartments.

For many around the world San Francisco is known as a Gay Mecca - my apologies to the Muslims, especially since as James Baldwin observed "at least they aren't pretending to be Christians." - but Gay Mecca is as bold and brazen a lie as the US being a Christian country. Like Disneyland, San Francisco offers a variety of theme parks, The Castro being just one, for tourism dollars.

The Mecca has been steadily reduced in size to barely a block for tour buses to ride through and gawk.

As late as the early 90's in the wake of a viral hurricane called AIDS the gay men who lived there disappeared, and the straights - young and urbane - began to move in.

Militants didn't like it, but they believed the hype. The Castro, they believed, "is Ours." It was never "ours."

The same could be said of the equally famous Haight-Ashbury neighborhood: another theme park for tourist dollars intent on experiencing The 60's Mystique.

This is what the religion of commerce and markets do, this is the corruption of capitalism which mandates you produce for market or risk ending up looking like ...

I wanted to say looking like the Third World, the Global South. But we are already there.

Hurricane Sandy exposes this. Masses of people so easily made destitute should tell us something about the thin ice we are walking on.

The more subtle destruction in Los Angeles for which no help has been sent has always been there as soon as Blacks moved there after the World War II. Whites successfully kept the Blacks enclosed in the center and so-called "South" of the city, allowed them factory jobs and public schools to feed those factories; but nothing more. Remember not even Nat King Cole could buy the house he wanted because it was in a neighborhood zoned only for Whites.

The City fathers had a reputation to maintain. That's the Market. Liberal Hollywood, indeed!

This subtle destruction among Blacks, poor Whites, and newly arrived Economic refugees from Latin America only intensifies in the wake of the post-war industrial base being sent abroad and bringing us in return part-time, low-wage service jobs stocking shelves with garbage made by slaves.

"Would you like fries with that?" - fries brought to you by a Recovery.

The two men whose political parties have maneuvered themselves as our only option will not change this: they are firmly creatures of it, and they have said so again and again. They have always insisted The Show Must Go On. More Recoveries are promised.

This is why I am occasionally angry, sometimes inspired to action, but always saddened.

More Hurricanes are to come. the real long-distance race is can humanity and the ecosystem survive them.

On Pets and Children

All parents may not be bad people, but all parenting is bad. Parenting children is not only over-rated - the influence we have as adults over growing children may, optimistically, be confined to the span of the first five years and no more. This means that afterwards, as the child grows to have enough sense and sensibility to discern - viscerally - good from bad, right from wrong, truths from obfuscations, only coercion and psychological warfare must be inflicted. Every child will discern vividly this: and so the long years we keep children like property with their elders like owners means parenting is limited to the same obligations as your average prison guard.

However horrifying you might find comparing the average prison guard to a parent, it does make parenting a fitting complement to the function of our public schools, to begin there, all of our other public institutions, and our private institutions by definition. Compliance is really all we reward.

As matured adults we are supposed to defer to Power, kneel before it, parrot its rhetoric for good grades, secured employment, and in defense of our doctoral theses: this is first taught in the Home where children are house-broken, and then reinforced in the schools, and later exemplified in our workplaces.

The consequences for disobedience are well known by everyone but best expressed by the worst offenders and so-called delinquents, while the more educated and disciplined make apologies and keep their heads down.

The lessons we impose on small children seem to come from all sides, public and private, to mold otherwise natural human beings into very unnatural ones so they can - we keep telling ourselves - succeed. It takes a lot of training and myopia to not examine what success means in our civilization, what it implies against our actual and moral land-fills, and what it makes of the human being.

Those who cannot be house-broken as children will be treated to Resource Specialists, Child Psychologists, the cottage industry of New Methods. If that doesn't take, the child can be given all sorts of medications down their throats. And worst-case finality is our vast and expanding penal system.

So our childhoods can potentially be fairly loathsome experiences at the hands of these prison guardians, and this is troubling enough when it is children who are the ones being restrained, coerced, beaten, extorted, and alienated from their Natural development. But now at younger and younger ages - as the machines have not only made slaves of their parents but now exotic ones are put in the hands of the youngest - they are plunged deeper and earlier into the obscene market culture of high technology: better to start them early at being slaves to machines as being consumers and wage-slaves who follow orders.

Our domestic pets at least are spared being made into the consumers and slaves to machines: their owners and masters alone are still being targeted to buy the most exotic of pet foods and refuse to litter house and yard. But otherwise, the way we've come to treat these nonhuman beings is another atrocity on Nature at hands worse than the prison guard but closer to the guard at the Death Camp.

Neither your dog or cat or gold fish being affected by social policy or at risk of going extinct can say anything back to us on their behalf. And our inability to hear them - distinct from them saying something - or to see what is really going on with them and the Natural World is in direct proportion to how even our fluency with languages has evaporated: we do not care about trees in forests, be they felled or clear-cutted. We do not care what cows are made to eat as long as our cuts of beef are cheap. Language is a subtle thing and not restricted to words. An illustration of how facile we've become is the Good Witch Glenda's response to Dorothy in the "Wizard of Oz:" I didn't tell you, because you didn't ask.

Nature, when all is said and done, will not forgive us for our delusions and ignorance. Nature will do what it is doing and wipe us out.

Most of us have sense enough to know a gold fish should not be put in a hot [or cold] pot of coffee, yet it is still to this hour perfectly acceptable to make the home of the same gold fish a small bowl of water placed in the center of your coffee table. This is also supposed to be charming. It is also acceptable and highly marketable to house dolphins and whales in small tanks of water for our amusement. This is supposed to be entertaining.

None of these is the natural habitat for a gold fish or a whale, but our civilization and its dissonance dress this up with apologia upon absurdity that would make a Southern slave owner proud.

Meanwhile, a delicate ecosystem of natural habitats is being assaulted.

On the other hand, we house children ... well, anywhere. The political class, where they are marginally important, come out to kiss them to win votes, and pass Christian, Judaic, or Sharia laws against Human Nature on the child's behalf, as if the child cares: the average ones of us form a willing chorus to these prattling sermons.

But yet, children are housed in all sorts of deplorable places, from shanties with no clean water and old diseases like polio and the plague at the back door, to cold, over-extended stucco houses in the middle of deserts, which teach the child nothing about his or her relation to the natural world but only make being a parasite on Nature normal and to be aspired when the child becomes an adult and wants a large, over-extended stucco house of their own.

Similarly with our coercion, displacement, oppression, castigation, corporal and capital punishments, cajoling of children - all dressed up in civilized terms - just so, deliberately, they can grow into obedient, undeveloped cogs, afraid to raise their voices at their master-managers.

Our pets have had it worse, since the supposedly fortunate ones are made to live right along side us, like collaborators. And every rebelliousness is treated as a delinquency: they too must be house-broken.

The only freedom for them is escape: adulthood for the pet yields no more rights and liberties than when they were pups or kittens or whatnot. They gain no more rights or privileges, and are often referred to by adults as "our baby." Many are dressed in odd bits of clothing, which I can't bear to look at.

For our pets, our modern society has become an inhospitable place given the rapacious destruction of the Natural World on the one hand, and the confines of our ever-shrinking apartments, narrowing acreage of our "lots," and abundant opportunities to become road-kill on the other. Escape from the tyranny of the owner in our urban and suburban never-never land is filled with hazard upon hazard and certain premature death.

(Of course, this is the exact same consequence to our adult children if they themselves attempt an "escape" from the wage-slave system as cogs: misery and certain premature death.)

But this is if you are lucky to find an apartment owner or rental that allows pets!

We are told again and again that we have an excess of cats and dogs, that our shelters are filling up with unwanted pets to be rescued, to be adopted, or to be euthanized. It is common and accepted practice to "fix" - meaning, sterilize - the new pets, and this is just as uncontroversial and unexamined as the West's common practice to sterilize the women of the global South. One wonders if the Humane Society got the idea from Planned Parenthood, an early advocate of sterilizing Black women.

Just as we have less room for Nature we have less room for these nonhuman beings, and so we deal with them in the most efficient NAZI fashion. Our housing is increasingly unfriendly to other parts of the ecosystem, including and especially pets, so it is no wonder an excess has been created. And no wonder a NAZI culture like ours - bent on death and destruction for profits - would easily turn to "putting down" the unwanted breeds, like they were rodents or cockroaches - also necessary to a real ecosystem.

In this maybe these nonhuman beings have it a bit better than the prospects of the slave system that awaits the rising generations of human beings: the pets meet a quick end at the end of the veterinarian needle, while the child grows to have to deal with the failed state, and to one extent or another make a peace with the failed state if he or she doesn't want to go crazy: the adult child must become an accomplice. Worse, the adult child is coerced into helping to build the walls of his work camp if he or she wants to eat.

The pet is only expected not to bite, not to ruin the furniture, and to take care of its natural functions outside or in a plastic box.

What to do? How to do it? Zoos, aquariums, and humane kennels should remind us that even Chancellor Hitler allowed the Red Cross into a selected Death Camp to showcase that all is well, when all was not. Our gullibility knows no depths of stupidity and cruelty. Our excesses, our gathering mental and actual debris, and the intricate philosophies we invent to support them must be cast on a funeral pyre: I can't think of anything more humane as that.

Reforms will not be enough if the ecosystem of humans, nonhumans, and other life is to not only flourish but also develop positively.

Our paradigm of creating little jails for ourselves in little work camps encircled in little prisons leaves room for very little and risks only making more things into expendables, like our pets and other nonhuman beings, to be exterminated judicially or extra-judicially. To continue on this path will only bring more "humane" solutions not unlike the Final Solution as we serve the high purpose of the market force and not the Life Force.

Obama's New Rabbit Hole

The fat, sweaty white guy sitting in front of me on the employee shuttle seemed to be trying to push into fifth gear in his four-gear, lithium-deprived brain: something, as they say down yonder, had got into his craw, and he was in full, incoherent, angry flow about the US president.

Of course, this is all taking place in Orange County, the western-most seat of the Ku Klux Klan and the American NAZI Party [American and NAZI being empirically rather redundant, in fact].

The shuttle was practically empty, except for his loud mouth, a white woman in front of him who politely made occasional eye contact with him as he pretended to talk to her, me, a Latino man in the back, and the low-paid East Indian shuttle driver. So, for all this thick-necked buffoon's loudness, I took his rants as performance art, not for the white woman whose attention was at best remote, but rather for the darkies to whom he had to declare his independence.

The half-wits flew out of his mouth like little birds.

"Obama hates this country!" The right-wing always address the presidents they despise by their surnames; while the chalk-brained Reagan is forever "President Reagan."

"His only goal is to ruin our Constitution."

"He's put this country so deep in debt, we'll never get out."

"If Obama's car ran over a pot hole in the street, he'd blame President Bush."

But amid all this King Georgesque madness, there is an astute narrative, but this man, and, it seems, most of my country of whatever shape, color, hue, or sexual fetish, is grossly unaware. The enemy is personified, never institutionalized. So every four years, it's Groundhog Day!

When Noam Chomsky was asked if there was anything of the country for which a citizen could be proud, Chomsky conditioned his response on what the person meant by the "country". If this means "the government": No. Governments are purely instruments of power, states are violent institutions; you can never be proud of that. Not any government, he said.

This revelation that our institutions are corrupt and contaminate any who enter them seems never to have occurred to that Aryan sector of Orange County for whom a Black man aspiring to be president could never have been born on this Holy Ground - or for any of its walled-off Aryan sectors [in Los Angeles or anywhere else segregation still holds firm].

Only now, the government as headed by Barack Obama is deemed a nefarious enemy of gun owners, full of waste, and its machinations to create Death Panels to exterminate us widespread.

Why did we let this Foreign-born, Muslim Socialist become president?

Vicious white racism is only different than the European variety because of simple dynamics: while the West was being won - built up, industrialized, amassing wealth, and breeding psychotic billionaires - the whites on these conquered lands were forever having to fight range wars. The Native inhabitants and the imported Africans would not comply easily to the strange ways of this European trash and its gutter religion, and they kept rebelling. These dark people can never, therefore, be trusted.

The Untouchables for the European Powers were in the Congo, India, and other far-flung places. Queen Victoria could have an Indian servant as a pet, but this didn't disturb anyone outside the upstairs-downstairs of Buckingham Palace. The elites in the US literally had the natives everywhere breathing down their necks, ready to storm the back doors.

Obama enters the US consciousness of a people hunkered down in the trenches of a race war, which, lost, threatens to dismantle their apartheid system. Like most of my screeds - to use the right-wing expletive - notions of race wars is not newsworthy but just my anger, and to be dismissed. Dismissed like those swathes of urban poor, Black and Brown, and the persistence of worst poverty among Native descendants. Unlike my screeds, the science and philosophy and Opinion that justifies our apartheid is perfectly acceptable, because, after all, weren't the Blacks savages in Africa until Europe civilized them?

Many lies have become agreed-upon truths, made careers, and justified the worst penal system in the world. That's Big Business, and it has used science and philosophy and Opinion because it owns them.

What that fat man and his Klan cousins are too slow-witted to realize is Obama is not the source of this hegemonic system: he is its servant. And this is the tip of the iceberg these Aryans refuse to see.

The months prior to the 9/11 attacks, Bush's poll numbers dropped precipitously, the economy continued to stagger ever downward like a Greek tragedy in need of a deus ex machina. In the wake of the 2000 election fraud, this should have provoked a lot more discussion than it did. But barely a newspaper of record investigated.

Then our Reichstag came. War would follow. More than 10 years of war and counting, longest in US history for a hot war [unlike that long, long Cold War].

The presidency's task is to keep this steam ship rolling along, which really means to do nothing at all to solve real problems. The steam ship is commerce. This impotence to do little else is not an accident.

The founders of the US asserted that those who own the country ought to run it: so much for not letting the daylight in on the magic!

The French and English revolutions cut off the heads of kings to progress the exceptional values we hold so dear, for freedom and democracy to flourish. This is what we are taught.

The truth is otherwise. These were merchant - not popular - revolutions: that is, they were basically attempts by the merchants, investors, and bankers to liberalize [meaning: pry open and out of the hands of the locals!] the economy to increase their market share - in slaves mostly.

Mass, insurgent attempts after the English Revolution to challenge the authority of the state, to question the dominance of Parliament and the Military frightened the bankers so much they needed to do something to protect their privilege from mass scrutiny: so the monarchy, the one institution shielded from the electorate and popular pressure, was duly restored. The religious order was re-established.

Perhaps indoctrinated with a hierarchical, patriarchal religion, logic dictates that Fathers must head families, Government school teachers are omnipotent, Bosses run workplaces, the King can do no wrong, and the state is on a predestined course to do Good. From the myths, lies are born.


This is why religion is not only an opiate but also a lobotomy.

Like any corrupt institution, our modern states will only promote those men and women who will serve its functions, to advance commerce, increase market share, beef up quarterly stock reports. This is not conspiracy theory but rather an obvious institutional analysis.

Anyone who gets in the way will literally, or figuratively, get a head chopping.

That angry man on the shuttle will put the weight of the world's problems on the shoulders of a Black man without hesitation. The poor, the dark, the colonials, are always ripe for blame over what ills our Chosen People. But he will not see what links us as workers in a country whose government wants to compete with slave-labor shops, like China. He will make no connection between the system that ended one service contract for a cheaper one, with cheaper shuttle drivers, earning what your average WalMart associate earns, which is equally alarming, to our elite's fascination with sweat shops and seeking lower and lower wages, breaking more and more unions, and driving more and more people into poverty.

This angry man will hit a pot hole and in fact blame Obama for it, not the failed state.

This is not about Obama any more than it is about Bush, Clinton, or Reagan. They all serve their function, which is increasingly to the detriment of wider and wider swathes of the population.

But Barack Obama is in a pretty precarious spot. While he is constitutionally qualified (so is Sarah Palin), he's clearly not up to the tasks of the people having sold his political soul, or of Wall Street, who does not trust a man of this color to make the country safe for more sweat shops.

The country is enduring a worst malaise than that of the 1970's, an economic Depression has hit whole sectors of our economy, and Obama can do nothing. History will regard his presidency comparable to Jimmy Carter's, who made a success at being an ex-president. So there is hope for Obama in his professional afterlife.

Meanwhile, Obama plays with a rather dull collection of toys from a Cracker Jack box, and the Mormon with his offshore accounts will balance the books as easily as Queen Victoria did with those Irish she starved to death.

They paw at each other through the hazy gossamer veil between them. Neo-campaign politics.

Congress doesn't want to get anything done - like the president, it has essentially gotten out of the way, vacated its posts, so the banks and financiers can maximize their trade routes. Commerce. The US Supreme Court, rarely a defender of the rights of people and communities, has become the legislative body de jure of our state capitalist, failed system.

What a shame, as Gordon Ramsay would say understatedly, examining a ruined expensive entree. Obama began as somewhere on the left - with much of the rest of the country. He supported universal health care, like every first world country has; he supported gay marriage; he stood against our wars, against the human rights, Geneva Convention violation of Guantanamo; he was against the blockade of Cuba, which the UN General Assembly has repeatedly condemned [only Israel, naturally, supports us].

For all Obama's vapid, empty campaign rhetoric of 2008, the expensive entree is what people wanted in power, before our own twilight extinguishes in the same ruins as our supposed nemesis, the Soviets. But since Wall Street selects our presidents and directs policy, Obama had to do an about-face. It was an error, we were told, that he supported gay marriage. Guantanamo has made a war criminal of him as has his strange assassinations of US citizens without any trial. Assassinating non-US citizens we are expert at, and something we must all reckon with.

The people - that shrinking half who vote - are further demoralized. The elites are anxious to accelerate neoliberal failures at home that they once imposed in the global South, and like their redneck underlings they don't trust this president to do it. Their money has been filling the campaign coffers of the Mormon with offshore accounts, a chilling forecast indeed.

What to do? Elect the Mediocrity from Lego Land or the Mormon with Offshore accounts? Either way, it seems the Mayan forecast is spot on, an End is near, though just not the literal one the religious zealots peddle.

Europe and the Roots of Our Pathology

Are human beings incurably depraved? Our masters talent for continuing to fuck things up for their inferiors is to be expected, even if it is genocidal. But our own talent as slaves for being so gullible, so lazy, so narcissist, so dis-empowered, so depressed to do any meaningful thing for our own good or the good of the whole should make us all despair not only for succeeding generations but for our present, toxic, death-laden one.

Since as long as I remember, it was conventional wisdom that pedophiles/child molesters were also incurably depraved. This was alleged because the trauma they faced themselves as children - defiled and deflowered more than we defile and deflower most other children - was so great, so severe, that it had done irreparable harm: the wound had cut too deep to heal.

Anyone who is immediately unsettled by my drawing an analogy between ourselves and pedophiles does not know, fundamentally, what we do in the names of God and Commerce - to children: it is just a glimpse to what we do otherwise and elsewhere.

Arguably, after white slave trafficking, the subjugation of women, Jewish holocausts, economic-induced famines, nuclear detonations on civilians, bombing ancient civilizations back into the Stone Age, court-sanctioned wife beatings, the forced migration of millions of nameless Africans from their homeland and their new Christian governments turning the other cheek to lynching, the extermination campaigns against Amerindians, Native Hawaiians, Aboriginals, and the forced relocation of the survivors, a Holy Inquisition against earth-based religious followers - not to forget the State Inquisitions against labor and human-rights activists: it's probably fair to say we've all been a bit defiled and deflowered and traumatized.

But have the wounds run too deep for us to stop the bleeding?

Watching reality shows, like Gordon Ramsay's "Master Chef" the one thing I take away is that there are countless people out there - many gainfully employed in revered professions - who despise their lives because they are unfulfilled by their work, which, if you include getting dressed, commutes, and actual eight-nine hours workday, consumes the vast part of our time in the sun and our youth and our energies. Time, keep in mind, we will never get back. 

These people are ready to chuck it all away in a tantrum of hopefulness for the chance in a 1,000 to be the selected 100, to compete to do something meaningful and creative with their lives, like being a cook.

And yet, for all their supposed job status in the twin towers, they have no power over their lives to make themselves better, or make anything better. All they are empowered to do is work harder or displace themselves from the machine and win a lottery.

Why not chuck the system away? Why not destroy the machine itself? But are we, as I originally asked, too traumatized to do even that?

The trauma is often intentional and meant to instruct deliberately. In that way it is different than the abuse we do to children. Or is it? Beating up, deporting, and shooting labor activists can have a very sobering effect on other workers who will think twice about speaking up; and they won't think once about befriending that brash coworker who is always causing problems.

So many classrooms to this alleged "service-oriented" economy are still arranged with the factory system in mind. Rows of desks, all facing the head, the teacher, whose instructions must be followed to the letter or you are singled out to stand in a corner, after school detention, or to the principal's office for worse punishment. This is as it was intended, then and now: a model workplace. The good students raise their hands, are otherwise quiet, faces down in their books; the bad kids won't follow direction.

Assigning various hash tags to our economy is a bullshit enterprise that may only interest the cottage industry of Economics Departments. Industrial. Post-Industrial. Service Oriented. Capitalist ... and my favorite blooper: the mixed economy. These all hide the reality of a slave system that demands obedience to the ruling order, the chain of command, the titans of industry. Our way of life [which even in the loosest sense of the meaning of the word civilization: it is not].

If I did join the bullshitters, the economics departments, and the spinning talking heads the better tag for our system is a European system. But even this is sloppy.

To the extent we have a memory, it is to Europe [which in itself shows we have no memory]. To the extent we relate to an institutional history it is to that horrid little boil on the planet, with its kings and queens, its hollow liberty, equality, fraternity, which managed by fault of geography to be a war-loving, savage, greedy monstrosity


You can go back to the Greeks and Romans for equally heinous civilizations, and study, for example, how the aggregation of Roman civilization directly contributed to the clear-cutting of the old growth forests of Northern Africa: to build Roman ships to conquer new lands, to subdue Egypt for grain needed to feed Roman citizens. This produced an arid desert, perfect for David Lean to film on for his "Lawrence of Arabia."

But to the average American - by design - Greece connotes exotic food and a pantheon of human gods. Rome is pretty much reduced to a list of emperors we know nothing about, and it imploded ... because it violated some prohibitions of the Old Testament. Something like that, right?

Our history books falsely delineate Ancient Greece and Rome from Modern Industrial Europe, but it is actually the same creature in different advanced stages of ... decay. Yes, the mightier its sword the worse its consequences to the ecosystem.

Europe, imperial, majestic, and bloodthirsty, is to the ancients not what humans are to their ape predecessors: not an evolution backwards. Europe is the prince of Wales, the first born, the male heir to the ancient civilization.


As one German expatriate friend noted, the European landscape is a barren wasteland unfit for human life, let alone our monuments to their plunder, and undeserving the huge concentrations of wealth and power. This runs exactly counter to what we are carefully taught about Europe's genetic and racial superiority contrasted with the inferiors of the global South, so it needs some careful unpacking.

In other words, they had to search outside for development.

The wealth of the world, the riches, lie in the soil and sweat of the global South, which is poor and despised and maligned for its laziness and backwardness. That's why Europe has been so obsessed with the global South, scrambling for them, with how its states are drawn up, who rules them and how, and making sure any nationalists, labor activists, communists, anarchists - anyone who will rock the boat is exterminated quickly, often with European weapons: this is called "stability".

And this is why the global South is poor and despised and maligned.

The real impoverishment lies in the global North, which has few resources, what arable land it has is quickly turned into a dust-bowls by backward farming practices, yet it is praised for its advanced civilization.

The religion of Europe - Christianity - is a wonder of the world, but not really. What predatory society has not had a corresponding philosophy, which would allow - say, in keeping with my earlier allusion - the persistent abuse of children in a Roman Catholic Church and not be shut down, taken over, disbanded?


In other, more brutal, words, Europe's incurably depravity is rooted in the values it had to cultivate ... and teach, enforce, justifying mediocrity for superiority; wealth from conquest and theft; and for calling any man or woman who refused to turn their other cheek a criminal terrorist. Do not, an English historian in not a too dissimilar context alerted, "let too much daylight in on the magic."

Europe's barrenness and its needs not only to breed wars within its region for survival - and to develop in the peculiar way it did, militaristically, because of its needs for war - but also to spread these wars of conquest to any corner of the world.

Frontiers always close down at some point, and a people whose civilization is parasitic from the genesis must always find another route to India.

Presently, Europe is going through yet another upheaval. Its civilization was always precariously placed on the backs of the global South, it bribed wider and wider sectors of its population with higher wages and social benefits - meaning: greater access to the pillage of the global South - and now it has collided with yet another frontier closure. It is not going peacefully into its twilight: 19th century style colonial wars are becoming the norm, even if our teachers won't call our adventures in Afghanistan and the other Stans, Yemen, the Sudan and AfriComm, Iraq, ad nauseum, just what they are.

The world is not their oyster; a quarter of the globe will not be painted red to represent the British Empire. Other empires are rising from the East, which promise to bring more problems - not just competing and outbidding with our traditional masters in Europe, which I could care less about - but mimicking the European civilization and decimating the ecosystem still further.

This is after all how the West was won - the West being a vast, right-wing conspiracy of merchants and slave traders who cut off the heads of the feudal regimes to burn villages to save them and construct monuments. 

The global hedge funds, billionaires, and emerging global governments of India and the People's Republic of China are scrambling to buy the best arable land in Africa, leaving the worst lands for the Africans, who face displacement, famine, disease, and of course being called lazy and unable to govern themselves by Western commentators.

More Christian missionaries cannot be far off.

This is the European system. It is, as the rightwing Economist Magazine once headlined "the Anglo-Saxon system." It is incapable of correcting its wrongs and brought us up - its slaves, its Eichmanns, its paper pushers, its mediocre managers - to believe in the utter perfection of the system, to dissociate the carnage, the collateral damage, the suffering, the polluting to air, water, land, and spirit.

Philosopher George Draffan is easily right: sooner or later we will revisit the Stone Age. How we get there, what becomes of humanity and the ecosystem cannot be left in the hands of pirates, even and especially the pirates in our own heads, put their by a carefully constructed indoctrination system.

The pirate instead of preparing for a long, cold winter want to expend huge amounts of energy to extract the last drops of petroleum from the earth.

This is bad religion.

Still, worst there is something else we can learn from those reality shows I referred to. What they demonstrate is not only our unhappiness of the state of things, our visceral reaction to a slave system, but they also sadly show our inclination to seek mystical solutions to real social problems. Lotteries and gambling casinos will neither end poverty, reverse disturbing social trends, or dismantle genocidal paradigms. These games are a form of magical thinking.

"It is now time for a destructive order to be reversed, and it is well to inform other races that the aboriginal cultures of North America were not devoid of beauty. Furthermore, in denying the Indian his ancestral rights and heritages the white race is but robbing itself. America can be revived, rejuvenated, by recognizing a Native School of thought" Chief Luther Standing Bear [Lakota Sioux].

Why I am an Anarchist

A manifesto of sorts, admonishing us not to be happy and submissive but to be angry, queer, and insurgent.

Perils of Supervision

The other day, a supervisor gave us an after-work "briefing" in which he said he didn't "like the negativity" going around the workplace, and for us to be "more happy, more positive." He told us to be happy we had a job as there were so many out there who did not. He offered no specific cause of this negativity, as this might have elicited a rebuttal; like, he made no mention of the terminations that have been happening to our coworkers who are being sent among the unlucky people with no jobs; no mention of the "zero-tolerance" and draconian punishments resulting for what used to be minor infractions.

Like all our elites, from top to bottom, from the coarsest, foul-mouthed factory floor over-seer to the more refined, elegant and ruthless corporate Eichmann, and every follow-orders gentleman and lady in between: these sorts of briefings are as common as Bush's admonishment as the Towers fell: to keep shopping.

Ignore the man behind the Curtain: the great Oz has laid an egg.


If our supervisors and managers mean anything in these declining, austere times it is exemplified in this: they are rather impotent except where it comes to coerce our obedience. This they must do to eek out one more week of profits from disgruntled labor forces.

Gone are the golden days when they were problem solvers and trouble-shooters. With so many of our comrades unlucky to be without work, the lucky ones are easily replaceable,  their chains being tightened, and yet told by these underlings not to flinch: Be happy. Otherwise, these lucky ones are guaranteed to be replaced with the growing population of Unlucky.

What the lucky ones don't seem to realize with all their good fortune is: this is really no different than chattel slavery, where the slaves were physically beaten for not complying, the wage slaves are coerced psychologically.

The employed are told so often by their managers that they are lucky, that many workers even repeat it to others, and repeat it to themselves in the mirror. To those who want to keep repeating they are lucky to have a job without examining the conditions of that job, consider this: Blacks enjoyed full employment during slavery.

This good fortune of having a job has clearly taken the place of any further advancement in the labor movement from, say, the mid-19th century. An eight-hour work day and minimum wage were barely won with blood staining the streets - the managers pulled the triggers and the workers took the bullets.

But not too much advancement, since at the same time as a giant step was made in trades-unionism, chain-gangs populated with former Black slaves continued to offer free labor to build what the West erroneously calls its "civilization;" some of the former slaves were used to break Northern unionism when Black men not in the chain-gang were lured North to places like Chicago and St Louis and Los Angeles; and later: immigrants fleeing free-enterprise miracles of the global South found themselves just one wrung above the chain-gangs doing menial, backbreaking work for pennies on the dollar. Good liberals condone this arrangement on the grounds that no one from this country would do such work for such a pittance.

A slave system has imposed itself within the freest and most prosperous country in the world, just as an apple with a rotten core is still an apple, so they might say. Workers are not supposed to note the contradictions of wealth and poverty created by the system, nor flinch when we are shown how expendable we are to them, nor question the legitimacy of a Master-Worker system. This is the "negativity" that supervisor-manager warned against. Negativity inhibits the bottom line of the stock market, the Overall Mission of profits - the rationale of a tyrannical state.

We No Longer Cure Diseases, We Manage them too

From the more militant beginnings of labor insurgency, when it was not only the worker we were concerned with but understandably the society the worker labored under, reform competed with revolution for the central modus operandi: can we tinker with the existing institutions [reformism] or must we do away with them altogether [revolution]? Regardless, the institutions have remained virtually untouched as power centers beholden to the same things a stock broker is beholden to, so meaningful reforms would always be tenuous. Revolution impossible.

It's no wonder our powerful governments go limp with helplessness to do anything jobs are transferred in whole factories from entire communities and sent like chain letters to deeper, more remote parts of the global South, out of the reach of US labor laws. It is not workers or communities, children or the health of our bodies, the very old or the newborn baby it is concerned with: stock brokers might be fine to tolerate but not in charge of the upbringing of a child.

The assault on workers and our treatments is akin to a plague being prescribed a placebo: the Haymarket militants - even the most docile of them - would look at us in the 21st century with our "lucky to have a job" excuses and the privilege of working two and three to make ends meet, no health care, education- and community-funding austerity measures, housing and food insecurity, while the logic of capitalist keeps apace to create fortunes for a few, and wonder if they had not been transported back to the the 1500's.

Our problems have worsened, and our elites predictably offer a strange array of solutions, no stranger than how they seem to address health issues: as AIDS activists have pointed out, after 30 years of that so-called viral epidemic, no cure is found, rather a host of expensive tests and treatments, which benefit pharmaceutical corporations.Similarly, our elites' prescriptions are rhetoric and more belt-tightening.

Multiply that 30 years and labor solutions function much the same way, making the poor worse off, and the rich more bloated. For example, it is considered an advance that 23 states are now right-to-work states, where unions can no longer be an obstacle to what elites like to euphemistically call improving the economy. Why we should allow the interests of health, like HIV, to be in the hands of those seeking to maximize profits is as amazing as allowing the same interests to decide what's best for workers - that is, the best decidedly being to have as little as possible.

And naturally any prescription cannot credibly come from workers or from unions, since we don't know what is good for us.

Our Best Unions No Better than Junior Members of a Corporate Board of Directors

Our unions, thanks largely to a campaign of disinformation, sabotage, extermination, and purges have nearly fossilized into relics. They may look nice from afar, but they are brittle to the touch.

If publicly traded, NYSE-type corporations are only interested in maximizing profits every quarter and controlling a larger market share, it is not unreasonable to conclude the boards of directors is interested in nothing less. Each board member plays a carefully scripted role in meeting this end: it is not in unschooled, illiterate circles that this statement is controversial. It is among the well trained and well schooled, who learn absolutely nothing of the power and role of corporate power in an average high school civics class: to them, to these matriculated, to suggest corporate power is a conspiracy is something to be filed away with our not really having landed on the moon.

But the members of the board know if they do not play their particular role to meet the only goal for the quarter, they will loose their lucky job and find themselves padding up their resume in search of a new one. Even the junior members of the board - like VP for Human Resources - knows this.

So when its has become a popular smoke screen for certain firms to stage workplace democracy, many of those well-schooled, well-greased, well-matriculated proletariat inhale the smoke screen deeply.

An Employee Council established by the boards of directors, staffed and vetted by the boards of directors [or not, since that VP of Human Resources can downsize anyone at any time] is not workplace democracy: it is an extension of the board of directors, which is interested in one thing and one thing only, and it is not the condition of the workers, their wages, their levels of satisfaction, their empowerment to make meaningful changes.

The Employee Council, like that VP for Human Resources, is a junior member of the board.

What does this have to do with unions? If there is a difference today between our better unions and these Employee Councils, it might be that one has the audacity to charge you dues for the indignity to represent the bottom-line interests of the board of directors: that is all. The hot air they expend in order to collect those dues from you does what hot air always does: rises high into the heavens where it is never to be seen or heard from again.

And if this is a sad thing to say about our better unions, the worst ones are not worth mentioning.

Funny how this works for many people: if the electric company kept making excuses why your power wasn't being turned on, even though you were current on your bill, the board of directors might be happy that their coffers continued to be filled, but this would not mitigate you not having any lights.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of it. This sham extends, as it must, to the polling place, where our elections are rigged to favor business interests over any popular control. Many examples of this exist, but a notable one is that contrary to 70% of those polled want a European, government-controlled, universal health system, 99% of the corporate interests do not: the stock broker wins again.

Capitalism basks in the glory of their exploits: the exploited bask in race pride, nationalism, culture wars, and the chivalrous defeat of Sin

But this is the nature of the conspiracy: the well-oiled, well-tooled machine that seems to make clean, sweeping movements on the outside, but underneath, gears are grinding into each other, and we are none the wiser, precisely because we have been educated.

The harassment of anarchist and communist union agitators taught us to watch what we say and around whom we say it.

The extermination anarchist and communist union agitators in the 1930's taught us to hide.

The official purging anarchist and communist union agitators in the 1940's from the union rolls taught us to stop learning their lessons.

Then their presence is not mentioned in the official history books, so your silence and obfuscation is no match for your child's ignorance to why they are sitting in classrooms laid out in rows, like a factory, with the teacher at the head of the class, like their future manager.

We are well educated.

And lacking a meaningful knowledge about how our authoritarian system functions - who holds power, who wields it, and on whose behalf, we are left to debate feminism, gays in the armed forces, race, abortion, unwed mothers, moral degeneration causing natural disasters - to name just a few absurdities: because these issues are really about who can fly closest to the Sun, the center of Power, access the wheels and levers, without the wax melting from your wings.

The debate is not about women or gays and lesbians or white purity: it is about an iron will to preserve intact a predatory, unequal, malicious system, then: to create appropriate fables to support it, like the inferiority of women, the perversion of queers, and the supremacy of whites. And these justifications can come from science, which asks us to look at the data; Bibles, which demand we emulate the morality and superstition of a persecuted ancient North African-Roman tribe; or televangelists, who really should know better.

Ceasar and Pharoah and their exploits, the blood they spill, the mass graves, the riches they inherit: they get away with murder.

Political Paradigms yoke us to complicity, Ridding Ourselves of Sexual Delusions might be our best hope

So who will rid us of this turbulent prince? Moses led his tribe to freedom; a Divorce Decree rid us of the Roman Catholics; the beheading of a few Godly kings rid us of absolute monarchism; Cromwell rid us of monarchy altogether for a time; Puritans and Calvinists rid us of Anglicanism; Magna Carta rid us of arbitrary convictions; the Viet Cong and Cuban revolutionists rid us of US military supremacy; China rid itself of British occupation in Hong Kong, and the Panamanians - despite Ronald Reagan's protestations - rid itself of the US; Russia rid itself of Czars and its global South economy ...

And what did this give us? An armed, predator nation in the Middle East; Henry became the pope of an English church; the free French not only held liberty, equality, fraternity to their hearts but they also tried to hold colonies, like Haiti, just as fervently; the Christian-fanatical Pilgrims began the holocaust of Native Americans; Victorious Vietnam has implicated itself into the global market system, along with China, as the go-to place for cheap, regulated, oppressed labor.

Plus ca change, c'est la meme chose!

Maybe it's time to put down our Bibles and our Marx, Lenin, and Henry George, and kill John Wayne. Those of us inclined to follow the supposed Word of a Jewish carpenter in the ancient desert persist in consulting those texts for answers; while those of us who have purportedly freed ourselves from such superstition dive head first into another catechism of communism. Each and all sides insist we need only perfect the Message, and we have been doing this for a few hundred to a few thousand years. In our efforts we have replaced one pope for another, then another.

John Wayne is a product of our imaginations: that is not even the actor's real name. He was not a cowboy but an actor. He is the model for our brutish behavior, machismo, the West, Civilization, the white hero come to rescue the damsels and pluck one to wed, reprimand the natives, and kill the extras as a show of bravery: in short, a thug. He has become a model for Manhood itself, in sharp contrast to a pan-sexual, empathetic, culturally embracing, humble, intellectually thoughtful human being which the world arguably needs.

What seems to really hinder our human progress into a better future is whatever our catechism, we adhere to the model of John Wayne: we probably find something as comforting in that icon as we might a military parade. I have seen the doctrinaire Christian, and he is no better than the doctrinaire Socialist. We keep cultivating the worst characteristics in our children, trying our best to model them ourselves, and the result is a kink in our moral evolution, if not our economic.

The Syndicalists can rightly advocate a worker-owned and managed factory, but watch who asserts themselves and how, and who is marginalized and with what tactics: and the meeting room will be laid out just like the classrooms of their youth, with the master at the head.

A therapist once told me we should not vilify those who seek counseling; if anyone, we should vilify those who do not. Even, the women who joined the ranks of the Black Panther Party in the 60's found they were expected to make coffee, something the Southern Baptists would have given a hearty "amen" to.

At this point any man or woman who wants to evolve needs a little queer in them; but this is a tough task until we put enough queer in society.

And if the church wardens are uneasy thinking I am referring to sex: good. I am glad to make them uneasy and knock a few pedestals over. But I am not talking about sex: that is already going on, between men and women, women and women, and men between men. Despite Dr Kinsey's findings, we persist in saying things like 7% of the population is homosexual, when sex between men, and between women, is much more frequent than that and would qualify at least 25%-40%. But this fact has never jived with the alpha-male, John Wayne frontier conqueror we aspire to be, so cognitive dissonance simply removes the facts for the fiction.

Recently, after having sex with a guy, he told me he was born-again Christian, and showed me the photos at the river and a Bible within arms reach to prove it. He then went on about the Word of God: how being gay was a sin because it was clearly stated and irrefutable in the Bible: how he could do what we just had done within spitting distance of the framed, color photo of him being dunked in a cold river is called discipline. He was the bad person, not the text, which he argued must be correct because it has endured so long [like, say, Homer's "The Odyssey"? Sappho's poetry?].

This might seem like a strange case to many, and it is strange: but it is far from unusual. Again, given what Dr. Kinsey reported in his two published studies, we seem quite comfortable with norms and directives handed down from the Master Teachers, Supervisors, and Management; and guilty and full of shame and doubt about our own natural impulses.

No change, including the most modest, significant social change, let alone radical change, can happen under such a paradigm. You can recite all the Lenin or Mao or St. Peter you want: as Bernard Shaw wrote "Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."

For the sake of not only humanity but also the other species - known and unknown, the water, land, and air, we must change our ways.

The state of things as they are will lead to greater exterminations: this is not a prediction, but rather a prognosis of what is happening right now. Neither religious zealotry nor political dogma nor supplicating our masters' foolish directives to "be happy" can tip the scales in humanity's favor: this is worse than moving chairs around on the deck of the Titanic:  it is akin to trying to find the most comfortable one to sit in. And the Captain is not going down with this ship. So he must be thrown overboard.

Anonymous exposes Long Beach city officials

A recent article in the Long Beach Post reveals some interesting but obvious things in our elite narrative and the direction current activism is taking, and they are worth noting.

Our elites have always responded harshly to signs of dissent, often disproportionately. So a peaceful protest as what happened in the infamous Kent State antiwar march in 1970 saw Ohio state militia shooting and killing activists. The Democratic Convention in Chicago, 1968, is commonly accepted to be a "police riot." And of course, most recently, Oakland Police shot a protestor in the head, seriously wounding him [that he happened also to be an Iraq War veteran seemed to garner him special attention by the mainstream media, as if any other activist might have deserved this brutality].

So it goes without saying that what Anonymous claims to be doing in exposing malfeasance in the Long Beach, CA, city government is characterized as a "warning" by elite thought, as if it is activists and organizers who are menacing officials.

You rarely read such headlines as Long Beach Police "warn" Occupy Long Beach activists; or Long Beach city council "warn" medical marijuana advocates; or Long Beach Mayor Foster "warns" free speech rights of photographers.

What elites do is - by mafia standards - by definition correct.

It's one thing for the insular, pro-corporate world of the political beltway to think this of themselves; it's quite another when our media do it for them. But this is why our mainstream media is so dreadful: it serves the elites on bended knee.

The elites hold the convention that "the king can do no wrong," which is an obsolete, medieval method of protecting the power structure from popular scrutiny.

Seventeenth century British elites re-established the monarchy after Cromwell's interregnum to keep popular demands out of reach of the power structure: the monarchy was the one institution able to keep itself away from the public; or as the British elites are fond of saying, "above politics."

The US and its allies have rammed through similar institutions under the guise of global "free" trade that are also "above politics," like the World Trade Organization. These institutions make decisions for the financial industry, the 1%, and are insulated from the demands of people.

The Long Beach Post's headline is by far not the most egregious example of elite narrative, and as an alternative news source to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, it must be commended for even featuring the item. But the question remains why our newspapers of record do not scrutinize such behavior as a city police force detaining photographers: such behavior would warrant a White House Press Conference if done by one of the US's official enemies.

Obviously, even in a sleepy suburb of Los Angeles, like Long Beach, is culpable of serving elites, and is not above scrutiny by activists.

Bottom line, our elites are only continuing a class war, and their overall intention has been loudly expressed in the business press. They want to make the US better for business, not for workers; so they break unions [Indiana being the 23rd state to ban closed-shop trades unions, aka, right-to-work]. The elites want to bring the 19th century sweat shops back home, because they want to compete with places like China.

Should we even be competing with such a labor atrocity as China is never asked among elite media; only "how" can we compete.

So it is encouraging that groups like Occupy, Wikileaks, Anonymous, and Black Bloc tactics are employed. In an open democratic society, such tactics and non-hierarchical organizations would not be needed. We wouldn't need subversive organizations to expose what our governments were doing, at home and abroad: the civil rights abuses, like those alleged against the city of Long Beach, the anti-labor practices like compromising collective-bargaining rights; the war crimes, like those of Abu Graib, Guantanamo, etc., or the broken United Nations conventions to which the US itself is signatory.

These dissident groups are not brick-and-mortar, IRS-ordained groups, like the ACLU or Human Rights Campaign, which can do meaningful work but are often beholden to the same financial industries our mainstream politicians, and Long Beach officials, are beholden to for funding.

So the radical changes we need are not likely to come from above, from these elites and their clients.

It will be the persistent work of these insurgent groups and their tactics that will bring the radical change we need, not more handouts to the elites.

Keeping the rabble in their place

The most recent developments in Greece should not surprise anyone familiar with the historical record. The elites and the management class have always responded in proportion and to excess against any popular, democratic movement. These movements have always been a direct threat to the existence of elite culture and the so-called profit motive. And the historical record is clear that the elites, its managers - the little Eichmanns - and their police powers are forever on the watch to stamp out the menace of popular will and participation.

So Greece is not only bearing severe austerity measures, which even the official press acknowledge will prevent it from making any advances in social development for many years to come, but also the EU and banking elites have successfully imposed a pliable government on the Greek people. What devastating effect this has on the Greek people is not open for serious discussion, no more than the consequence of Western pioneer culture had on indigenous communities in the Western hemisphere.

The rabble do not matter.

But even EU machinations has proven difficult to pacify that ancient country.

Just as the elites of the 17th century found they could not trust even Parliament against popular insurgencies in Great Britain, and so had to re-establish the monarchy as the one institution "above politics" [meaning: outside popular control], the EU and its little Eichmanns have planted a virtual viceroy over the Greek economy, and imposed measures some have compared with the vicious measures imposed on Germany after World War I.

We have to pay attention to this. We cannot be docile to these machinations.

True enough, our brothers and sisters in the global South have endured this sort of disrespect for democratic institutions for as long as the imperial boot pressed on the neck of the real producers of the colonies - the indigenous, the African slaves, the wage-slaves reduced to sweat-shop labor for the "Metropolis" - Madrid, Paris, London, New York, ad hitlerium.

Haitian popular organizations under Lavalas had to be ignored, vilified, or crushed so the US elites could dare go and "teach" that island nation a different kind of democracy - the democracy for the elites.

This perpetuation of failed states - states without any democratic institutions, because those are dangerous - is a practice well developed by elites. It's policy. We could learn a lot from the global South: what they endured and tactics to resist.

Well, me must learn. Greece represents the sort of assault long imposed on our colonies but now imposed on the so-called global North, the West.

It's odd: Reagan haunted us with images of Nicaraguan Sandinista revolutionaries marching up the peninsula to invade Texas, when really it was our own masters who are the threat.

If they came for them at night, they will come for you in the morning.

Austerity measures have been hitting sectors of the global North for more than a generation. Those sectors include racial and ethnic minorities, women (especially single mothers), whites educated for nothing more than to be be factory workers, which means they weren't educated at all.

It is interesting to be hearing this recent angst about our failed public education system, since it was one of the first institutions attacked by the elites in the late 1970s, with such taxpayer-rights initiatives, like Proposition 13. This decimated California public schools for those most needing them; but there was scarcely any talk among official media about the side effects of taking vast sums of money from public education and what this would logically do to the poor.

Now, under Republican and Democratic regimes, we see what was an attack on various sectors of the global North expand to include things like middle-class suburban housing, white-collar service jobs, and university education costs.

Only now, the movement - Occupy this or that - gets a bit of attention.

Well, Greece proves that worse is to come for us.

Our elites and their managers will not impose a monarchy on us - that's very old school. What they have been imposing on us for the last generation are institutions similarly immune from any popular scrutiny or control, like the monarchy. And the rationale for these things is not much different: the rabble can't be trusted to do the right thing.

It's not just Apple Computers, lauded as a Silicon Valley giant when it basically exports its workforce to areas where the US labor, health, and safety standards cannot touch it: to sweat-shops in China that our forbears would recognize as what sparked militant trades-union movements [which of course were responded to with utter brutality and extermination].

It's not just these US-based corporations, with headquarters in our infamous metropolises, outsourcing work beyond the reach of US law and popular will; it is also the creation of global financial institutions, like NAFTA, which impose from beyond "trade" laws to enrich the elites and impoverish wider sectors of the global North.

The jobs we are left with are Target and Starbucks jobs, jobs to sell the products of slave labor.

The only good response to this is to respond at all, first. Like learning to ride a bike, some things can be learned from books, from our forbears, from previous insurrections; but we have to set out in practice and be ready to fall down, re-examine, reflect, and pick up our proverbial or actual weapons and move on in a sustained, organized insurrection of our own, disciplined or not - whatever that means ultimately.

There is no petition to bring about a social and economic revolution, so we can't wait around for it.

If they screw with Greece tonight, drones will come for you at dawn.

What did the Queen know and when did she know it:? A 60-year Retrospective

A recent article in Truthout.com highlights the criminal nature of Tony Blair and his term in office. Writes, John Pilger: "[Gareth] Peirce's book achieves the impossible on Blair: it shocks. In tracing the "unjustifiable theses, unrestrained belligerence, falsification and willful illegality" that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, she identifies Blair's assault on Muslims as both criminal and racist."

This criminal nature is not controversial except to mainstream media and apologists for power and war, for whom any means justify the ends.

While the article presents the agreed-upon facts of the matter of Blair, it omits entirely the nature of the British government and its particular fashion of wielding power against growing majorities - often active majorities.

Recall, for example, that the anti-war members of Blair's own Labour Party had to ask his permission to debate the oncoming war against Iraq in the House of Commons. It was up to Blair whether to consent to have this debate or ignore his rank-and-file altogether.

This illustrates a bit about power in Great Britain and should be understood. It must be understood for its own sake - for, it is important to acknowledge the different ways power manifests over us. It must also be understood to allow the broadest discussion possible.

Certain dissenting voices have broadened this discussion, but predictably have been marginalized. Political activists, like Tony Benn and Willie Hamilton, have focused on the root of the British decay: the British Establishment, its antiquated laws and customs, and its undemocratic nature.

I am referring to the monarchy.

During that chapter in British history known as the interregnum, after a civil war and one king had his head cut off to be replaced by a commoner to head a republic, activists were already agitating for a democracy where they'd be ruled by neither a king nor by Parliament. Years of corruption, followed by the execution of a king probably shook what was left of the rose-colored glasses off the faces of the masses.

They also must have realized that killing God's alleged representative on earth did not send them straight to Hell. So energized and enlightened, they were safe to push the issue of throwing off all yokes and chains of their oppression.

Now, these activists wanted more. And this agitation scared some Hell into the ruling classes, whose heads had not been cut off, as a future socialist Ken Livingstone advised newly elected Hugo Chavez to do. 

As historian Christopher Hill details in his work, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, the English establishment that lingered after the execution trusted neither the army or Parliament to close ranks and save the nation for the upper classes, as these were filled with still too many popular forces.

So, Hill argues, the monarchy was restored. It was the one institution immune from public scrutiny and public pressure - no one votes in or out a king. Widening parts of the electorate could influence Parliament. More and more working-class men could enter the armed forces. These institutions were not entirely trustworthy.

But the monarchy was for a select, insulated few.

Which takes us back to this recent article in Truthout, and other articles like it in progressive circles. These articles correctly go so far as to call Tony Blair a war criminal, demand investigations and trials, but none dare to say the same of the Queen or to implicate her.

That calling the Queen a war criminal, suggesting she be at least subpoenaed, seems beyond the pale is exactly the point. Were this a rogue regime from the Axis of Evil, with a monarch at its head, the Queen - like Germany's kaiser or Japan's emperor - would not be overlooked as a charming relic or a figurehead. There would be interest in her involvement, investigations, and questions of "what she knew and when she knew it."

Even among many Western progressives there is a powerful spell upon them: all that glistens must be gold.

Elizabeth Windsor Mountbatten has held the position of queen of the United Kingdom for 60 years now. Every prime minister has kept their conversations with the monarch secret, but they have at the same time acknowledged, one by one and every one, that she is informed of everything, that all secret papers are funneled through her desk for review, that no law becomes a law until the queen signs it, no Church prelate or Supreme Court jurist is appointed without her.

"The Queen received all Foreign Office telegrams and papers," Labour historian Ben Pimlott quotes an official. "And so in some ways she was better informed in advance of the operation than many members of the Cabinet."

Those infamous Red Boxes, lined with lead and waterproofed, go to her from prime ministers, cabinet ministers, MI5. The highest ranks of the military often meet with her privately.

So what did Tony Blair tell his queen in the lead up to the war in Iraq, about weapons of mass destruction or extraordinary rendition or torture?

These are the sort of questions a trial or truth commission might ferret out. But they would not end with the UK involvement in the war in Iraq.

In her 60 years as unelected head of state, from 1952, a lot of other international crimes have been committed. Britain can ostensibly decide its own form of government, so being an unelected head of state is as much its own business as having unelected institutions in the US control our economy, which should be our cause for alarm and agitation.

The crime is what the UK does outside its borders. The crime is what it does to others. And these crimes have been significant.

Here is a sample, taken from Marxist historian Walter Rodney, Ben Pimlott, J.M. Roberts, and from Intervention and Exploitation: US and UK Government International Actions since 1945:

Kenya: 1952-1956
A liberation campaign is launched by the Mau Mau. The British response is "to close the 149 schools of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association, 21 schools of the Kikuyu Karinga Education Association, and 14 other independent schools."  "They were," writes historian Walter Rodney, "considered training grounds for rebellion." The British then impose a state of emergency and brutally suppress the Mau Mau. ,British forces conduct human rights atrocities, establish Nazi-style concentration camps and ‘resettle’ hundreds of thousands of people in ‘protected villages’. Around 150,000 Africans die.

Guyana: 1953
October - Britain suspends Guyana's constitution. "The People's Progressive Party," writes Rodney, "was the first mass party in Guyana and it was also a multi-racial party. It was at that time the only pparty in the West Indies which had any pretensions about having a scientific socialist outlook or Marxist outlook or working-class outlook." Predictably, he notes, the PPP came into "conflict" with its British imperial masters, so Britain sends in troops and installs an interim administration after democratic elections for parliament produces a result not to its liking.

Libya: 1953
December 7 - Britain imposes military bases in Libya for a period of 20 years, ostensibly in return for economic subsidies, which never reach the people but prop up an Arab facade.

Egypt: 1956-1957
"The British, French, and Israelis conspire to overthrow [Gamel Abdel Nasser] in the Suez adveture, the last fling of old-style imperialism," according to historian J.M. Roberts. The incident is notable also because in the frenzy to dispatch troops to Egypt, the British prime minister had to get the signed approval of the Queen. According to historian Ben Pimlott, "the hastily prepared Proclamation" was given to her for signature while she was away at a horse race. "Her approval was required before it could be read out in the House of Commons the same afternoon."

In the wake of the failed Suez invasion, MI6 (Britain's spy service) plans and carries out several assassination attempts against Pres. Gamel Abdel Nasser. The US were also involved, recruiting the Saudis and Iraq to help them. Britain had already made plans to assassinate Nasser, even before he nationalized the Suez Canal.

Yemen: 1959
Federation of Arab Amirates of the South created as an autonomous territory under British protection. Britain occupied parts of Yemen in 1837, the year Victoria became queen.

Guyana: 1961
Despite a campaign against the PPP by the Guyanese elites and the churches, PPP organizes gains ground. Guyana is granted internal self governance, with Britain retaining control over external and defense matters; Chetti Jagan of the PPP becomes prime minister.

Kenya: 1961
The British are forced to introduce a new policy which allows Africans to buy and farm the White Highlands. Kenya's first pre-independence general elections are held. The KANU defeat the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU). The KADU (led by Masinde Muliro, Daniel Arap Moi, and Ronald Ngala) represents smaller and less advantaged ethnic groups of the Great Rift Valley and coastal areas, including the Kalenjin. The KADU advocated Majimboism (regionalism in Swahili) which would create ethnic-based, semi-autonomous regions.

The KADU had been formed with the covert assistance of the British government and British businesses, in an effort to get a more 'moderate' government after independence. The British stopped supporting it when they saw it could not beat the KANU.

By selling at a high price the land previously seized by the white settlers, not only do the settlers make a great deal of money, but it is ensured that the land passes into the hands of a either wealthy individuals who will protect European business interests or people trapped by the debts they incur in borrowing money to buy the land.

Guyana: 1962
The US concludes that Dr. Jagan is a Communist and although all alternatives to Dr. Jagan are terrible, the US backs Jagan's opponent under an independent British [sic] Guyana, which would cause the U.S. fewer problems than a government under Dr. Jagan.

Jagan announces a budget which is widely praised by international commentators, but the opposition condemn it and use it as an excuse to incite violent protests. The opposition is supported by local labor organizations who receive support from certain US union groups funded by the CIA. The British Governor-General initially refuses to send troops to quell the disturbances, but eventually does so after arson, looting and deaths in the capital. Jagan is forced to withdraw the budget.

Yemen: 1962
MI6 begin covertly providing arms, funding, and logistical support to pro-British "rebels" in dirty war against pro-Egyptian republican forces. In this the Briitsh government colludes with Israel's Mossad and the Saudi regime. Around 200,000 die in the war.

Yemen: 1963
Britain rejects a UN call for it to withdraw and permit self-determination.

Australia: 1975

The government of prime minister Gough Whitlam is plagued by resignations and the blocking of its budget by the upper house of the parliament. In an unprecedented move, the UK governor-general, the official representative of the British queen, dismisses the Whitlam and the government. A caretaker administration is installed.

The speaker of the Australian House of Commons writes to the Queen to ask her to restore Whitlam to office, but she declines to intervene, saying it is not proper for her to do so.

It later transpires that the CIA had apparently encouraged Kerr to dismiss Whitlam, because he was raising issues about the the US running a control center for spy satellites in the Australian outback, amongst other things.

The Falkland Islands [The Malvinas]: 1982

Even after the UK claimed sovereignty over the islands in 1833, Argentina contested this. In 1982, the military junta of Argentina seized the island - which lay just off its coast - prompting the British to send in warships and wage a 74-day battle. The British re-took the islands, but to this day Argentina disputes this.

When then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher went to the Queen to send troops, Parliament was only notified afterward.

Ireland. A pope gave Ireland to Henry VII, and tried to take it away when Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic church. Nevertheless, the UK has held all or part of the island ever since the 15th century, culminating in the "Troubles" of the 1970's.

What is notable is the steady decline of British mischief, which roughly corresponds to its stature as an imperial power. What has not declined, even in an age of greater indifference to the monarchy, greater press scrutiny of all things official, less deferential treatment of our "betters" is the hands-off treatment the British monarchy is given. The International Criminal Court readily indicts Gaddafi and wants his son for questioning, but nothing of British crimes or wanting answers from its high officials, like the queen.

This is comparable to the hands-off treatment our own US press give our own unelected power brokers and the deferential treatment afforded our financial centers, which is corrupting.

The British prime minister is allowed powers most democratically elected presidents are forbidden. Its actions and its crimes are, like the queen, "above politics" and outside public scrutiny. It is allowed these powers because it is said to act on behalf of the monarch, whose powers are nearly absolute: war, peace, treaties, etc.

This is exactly what those 17th century ruling classes wanted after the interregnum, an unchecked power to act on its behalf and for its profit. It is not only important to understand who rules Britain [or any modern state] but also how power is distributed and to whom it is accountable.

In 1992 the Queen said "No institution: city, monarchy, whatever should expect to be free of the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don't."

Passing Briefs ...

MLK the Socialist firebrand * How many slaves do you own? * Cancer Barbie vs AIDS Barbie * Technically colorblind * Purge of left-wing Federal employees? * Ancient civilization before the Hun? * Escaping monkeys * When Mr. Galloway came to Washington


While I do not like the definitive title of this Youtube clip, but the sentiments from King impressed me a long time ago. He was a "socialist" [not a "Socialist!]."

I am not a Christian in any form, but I am impressed by the example of the Jewish rabbinical carpenter who spoke about justice and our only human birthright: each other, who was executed by Rome, as I am impressed by the Baptist preacher who spoke of a just society, who demanded we do in deed and word to act against Our Rome, who was also executed by Rome.

***

HOW MANY SLAVES DO YOU OWN?

I listened to an NPR-radio discussion this morning about the controversies around an infamous Apple Corporation plant/labor camp in China, where workers are committing suicide due to horrific work conditions and treatment.

The moderator asked the audience "how much more would you be willing to pay for you Apple products, and would you pay double" to ensure all the workers in the development were paid well and afforded labor rights?

Can you imagine an abolitionist asking such a morally bankrupt question in 1850? NO! Only a slave trader would pose such a question.

The question to ask our iPhone- and ePad-loving society is Derrick Jenson's: How many slaves do you own?

Further, it is the wrong question posed by our masters: how should we compete with China? The correct question is: Should we?

***

There used to be a lively, radical 'zine in San Francisco put out by activists from ACT UP/SF (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) called DISEASED PARIAH NEWS [DPN], which featured "AIDS Barbie" complete with photos of her swathed in KS lesions and stories about her vomiting from the side effects of those noxious drugs. MATTEL tried to sue.

DPN packed a punch back in those street marching, AIDS-phobic times.

Now I wonder if we're at risk of normalizing a cancer pandemic among women without really solving it. And I wonder what Mattel's contribution - who dropped the lawsuit earlier because these activists weren't dumb enough to incorporate and list their names - is doing with cancer Barbie.

What eats at me is we no longer have a health industry but rather a pharmaceutical economy. We no longer end disease but find expensive, patented treatments to enrich big pharm.

***

"Technically it's not mine"

... aka technically it's not my canal, technically it's not my land, technically it's not my oil, technically it's not my country, ... but we're going to bomb it/steal it/drain it anyway ... funny how lack of values spread like a plague and WHO is permitted to commit the crime and who is presumed guilty prima facie.

Color blind my ass. The undercover video shows who we are in word vs deed.

***

“I think an intelligent conservative wants the right federal employees delivering the right services in a highly efficient way and then wants to get rid of those folks who are in fact wasteful, or those folks who are ideologically so far to the left, or those people who want to frankly dictate to the rest of us,” Gingrich said in response to a question from a federal employee at the forum.

Yeah, I just got a copy of TSA's Office of Human Capital's Management Directive HB Addressing Unacceptable Performance & Conduct ... 15-day suspension, 15-day suspension, Removal from Federal Service, Removal from Federal Service.

Gingrich wants to frighten federal employees into silence and submission. The ground has already been plowed by the current administration!

***

And this BBC story is supposed to be a surprise, that civilization began with the Western religions and Conquest??

Civilization ended with the Western religions and the Conquest. The barbarians - by sheer, brute force forged from whence they came: barren, cold Europe - imposed themselves on the richest, most civilized parts of the world to extract resources to make the wasteland of Europe into an industrial power house.

***

This story from Brazil about some ingenious monkeys is proof that not only are other species smarter than we credit them but also these monkeys are smarter than most of us.

At least they have the sense to try and escape from their prisons while we keep endorsing, collaborating, defending, justifying our failed state, waiting like characters from old Greek drama for the Deus ex machina to come down from stage left to right all wrong.

***

This 43-minute Youtube video is might seem somewhat dated coming from 2005. But in case you missed the original airing and in light of the alleged US troop withdrawal from Iraq - almost 10 years later!! - it's worthy to note how George Galloway undresses and owns our useless US Senate.

Galloway is a firebrand socialist and, at the time, a member of the British Parliament. Then British prime minister, Tony Blair, orchestrated Galloway's removal from the Labour Party for his criticism of the illegal war. Galloway bashed back by forming his own political party, running against a Labour MP, and winning.

Go, George!

Often apologists and revisionists gloss over historical atrocities saying the ancient times weren't thinking as advanced as we [supposedly] are. This is a lie. Fr de las Casas made sermons against the Spanish extermination of the indigenous population in the Americas. He was ignored. The British Anti-War movement, and members of the British Parliament, like Galloway and Glenda Jackson, spoke loudly through the smokescreens of the rationales for war.

There is always someone speaking out.