Why the Ottomans do not matter to us

By Ottoman I do not mean a piece of furniture. The Ottoman Turks gave us far more than the name of a piece of furniture, which is an interior-design question best relegated to an IQ test where class and privilege matter.

The Ottoman Empire lasted far longer and became far more powerful than, say, the British, and yet the average adult and above average school student know nothing about them.

From the 15th century up until the 20th, up until the the births of of my grandparents, the Ottomans ruled that part of the world which included many of our cradles of civilization: Egypt and parts of northern Africa, southern Europe and what we now call the Balkans, and onward into what we now call - thanks to the British - the Middle East.

They made numerous contributions, all of which we think - like our civil and human liberties - fall from on high, graciously: deus ex machina or el rex le veult.

But I don't want to write a history of the Ottoman Empire. Many sources exist already, never classified, easily excavated at your local public library; and the best education is self directed.

I do want to make a note on why the Ottomans have been wiped from our historical lexicon, why we can name the Romans and the Greeks; then the French and its Sun King, Marie and her cake; the British and its majestic white kings and queens, which we are still very fond of, which is really creepy given their incessant inbreeding and bloodshed.

A fringe of us can even add the US empire to this random list, exterminating natives, stealing foreign territory, wars of foreign conquest.

But nearly 500 years of the Ottoman Empire, and a whole lot of real estate along with literary and scientific achievement, is nowhere to be found among our historical mishmash of propaganda.

Why?

Without the Ottomans the various occupations in the Middle East become humanitarian interventions. Without the Ottomans, a certain rogue apartheid racist state can be invented and an all-out land grab ensue. Without the Ottomans, the political boundaries drawn up by the British take on an ancient, timeless flavor and so are beyond scrutiny.

Without the Ottomans, the House of Saud is an ancient dynasty when it is nothing more than a West Asian Kardashian drama, and the kingdom of Jordan an episode of "Keeping Up Appearances."

The Ottomans do not matter to us because they cannot. The narrative the West needs us to believe breaks down if the Ottomans are allowed to intrude, then questions are asked, fresh options explored - like, if Humpty Dumpty Germany can be put back together, why not the Ottomans? This question cannot be asked because of "our enduring friendship with Israel" and, basically, oil, which, like the slave trade of recent times is a necessary evil the West is thoroughly willing to suffer upon others for its conglomeration called civilization.

Removing the Ottomans from our thoughts is like removing the indigenous civilizations from our history books. We are left with an untamed wilderness ripe for exploit by the Europeans and their bankers.

And before you offer a Survival of the Fittest argument for the Allies victory over the Axis Powers [Germany and the Ottomans], know that it was not British might that brought the Turks to defeat. It was monogamy.

In another blow against traditional marriage, a certain sultan broke with longstanding Ottoman custom and became a one-woman kind of guy - we are told this was "true love" - thus messing up the pool of heirs and causing discord. Before this, the sultan in charge had had several wives who bore many children, and the sultan could chose which male[sic] child was best to succeed. This provided a steady pool of qualified aspirants.

With monogamy, the one wife had to produce the one male heir, and he could have been brilliant as easily as have had no temperament for colossal rule. He might have preferred painting. He might have been an imbecile. Just look at the British.

Narratives are important, hence Bible citations and morality tales rammed down our throats. Narratives are important not only to teach lessons but as in this instance to avoid learning any altogether. Once upon a time, the West tried to fix the Middle East - not, how it was intentionally broken in the first place. And, the gods help us, the West will kill them trying.

A Shavian Pope?

First, a disclaimer: while I somewhat embarrassingly call myself an anarchist, I don't put much stock in the label or those who wear it. It is an emblem like any other in a swamp of emblems, like DKNY or Gucci, that say something, but not enough, about a person. Also, I have fierce awe and respect for those anarchists who got their hands dirty and broke things - as opposed to those who climb academic ladders for PhD degrees and marginal think-tanks or those who busy themselves telling us why others are not real anarchists while they build nothing at all. Or those who plod out blog entries!! My thoughts on Pope Francis, like my already published [and scorned] thoughts on Charles Windsor, aka, Prince Charles of the UK, are not written as a thesis defense for that panel of self-appointed, self-righteous radicals who pretend among themselves they care. I simply do not give a damn about them.

No, Francis is not a bomb thrower, but he is causing quite the stir. He is doing the unexpected and the undesired, and this always impresses me. He said, "How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?"

I did not start as a blogger but as a fiction writer. Short stories read after lunch to Mrs Herbert's third grade class - stories I had written in the library during lunch rather than play on the play ground. So character interests me. Many writers do character better than others, like people, who hide their bad character worse than others. I suppose how you respond to character is like how you like your steak cooked.

Anyway, Agatha Christie's characters and Poirot's judgement of them started as my favorite. That was high school.

Then there's Shaw. George Bernard Shaw. Anyone who claims to know me well has heard me quote Shaw. He was a character in himself. When I encounter Prince Charles or Pope Francis I think of Shaw's king in The Apple Cart or the doctor in A Doctor's Dilemma. I think of Candida in the play of that name. I think of St. Joan: "Oh, Lord, when will the world be ready for thy saints?"

I think of the Black girl in his novelette A Black Girl in Search of Her God.

Shavian? I can best define this adjective with a description of the referred-to novelette: the Black girl isn't really in search of God as she is in exposing the lies and hypocrisies in all of them. My Tennessee grandmother might call a Shavian character "contrary" - meaning contentious, irreverent, curmudgeon.

That is Shavian; that is George Bernard Shaw.

Pope Francis is a character ripe for Shaw's hand. He's leaving no false idol unhinged from its base. He's doing the unexpected and not playing to that choir of do-gooders who pretend to care about the poor but want absolutely nothing done.

And he doesn't give a damn about detractors.

To give a little contrast, I've made no secret of my respect for Fidel Castro. But he's not a Shavian character. Maybe he's a Cervantesian Don Quixote. But not Shaw. Fidel did what was expected of him, even if it shocked the sensible people of the US, even if it shocked many Cubans. He meant to do what he said he was going to do, so maybe - just maybe - it's a cautionary tale of be careful what you wish for.

If there were a sequel to The Apple Cart, Charles Windsor would be the central character. In this play, Magnus threatens to abdicate his throne rather than being hog-tied by his prime minister by constitutional niceties, then run as a private citizen in an election against said prime minister. Magnus wants to do something meaningful with his life, not just be a symbol - or a cudgel - used by political parties. Prince Charles wants to do something, and I don't believe a minute in the retraction made recently that he compared becoming king to a prison sentence.

The pope's role in a Shaw play remains to be seen after some more careful simmering. He could be Ceasar in Shaw's Ceasar and Cleopatra, or the vast theme behind Back to Methuselah, where Shaw indicts modern society its pretensions and its technological prowess in the face of such poverty and brutality as was witnessed after World War I.

But Pope Francis is Shaw, that famous writer and social activist who refused the Nobel Prize, declined a knighthood from the king and declined twice induction into the king's Order of Merit, stating that merit was a thing bestowed by history, not kings. The no-nonsense Shaw who wrote in a tiny shack and had his ashes spread as fertilizer in his garden. That is Shaw: taking a little and giving as much back as possible.

"I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security," he wrote.


I will argue to the death those who say you can change institutions from within - institutions, especially government types, are insular and conservative and can if so empowered resort to violence to prove their purity. This not only explains governments of the present and past but also those self-appointed committees I am so bored with. But when I see someone on the inside, as it were, breaking up some of the foundation stones I cannot help but admire the handiwork.

The AIDS Ponzie Scheme Carnival Continues another Year

If HIV AIDS is not a ponzie scheme, aren't we justified in thinking it might be?

Right now, a killer fungus threatens to destroy our stock of [Cavendish] bananas, that most common brand of banana in our local stores. An earlier fungus outbreak spread in the 50's. Scientists are more confident than the farmers, reports indicate. Scientists assure us some-such-something will be developed to kill once again this fungal pandemic; they say we've learned a lot since the 50's.

Farming practices, to put it carefully and cautiously, have evolved. Yields have increased. Various pestilences have been mitigated. Now, the ways these things have been done should sometimes make you sick, and they do. The Monsantos of this world have engineered resistant seeds that can withstand all kinds of onslaught, but the effect on the body is besides the point to our business morality. But organic and commercial farmers have also learned new techniques to deal with encroachments onto their crops that have nothing to do with Monsanto.

Medical science has continued to make - again, to put it cautiously - strides. Antibiotics and vaccines have done much to mitigate the side effects of civilization. When curable diseases became least profitable, yuppie drugs, like for hair growth or restlessness or to supplement your ineffective anti-depressants, were developed.

The point is not to laud these achievements as such. Aside from the clear controversies in these so-called advances, science cannot be said to have stopped and stood still over the last 50 or 100 years.

And yet, in the so-called HIV-AIDS field, we have gone from potent poisons like AZT, which killed people in the 80's and 90's, maimed others by destroying their livers and other vital organs, to less potent poisons which have a slower corrosive effect on the body is purported to save. People are still dying, moneys are still being spent on a variety of activities - from the pharmaceuticals inventing another brand of Coca-Cola to the HIV bureaucracy of "counselors" and research "assistants."

But where has this budget produced an advancement except in pharmaceutical companies? Why hasn't anyone convened a congressional inquiry into the fraud of billions spent and very little to show for it? Why are World AIDS Day festivities and "Get Tested" promotionals become our obsession rather than good, old fashioned scientific discovery and cures?

Why 30 years of bullshit?

The disturbing writing on the wall is while HIV drugs are profitable for the drug companies, these drugs are also prohibitively expensive: without insurance not even a middle income person could afford them, let alone the growing numbers of working-class and poor: and I am referring to the working class and poor in the global North, the so-called First World.

As our middle income and mid professional jobs disappear in favor of low-wage service industry and underemployment, who will pay for these drug companies to continue to reap profits with these expensive medications? Will ObamaCare pay for HIV meds for an underpaid WalMart or fast-food worker?

Since we have no functioning civil society in our opulent countries, the nexus of this debate will happen not in a public square but on Wall Street, and, as always, they will construct the message and the morality which will not want to address this mystery virus at all, will blame its victims - the gays, Africans, you know - and no inquiry will be made into the heart of this so-called epidemic - viz, who caused it, why it fails so many established scientific theories, why the Reagan administration unilaterally chose one HIV theory over any others while the scientific community was busy with several hypotheses, etc.

It's Imperialism, stupid

I hear a lot of talk about the environmental movement, about green jobs, opposing fracking, recycling, sustainable energy, renewable energy, clean coal, peak oil.

Some Greenpeace activists may spend seven years in a Russian prison for opposing Russia's oil thirst.

Amy Goodman spent a whole week in Poland at a global environmental conference which seemed to end like all the others: in despair.

But the only ones despairing were the ones who went thinking "this time, this time ..." Structurally, I suspect these conferences are designed to fail, designed to wear away at our hopes and to feed a skepticism. And actually, Russia's iron hand is a sign of things to come - East and West - as more activism tries to surround this unquenchable thirst for oil, gas, and other resources.

It's passed time to change the conversation. The environmental movement needs to stop being the acceptable alternative to what is really plaguing the planet.

The other day, a Facebook ally posed this question: what do you think about the term "social justice"? It was an interesting question, because I can almost remember when this facile term came to be used too widely for its own good: I think in the mid 90's.

I don't like the term now and didn't like it then because it was used to put some distance between its aims and that of socialism. Good cop/Bad cop. Martin vs Malcolm.

The environmental movement needs to get the point. It's imperialism, stupid.

The heart of the issue is development. How is development to be accomplished, whom it will benefit, and who controls its direction.

Imperialism, which no one wants to talk about, did not want to develop the colonies at all, only rape and pillage them. Its aims are no different today. It cannot develop the global South while it continues to support a "global" system which needs to rob, steal, or take for cheap, those things which the global South possesses.

Imperialism is a rapacious, ravenous organism. If it has to foul the waters of some poor country, it will invent a morality to rationalize this pollution; it will also make the people of that poor country seem needy of civilization and at the same time the cause of the misery the West imposes on it.

Or, as Fidel Castro once put it, "They hang us by our necks then criticize us for not breathing."

If it has to foul the water of a poor region within its own territory - a slum, an Indian reservation, an "industrial" area, or a whole state, imperialism will not hesitate to do the exact same crime.

This is the heart of the matter of environmental degradation that continues to plague us right to the present.

Why are they still counting bodies after the hurricane in the Philippines? The environmentalists speak about global warming. The earth is warming. Human civilization may or may not have an effect. But global warming did not make the Philippines a poor country with a wide class stratification and no early warning or evacuation plan.

For about 400 years imperialism promoted itself upon the Philippines - the Spanish crown then the US plutocracy: they were going to raise them up, civilize them, develop them. Some of us have known for a long time this is a lie. The havoc of this hurricane is just another piece of evidence of this lie.

Four hundred years, and nothing to show from it.

The US is still an imperial power. The United Kingdom is still an imperial power. France is still an imperial power. The West is still dependent on extracting the wealth and treasure of the global South for it to be what it is, the monster that it is, cultivating the atrocities it does and making human values out of it.

It is fascinating to hear the current pope speak truths to the lies of these so-called human values.

Nature may or may not be under our influence. But how the wealth and resources are distributed is a task for anti-imperialists. It is a task for people who will call things by their proper names.

Chelsea Manning and the dungeon of our despair

Just moments after being sentenced to a 35-year prison sentence for leaking government crimes and malfeasance to Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pvt 1st Class Bradley Manning, announced she would commence to live her life as a woman.

Maybe it is the chip on my shoulder but I felt the air being sucked out of the room. The Right, of course, has never liked Manning, so their support is not expected. The Left has always shown its dysfunctions more publicly. Witness how the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Pride Committee withdrew considering Manning as Grand Marshall for the Parade earlier this year (but as I have said too many times of that reputed city, all that glistens has never been gold).

Now that Manning has just as publicly declared her gender and that she will begin taking hormones, I imagine much of the Left will simply drop her from their thoughts while she languishes in prison.

How many "I AM CHELSEA MANNING" placards will be see? Time will tell, but history is a guide. We've only just come to liking lesbians and gays, as long as they are devoid of militancy and long deeply to be hetero-normative ... Or is that the chip on my shoulder?

History, at any rate, is also a guide for this conundrum we find ourselves in regarding such topics as sex, gender, and race identities.

We in the Western world - and this includes the non-West where our tentacles have reached - live in a madhouse. I do not mean this metaphorically. Our madhouse is around color and gender identities, and we are crazed about it. This means that our perception of these things are immediately warped, always suspect, and potently volatile. We kill over the stupidest things.

To the strict Western duality, there is Black and there is White. There is Male and there is Female. There is also the Man and there is the Woman. Each must know his [and her] place. Just as there were once mulattoes and quadroons and octoroons, and they had to know their place too.

You are this, or you are that, but if you try some other course you may be lynched.

This duality is about power and maintaining it.

A Patriarchal arrangement with an Old Man God in the sky to whom we must submit as we submit to our husbands and to our kings, and even to our vanguard, must make these distinctions between human drones sharp and few.

As true to a system which affords us Coke or Pepsi, and fewer choices of how to rent and sell ourselves in wage-slavery, it would be stretching hope to think we'd be given broad options in the expression of our so-called identity.

Options would be a threat. Options, simply put, is a means to abolishing the West and its prisons and its morality and its labor system.

I have, for example, read that among many native American groups, the "Two-Spirit" existed while in West African societies, the "Gate-Keeper" thrived.

Modern gay/straight duality thought have placed these phenomena on the LGBTQ team, but this misses the point. The Two-Spirits and the Gate-Keepers weren't fringe subcultures brought out like pets. And it seems while these indigenous cultures had two sexes, they embraced many genders.

They existed as a norm before the West was Won: not as an alternative, not as a "gay lifestyle" but as one of many norms within complex civilizations which had a better relationship with the natural and supernatural world.

Those true civilizations knew what we have lost: we are ourselves expressions of this natural and supernatural world, and this fact confronts the Western claustrophobic one every day. This is why governments and monotheists have waged wars against any expression of difference.

If we had escaped what anthropologist Margaret Mead called, simply, "an accident of history" - that is, us, here and now, enslaved, brutalizing each other, exterminating the ecosystem, fouling the planet, and seeking to spread our plague to galaxies far, far away [and calling it Progress!] - we might still have our civilization and not live in a dungeon of barbarism, guilt, and man/woman duality.

Yes, we got history backwards. Our official texts tell us we are modern and civilized, advanced and developed while our ancestors were primitives. That is a lie. What we really have done is what the Hon George Galloway lectured the US Senate in a not dissimilar context: we have defied evolution and gone from a butterfly and become worms.

In our real civilization, the ones we aren't supposed to know about, people like Manning would not be imprisoned in the binary male-female world: is she a man, or is she a woman, and what do I call ... him? .

I say these things about our false gender choices at some risk of angering my more sympathetic friends and allies on the Left. Because I am skirting dangerously close to criticizing Manning's announcement. Maybe that old chip on my shoulder wonders how civilized cultures, like who embraced the Two-Spirit and the Gate-Keepers, among others, would have nurtured Manning in his youth and allowed that human being to grow and become, period. It was not a Coke and Pepsi world back then. It would have offered the child more ways of being, as normal and as natural as another. It would not have told him, in so many violent ways, "if you are not this you are that."

Are Unions Obsolete (or, If they are not, should they be)?

The relevance of trades-unions is not really a subject to be addressed to the Democratic and Republican Parties. Their hands are not clean. Both the political parties represent first and foremost the interests of the business class - Wall Street and international capital.

These elites have shown their intentions: the class war in the US against unions began in blood shed and continues right to this hour against workers who may work full-time work and be starving.

In fact, that we keep talking in terms of just these two parties, with all the problems we have and the problems building up in front of us on the horizon, would alert an elementary school child.

This toy is broken; and that toy is broken; so I want a new toy. Why are we wondering if Hilary is running in 2016?

But we have become too sophisticated to think with such elementary logic, so we keep turning to these two political parties and a very broken system while our workers and our communities, not by accident but by design, are made less and less viable.

But back to unions. I address this question of their obsolescence to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), International Workers Association (IWA-AIT), Solidarity Federation, Workers Solidarity Alliance, and their "types" and supporters. These unions maintain, at least rhetorically, a militancy and a vibrant pro-worker history. All of them, except the IWW openly embrace anarcho-syndicalism.

For this militancy these unions have - again right to this hour - faced repression and harassment. Note Spain's conservative government and its hounding of CNT organizers.

If you're not familiar with any of these unions you should be. They are not the business unions you are familiar with. Business unions, like the Teamsters, AFL-CIO, etc., cuddle up to the two pro-business political parties.

In an of themselves these business unions are a motivation to put unions in the dustbin of history and end this essay.

Because to whatever extent trades unions ally themselves with elites, with the nation-state, with kings and presidents and corporations, they should be obsolete. They have no use to workers: this is not dogma, but something borne out in fact. Wall Street rallies, workers gets screwed.

The AFL-CIO is not a trades-union of tradition. It and its kind are booster clubs for the Democratic Party, rallying the downtrodden to add legitimacy to corporate elections which make us more downtrodden.

But whether it is a militant trades-union or a business union, they share a similar problem.

The conundrum with trades-unions generally is they organize themselves around workplaces - factories or stores in most cases; or broadly by trades. Historic reasons exist for this.

But our workplaces and our trades are not today what they were in earlier times when trades-unions were organizing. An average worker may change careers - to use that word loosely - four or five times in his or her lifetime.

Added to this conundrum is that throughout modern history elites have so degraded what it means to work that it means nothing at all.

Work today is a task done for a paycheck. That task is rarely open to scrutiny by even militant trades-unions, who are interested in wages and health and safety issues. This is best seen in urban areas, where the chambers of commerce designate as work anything which supports the bottom line - viz, office support staff for the importation of produce from outside areas, other states, or foreign countries.

Not validated are the tasks which would make notoriously unproductive cities less unproductive, more self-sufficient and aligned with the natural world - like reclaiming land to grow food, water reclamation, and meaningful tasks the indigenous populations did for thousands of years without harming the landbase.

But opening up for question an urban metropolis challenges the validity if not viability of our cities. Can our trades-unions do this?

Meaningful work does exist, but it rarely gets done. Can a trades-union, actively organizing a workforce, at the same time open for question the very work that is being done?

Our trades-unions, even our militant ones, seem stuck in an old paradigm where: a worker in a factory is automatically deemed a social benefit; and it is assumed that this worker is employed with some longevity so he or she would have a sustained interest in making improvements.

Both presumptions are false.

Can a movement centered on debauched tasks and unsteady employment, where we move from job to job and care less and less what we do but will it make ends meet, ever be an effective movement?

Or do we need now a broader, social movement, a militant, avowedly anarchist [-syndicalist, -primitivist, -communist, etc] organizing, above and below ground,  of whole communities and across communities?

This is where our work needs to be focused.

Is kidnapper Ariel Castro really the worst kind of human being?

The question is worth asking. Ariel Castro has been given a life sentence and an additional 1,000 years. If a 1,000-year sentence does not convey overwhelming disgust I do not know what else would.

In an older day, not too long ago in fact, Castro would not only have been executed without a trial but also tarred, feathered, and castrated in the public square. In other words, a lynch mob would have desecrated his body as they hoped to send his soul to Hell.

What was Castro's crime? He kidnapped three innocent girls and kept them for 11 years, torturing and raping them.

Castro said on his behalf that he is not the violent man he has been portrayed, that he did not torture anyone, that the rapes were not rapes at all but consensual.

This testimony is widely mocked.

You don't seem to need a psychiatric credential to say this man is delusional, to ridicule his supposed defense of what he did. Psychiatrists have weighed in, but so have almost every media commentator and news reporter. His crimes and the sentencing have made the front pages.

And yet, what the US government has done for eleven years to these boys - who have become men - at Guantanamo should to a civilized people be indistinguishable from what Castro did for eleven years to three girls.

But where are our mainstream commentators tripping over each other to express shock, demand justice, and use their front pages for the injustice of Guantanamo prison?

The United States government maintains the Guantanamo gulag on occupied territory on the south end of Cuba. This fact is virtually never reported. The Cuban government has demanded for almost 60 years the US leave its island. The US ignores the Cuban government.

The US government ignores a few other things: the Geneva Convention, Nuremberg Principles, habeas corpus, and access to attorneys are all sidelined as the mob of an older day clearly wants to desecrate the bodies of these men.

Guantanamo Naval Base has been used for various nefarious purposes since the US imposed its presence there at gunpoint. Most recently after the 9/11 attacks, the base became one of several judicial no-man's lands for young, battle-aged Muslim men from the expanding war zones in the Middle East and Asia: to be water-boarded and various other methods of interrogation, all for the good of the "cause."

As we suspected then and know now, not all the boys and men the US troops kidnapped were waging any war. They were said to be on the battle field, which when fighting something called "terrorism" can be anywhere you say it is.

Among the over 700 men the US Dept of Defense maintains or has maintained at Guantanamo, none to my knowledge have made the front pages or elicited the robust indignation of our American commentators. Attempts at bringing their cases to court are rebuffed.

The US, like Ariel Castro, offers a bizarre defense: We are not torturing. Or, what we do is not technically torture. Or, one of our bureaucrats has certified what we are doing is OK. Or, its the fault of the detainees being in the wrong place.

But no one among our elites mocks the United States government for its delusions.

As far as I know Ariel Castro was not in charge of what went on in Guantanamo. There is no link, and I do not mean to suggest any.

But I am waiting for the conspiracy theories that he was a CIA assassin trained at Abu Graib. Such theories came out after 9/11 about the conspirators, followed the underwear bomber, and were hinted about the Boston Marathon perpetrators.

What these conspiracy theories reveal - in themselves, true or not, and I am in no position to know since my government keeps its cards close at hand, telling me nothing and suspecting me of everything - is an actual, clear moral force, a lack of any hypocrisy.

This is unique characteristic if you only follow the mainstream media and digest the lies of the elites, who forgive us our trespasses but mightily and overwhelmingly condemn trespassers.

In such conspiracy theories is a consistence. It acknowledges an evil, a crime against humanity, and it links these crimes, one to another, and singles out a probable culprit.

Isn't this what police detectives do, after all? Patterns.

Many scoff at these strange conspiracy theories, but the fact of them says just as much about some of us, which I do find encouraging, as the overwhelming hypocrisy among our intelligentsia says about them. We don't means test our victims. A crime is a crime. We are trying to connect dots. Their only standard is the king can do no wrong: this opens the door to no standard at all, and the worst kind of human being.

A Brief Word on Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning is on my mind. At 25 years old, he may seem a remarkable hero to some, and a traitor to others.

He is neither to me. But this is because I had the good fortune at 25 or so - almost 25 years ago, in fact - to be surrounded by aspiring men and women just like him. Queer and anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist activists, drag queens, radical faeries who put so much on the line.

They taught me so much, and they are why to this day I am a bit embarrassed claiming the Queer or communist or anarchist label. They made something of those words, and I still feel I am striving to live up to their good example.

They broke windows. They stopped rush-hour traffic in downtown San Francisco. They infiltrated temp agencies and sabotaged machines. They surrounded bigoted Christians who came to San Francisco to pray the queers away and shouted "Bring back the Lions." They organized. They studied up and went to meetings and made demands. They always made demands. It was too late in the day to beg.

They are my peers. They are a high standard.

Civilized people who want to remain civilized have no other choice than to speak truth to power, speak truth about power, and dismantle the structures of power altogether. This is natural to me.

Instead of asking why Manning turned all those files over to Wikileaks to expose and stop US and British war crimes, I asked why no other soldier did so. I asked, how could a human being sit back and watch that, cheer it on, or look the other way.

What kinds of monsters raised those military officers, and who were their peers and role models, these silent, complicit, SS-type soldiers?

When I meet mid 20's people - especially if they are gay or lesbian and/or of color, but even if they are white and straight, what astounds me is not the Bradley Mannings among them. I expect that. What baffles me is the wealth of mediocres, the Step-N-Fetch-Its, the Tap Dancers, the "Are We Sick, Master" men among them. I work with some. They will turn your ass in to the Overseer in a heartbeat.

I look at them as an anthropologist or explorer might and wonder: where the Hell did you come from?

I read that Manning, for exposing US war crimes, has been found guilty of 19 indictments. A society that kills the messenger will have more messengers. They - we? - will not disappear. Trust. A society that acquits white supremacy and Nuremberg Principles and pardons the SS officer but hunts down, tortures, imprisons the Resistance will only get a more angry, militant, vocal Resistance.

Many of us, enough of us, were not raised and reared by beasts to be monsters, and we have peers we think too highly of to sink so low into the gutter of this nation-state.

The Development Myth

What is occurring right now in Hawaii is not development. The elite call it development, like they promise to bring infrastructure and jobs to impoverished areas and lift people living below a poverty line.

What is happening right now in Hawaii is happening right in front of our eyes. What is happening in Hawaii is not history in a book. It is now.

What is happening is not reading about what happened when the United States took half of Mexico's territory and pirate settlers, like the Irvine Family, moved in to steal Mexican-owned ranches for their own. The Irvines still own the city of Irvine, a wealthy part of Orange County. I read Irvine is called a "planned" city: this too is not development. "Planned" is the inelegant prose of elites who don't want you to know what they are doing, in this case opening a kasbah of speculators, bankers, and venture capitalists.

What is happening in Hawaii is the building of resorts and the creation of golf courses, and they call it development. But this is not development.

Elites have always presented their projects as a gift from above to the poor and disenfranchised.

If you don't believe me watch how your next sports stadium is forced down your throats by the people you thought were elected to serve you and your communities. The joke is on you.

I remember when Willie Brown, mayor of liberal San Francisco, went all folksy and down-home for the Blacks of impoverished Bayview/Hunter's Point. Bayview is to San Francisco what Watts is to LA or Harlem was to NYC before they started running Blacks out or East St. Louis is to ... whoever claims it. Brown had to sell the stadium for his Masters, the bankers: that was the mandate. So he had to convince the people of San Francisco in general, and the Blacks of Bayview in particular that this stadium was their salvation. Jobs. On TV, radio, and bullhorn he sounded like a Texas sharecropper pretending to speak the language of these people.

Developers are never lacking in house slaves to tap dance to whatever tune is played for them.

First an area or region is abandoned [are you listening Detroit?]. The area becomes desolate, the communities poor and subsisting on government handouts. There: they have you where they want you.

Incidentally, you got that way by so-called development.

Back in the day, after the Civil War, developers wanted to build up an industrial age and built their factories of death in cities and forced us off the countryside and into a wage slave system.

That was their development, and our Hell. On farms we did not romanticize poverty; it existed. No one measured it, there was no poverty index or unemployment rate because while you may not have had any money you had food, and you had a roof over your head. You weren't so gullible as you seem to be now because you could for the most part take care of yourself. I mean: you could really take care of yourself.

Their development cured you of your development.

In the cities, you were not only dependent on wages to pay rent but you were also dependent on wages to buy food. So there. And within a few generations, you probably forgot how to grow food. And, by "grow food" I do not mean that charming little herb garden at your kitchen window.

What has been developed? They have gotten richer, and you have gotten dumber, hungrier, and more gullible.

So when the source of your wages begins to disappear - the factory downsizes or closes altogether to find new wage slaves in the global South -  it affects you and your community. It breeds hunger but it also breeds fear. I wish in my heart it bred anger: would the National Rifle Association say then: "If they had guns they would not have lost their jobs"?

What is happening in Hawaii is impoverished native Hawaiians and Hawaiians who were imported here generations ago for cheap labor have become impoverished enough to sell what land they might have, be guided by a menace called the Hawaii Tourism Authority, which seems to be sort of the last viceroy of India who doesn't want to relinquish the old system, a Pacific Camelot, for tourists to come and pretend they are the British Raj.

This is a ripe moment for developers to move in, buy up virtually whole islands, like Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, was allowed to do, buying "98%" of the island of Lanai. He bought it from Castle & Cooke, white land settlers who never should have had the island. Castle & Cooke describe their beginnings in 1851 as "humble" - but not nearly as humble as the people they stole from in their zealous "entrepreneurial spirit and vision." I love how white settlers deify their beginnings.

If I knowingly buy a stolen piece of property from a thief we both go to jail.

The speculators and bankers build resorts for rich tourists, sell tracts of gated communities for rich Americans, like Oprah Winfrey and Men's Wearhouse founder and former CEO, George Zimmer, to buy vacation homes, and poison the land with more golf courses.

There seems to be no limit to these bloody golf courses.

Golf courses require an immense amount of resources to maintain, and they produce nothing beneficial. What they do produce is never, ever in the brochures: poison. The immense amounts of fertilizers poison the ground, and, here in Hawaii, that poisons run off into the ocean and kills the once-beautiful, once-vibrant corral reefs, drives away fish populations, and sullies the water.

What is this developing?

If the developers have an answer to this collateral damage it is to create a Nature Reserve where a section of reef is said to be preserved for tourists to pay and come and look at, like they pay to look at animals stolen from their homelands in zoos, like they pay to watch friendly Hawaiians hula in front of the hotels.

By the way, the tourist magazines here are not funny, usually on the cover depicting a young Hawaiian Cosmo-Girl woman in "native" dress. Can you imagine if the tourist brochures for Alabama portrayed a Black man happily picking cotton?

Come to Dixie and spend a weekend on our restored plantation being waited on by our darkies.

The communities who were sold infrastructure and jobs by the development mafia do get both,  but read the fine print.

The infrastructure is actually designed for the developers to move their clients and their merchandise more easily to and fro, like paved roads and highway improvements.

And developers never tell you the truths about paved roads and highways, just like they never tell you truths about golf courses. This is because developers are serial killers. They kill ecosystems.

Nature does not like a paved road. If you don't believe Nature has feelings, find a road that has been neglected, or a highway, or a sidewalk. Nature desires to consume and overtake it and reestablish an equilibrium.

It takes a lot of constant work and resources devoted to building and maintaining a paved road and fight Nature.

Nature's persistence is probably the only thing that gives me any ounce of optimism: when this Death March of this Death Culture is stopped, Nature will seek to reestablish its equilibrium. Nature is antithetical to the development mafia.

What is happening in Hawaii is when these developers have gotten their land, built their resorts and their golf courses, the communities are actually poorer.

This is happening everywhere.

We know why this is so: the jobs that are offered are low-wage, low-skilled jobs. You can always find a sucker Uncle Tom with his shoes shined for his Master prattling about his luck to have a job, but he won't prattle about how easy it is to meet ends. He won't prattle about how is rent is cheap because developers will inflate property values.

These house boys are housebroken, but they are not hopeless. I just can't devote much time to he who drinks the Kool-Aide and asks for more!

So in sum: developers do not develop anything: they destroy the land base, they destroy people, they destroy communities. Like their industrialists forebears who only polluted the land, air, and water - for the stock exchange - the developers today are homicidal.

What is happening here in Hawaii is in the sunlight of these resource-sucking resorts, where tourists play golf on poison-infused courses, native Hawaiians are fishing for their food on the one hand, while other native Hawaiians, Filipinos, and some poor whites who came here with a dream sold them by the Hawaii Tourism Authority, are serving food to tourists with the other.

Development of this sort is mass murder.

The United States which stole Hawaii was never a nation of laws. I know some social critics like to suggest the white lie that it was a nation of laws to contrast to how bad things are now, but this only shows their myopia to how things have always been.

If the US were a nation of law, Hawaii would today be a sovereign state. It would have developed. Its people - in my opinion - would have by now thrown out its monarchy and implemented a truly bottom-up, democratic, vibrant civil society: this is how all societies and work places should be run, but since this is the wrong lesson, it cannot happen anywhere.

It could not happen in Cuba, which celebrates the 60th year of the start of its revolution this week, which aimed to create such a bottoms-up, vibrant, democratic society. The US launched such a vicious war on the revolution immediately, that the Cubans had to hunker down in defense mode, so this lesson has been lost to everyone.

If we had a bottom-up, democratic, vibrant civil society we'd treat this development mafia as the sociopaths they are: with swift justice. We'd see them for what they are. We'd see a lot of things for what they are, like patriarchy, management, and newborn white babies predestined to be kings, head an entire military, be the head of a whole church, and have at his disposal vast tracts of land and real estate and the rent which comes from them when four out of ten of his peers are born into poverty. That is development.

What is happening right now in Hawaii is not development, it is anti-development. It has happened for a long time wherever the West has Won, and why the Western system, its nation-states, its state economies, are Death Cultures.

Whose Independence Day?

The mid- to late 17th century was tumultuous in Europe generally and Great Britain specifically. Central to this period in Britain was the execution of King Charles I. This brought an end to the monarchy, the establishment of a republic, but regicide only scratches the surface of the insurgency among working class people at the time. The laboring classes grew to despise being ruled by kings or by parliaments, and this insurgency grew to such an intensity that by the death of Cromwell, the elites grew so fearful of losing their control to these organizing militants they quickly restored the monarchy. Why the monarchy? Monarchy is the one institution immune from popular control. It's important to remember this about monarchies, and to remember when the West was drawing lines in the sand in the so-called Middle East [Western Asian and Africa more accurately], it established not parliamentary democracies or congressional republics but rather monarchies and sheikdoms for this very reason: an institution immune from public control.

At any rate, the insurgency of these 17th century working class people - like any activism of the poor and disenfranchised - has been diminished by official record for obvious reasons. Elites who write the history do not want modern working class people to become working class agitators.

In fact, the dots between these 17th century movements and the so-called Enlightenment are rarely connected in the official record:

I believe it they are not only connected, but the Enlightenment, which we all know something about, was born by these working class insurgencies, which we despise.

John Milton produced an anonymous pamphlet at this time, "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates." Milton argued that the people had a right to do away with a bad king [tyrant], that the high court offices existed only at the public's consent as long as the public allowed them to exist.

What does this have to do with July 4th and the Declaration of Independence?

Prior to the white settler uprising in the 13 British colonies, Great Britain had gone to war with France over trade access. The trade in merchandise and humans was bringing great wealth to these European countries, and any infringement on this trade offended "national interests."

By the conclusion of this Seven Years' War, the white settlers in the 13 colonies had grown rich. Naturally, they had grown rich. This was the whole point of the war, as far as Britain was concerned - to enrich itself and its class.

King George III, cash poor from a long war, turns to the white settler profiteers to replenish his coffers. The king's treasury bore the cost of the war.

Tax shelters and Cayman Island accounts did not exist in the 18th century, so that was not an option for these enriched white settlers. They did not want to pay, said they were offended by having these taxes imposed on them [they were not offended when British troops were opening up trade routes for them].

So they stole a page from the evolving insurgency of those 17th century radicals, who wanted to be rid of unjust government, corrupt princes, and tyrants.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: a lot of gloss and smoke and bad magic have been used to hide the obvious contradictions between what these white settlers wrote in that declaration from Great Britain and what they actually created. All men did not include the natives, nor the Africans, neither women, nor the indentured and poor. What these white settlers did, laws they passed, court decisions they adjudicated are self-evident: these were the forbears of a venal NAZI-like mentality.

Many establishment academics and apologists like to say the founding documents are "organic," like beings that grow naturally into maturity. Whatever growth this nation-state has seen has been because of people here who emulated those 17th century working class insurgents, not because of some white-settler slave owners' Master Plan, not because of some secret DaVinci code embedded in what those white settlers put in their document. They actually wrote quite enough to know what was on their minds, and I am not being outrageous when I call them NAZIS.

So the reason for the contradiction between the declaration from King George III and what they spawned is they never believed as those working-class insurgents had believed in these Enlightened principles. They co-opted a popular idea and cast themselves - these rich, white landowners - as the downtrodden of the earth. Then they got together, propertied war profiteer tradesmen, and declared a break from Great Britain.

So whose independence am I being asked to celebrate on the 4th of July?

View from the Conquered Islands

It's odd to juxtapose Obama's imperial saunter through Africa, prattling about trade and development, standing bleary eyed at the Point of No Return, Wall Street investors in tow, while I still adjust to my life here in colonial Hawaii, a group of conquered islands. I imagine it must have been just like this over one hundred years ago, some agent-provocateur, like Obama, cloaked as do-gooder hid his forked tongue and bad character to coax just enough out of the indigenous Hawaiians to be able to snare them completely.

I feel guilty for being a living witness to conquest, not only seeing Obama in Africa, which because of the distance feels less intimate, but more with these islands in the here and now, which is as in my face as the selling of the hula for tourist consumption.

Development by the Yankee terrorists seems universally to bring a new kind of hell to the indigenous and poor peoples, from Kailua Kona to Sao Paulo to South Los Angeles to Cape Town. Wherever the Yankee foot steps, RoundUp follows in spray, decimating any real signs of life.

The Yankee promises development as a means to improve life and lifestyles of the locals and yet the locals end up suffering less access to land, hungering with limited access to food, homeless with precarious access to housing, stifled by lower wages, dispatched with a lower life expectancy, industrial diseases, family disintegration, and oh, yes: Christian tomfoolery nonsense bullshit. We cannot forget the Christian missionaries! Too bad there weren't any lions on the islands to feed these mischievous people to.

Part of this development Ponzi scheme is, of course, the paradise commodity that brings so many tourists, seekers of new fortunes, and idealists like me to the islands. This paradise commodification is a direct outgrowth of the Hawaii marketed by the developers.

How different are those who transplant themselves here from the mainland from the born-and-bred Brooklyn Jew who transplants himself to what the Israeli government markets as his "homeland"? We come filled with dreams manufactured, images of friendly docile natives eager to perform for us, and we take a little or a lot of what should belong to the native Hawaiian.

The development racket is also a cover for white supremacy: many "haoles" would say if it weren't for the Yankee takeover, development would not have come - as if the world's indigenous people were waiting at the Point of No Return to be civilized, waiting for the Wall Street pirates Obama works for, because we all know the way indigenous people had been living was not civilized.

I call Hawaii conquered islands because I take the conquest one step further than many sovereignty activists, who lament the overthrow of Hawaii's monarchy, of Liliuokalani,  by the same type of Bernie Madoff characters that wrote the Declaration of Independence and who care so much about development they will make the locals into fertilizer to green the grass of their tourist resorts, like Queen Victoria did to the Irish.

Hawaii had been a chain of autonomous islands, each run by local chiefs, until King Kamehameha got nation-state-itis in his brain and waged wars to conquer and unify the sprawling archipelago.

Nation-states are Western European inventions, which means prima facie, they are creations that are unsustainable. Remember, Europe had to look outward for its own development. The Industrial Revolution could not have happened without slavery and theft of the global South. Wherever the West has imposed itself, the nation-state is the model that follows - viz., the so-called "Middle East."

The nation-state does not, by definition, live in harmony with its environment: it lives on the harmony of others.

Some Hawaiian nationalists may be offended by my lack of honor for their "king." But kings and queens are just more perverse ways to keep power from people and from communities than our current, more elaborate failed state models are. John Jay wrote, "the people who own the country ought to govern the country," and this is what the US system is. The British restored its monarchy after Cromwell because popular forces agitated to be governed by themselves, not king or Parliament, and this worried the elite classes enough to bring back the one institution immune from popular influence.

Hawaiians who confuse their own Restoration with sovereignty and popular control, democratic control, from the community to the work place to the environment, must still believe that gifts come from above. This is a kind of superstition taught by the best and worst schools to ensure compliance by the best and worst.

Like the royals, the nation-state is an inbred, insular system: those sober voices who like to say "change takes time" or to quote liberal apologists like the idiot who said, "don't get involved in social issues unless you have 30 years" are bowing to the failed state. No elite want power to the people: the people are the enemy. No elite want work-place councils who own and self-manage because these councils make decisions anathema to Wall Street. So if "knowing your place" or "for Queen and Country" don't work, riot control and the militarization of our police forces - indistinguishable from our military - will do just fine.

Sovereignty will not more come with the restoration of a monarchy here in Hawaii than it will at the hands of Wall Street, brought to you by Obama, to Africa.

The New Face of Labor at the TSA

Mention the Transportation Security Administration [TSA], and most people think of heavy-handed security, mistreatment of passengers, and violations of civil rights. What George Bush began in the wake of the 9/11 attacks as an attempt to codify airport security across the country and bring peace of mind has become a sort of monstrosity of controversial body scanners and TSA officers in the news stealing property and molesting elderly passengers.

But aside from the carefully crafted pronouncements from TSA bureaucracy, few in the public know the inner workings of the TSA, what Bush established, and what Obama has continued. So the public's justified scrutiny and sometimes justified ire is heaped pile upon pile onto the shoulders of TSA underlings - the officers we all encounter at the various airports.

In fact, the recent release of an updated "prohibited items" list to allow some pocket knives, baseball bats, and golf clubs reveal more about the inner working of this insular, remote agency, which seems to have no connection with the real world of airline staff, passengers, and including its own agency officers.

Worse, the TSA doesn't seem to want any connection with the real world or the public.

George W Bush created the Transportation Security Administration  with the Aviation & Transportation Security Act of 2001. A year later, the Dept of Homeland Security [DHS] was created with the Homeland Security Act of 2002. These statutes are important to understand for their controversial nature: and, like other Bush policies on the so-called war on Terror, Obama has continued them in letter and spirit, and then exceeded his predecessor.

Unlike the rest of the federal government, TSA officers were kept off the General Schedule [GS] pay scale and initially excluded from collective bargaining rights. This is a classic, new world order, global South model whereby management is empowered to do what it wants, even excusing itself from DUI's, failed drugs tests, sexual harassment charges, while the laboring class - the workers - are routinely written up, disciplined, and fired with little recourse.

Obama came in to office with an inclusive, populist rhetoric, which gullible people who believe change comes from above ate up like pigs at the trough. Unlike his Republican predecessors, Obama's language did not employ the usual divisiveness of color against color nor did he seek to demonize the poor. But his actual willingness to cut into social programs belies his rhetoric.

This same dichotomy extends to the TSA officers, who fair no better. Like the neoliberal he is, Obama continues the Reagan/Thatcher revolution to undermine workers, drive labor costs to the least common denominator, and empower management and global capital to maximize quarterly stock reports at whatever expense.

This is neoliberalism, and it has its own logic once you follow its course. So rhetoric aside, it demands workers rights [and wages] be curtailed and undermined, and this has obvious implications to democratic principles.

Obviously it goes without saying following the neoliberal doctrine that a public agency, like the TSA, must be immune from public scrutiny and popular control.


Barrage of Tests

After years of clamoring for fair assessments, collective bargaining rights, and to be put on the GS pay scale, TSA officers did win some concessions from Obama’s appointee, TSA Administrator John Pistole.

The concessions came with restrictions. Officers won collective bargaining rights but not the ability to negotiate how TSA officers are assessed—this is considered a security issue and therefore falls under “management rights.” Nor can they bargain wages—these are set by Congress, and pay starts low, at around $12 an hour. As in other federal agencies, TSA is an open shop, meaning officers choose to join or not join.

According to the Aviation & Transportation Security Act, TSA officers must be “assessed” yearly. TSA upper bureaucrats have decided this means a constant barrage of testing. Currently TSA officers are subjected to three separate tests to ensure competence. It takes nearly a whole year to assess each officer.

The consequence for failing any one of these tests is termination. Two of the three have been highly criticized by TSA officers: a practical skills examination (PSE) and a quiz called the Screening Operations Procedures Assessment (SOPA). The third test is an X-ray imaging test called the Image Mastery Assessment.
The PSE is a hands-on demonstration of various procedures officers do at airport checkpoints, like pat-downs and bag checks. Officers are in a room with two management-appointed testers and must demonstrate proficiency and commit no so-called “critical errors.” A critical error results in a failure.

The controversy among TSA officers is that if an officer claims to have done a complete procedure but the management-assigned tester says he did not, the tester’s word is taken. Calls to have the examination videotaped to allow an “instant replay” have been road-blocked.

The SOPA is a 30-or-more-question, multiple-choice quiz. It is controversial among TSA officers because many questions are ambiguous, making it tricky to identify the best answer, and because some questions don’t seem relevant to security in the first place.

The X-ray imaging test is less controversial. At many airports, officers are allowed to practice on TSA software to prepare. (While there is equivalent preparation for the PSE, none exists for the SOPA.) However, the preparation software is to the actual X-ray test as a Dr. Seuss book is to a John Steinbeck novel. And the difficulty of the tests seems only to increase.

Again, failure to identify a percentage of images correctly is a failure. This seems like a reasonable consequence for TSA officers hired to screen passengers and baggage, but I am reminded of my college biology course.

The professor made it clear from day one that this biology course was for liberal arts and fine arts students, not for aspiring doctors. It was to meet a university requirement and to give us a good foundation in science. If this same professor had given us as a final exam his tests from his pre-med course, we would have largely failed.

Does the TSA want liberal arts students or pre-meds? The hiring, training, and tests need to conform to clear standards and desired outcomes.

TSA might argue only a fraction of its officers at each airport may be terminated due to failing any one of these tests; the pall it sets over the whole workplace is thick and full of anxiety.

In 2012, Congressional Republicans demanded a 40%-50% cut in the TSA workforce. While TSA Administrator Pistole has rejected this as excessive, he has not defended the hiring of the agency so far and has himself announced layoffs of 6,000, or about 12%.

But this 12% cut is misleading. Pistole is targeting 6,000 officers to be removed through the front door, but how many will be removed under the guise of their stringent, less-than-transparent testing protocols?

Obama may very well be targeting 40% for removal as he makes concession after concession to the neoliberal model. But even half of that would be a scandal if this liberal doyen endorsed such a number openly, so better to use the front and back doors and continue to fool his gullible supporters.


Business Unions to the Rescue of Management

The union is of little help.

Even in a better world with a better union, any union would be hard pressed to effectively represent its rank-in-file under such conditions as Bush and Obama set. But we aren't living in a better world: we live in the world of business unions. By a vote of TSA officers between two competing unions, the American Federation of Government Employees/[AFGE] AFL-CIO, won.

Business unions, a logical outgrowth of the war against militant trades-unionism, where the militants were weeded out, exterminated, and deported.

Business unions are at best junior partners to neoliberal goals. They are not about worker control, worker self management, and creating a more just economic system with workers and communities at the center of power. That is socialism.

Generally, the agenda of business unions, like AFGE, is reduced to issuing White Papers and supporting Business Political Candidates at election time. Where possible in the private sector, their sole mission is increasing wages and profit sharing [i.e., taking a cut of those quarterly profits] not increasing worker power or organizing social justice.

AFGE crossed the victory line and announced to TSA officers it had won ... an increase in their clothing allowance (an increase which recent austerity cuts may repeal, like the 0.5% raise). There were understandably no rousing cheers from the ungrateful rabble who had other things on their minds.

Given the nothing that AFGE has done for TSA officers, it follows the rank-in-file are proportionally disgusted with unions in general, and AFGE in particular. That's not only due to the tepid agenda of business unions but also the success of elite propaganda, which disparages unionism as a special interest and seeks to undermine its effectiveness. TSA officers have been reluctant to join, pay dues, to a business union that seems incapable of doing anything.

Wide Hiring Net

Who are these TSA officers?

With the possible exception of the TSA Federal Security Directors assigned to each airport, TSA has not made a point of hiring security officials. The net it casts in hiring is pretty broad. Kids right out of high school. Young veterans right out of their term of service in the military. Some people near retirement, some at retirement, some former second- and third-career professionals who were downsized in one of our frequent recessions.

Since the pay is kept low by excluding TSA from the GS pay scale and new officers often start out as part time employees, TSA seems to have no desire for security professionals. Arguably the rank-and-file are the WalMart associates of the federal system, and treated as such.

Which begs scrutiny of these extreme testing protocols. Arguably, if the TSA were really that concerned with these competencies wouldn't they recruit former law enforcement officers and military police and pay them commensurate to their skills rather than higher a young high school graduate then submit them to a battery of tests?

The flying public knows little if any of these facts. They aren't meant to. The TSA and our pubioc agencies are looking more and more like the private tyrannies that exist as most corporations - insulated, heavily managed from the top down, and impenetrable by the public generally or its laboring classes. The TSA bureaucrats are only interested in spin and issuing directives that seem to have no connection with reality. Their allies in the neoliberal news media seek to undermine anything that smells of public services, like school teachers and postal workers, and lauding Wall Street's escalation of the class war. Our unions, like AFGE, is mute in practice. So the public should not be surprised if some day they come to the airport and find TSA officers in orange aprons greeting them with a management-enforced smile.

[A shorter version of this appeared in the magazine LABOR NOTES.]

Christopher Jordan Dorner

Christopher Dorner did choose to go into the Navy, but this doesn't mean he has a military-industrialist complex. He chose to join the LAPD, but this doesn't mean he sought to serve the elites in keeping the rabble in line.

We don't know what experiences INFORMED his choices, and before you quickly apply the standard of White Male Affluence on a working-class BLACK man, take a breath and count to 100.

When I worked with the San Francisco Unified School District, about 10 of my kids signed up to go into the military. I did not want them to go. I kept the military out of my office. I tried to dissuade them. All were students of color, poor, and signed up without exception to get money for college. Do not infer from this that I am a "Support the Troops" cheerleader anymore than I am thankful that Walmart workers have jobs. In our failed state our ground is littered with institutions that only seek to grind us up for profit. These institutions wage war on us everyday, and its passed time that we bash back.

Until 7 years ago I went from harmless, politically correct jobs like publishing, the YMCA of San Francisco, and a longer tour of duty as a public school teacher and into a job with the federal government. The economy has narrowed things for everybody and their brothers and sisters, but worse for a Black man. Black men KNOW this, and many acknowledge this openly [this is called "anger" by some Whites, who like to rebut how far we have come ...]. White men, even some White men on the Left, don't quite get it.

So when people suggest certain motives to Dorner for joining the LAPD, or suggest he's only pissed because he got fired they are showing a pathological ignorance to what is going on in this country, among people - James Baldwin often reminded us - "are your brothers."

The publishing company is gone. The YMCA downsized. The schools are STILL laying off. That is why I got a low-paid post with the federal government. No one else would or has to this hour hired me.

I moved to Los Angeles almost 10 years ago in search of new opportunities, and I walked into Johannesburg. No temp agencies would take me, save one, which gave me a two-day job with 10 released convicts [all of color] setting up tents for the Beverly Hills Art Show.

From the start, the YMCA here called me in for interviews based on my resume and experience, and I never heard from them again [Westchester, Hollywood, Long Beach, and Mission Viejo Branches]. Not even a "No, thank you."

All my friends continue to be surprised at my "choice" of jobs, given my strange politics, given the mirage a high-education degree displays even for the most WASPish. I agree with nothing about Clarence Thomas' positions, but I FULLY UNDERSTAND why he disparages his Yale Law School Diploma:

"I peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I’d made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value," wrote Thomas after no law firms would hire him.

I UNDERSTAND.

Just like I understand Dorner when he writes:

"I’m not an aspiring rapper, I’m not a gang member, I’m not a dope dealer, I don’t have multiple babies momma’s. I am an American by choice, I am a son, I am a brother, I am a military service member, I am a man who has lost complete faith in the system, when the system betrayed, slandered, and libeled me. I lived a good life and though not a religious man I always stuck to my own personal code of ethics, ethos and always stuck to my shoreline and true North. I didn’t need the US Navy to instill Honor, Courage, and Commitment in me but I thank them for re-enforcing it. It’s in my DNA."

What did Shakespeare's Othello say? "I have done the state some service, and they know ’t."

A Black man, like Dorner, coming out of a stint in the Navy may have gone into the Navy for any number of reasons, but I KNOW what he faced in the job market. LAPD might have been the only call he got, the only conceivable skill set he had.

I say this maybe somewhat prematurely, because I BELIEVE his testimony. He is not a Go Along to Get Along StepNFetchIt, which is probably why he is not still in the Navy, and why he got into trouble BEFORE he was even PURGED from the LAPD.

So before people question the authenticity of Dorner's Manifesto, take a breath and count 100 Black men.