Arlen Specter's switch from Old Slave Merchant to New Slave Merchant

Sen. Arlen Specter's big switch from Republican to Democrat is only news to those inside the spiritually bankrupt beltway of two-party politics. It is within this barren space that our alleged two parties fight for the center-right by not addressing structural problems of poverty and human rights. The very fact Specter, who used to be a Democrat, can jump from one ship to another so easily speaks to the common ground of our one party system, its ideological seamlessness. The US is ruled by one political party, the Property Party, and it has two branches. James Baldwin, with his usual articulate phrasing, said the official religion of the United States is Commerce.

To help you visualize the fact of the single party, look at the left and right origins from the French Revolution. Left and Right came into political speech literally from where different factions of the merchant class, the bourgeoisie, sat themselves to caucus for the future of the French state.

Alas, they were merchants all, whose liberty, equality, and fraternity did not at all extend to the slaves they were buying and selling or those kept captive in the richest colony in the Americas: France's San Domingue, which became Haiti after its own revolution. These French merchants may have sat themselves in different places within the Assembly, but they were united in that they had been kept out of political power by the Old Regime of Sun King, Nobles, and the Church, a wicked trinity more alive today than dead.

Alas, the Republicans and Democrats are a merchant party as well, fundamentally believing in and willing to fight wars against workers, the poor, women within and beyond the US border. And if you believe they've reformed their tolerance of human slavery, look at some of the regimes they support.

Specter's switch from Democrat to Republican and back again is unremarkable because he moves from one faction that condones terrorism to another faction that condones terrorism. Putting profits for a few over the well being of humanity is the perfect foundation from which to allow terrorism. Remember, Ronald Reagan was a Franklin Roosevelt Democrat and a Union boss before he left the party to become a Republican.

For Specter to join the Greens, the Socialist Party USA, Party for Socialism & Liberation, Revolutionary Communist Party would be a earth-shaking as the deathbed conversion of a Roman emperor to Christianity, another merchant party if ever there was one, to distinguish it by all means by the revolutionary teaching of that quasi-rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. These political parties to varying degrees propose a radical restructuring of our political machinery.

Democrats are aglow at the prospect of a 60-seat majority in the US Senate. But this has nothing to do with expanding medical benefits to all, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing public education, the slaughter of Iraqi and US young in that Imperial adventure, US support of the Israeli apartheid measures, or the theft of public funds to support failing private enterprise with arguments that certainly make the late infamous Ayn Rand smiling in her dark pit next to the Christian Roman emperor.

The slaves must rise up as surely as those in San Domingue did, perhaps putting meaning to the empty phrases of our masters: yesterday, liberty, equality, fraternity; today: change is coming. The villainy they teach we must execute ...

The US is still without a viable working-class political party. This is by design. Those I mentioned have a hard time getting ballot access because the rulers rule the roost. In California, the Peace & Freedom Party, my current affiliation, is elegantly described as a "feminist socialist political party." This hits all the right notes for me. It is the only socialist party recognized by the California secretary of state, which means I can run for mayor under the party label and not as an Independent. But Peace & Freedom is a rarity, and it should not be. In place of real sea-change we as spectators are asked to be awed by Specter's shift from one side of the Titanic to the other. Specter would never consider taking planks from a socialist party platform, not even on the principle that all children must be fed. Our bankrupt political system is owned by people for whom such socialism is as much a threat as democracy was to the Framers of the US Constitution.

Swine Flu or Pig Lie?

We'd sort of been here before. Illness emerges in the headlines and strikes a few human souls down. I was barely in high school with Gay Cancer emerged in the early 1980's, going through a few names before all the world except US president Ronald Reagan knew HIV/AIDS, which like sex and violence, became one concept and often erroneously used interchangeably. Today, Swine Flu is reportedly sending Mexico into a panic. Schools and shops shuttered closed. Sport events played to empty stadiums. And the crisis shows no sign so slowing. The Mexican military were redeeming themselves by passing out face masks after bloodying themselves in the mid-1990's with Zapatista Rebellions. I myself saw them go from doing the best a modern, civilized military could by tidying the streets of Mexico, DF to behaving like any pre-modern imperialist milita.

This morning, only a handful of cases were reported north of that arbitrary, politcal boundary that delineates the Third World from the First, the United States of Mexico and the United States of America. By afternoon, more cases, further inland. The speed with which this epidemic seems to spread is interesting and triggers the horrors of our medical history.

Something in this morning's reportage made me think back to the earlier time of Gay Cancer and or need to seriously investigate our medicine: NPR reported that most of the deaths in Mexico were of men 25-45. They themselves noted the strangeness of this, just as I did.

Was I simply suffering from post-trauma from being a queer man who has seen men go from health to being dead, and any mention of young men dying "myseriously" triggers in me a flash-back from the 80's?

I wondered if these Mexican men were gay.

I wondered if they had been the victims - as many of our Third World brothers and sisters - of an experimental vaccine gone awry.

I wondered if they had been the victims - as many of our Third World brothers and sisters - of a vaccine made on the cheap, and then sold to the Third World. "Scientists" wonder aloud if this isn't already incubating in the corners of the globe: I wonder if it's not already been injected or dispensed, like in the antibiotic I had to take recently for a bad sinus infection picked up from the ocean waters (and: what's being dumped into that water that knows nor respects boundaries).

I wanted to know the profiles of those sicken in the United States [at this writing, no one has died in the US from this], like some New York school children who had visited Mexico.

I readily admit to retaining a healthy skepticism for modern medicine. When I have approached its labs, it is with the utmost reservations and only after exhausting - even to the point of near-death - the other options short of a witch's incantation.

Swine flu: human, pig, and bird virus. What a bizarre jury for Mother Nature to bring together, no? But a creepy mad scientist: indeed.

Our vaccines are harvested from animals after all as are some medicines for chronic ailments. Do you know where your medicines come from, swine, human, bird, or what?

Who is being experimented on, the cats in cages or you and me and our comrades in the Third World and in Third World communities within the First World?

And while I am sounding paranoid, I remember that the West has used germ warfare on countries as innocent as Cuba, just to ruin its economy so its socialist experiment would not succeed; the US spread dengue microbes over the island to sicken the workers. Our esteemed scientists tell us unconvincingly that HIV/AIDS came from Africa, a tribesman, and a monkey he dined on. Constantly, the narrative is of our pristine, angelic, well-meaning societies put in peril by the Dark Corners of the World!

Our official scientists, like from the World Health Organization or National Institutes of Health, cannot air such speculations. But they are puzzled: they are airing a deep perplexment. That's enough for me to have pause.

Nature is a tempramental force, but she is not perplexing. She does not one morning change her laws. Man does that. Industrial society attempts that. Greed does that. Power does that.

Hundreds of thousands of human beings die daily from curable diseases because our for-profit drug companies cannot see it profitable to produce basic antibiotics. When they do produce these medicines, they do so on the cheap.

Summit of the Americas: An Open Vein?

THE SUMMIT OF THE AMERICAS [sic] has ended, as the promised veto by Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, of the Final declaration, no declaration was forthcoming. I watched some of the Youtube videos of the opening speeches. It filled me with such emotion to see Daniel Ortega, who lead a socialist revolution against the US-backed dictator, Agustin Somoza, and for this crime Nicaragua was rained on with US bombs, and a Contra War. The US Government finally told the Sandinista revolutionaries that they would stop the war only if a US-sanctioned "election" was staged. Violeta Chamorro, backed by the CIA, won ... of course. But there was Ortega. President, speaking of being ashamed at being at such a summit without Cuba, and without PUERTO RICO, which remains under US control. Christina Fernandez de Kirchner also spoke on behalf of Cuba and highlighted the hypocrisy that Cuba should have been expelled for threatening the hemisphere but Argentina, 20 years later, was left alone when the UK sent the royal navy in the Falklands War.

At this point, this is sort of like an earthquake. Not sure what will fall and what will be left standing. Clearly, all but one of the Latin American/Caribbean countries have taken a turn Left, some moreso than others. All but one have embraced Cuba in their family of nations. The US stands alone, but I do not underestimate the US to bow under such pressure, right or wrong.

A BBC online news story makes this assessment: "US President Barack Obama said he saw positive signs from Cuba and Venezuela ..." Once again, the world is to be seen from the vantage point of the US! Even from the British side of the pond. This is predictabe since the UK is what Gore Vidal called a "US aircraft carrier."

When Fidel and the Revolutionaries rode into Havana January 1, 1959, they were approached by a delegation of the US military. Fidel told them they should return to their home country, that their pupils had failed, and that the Cubans had no use for their lessons. I imagine he gave them a RuPaul double-snap.

It would seem in light of the global melt-down - or, I still suspect the manufacture of said meltdown - Obama would be told the same in no uncertain terms.

But I am not a diplomat. I am an essayist, stream-of-consciouser, provocateur.

The BBC further reports: "In a news conference at the close of the summit, Mr Obama conceded that decades of US policy on Cuba 'hasn't worked the way we wanted it to'. But he highlighted a string of key issues where Cuba must make progress. 'Issues of political prisoners, freedom of speech and democracy are important, and can't simply be brushed aside,' Mr Obama said."

I am sure, although it went unreported by the BBC, which made every excuse not to air the Gaza Appeal a few months ago, our American neighbors had a reply to these comments from our president, which to me only speaks to our pig-headed stubbornness to dictate how the world is to be shaped. For our benefit, of course. How, praytell, did we "want" US policy to work? The assassination of the Cuban leadership, destruction of commerce, buildig mass internal discontent?

Let Obama address the issues listed at home first, openly. Let him begin with the heinos constitutional crimes committed by the Bush administration and work his way back through J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO.

And what about democracy in such disparate places as Saudi Arabia. Israel. The Vatican. Will this be brushed aside? History answers in the affirmative.

Reading the bourgeois press is indeed seductive. Thanks to YOUTUBE I watched the Summit speeches, understood as much as I was able with my remedial Spanish. I also watched a speech by Cuban president Raul Castro a few days before the Summit. Raul has been protrayed lately in a quote attributed to him that he would discuss anything with the US. It was implied, but never directly stated, this meant the Cuban government was ready to negotiate certain acheivements. But then I watched the speech, in the presence of international journalists and other Latin American leaders who are forming a new bloc of their own, ALBA. Raul was in military uniform and was as animated as his older, famous brother on the subject of US duplicity.

Chavez, during one aired session, stood and gave Obama the gift of an Eduardo Galeano book, OPEN VEINS OF LATIN AMERICA: FIVE CENTURIES OF THE PILLAGE OF A CONTINENT. I have read Galeano, a Uruguayan leftist who cooled his support of Cuba after the arrests of 70+ dissidents a few years ago. His is the history of the conquerors and victims. The gift was symbolically important, but it suggests the trap many of us fall into when having a disagreement with someone: that the other person is simply unaware of the "facts", and, once informed, the sky will open up. The powerful interests behind the US government very simply have a different universe of facts from which they act. These facts would indicate a South African-style, regional-wide TRUTH COMMISSION, where everything can be brought to bear, British involvement in the Caribbean and Latin America, US involvement in the same; border disputes between South American countries; all levels of human rights, including the right to housing food, and work.

It is from these pages we must glean new lessons, and form the new bonds that Kirchner demanded of the region. But the ensuing days and months will tell, the period after the earthquake, when things are properly assessed. Which Summit? A fractured one unable to come to any approved agreement, or one marking the Turning-Point in seeing positive signs from the US?

FREE TIBET!! LET CHINA DEVELOP IT

A recent letter published in the Guardian UK. It is addressed to the People's Republic of China by a motley array of thinkers. The subject is TIBET, that favorite liberal cause celebre in the West. FREE TIBET! That tiny country invaded by Red China.

Tibet is portrayed as a poor victim and its former headman, the Dalai Lama, a man of peace in exile. But this narrative has more to do with Western geopolitics than Reality.

Before China invaded - re-claimed, or whatever - its province, territory, or that sovereign country called Tibet, it was a feudal theocratic monarchy, a privileged elite, and masses of its people living in squalor and poverty not unlike centuries passed, where serfdom and slavery existed. Punishments included gouging out a person's eyes or cutting off body parts. How does a feudal theocratic monarchy keep its people poor and itself rich and in power, class if not by gouging out the eyes of "criminals"? The current Dalai Lama's predecessors collaborated with British and US agents: to what end, one wonders. Franklin Roosevelt sent an expedition to bear gifts to the Dalai Lama during his presidency. One wonders why ...

China under its ancien regime before its revolution was little better than its Tibetan neighbor, wide class disparities, abject poverty and a ruling elite, imperial powers taking wealth here and there from it. Then, as Lincoln famously remotely said: the war came.

Mao Tse Tung began a social, economic, and political awakening to that great country with a devoutly communist revolution. Examine the record, and tell me where a capitalist revolution has brought such great changes to not only the peasant but also national productivity. It is a much-ignored fact that thanks to Joseph Stalin [yes, Stalin!] the USSR was the most industrializing and prosperous country while the West was sorting through its 1930's Depression. But official doctrine says Stalin must only be remembered for his heinous crimes - that of the murder of thousands. The Western equivalent of such crimes - the massacre of Native Americans/Indians, for example, by men like Gen. George Washington, are dropped from the narrative and are not worthy of historical record.

Mao and the PRC, like Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the USSR, were anathemas to the Capitalist West. So of course, our official hearts began to bleed for those peasants we had yesterday forced opium on. Human Rights is a novel tool employed by the West. Like Apple Pie it would seem uncontroversial, but a look at the historical record of the 40's and 50's, the former Imperial powers gave not a damn about Human Rights in Latin America, Southeast Asia ["French" Indochina!], or Asia as a whole. Indeed, no. Human rights seemed only to extend to the privileged West's right to exploit the humans within the Axis of Dark Corners of the Globe. This hypocrisy would extend to that tiny, brutal country called Tibet.

I have no position on whether it was a China province or a sovereign country, but I recognize such a position is important on principal. Do I endorse invading foreign countries at will and claiming them? This is an important principle and debate. But it is also an important principle to speak Truths.

We can endorse sovereignty for Afghanistan, for example. But will we not highlight laws against women, against gays? Free Afghanistan for the Misogynists?

Enter an Open Letter, authored by Vaclav Havel, Prince Hassan Bin Talal, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and others. I am struck by this intersection of theatre [Havel being a brilliant playwright and essayist], a member of the Jordan Royal Family - a client state carved there by their British masters after the Ottoman humiliation, and a very, very honorable man who has defended the rights of democracy, women, LGBT's, the poor. Strange Bedfellows indeed and one wonders why Tutu's name would be added!

The Open Letter may reveal this. Anyway, Open Letters are kind of joke to me coming out of a weekly barrage of Open Letter Campaigns in my Queer Nation days. This one asks for a fair trail for some Accused and more openness in China's goings-on within Tibet. Tutu chaired a famous Truth Commission the likes of which the world has not seen. He has unblemished authority in this matter. A son of the Jordan ruling family is poxed. His country is poxed. His terrain is poxed. That he would have any authority to speak about human rights is a joke.

On the eminent closure of the Guantanamo gulag, Mumia Abu-Jamal warns us that there are Guantanamos within every one of our 50 states. But where is the chorus demanding US openness, British complicity - with these War on Terror crimes against humanity?

The Free Tibet Movement is a tool. Some good-thinking people who know little about how tools are made back it out of an sincere desire to want to end oppression. But the Western Interest forms the movement's foundation and continues to use it by perennial assaults on Chinese Communism. The Official Narrative dictates we must never think anything promising about Communism, so we must keep getting proofs of Chinese barbarism and evidence of Western compassion. As usual the Official Story is Twisted.

On Pets

Six-month old BO has landed. The newest presidential dog provoked some really strong feelings in me, nothing like the social justice/socialism/communism I consider a craft, mission, and passion. Having a pet is farther up the List, like swimming, good espresso, feeling Ochun. The Obama Family is lucky, and smart, to have a pet. The old saying goes they are Man's Best Friend. But one of my weaknesses for the unelected Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland is that she is a life-long dog owner and horse breeder. She's reared, birthed, coddled, trained, and buried a host of dogs - corgis and labradors. I feel I know something of her fundamental trustworthiness because of her insistence that her dogs be with her, travel with her. I know they must give her the kind of relief we ourselves cannot give each other even in private moments let alone public ones.

I grew up with collies, which is a described as a herding (or pastoral) dog. But my parents' first dog was a German Shepard named KING. I don't remember KING. My mother got him when he was a pup and I was in cloth diapers, and having no mother, my own mother got a bottle and nursed the King. Still, as he got older, that Nature came out and he became rather dangerous, first the furniture, then ... yours truly. King had to go.

Then they got a collie, LAD JANLO, which was a rendering of my parents first names. Lad died a natural death of old age with my father, whom my mother had already divorced and moved us human children to California.

My mother started a kennel. Collies again, of course. The Bitch was bred and birthed several beautiful little pups, sable. Lad was Tri-color. One night we went out to dinner. My mother, step-father, sisters and me. Mexican Food. I remember the evening even though I must have been in 4th grade, 1977ish. When we got home from dinner and began to wander through the dark house, I heard my step-father call out with some urgency. Then, my mother's "Oh, no!". The back door to the backyard slid open. I came out of my room to see what the commotion was. Our pool light lit a dull green across the pool I practiced laps in. And floating in the water were the several little furry plumps of collies. Their Mother was in her kennel nearby, in view of the whole disaster. The pups had apparently done what dogs do and dug holes under the fencing around the kennel, gotten into the pool, and couldn't get out. The holes too small for Mama to get through. We got the pups out, cried and cried. My mother and I took each lifeless body and began to administer mouth-to-mouth. My step-father discouraged this, wanted to spare us I guess. It was an incredible night. Nothing could spare us. What a cold, dark, damp, lifeless night that was.

The kennel ended that night.

Years later, we bought another collie. It was originally a family dog, so my sister won the poll to name her JADE, after a Brooke Shields character. I won the tag for her kennel name, which American Kennel Club dogs have to have: Love Nest's Plantagenet, for my mother and step-father's home and for the historic name of English kings. Love Nest's Plantagenet Jade [Jade for short] became officially my dog soon after. This doesn't mean I combed her like I was supposed to. Collies shed! And my mother would get angry at the shreds of Jade's coat all over the carpets in the house and blowing in the backyard.

It was at this time I really fell in love. Dogs have an instinct bred into them and just because you put them in a house and give them human names doesn't end that instinct. The human instict seems to be bred out of us, but really we just turn to drugs and violence and indifference, human sicknesses. Anyway, Jade made sure I got up for school in the morning, laying her long nose on my bed by my face. She laid next to me while I did my homework, wrote in my journal of all my woes ["Woe is Me!!!"], slept next to me while I watched infinite hours of TV, and struggled with all the moods a young boy needing to Come Out went through. When I was especially full of the melacholia wickeds [as Katharine Hepburn calls it], Jade would come into my room, insist I take her paw, and look at me. I would drop the paw, discouraged, and Jade wold lift it again until I held it. Magic dog! She wouldn't let me be alone, bless her! Whenever I dared get in our pool to do laps or play, Jade came frantically to the edge, barking at me, seeming to want to leap in after me ... like ... like ... that Bitch mama must have wanted to do years before.

When I went to college back in St. Louis I had to leave Jade. When I moved to San Francisco I couldn't find a place that allowed pets. At any rate, I told myself Jade was better off in her domain of that backyard, monitoring the horses passing on the trail behind our house. This is how I imagined her. This is how my mother described Jade's golden years.

One day, she came up to the back door, stretched out for a nap, and never woke up. My sister found her. I can't remember who called me. Jade was buried in her spot by the back gate to the horse trail, where she spent those twilight years.

Jehovah was my next pet. A rat. That's right, a rat. And I indeed named it Jehovah. Rats are very smart creatures. He quickly learned his name, would come when called. He loved cooked [cooled] brussels sprouts (my favorite vegetable) and popcorn. I would close my bedroom door, let him out of his big cage, and he would explore my room and always come when called. I would sit him on my shoulder, and he would somehow manage to recline as if to nap or stick his nose into my ear and lick the inside of my ear.

Jehovah died while I was away in Cuba.

I vowed never to get a pet again. Didn't want to abandon a creature like that again. But after moving to Los Angeles's Koreatown, I rescued a very small, newborn CAT! I am allergic to cats. But the sight of this frail, barely able to walk thing on Pico and Normandie, oblivious to the dangers around it and those dangers oblivious to it, I scooped him up and brought him to the house I shared. I named him OBI SECO, he being black and white and obi seco being a term of art for coconut. Obi Seco grew strong. He had other cats in the house to commune with, a huge yard to stalk and climb, various planters to nap in. When I came home, I would call out to him, sometimes anxious that he'd left as magically as he came ... but he would emerge from the brush, galloping towards me. I could hear him purring.

That house began to go to hell. Another story. I had to leave. I got an apartment in Long Beach, and Obi Seco, literally reared in what must have seemed like Nature, was suddenly confined to a studio apartment. I never heard him make a sound, but now he cried and moaned all day and all night. He began to tear up carpet, blinds, scratch at the door. The night he ripped a large slit in the bathroom screen and tried to jump out two storeys below, I had to make a change. Another house-mate who escaped the madness offered to house Obi at his sister's. She had a house, large yard, other cats.

Humans abandon their young, sacrifice their blood for wars, starve some as being "undeserving poor." Pets - animals, that is: normal, adjusted beasts of Nature - are much more civilized than us. They will love us unconditionally and what's more: they do not hold back their nurture instinct, another uncivilized trait humans seem to cherish with maturity. This is a characteristic I know must at some remote level sustain the human subject [i.e., the "owner"]. This is why I know Queen Elizabeth II must be decent. LBJ's Beagles. Reagan's Pomeranians. Of course, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Bull Terriers. Henry II's corgis. Queen Elizabeth I's pocket terriers. Queen Victoria's Pomeranians, greyhounds, sky terriers, dachshunds, pugs, Pekinese, and ... yes: COLLIES. Lincoln loved mongrels. Bill Clinton, like the Queen: labradors. Mary Queen of Scots loved her Toy Spanel so much she kept it under her large skirts and it wasn't found until after her head was cut off. It is too often said of pet lovers that they are more at ease with their pet companions than with humans of their own species: well, of course we are! We all want to be loved, and having a caring companion for a pet shows that we can be loved, and that civilization is not totally lost.

PASSOVER/PESACH begins Tonight: My Thoughts

And what is the status of my Freedom and yours and ours? Where are the new Revolutionaries?

Passover (or Pesach) is about finally taking more than enough abuse and leaving an abusive relationship, an abusive system. You have to see that it's abusive first, that plagues are not Love. If you don't see this, Passover is but another Fairy Tale for your dusty King James[!!!!] Bible.

I am not a Christian or Jew or Muslim, but revere the essential spirit behind these religions and other paths that have crossed my Path for their deep, spiritual lessons they teach. I have made it a point since my college days to observe all of these Holy Days in some measure - Lent, Ramadan, Passover, The Solstices. Our best teachers employ metaphors to make their lessons more powerful and better digested, and these Holy Days are powerful focal points from which to take steps forward. The symbols behind Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are no less - even while its supposed adherents happily enslave themselves in superstition rather than lessons of prophets, wise men and women [yes, there had always to be women!]. Being a "Westerner" and more impacted by the Christians, I see them a lot like Baldwin did: pretenders, lacking moral authority by their crimes; or Maya Angelou, which said her Christianity was more like a Holy Grail that daily, hourly, had to be fought for, always elusive, first requiring a boundless passion, because you were always coming up short. Like being a revolutionary, conscious a successful revolution begins a process.

Jesus, who was born and died a Jew, was also revolutionary. Undoubtedly, if you see beyond the sectarianism and religious partisanship, he was essentially trying to extend the mission of the Jews leaving Egypt and continue the Revolution. Our sects and religious parties - no better than our political parties - draw strict boundaries between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. How idiotic. How short-sighted. How ... calculated! Also, Egypt was and is in AFRICA. The Jews were escaping the terrors of Ramses II, but they were in Africa. Egypt in some historical twist ceased to be in Africa, the cradle of civilization, the site of the oldest Jewish synagogue [Ethiopia]. What does the breaking of these continuums of philosophy and geography do to break the bonds that tie us and form a cohesive and coherent moral story?

What is Pharoah teaching you today?

So, on this Passover: how's your state of Freedom? Broken? What old, worn-out, diseased ideas are you chained to? Where is your Liberation? How many injustices and profanities will you swallow before you gather what you can and move on?

Tonight, I will sit at my boveda with my Eggun [ancestors] and read the Passover story from Exodus. I will do so conscious of a strong, historical thread linking that old Mother continent, Africa, with Judaism, Christianity, Islam; our common class struggle; and our spiritual prisons, our economic prisons, whose bars need tearing down. Conscious that it was not at the first abuse we stood up but after 210 years of slavery. This seems strange in hindsight, but don't we all know co-conspirators? Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor, wrote about these Jews in the camps and what they did to survive and what they had to become, as bad as their captors, and equally weak-in-spirit.

How often do we turn against our comrades, empowering the wicked, degenerate Values of our oppressors and cowarding from the human values?

CHANGE BEGINS WITH ME is a reality. We can all be a Moses, a Jesus, a Mohammed, a Sojourner Truth, an Emma Goldman, a Fidel, a Mao, a Bolivar, a Boukman. When the knife hits the bone and you scream "Enough!" depends on your constitution and what you are ready to give up. Fidel admonished us many years ago that the duty of a revolutionary is to make a Revolution, not to sit on your porch waiting for the corpse of Imperialism to be brought passed.

I guess you must at some point see the civilization around you as being fundamentally wicked. My co-workers/co-conspirators who would take milk from a baby because some government rules allow it is a daily, profound reminder we just might do better under the Taliban than suffer another hour of such nonsense. That many of my co-workers/co-conspirators digest this whole and seem to gain a sense of power speaks to lack of moral and ethical authority the West and Christianity have.

For, Christianity no more exists than Judaism or Islam. The distinction between them is rather like the distinction between Mexico, the USA, and Canada: political boundaries in what Nature created as one cohesive land-mass. Together, these teachings speak to a powerful revolution of human society. Separate, we are prisoners in ghettos, under the boot of an overlord, wage-slaves, tyrannized. Ramses II's troops may have drowned in that sea, but the pharoah lives on and on and continues to amass new troops.

Socialized Housing

If maintaining a viable postal service for all is an important service, why not housing? The answer is somewhat obscured but fairly simple why our various so-called leftists and avowedly right-wing elected officials wring their hands over the homeless and housing but do very little to solving the problem. And I read many years ago in college how our US Army Corps of Engineers can go into a remote backwater and in a few breaths construct a workable bridge over which to carry supplies. But we cannot provide truly decent shelter for the poor, the unemployed, the underemployed.

So why not Housing for the growing numbers of people, families, children, working adults, even middle class? There is no means-test for buying a US postage stamp. We do not ask for a tax return before selling someone a stamp to send a letter. Why should there be means-tests for the paltry excuse for available, affordable Section 8 housing? It's because Section 8 housing is intentionally kept to a bare minimum, and less than that. Section 8 feeds the myth of a "deserving" poor as separate from an undeserving poor. Section 8 further hides the working poor from our sights. Section 8 housing is only meant to keep a few of the many homeless in shelter. We have no such paradigm for postage stamps.

And yet our postal system stares us in the face with the obvious solution to housing that no politician dare enact. The postal system is government run, and this is an anathema to any private enterprise. Federal express and UPS are private shipping companies. It's not hard to imagine a country where FEDEX and UPS controlled our political culture and sponsored the elimination of the US Postal System to increase their clientele. It's not hard because so much of our political culture is run by private, for-profit interests where our basic needs are sold and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Eliminating the postal service would give FEDEX/UPS the lion-share of the market, and it would cost us several dollars just to mail a letter, more if the letter be mailed to a remote area out of FEDEX's service area. Imagine this. You don't have to, because this is what we have with our housing. FEDEX owns the houses, pays or political culture to maintain its monopoly, and reaps the profits.

Not coincidentally, one of the first logical acts the Cuban Revolution implemented in 1959 was to cut rents in half. Housing was not socialized, but the Revolution clearly recognized as clearly we we seem to deny our property system that it is unworkable. We here in the US seem to think this arrangement came from the Heavens. The Cuban Revolution knew it came from landlords, many Cuban, many living in the US.

I was moved the other day when hearing Fidel in 1968 expound on the various facets of underdevelopment. He covered the ones known to most well-read intellectuals, but he touched on a new one: that underdevelopment is a psyhological problem. So one of the challenges of a successful revolutionary process is to enlighten the people to discard their futilistic thinking, that not much is possible, this-is-the-way-it-is thinking. I would say this is the biggest problem facing underdeveloped peoples and countries.

Why can't our city and state governments, which levy taxes on us, buy apartment buildings and houses and trailor parks and duplexes and lofts? Who said these must be the domains of private interests only motivated in profits, even to the point of keeping them empty!?

There is no law of nature that dictates this.

Our elected government should buy properties for the public use, rent out these properties at a low cost to those who choose to take that route as easily as those who choose a US stamp over a UPS fee. I as a lifelong renter should have the choice of renting with my government for a low, no-frills apartment or choosing a private concern, which might want to offer an array of bells and whistles.

But as I said, this is not the case because our property system owns our city councils, city assessors, mayors, and state governments. How did this come to be so? The end of feudalism and the beginning of the "modern" [i.e., capitalist] era was marked by a series of Enclosure Acts in Europe. Land-Lords discovered they could earn more money by selling surplus goods rather than fulfilling their feudal obligations and giving them to their tenants, the serfs. The serfs were thrown off the land, literally onto the streets. Police powers were instituted to keep the poor off the land. In Britain, after peasant revolts, laws were passed that mandated a homeless person show his means of livelihood or be thrown in jail. So from the beginning, the state created the problem then penalized its victims.

Among the "classic" causes of homelessness - lack of affordable housing, unemployment/underemployment, mental illness, substance abuse, poverty, mental health law reforms, evictions, and foreclosures - socialized housing models would address several of these at once. Without high rents to pay, an otherwise low-wage worker [with socialized health care of course!] could well afford a decent place to live. Of course, if or high-wage brethren wish to partake of socialzed housing that would be their right too as well as accessing a socialized health system.

Bottom line, with a working model of public/private mail service in our midst, such a model of housing is not unrealizable. Arguably, housing services are much more vital than mail services. Our elected politicians, in the pockets of a private housing monopoly, are in a fix: they dare not anger their politcal funders by robbing them of a captive audience of customers. Further, banks fearful of losing profits will make arguments against such a measure. But faced with publc anger over the sight of homeless encampments, like the one that used to be in front of San Francisco's beautiful City Hall, public servants are stuck finding cracks in a paradigm to fill a huge population of people.