Signs of the times!

Guy Fawkes

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Jesus the Anti-Christ or Octavius the Messiah

Myopia is not natural. It is not genetic. It is rather a construction of a modern, "capitalist" authoritarian liberal government. This government seeks these divisions and to maintain our peculiar ignorance, in order to perpetuate its rule over us by making it easier to manage the various flocks we are put in to. Unrest among the whites, blame the blacks; among the blacks, the immigrants are over-running us. Etc.

One of the persistent places this manipulation and management of the masses occurs is in the area of religion.

As someone born in the West, this religion is bound to be Christianity, which is a peculiarity in itself. It has, as one activist put it, a "possum" in it. Official religion is not about religion at all but rather about the maintenance of state and class power, so just when you think it has spiritual lessons to teach and to actualize, The Good Ship Jesus delivers its human cargo to the new world, steered by Christian merchants and ship captains.

Christianity is but one of the master-class weapons to whip the people into line. Its power may be fading, but it is still relatively strong. So,a few things must be clarified about this peculiar religion, its mascot, and the people who have managed him [and us] for nearly two millennia.

A lot is attributed the man we know as Jesus, and a lot negated. His birth was predicted as the coming of a king of kings. He is quoted as having said some pretty wise, astute things, told some very revealing stories, taught, healed, lead. Born from a virgin, he was resolutely celibate, unmarried, and fatherless. He was crucified, rose from the dead, and growing numbers of gullible people await his return performance. He was born, lived, and died a Jew.

Two thousand years and counting, the Christians wait for this Jewish scholar. I thought Dicken's Miss Havisham had gone off the deep end wearing her molding, smelly wedding gown waiting for the return of the groom who stood her up at the altar in her youth, but this Christian crowd takes the Guinness Book Prize. The Christians wait for someone whose first stop would be the nearest synagogue, not the archdiocese of New York City.

I have dared question the Christian dogma since I was in grade school, fortunate that my mother did not subject me not only to its propaganda - we all, as I said, get that even passively; but also, she denied me its "community." Community is a more reckless thing to throw stones at if one feels a certain dependence on it, which is why so many battered spouses and cult members stay rather than flee even when the Kool-Aid is served, and why Christianity may see dwindling attendance in its churches, its hold on the minds lingers. I did not flee, because I was never there, thank God.

To me, Christianity is only an anthropological fetish that has unfortunately consumed the world. The possible lessons of the young Jew are mostly lost.

But this is what state and power want: anything to justify its human rights crimes and never, ever to put Jesus' communism into practical effect.

My questions took a great leap forward after I watched HBO's "Rome" series. The Christian's mascot-Messiah was not a character in that excellent series ... or was he? As the character Octavius grew in development on screen, I saw parallels to the Christian messiah.

I liked the series so much I do what students do in my day: I did not go to Twitter; I did some reading. First, I read Suetonius' The Twelve Ceasars. I followed that with Anthony Everitt's Augustus. Both fantastic books, by the way. 

History and the management of the masses seem to work at cross-purposes, because as a master class you don't want your proletariat to know too much about what is really going on, or, as one of the 19th century's cronies put it, "not to let too much daylight in on the magic."

This magic includes the design of the public school curriculum, which I as a veteran public school history teacher am a bit familiar with. The 10th grade World History curriculum in California begins not with ancient Greece or Africa but with the French Revolution. This means skipping almost halfway into that thick textbook (US History begins not with the genocide of the indigenous population but with the US Civil War, which only makes sense if you understand our history has been one long race riot].

So, when I read Suetonius's opening chapters about Julius Ceasar and Octavius [aka, Augustus], not only were light bulbs going off, but also fuses were breaking. And a star burned bright in the sky. Suetonius the biographer is as interesting a writer as any People Magazine reporter: facts, hearsay, and gossip galore. Sex, of course. Both Julius and Octavius liked to experiment sexually with other men as well as with their wives, Julius much more so than his successor. Both calculating, ruthless, of course.

The Roman imperial roots of Christianity were apparent in the lives and myths of these Caesars.

Hagiographers were busy making gods of men since Julius Ceasar, and embellishing all sorts of tales to support their scholarship. It continued right up to the Christian myth and Jesus' hagiographers.

If it is true that were God not to exist, we'd have to invent him, the Romans proved this in the ways they elevated Julius Ceasar to godlike status and Octavius his successor to a god of the gods.

It is in the context and timeframe the Jesus myth is constructed.

The official myth-making around these Roman chieftains has striking parallels to the official myth-making around a certain young Jewish boy who would have lived 14 years under the rule of Octavius.

The hagiographers of Roman times knew what to do to wipe the shame of Julius Ceasar's murder off their collective consciences. They took it a few notches up the wrung for Octavius, and it's not a far stretch of the imagination that the same proletariat who ate that popcorn up in the first instances would need it again for a purported Mascot-Messiah.

Almost immediately after Ceasar's murder - perhaps one of the bravest acts in human history, to kill a tyrant - the people agitated and the deification began. The 55-year old tyrant was said - per his dream of the night before - to rise up to Jupiter. A marble monument was erected and people prayed to it, made oaths before it, sacrificed animals to it.

A cult star was born. It might have taken off had his successor not bettered him.

The Octavius hagiography goes further, from his conception in the Temple of Apollo while his virgin mother slept there and was visited by the god himself, to his image being put on altars. Great omens reportedly preceded his birth (and his bedding in what Suetonius describes as a "food pantry," which doubled as his nursery ["Away in the manger, no crib for a bed!"].

The Roman people, like the Jews, were told before Octavius' birth that the gods were set to provide them a king-savior. Obviously, a Jewish savior-messiah was greeted with agitation by the elders of the Roman Senate so much that they decreed that no male child could be reared for a year. A Roman king-savior was milked.

One senator, upon hearing the news of Octavius birth declared "The ruler of the world is now born."

Stories of the newborn Octavius disappearing and being found on rooftops gazing at the sun or silencing the croaking frogs abounded. After his funeral, one witness said he saw Octavius' spirit rise to Heaven, but Suetonius doesn't record if this was the first, second, or seventh day.

Much of the folklore surrounded Octavius parallel Jesus. The rationale building up the Octavius myth is, of course, raw power. People in awe of and made to seem dependent on demi-gods are less likely to see a tyrant: the state can continue unobstructed in its imperial mission. Julius Ceasar took Spain. Octavius took Egypt. Tiberius famously annexed England.

The sun never set on ... oh, but that is a different empire.

It is somewhat better known that our high Christian holidays were preceded by high Roman pagan ones, and the dates of those older pagan ones (coincidentally I'm sure) happen to be the same as our Christian holy days. Some group of Crusading bureaucrats knew how to get the people to swallow this new day, they needed the same wine in the new bottles.

Speaking of pilfering, it's pretty clear from the history that the Roman Catholic Pontiff's office itself - right down the magic ruby slippers - was stolen from pagan Rome: again, to keep those agitated masses from tearing burning embers off funeral pyres and torching the homes of the elites, as they did after Ceasar's murder.

And, so, how to swallow Jesus as mascot, messiah, and justification of so much [further] turmoil?

Whether Jesus the Jew existed or not is immaterial. Octavius is but a figure of Roman imperial power, not to be exaggerated. Jesus' expressed ideas were certainly not novel to anyone studying the historical record before the French Revolution. You find ancient Greek, African, and Asian philosophy laced throughout the pronouncements of this Jewish carpenter.

If he did exist, like Octavius, he would have to have access to teachers and learning, which were not permitted slaves, who like our growing, modern, impoverished working class of today, had no souls.

If he did exist, he not only would have been married but marriage in the Roman world was not the fetish it pretends to be under the modern Christians: people married and divorced all the time as promiscuously as they might have a new robe of clothes designed. Without public ridicule.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean Jesus the man is not a remarkable person, any more than Barack Obama before he courted the favors of the reactionary Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is remarkable. He is, and his positions are equally discernible to posterity - Jesus', that is. But so too were Mr. Obama's.

Like his prototype, Octavius, Jesus was claimed to be the son of God, their mothers both visited by angels [well, Apollo, reportedly disguised himself as a snake]. Each have gained remarkable statures in support of state power - Christendom and the massacres of dissidents and Inquisitions to finish off the rest.

Is this Jesus or Octavius?

Irish playwright and pamphleteer, George Bernard Shaw, distills the rebel man we know as Jesus quite well, weeding out the Paulist and Council of Nicea distillation we've come to associate with this imperialist mascot:

"The doctrines in which Jesus is thus confirmed are, roughly, the
following:

1. The kingdom of heaven is within you. You are the son of God; and God
is the son of man. God is a spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and in
truth, and not an elderly gentleman to be bribed and begged from. We are
members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor
without injuring or helping yourself. God is your father: you are here
to do God's work; and you and your father are one.

2. Get rid of property by throwing it into the common stock. Dissociate
your work entirely from money payments. If you let a child starve you
are letting God starve. Get rid of all anxiety about tomorrow's dinner
and clothes, because you cannot serve two masters: God and Mammon.

3. Get rid of judges and punishment and revenge. Love your neighbor as
yourself, he being a part of yourself. And love your enemies: they are
your neighbors.

4. Get rid of your family entanglements. Every mother you meet is as
much your mother as the woman who bore you. Every man you meet is as
much your brother as the man she bore after you. Don't waste your time
at family funerals grieving for your relatives: attend to life, not to
death: there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and
better. In the kingdom of heaven, which, as aforesaid, is within you,
there is no marriage nor giving in marriage, because you cannot devote
your life to two divinities: God and the person you are married to."

Shaw concludes his assessment thus:

"Now these are very interesting propositions; and they become more
interesting every day, as experience and science drive us more and more
to consider them favorably. In considering them, we shall waste our time
unless we give them a reasonable construction. We must assume that the
man who saw his way through such a mass of popular passion and illusion
as stands between us and a sense of the value of such teaching was quite
aware of all the objections that occur to an average stockbroker in
the first five minutes. It is true that the world is governed to a
considerable extent by the considerations that occur to stockbrokers in
the first five minutes; but as the result is that the world is so badly
governed that those who know the truth can hardly bear to live in it,
an objection from an average stockbroker constitutes in itself a prima
facie case for any social reform." [Shaw, "Preface on the Prospects of Christianity", Androcles and the Lion 1913]

But why bother taking a classically educated teacher and making him the foundation of the slave-trading imperial world? Jesus' teachings as distilled not only by Shaw, but also by Christian anarchists, like Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, and the liberation theologists would seem to run counter to the muck we have been treated to by the master-class, who head churches, who bless troops sent to secure oil and spices, who trade in human cargo, and who starve the poor in honor of trade.

This Jewish teacher exemplified popular and dangerous ideas to the master class. Not new ideas and not original ones, but ones that caught and continue to catch popular imaginations. We do not want to be ruled, lorded over, mastered by men, women, or pirates who would sacrifice our community and will to do right to one another.

Historian Peter Marshall suggests why.

"The legacy of Christianity is not moreover merely repressive. On the one hand, there is a conservative, quietist, and authoritarian tendency originating in the Pauline Church in Rome; on the other, a radical, communal and libertarian one which emerged from the Jamesian church in Jerusalem."

Oh, Paul! Essentially what he helped manufacture as surely as Octavius' hagiographers was not Jesus but the anti-Jesus. And all the while the Roman emperors, like Octavius, are messiah's for state and class power. The Jesus that our masters sell us is not a community organizer but the Anti-Christ, set on destroying what is human. And we've been made not only to worship this menace to society but also justify so many communal and national crimes on him.

In a cynical maneuver worthy of Obama's shift to the reactionary DLC, the emperor Constantine did convert to Christianity on his deathbed, in a last attempt to save an empire fraying at the seams probably since Tiberius' reign. This is what happens to beasts who get too big, too slow, and needing to consume more and more resources which means creating more and more slaves and conquer more and more of other people's land.

In doing so, Constantine ultimately did not save the Roman world but he did give a tacit legitimacy to a version of old teachings taught by the young Jew. But with this infamous conversion this cult had a powerful collaborator: the state and establishment, which meant at minimum one could never, ever put those celebrated teachings into practice but keep them hanging up in the air with Jupiter and Octavius' placenta.

State power is always a bad marriage, as witnessed by the joining of the state and academia, or the state and modern journalism. This produces lies and a lot of strange careers.

Jesus unfortunately was not around to stop this marriage, the corruption of these ancient, communist, anti-master class ideas with state power. And as a mere teacher, not a messiah, it would never have crossed his mind.

Emperors are other creatures. According to Suetonius, Octavius was most peeved at "his name [being] vulgarized by its constant occurrence" during his lifetime and put an imperial stop to it. He seemed to resist deification, but he must not have understood the fraud magic the state employs to sucker the people.

Too bad this other "ruler of the world" could not have articulated an opposition to this same vulgarization. It might, one hopes, have stopped Paul, the councilors at Nicea, and the bishops of Rome, kings, and queen-empresses from handing us the anti-Christ as religious fetish.

Discovering US crimes against humanity and the Hepburns

The president of Guatemala couldn't have been more on point when he described recent revelations that the US had intentionally infected Guatemalan women with STDs. He called it a crime against humanity.

There is a parallel history to these crimes, which is just as persistent, that the US is a bastion for all goodness, chosen, global leader, etc. etc.

I was introduced to this parallel universe as an undergraduate, where on the one hand I was studying political science and history of the masters - that is, a narrative that supported the myth of US liberal benevolence. On the other, there is the reality.

I enrolled in a women's studies class. It was somewhat daring at the time - may still be - because I was the only male in the class and knew of only one other male student enrolled in a similar class. I was a political science major who had the list of required courses to complete for my degree. This particular women-in-politics class fit the bill.

My semester passed fairly unremarkably. The female students and the female professor liked to pick on me as the lone guy, but the real drama came when it came time to do my term paper.

I was, and still am, a big old Hollywood movie fan. So I proposed as a topic the political/activist role of women in Hollywood (viz., Bette Davis' landmark but unsuccessful lawsuit against her studio, which chipped away at the stable system, where actors were contracted to big studios and had little control of their careers).

Ok, to the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature [RGPL], an index the younger generation probably know nothing about. There was a certain art to looking through the RGPL: by year, by decade, indices.

What I was to find out when I looked up Bette Davis was one thing. But when I looked up references for Katharine Hepburn I was taken far from Hollywood and to the dark side of our liberal tradition.

If you type Hepburn's name into your Internet search, you will get all listings about the famed and admired actress. But via RGPL, interestingly, you would find another Katharine Hepburn: the actress's mother of the same name. The elder Hepburn was a prominent activist, alleged social reformer, woman's suffragist, and an early birth control advocate. Hepburn the daughter has said she was also a Communist.


While the only sign I could find of overt Hepburn activism was her political support of the Communist Party-backed, democratic socialist Henry Wallace in 1948 in his presidential bid, and against Harry Truman, the elder Hepburn's record was a pretty rich one. And disturbing to behold.


Disturbing because the Hepburn mother was one of the founders, with Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood [first called the Birth Control League]. These crusading women advocated not only legalizing abortions but also sterilizations ... of Black and Asian women.

For whatever the elder Hepburn's true political affiliations, she dared to equate poverty with color and [to her logic] reasonably thought an end to poverty would come when poverty ceased to produce poor babies, ergo, sterilize the poor.

Before Hepburn the actress died, Planned Parenthood honored the elder Hepburn and named a fund after her both women in the 1980's.

Further, Bryn Mawr College, the prestigious women's college that both Hepburns attended, honored mother and daughter for their achievements.

The Hepburn revelation was one of my first introductions into the nasty underbelly of the liberal politics we marginalized are supposed to ignore - those marginalized include people of color, the poor, lgbtq's, women, not to forget men who dare to walk a different path, queer or straight, in spite of public rebuke.

I myself have held Planned Parenthood in particular and the abortion issue in general at a chilly distance ever since.

It has been the recognition of these crimes against humanity, demands for social justice, reparations, regime and system changes that has gotten the reactionaries to mobilize to dismantle social and public services, especially our public schools. In fact, a whole elaborate propaganda system has been fortified, which includes our mass media and increasingly includes our "intellectuals" in the universities. It has certainly impacted public education, note Ronald Reagan's desire to shut down the Dept of Education, Bush I's education presidency, Bush II's No Child Left Behind, and Obama's Race to the Top.

The assault - the crime - continues to infect our rising generations with ignorance and compliance to a brutal system that wants only part-time labor from them, then to throw them away when finished.

The US "medical" crime in Guatemala is interesting. It comes just before our successfully toppling its democratically elected government in 1954, with the direct assistance of the CIA. So the war aims included not only saving United Fruit [precursor to Chiquita Bananas] but also for Nazi medical experiments.

The elder Hepburn was no Nazi, and she did make ample pronouncements which would make her communist sympathies believable and admired, but she also testified to US Congressional committees that Black and Asian women needed to be sterilized, that it was cruel to allow them to produce children they could not care for, etc. She did this rather than offer a radical critique of a capitalist system which had barely ended chattel slavery for Blacks and Asian workers and had made wage slaves of all workers: from this comes poverty, not color.

And what of the actress Hepburn's father? She described Thomas N. Hepburn as a "dyed-in-the-wool socialist." Dr. Hepburn was a physician and, like his wife, an activist in his own right. His concern was around venereal diseases and starting various private organizations to tackle this serious issue.

What was his role or knowledge, if any, in the crimes against Guatemala? Further, the records about that experiment show that the same doctors were involved in the domestic Tuskegee Experiment, where Black men were left untreated for syphilis and told erroneously they were being treated.

Dr. Hepburn was no small, local doctor with a pet interest. He was actively involved in addressing - to his credit - a serious health issue. Certainly someone with his involvement would have known about these things. But can he be as implicated in these experiments with "good" intentions as his wife was to her campaign?

We must no longer be shocked and awed by these revelations. There has always been a strange disconnect between the narrative of our supposed masters and that of the masses of humanity who suffer. Unfortunately, we must assume the worst from our rulers and the least from our collective response.

Getting a few Things off my Chest

My Examiner columns came in like a lion in 2009 and have become a sleepy lamb. My radicalism, however, continues to radicalize by worsening events around me and the lies which dare explain those events. But the column - began with the Examiner over a year ago to discuss Long Beach, CA., issues, has lately flowed barely to a trickle.

My obsession - may I speak candidly? Yes, obsession. My obsession has been the same decline that may disturb my brethren in the Tea Party Movement. But it is an angst also shared by my brethren in the Democratic Party, which is barely televised, who were themselves hoodwinked into voting for the Goldman-Sachs character to continue the third term of George W. Bush, albeit in softer hues. It is shared by so-called Progressives, who were merely apologists for Obama but more or less share my aims in a just, democratic society. It is certainly the angst that lights the ires of my anarchist (-feminist, -communist, -syndicalist, -primitivist), Trotskyist, Marxist (Maoist, Leninist, Fidelista) comrades, who are not televised at all.

Our current government is old-school imperial politics brought brutally home: the only way the System will protect a former war criminal, like Bush II is to install a new criminal in his place, and this is Mr. Obama, Lover of Drones who do not Love Little Babies or Their Loving Mothers.

The coals so stoked, we in the opposition find ourselves with diametrically opposed solutions.

Predictably, like the Intolerant Puritans of history some of them call for a "return" to God, meaning a Christian, Homo-hating, public-services ending God.

Jesus has no analogue to these Bible-thumping religious revisionists and their vicious attack on the poor, civil liberties, women, lgbtq's, but Jesus is no more than a mascot to them.

Others of us stubbornly refuse to drink the Kool-Aid and refuse to give Obama a long "give-him-time" leash when we would never have stomached doing so for Bush II. We continue to believe a radical leftist shift must take place, and it will not be provided by Goldman-Sachs, the military industry, or private health-care corporations.

I shudder when I think of them over there watching our drones drop into their neighborhoods, being assaulted in my name, and how they must see me and us, having the luxury to ponder these ideas in safety, suffering only from writer's block, while I can still feed myself.

I shudder at my complicity and the bull's eye that places on me.

My articles with the Examiner never seemed to reach any more readers than my pamphlet, My Socialism, did when it was first published six years ago. I not only missed a growing number of readers but also more to my dilemma the catalyst that comes from a communal give and take, honing and perfecting one's radical agenda, and building some kind of momentum.

I was sending out my warrior cries into a proverbial Black Hole.

And so, in wanting to remain relevant agent of social change, my mind had to look elsewhere. The Examiner column suffers. But my soul continues to witness!

With a nod to Derrick Jensen, whose "Endgame [Vol 1]" I'm reading right now, I'd like to share a few premises that under gird where I am going while I am not writing an Examiner column.

1. The United States is not a democracy.

2. For the last two generations at least, the United States' main product has been War and the stuff and collateral damage of war - that is, weaponry on the one hand and killing on the other.

3. Our public schools have always been apprentice factories, first, to keep the young out of the shrinking, industrial labor market, second, to "graduate" them as servile workers to the system [see premise #2] - these servile workers can just as easily be graduate students and professors as they can blue-collar workers.

4. Our masters care as much for the health of the modern wage-slaving family as we did their African chattel slave forbears.

This war machine is not only in obvious places, like the drones Obama drops and murders civilians in a search for untried "terrorists," but also less obvious places like the private contractor industry and the security industry we see on the borders and at US airports, where our taxes go to pay for huge staffs of officers and agents, and cities upon cities of managers who literally rose from no where and do nothing, not to forget the massive dollars put into shoddy, expensive equipment.

And that is the point - not that anyone should really be doing anything or the machines perform at the caliber of their worth: No. The point of this mechanism is to keep the defense industry - war - thoroughly funded.

Whether Reagan's Star Wars would work or not is irrelevant, the point is to divert domestic resources to Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Northrup, Raytheon, General Dynamics, etc.

If there is any Welfare Queen pulling up in a limo to collect her checks, it is our defense industry.
And sacrificed in this devilish deal are our public schools, our community hospitals, universal, single-payer health care, infrastructure, mass transit to keep cars off the streets and lessen the depletion of finite fossil fuels and the pollution of our air and water.

By the way, while I am rambling: a word about "terrorists". The other day a favored presidential candidate in Brasil who used to be a Marxist resistance fighter reminded me of the West's history with so-called terrorists: Cheddi and Janet Jagan in Guyana, run out of office in the 50's by the British Queen for being Marxists only to return. Ghandi vilified then feted. Nelson Mandela, whose ANC party was forbidden to set foot on US soil because Reagan and Thatcher had declared them all terrorists while they supported apartheid South Africa. Yasser Arafat of the PLO.

Of course every African freedom fighter against colonialism was a terrorist until the West found it could fight no more and had to sit down with them as diplomats.

I promise you, as history is my witness, if the West can find a way to increase its quarterly profits by making a deal with Osama bin Laden, you will see him given a honorary knighthood by the same British Queen who gave one to Robert Mugabe, and a Congressional Medal from the US, and in the wake of Nobel Laureate Obama lowering that bar, he/she will probably get a Peace Prize to ice the cake.

Principally the collective we do not fight these domestic crimes against the people because of what we've been taught.

Education is a big part of this. Despite the phenomenon of the last generation to make "reforms" to education this is misleading. Remember, first, this reform was started by that right wing radical, Ronald Reagan, who should not be regarded in any case as an individual at all but rather a conglomeration of the ideology of the industrial feudal system, no better than a GE spokesman dutifully reading their script, citing their numbers, signing their bills. Recall he aimed to shut down the US Dept of Education.

Pedagogists call our system the Factory System. Most of us don't know what that means, but we have only to look at our own public school experience: how the desks were lined up in rows with the all-masterful teacher at the head, the bells signaling when to come and go, when to eat, when not to eat, no chewing gum, how we were ordered about even on our "free" time between classes, recesses, and lunch breaks.

This was raw preparation for us to punch in, shut up, submit to drug testing and background checks, and perform like trained dogs for our managers ... or suffer the punishment.

Most of our current arrangements are coerced, and they have been coerced for so long and made to seem normal by our servile parents and teachers that we don't see it. We don't even recognize that we have been moved into strategic hamlets - a classic war aim to control populations - by urbanization. Now, almost all of our needs must be bought or rented through state or state-sanctioned, private mechanisms. Our shelter, our food, our water: everything is bought.

Critical-thinking skills (CTS), lauded by right wing education reformists, is an anathema to the preservation of this system, which requires unquestioned conformity. CTS is not any more wanted of our school kids than it is in our work force or in the public square.

What the system wants - has always wanted - is obedience, not democratic control.

What the establishment has argued for as CTS is actually its polar opposite, a response to the perceived threat of late-1960's/1970's radicalism. They don't want us to examine the system at all.

This radicalism came from the communities, the schools who ceased to swallow the Official Myths of the US moral mission and began to see the bloody, anti-human policies of Western governments and the corporations which run them.

To right wing reformists, this radical critique is showing a lack of CTS.

This radicalism was marginalized as "unrealistic," but it was really deemed a threat, and it had to be doused. Hence the war on schools in particular, public services in general.

As servile cogs, we know daily our managers are a real threat to us, are derelict at worst, incompetent at best. We know we can run our workplaces much better, with much better ideas. But we do nothing to further this because of our training, usually enforced by our own parents/guardians who told us to "Obey our teachers".

The state is, as has been said for some time, a power center. Ours happens to be in power for a mercantile system that was perfectly fine buying and selling humans as slaves, starving millions to boost profit margins, throwing whole populations off the lands of their ancestors, or looting the pockets of the poor to enrich corporations that will go around the world for a cheaper slave to oppress.

In fact, the state still condones slavery for the benefit of its profiteers, and liberals continue to rationalize migrant, undocumented, non-unionized farm workers as necessary for US food production, a fact which should be quite disturbing and as revealing as our thirst for cheap, designer clothing from south Asian sweatshops.

How many slaves do you yourself own?

To preserve this system the state must make unthinkable [enter austerity measures], if not criminal [widening prison population], if not blasphemous [enter God], the need of public services, workers' rights, and the necessity to abolish poverty and accumulated wealth.


Our own interests must be made the enemy, our masters' interests our salvation. No wonder we are depressed.

In education the aim cannot yet be the total abolition of schools. But to free students from the instruction of [progressive] teachers the state intervenes by, first, mandating standards [like, teach the US Constitution], second, dictating curriculum [No Child Left Behind], and, lately, under the Drone Dropper himself: his "Race to the Top", mandate funding modalities, union busting, and teacher firings.

This is to produce compliant, ready-to-work industrial slaves who will work, shut up, or be locked up.

But we have always resisted this, and I had hoped my Examiner column would contribute to this resistance, open some minds, stir some hearts. I am a fellow traveller of socialism and anarchism, because they are rational arrangements.

Our current arrangement is not rational. Can a family run itself on capitalist principles, starving a child or two to increase "disposable income"? Then why would a community? Is locking down the border with more federal agents more valuable than a teacher or doctor? Then why do we tolerate this?

Herds of animals are rendered extinct as they fall prey to this war since they cannot fight back (but Nature does). Families and communities struggle more and more to survive a similar extinction, and often do not succeed.

You can see signs of this insurgent urge to resist throughout human history. The tension between our freedom to care for ourselves and each other and the master's goal to have us farm or weld or dig for the lowest fee, not care when our brothers and sisters are starved out of their lives, and convince us this arrangement is natural.

We've always known in our hearts it is not natural, and there are ample examples in human history that show this. As the rebels of the 17th century English republic demanded, they wanted neither Parliament, King, or Military to rule over them (so the ruling classes response was to bring back the monarchy as the one institution inaccessible to the people).

Ultimately, my Examiner column aside, we must lose faith in this system of Parliaments, kings, and militaries if we ever want a truly just society.

Since I can get married now, I need to find a suitable gay husband. Any applicants?

This afternoon, a US federal judge, Vaughn Walker, overturned the will of 52% of the California electorate who wanted to deny LGBTQ's the right of matrimony. Now that marriage rights are more inevitable than yesterday, I supposed I should start designing the invitations, fully disclosing [sort of!] who I am, and setting some musts and cannots, like I told that sexy Virgin Airways flight attendant: we must have collies. He can pick the curtains.

I still argue that a good chunk of that 52% misfired, thinking a YES vote on the bigoted California Proposition 8 was a YES vote for equality.

Opponents of LGBT marriage are rebutting the ruling calling for the democratic process to decide this, not the court.

When will the 72% who wanted single-payer, universal health care get a vote, or the 75%-80% who oppose the US slaughters in Afghanistan and Iraq [to leave it there for the moment] cast their ballots? Funny how and when the democratic process is trotted out and when it is mysteriously shut away in an attic.

Nevertheless, it's time for me to come in from the cold of my non-support of LGBT marriage, first revealed in print in the editorial pages of the San Francisco Chronicle - to the utter bafflement of my straight and LGBT coworkers in the San Francisco Unified School District.

In the wake of today's federal ruling, I am submitting an "I do."

But who will join me at the altar? To marry I need a potential husband, the match made in online Heaven.

I don't have much money in the bank. I am employed for now, and I am one of those wage-slaves who waits eagerly for that next paycheck.

I have no stock portfolio. I own no property per se. I do own many, many volumes of journals kept since April 1983, but I plan to give them to my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis [if they will take them]. But maybe my husband can retain part of the rights, so should I die famous, he might be able to pay the light bill.

My spiritual artifacts are, by longstanding custom, to be allocated elsewhere.

My husband can have my books, but I think they'd be much more useful in an urban or rural library where some kid can go an immerse himself in the fantasy world of books, as I did.

I can't put you on my current health care policy because my employer, the US federal government, won't recognize you.

My temperament is my own. I am a cross between the sassy gay friend and a Noam Chomsky, an oily-watery mix, which might explain why I am still single.

If my husband cannot swim, he must be able to navigate a canoe so he can be my paddler during my ocean races, like the Seal Beach Rough water Race, which I will conquer next year.

Like I said, he must like collies. I don't have one, but I will give one to myself as a wedding present. She will join us on our honeymoon. If he is thinking of some resort, like Sandals or ClubMed, staffed by wage-slaves, think again: imagine instead a week of camping in a big tent, near a big body of water, warming ourselves under the sun, camp fires, and each other.

When this collie wants to sleep at the foot of my bed or next to me, the husband will have to sleep in his bed. Oh, yeah. It's best if he has his own bedroom. I'm told I talk in my sleep, long rambling stuff.

I am moody, definitely a glass-half-full kind of guy, full of pessimism about myself, optimism about children, suspicion for my fellow man. The dog will understand all of this. Consider the dog the Other Woman: learn something from her. Sometimes I am truly Garboesque and want to sit alone. Other times, not just when I sleep, I am relentless in my prattle and need to process everything. Dogs get that. They will just lay on the couch next to me, sprawl themselves at my feet, or find something more interesting to do than hang under my shadow.

Why bother with the nuptials? Well, obviously this is an important, critical issue or the LGBT Establishment would not have gone deaf and dumb on the AIDS and national health issue, LGBTQ's in low-wage jobs without worker rights, and the increase in housing and food insecurity - in short, the class war.

The ACLU's lesbian/gay activism would not have been reduced to the singular LGBT marriage rights were this not the most vital issue facing us.

I guess marriage equality will bring class equality, gender parity, an end to racism, an economic justice. Will US Judge Walker rule that the permanent underclass do not conform with the US Constitution? Is that the next domino to fall?

We must be living in a post-classist, post-poverty as well as a post Obama-racial epoch indeed.

So given this importance, I throw in the bouquet to the next insurgent to wail alone in the darkness, and I will walk down a sunflower strewn path with my husband and under the approving eyes of the conformists.

But who will submit to whom if my husband is a Southern Baptist?

In lieu of gifts to the newlyweds, please make a generous donation to Earth First, Diana Nyad's Extreme Dream Swim, The Humane Society, AIDS Project LA, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

Strategic Hamlets: a tool in class warfare

A rather self-righteous friend called me into question because of my government job, saying that I was part of the System and not really against it. In some liberal and progressive minds and nonconformist minds there actually exists a chasm passed which the true at heart have not crossed. The line of this chasm is arbitrary, depending upon where one's leftistism is, but it holds certain occupations up to strict scrutiny and places others on the Right Side.

I schooled my self-righteous friend that while it was important to have personal tastes as to what profession you are suited to, and to be aware of the consequences of one's moral actions, the idea that certain jobs lay outside scrutiny while others are reproachable is not of the real world we live in: and I mean the state capitalist world of wage-slavery - where we are all wage-slaves.

Every enterprise that involves the exchange of the official currency - from drug dealing, online porn, and prostituting to public school teacher, faux counselor at the "community" nonprofit to police officer on the beat to the soldier in the foreign field - is part of the same universe that is our moral conundrum. It is part of the same moral conundrum for the simple reason it involves the exchanging of the official currency.

Don't be misled by the ragings of the left and right on the Congressional floor or your local pulpit that certain things in our universe are beyond the pale. Look closer.

The problem is that many on the left or right look at the official currency only as an economic tool, much like a means of bartering, without any moral weight to it. It might me. The official currency is viewed simply a means to pay rent, buy underwear, pay your utilities.

But the official currency of the state is also a political tool to shape public choices and form a public consciousness. This is the point missing from a lot of analyses and my friend's unexamined moralizing.

The official currency is not only a means to purchase things. Currency is much more than that. An official currency is also a means to construct choices, to narrow those choices, to limit our liberty. It is a system of reward for falling in line as it is a punishment for those who do not.

To illustrate with two examples: how the West created Strategic Hamlets in its imperial conquests.

The British classically took over territory in Africa during what is ominously called in our modern textbooks as "The Age of Exploration" by creating these strategic hamlets to get the natives to work.

Because the native African population wouldn't willingly work for their aspiring conquerors, Britain used its military might and expropriated the best lands. They told the natives they were welcome to stay on expropriated lands if they paid rent. Rent had to be paid in the official currency of Britain. The only way to get this currency would be to earn it by working for Britain. That work was strictly defined not to benefit the local communities but rather for the British Crown: the Empire. We know the history: mines, fields, etc., all commodities for export. Naturally and intentionally, this altered these African societies, the fallout of which we still see today.

The US acted no better in its attempt to stop dominoes from falling in Southeast Asia.

When rural workers in Vietnam tended to support the nationalist, insurgent Viet Cong, the US response was for the Kennedy administration - to the silence of the US population [unimaginable today] - to launch a bombing, napalming, and crop eradicating campaign on the peasantry. This had the desired effect of not only slaughtering many men, women, and children civilians but also driving the survivors into the cities, into strategic hamlets, where they became dependent on the US puppet regime for their every need.

We all live in strategic hamlets where through an employment system and a propaganda model we are strictly tamed into certain behaviors. Better if our views fall in line, but this is not important: sit home and admonish the government all you like as long as you display obedience to the System.

The strategic hamlet of our urban centers are tools of an equally onerous class war, and our choices may seem broad but they are actually very narrow.

Who has access to greater amounts of currency and who has access to none is a political decision. Our urban centers - even the great ones, like New York City, Seattle, and San Francisco - liberal they may seem, are not immune. They are highly designed, highly disciplined machines, and we are no more than factory workers.

In fact, these urban metropolises are more critically disciplined than the rural Wyoming prarie, which might be why one sees a different kind of insurgence from outside the urban centers than from within.

So my self-righteous friend who labors at an urban nonprofit, to put it coarsely, may be doing good work. But he is not working for the Taliban or Weather Underground or the Black Panthers or the Revolutionary Communist Party, and this is not an error. Whether my friend knows it or not, that nonprofit is proscribed from certain behaviors and encouraged in others. It's part of the same moral conundrum.

AIDS Politics and Why HIV deterrents don't work except to fill jails and fund big pharmaceuticals

In Seattle, WA., Oliver Moreno, a male prostitute, has been arrested for knowingly spreading HIV to tricks who hired him and exposing them to the virus that causes AIDS. Reportedly, the tricks asked Moreno if he was "clean," and Moreno replied he was.

In a country that festishizes making crimes out of any and everything for reasons that need intense discussion, I guess it is not surprising that HIV should become a crime to feed our prison industry. It's perfect. It is a disease believed to haunt gay men, whom the country is kept at constant unease about because we are trying to destroy Marriage and disrupt its combat forces. So, yes: if you can no longer jail them for being queer, HIV works perfectly well.

And, there are always prisons and jails to be filled somewhere in this decadent country.

Additionally, the continued spread of HIV almost 30 years after it emerged as a gay cancer is baffling. It is only equally baffling to the scientific community's paltry offerings in response. (This is not meant to indict the many doctors, nurses, health clinic workers, sex workers, and researchers who want to see an end to this epidemic, but the initial direction HIV research was driven unilaterally is also up for intense discussion).

An online contact, a fellow gay man equally concerned about the continued spread overall and among gay men asks: "Why do you think HIV prevention efforts failed so miserably?"

The answers are multi-tiered and refute some common assumptions and myths about HIV/AIDS prevention. It is worth summarizing.

For one, "HIV prevention efforts"assumes it has been the intent to stave off the spread of HIV. I am old enough to remember that US President Ronald Reagan never spoke of it, and given the proportion infected given our supposed 7% of the population, there was very, very little hue and cry, even from liberal circles. People were simply allowed to die.

My alma mater, Washington Univ [St Louis] was the second university in the country to install condom machines in the bathrooms throughout the campus. This was 1986 or so. It caused an uproar from predictable circles, and quietly the machines were removed. Again: 1986, almost 10 years before the miraculous "retrovirals" when many gay men went from infection to death in a matter of months. 1986, when death came quickly. And who cared?

Second, it was controversially the main aim of the HIV/AIDS activists - AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) - to bring more and more medicines in the pipeline. This demand was not unreasonable, but it did not go without criticism from the ranks of activists (and many in the scientific community).

I joined Queer Nation/San Francisco in 1990. ACT UP/SF was already huge, and our QN meetings got up to 500 lgbtq's. A vocal minority of us questioned the reasonableness of asking for a Marshall Plan of MEDICATIONS for HIV rather than look at sociological factors, like poverty and employment, as some pointed to how and where this plague seemed to be fast spreading. We were frightened this was some social purification scheme, given Reagan's silence. Given the values of our establishment, how could we be wrong? And we were ignored. Meds make money. Poverty costs. There are many, global examples of this paradigm, including in Central Africa, were old diseases aren't profitable. AIDS, Inc., is.

Third, the sex message has continuously been nuanced from one dimensional to flat, but it is still a message to a marginalized community. Marginalized communities are historically removed from humanity even by liberal circles and expected to make water into wine, rouse themselves from deep poverty and get on their bicycles to find jobs [as one Thatcher crony dictated] as if we function in some Twilight Zone awaiting white papers and health department edicts to inspire us.

In the real world, look at anti-drug, anti-early pregnancy, anti-std campaigns and see where they have succeeded and failed and emerges a pattern a high school student could discern. Our establishment will not.

Where there is affluence, where there is a perceivable pathway "up" behaviors can be [self-]modified. This is usually, but not always, among whites with obvious exceptions. Anti-early pregnancy campaigns, for example, have worked best when women were given access to higher education, equal employment, Title IX, and breaking the glass ceilings: they themselves will hold off having children [and marrying or not] later (and I am not at all saying marriage/single motherhood is a good or bad thing, just stating what I understand to be the facts).

Nevertheless, the early "Safe Sex" message to gay men was on par with JUST SAY NO, a harsh command you'd give to a farm animal. Not to accept in full this message drew any respectable gay man into question. The harshness of the message was observed by HIV activists. We protested the framing of this message and were accused of making excuses for "reckless behavior", etc. We stated this message would never - and has never - been directed at straight men.

At some point in the mid-90's the medical community got less myopic, and "safer" sex was born. It was a far cry from the Safe Sex message from my doctor telling me to use a plastic sandwich bag on my partner and to keep my tongue in my mouth when kissing [1989].

"Safer" sex still ignores the human impulse and social conditions we urged be attended. So, predictably, HIV is reportedly fast growing among women of color, and gay men of color: marginalized communities within a marginalized community. Should this really be a surprise? What other indices do we know about these - our! - communities? And why are these indices ignored from my beginnings with Queer Nation to this hour?

I "know" exactly who Oliver Moreno is. He is an un-/under-employed queer of color whose had little or very poor schooling and is only meant to be a source of cheap labor for or capitalist economy. He can rent his body picking grapes, stocking a shelf at Wal-Mart, or turning a trick.

The men who believed he was "clean" are the same men who believe he is a loyal Wal-Mart associate.

AIDS Wiki & Celia Farber * Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science * HIV treatment response and prognosis ... * Peter Duesberg

The Nation-State is a plague on all our houses*

"What would ultimately be necessary would be a breakdown of the nation-state system - because I think that's not a viable system. It's not necessarily the natural form of human organization; in fact, it's a European invention pretty much. The modern nation-state system basically developed in Europe since the medieval period, and it was extremely difficult for it to develop: Europe has a very bloody history, and extremely savage and bloody history, with constant massive wars and so on, and that was all part of an effort to establish the nation-state system. It has virtually no relation to the way people live, or to their association, or anything else particularly, so it had to be established by force. And it was established by centuries of bloody warfare. That warfare ended in 1945 - and the only reason it ended is because the next war was going to destroy everything. [1]

"The capitalist or bourgeois class is no longer capable of guiding the uninhibited development of science and technology - again because these objectives now clash with the profit motive. Capitalism has proved incapable of transcending fundamental weaknesses such as under-utilization of productive capacity, the persistence of a permanent sector of unemployed, and periodic economic crises related to the concept of "market" - which is concerned with people's ability to pay rather than their need for commodities. Capitalism has created its own irrationalities, such as vicious white racism, the tremendous waste associated with advertising, and the irrationality of incredible poverty in the midst of wealth and wastage even inside the biggest capitalist economies, such as the United States of America [2]

"The nation-state system was exported to the rest of the world through European colonization. Europeans were barbarians basically, savages: very advanced technologically, and advanced in methods of warfare, but not culturally or anything else particularly. And when they spread over the rest of the world, it was like a plague - they just destroyed everything in front of them. They fought differently, they fought much more brutally, they had better technology - and they essentially wiped everything else out. [1]

"The American continent's a good example. How come everybody around here has a white face, and not a red face? Well, it's because the people with white faces were savages, and they killed the people with red faces. When the British and other colonists came to this continent, they simply destroyed everything - and pretty much the same thing happened everywhere else in the world.

"Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed he island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor. [3]

"Now from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals."

"So the process of colonization was extraordinarily destructive, and it in turn imposed the European nation-state system on the world, kind of a reflection of internal European society, which of course was extremely hierarchical and unequal and brutal. And if that system continues, I suppose it will continue to be hierarchical and unequal and brutal. [1]

"Europeans used the superiority of their ships and cannons to gain control of all the world's waterways, starting with the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of North Africa. From 1415, when the Portuguese captured Ceuta, near Gibbraltar, they maintained the offensive against the Maghreb. Within the next sixty years, they seized ports such as Arzila, El-Ksar-es-Seghir, and Tangier, and fortified them. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguse controlled the Atlantic coast of Morocco and used its economic and strategic advantages to prepare for further navigations which eventually carried their ships round the Capeof Good Hope in 1495. After reaching the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese sought with some success to replace Arabs as the merchants who tied East Africa to India and the rest of Asia. I the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Portuguese carried most of the East African ivory which was marketed in India; while Indian cloth and beads were sold in East and West Africa by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French. The same applied to cowry shells fro the East Indies. Therefore, by control of the seas, Europe took the first steps towards transforming the several parts of the Africa and Asia into economic satellites." [2]

[All the text in this submission are by the authors listed, not by me. During a recent swim workout I literally conceived this theme and assembled this conversation between these great thinkers - LBD]

[1] Noam Chomsky. Understanding Power. The New Press, 2002

[2] Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press, 1972

[3] Howard Zinn. A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. HarperCollins, 1980

Why is BP spill being called the biggest environmental disaster? It's not by a long shot

It was announced this morning on NPR radio that the British Petroleum (BP, the corporation formerly known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company) oil "spill" was the biggest environmental disaster in history, surpassing the Exxon Valdez crack-up of March 1989.

But you have to really be a good, disciplined student of government and corporate propaganda to believe this obvious overstatement. Really, the biggest disaster in history?

Funny, because most moderate apologists are usually more critical of official facts in other matters. Take racism and colonialism. If I mention the unprecedented horrors of the African slave trade, forced migration, a multi-generational holocaust, cultural genocide, many moderate liberals will attempt the balance the historical record with the Jewish holocaust, the Armenian genocide, East Africa, My Lai, Stalin ... Rightly or wrongly, they will bring these other crimes in, unknowingly acknowledging a norm that would disturb keep a child up at night.

With BP's "spill" [spill? this is not an "oops" moment], our mainstream narrative is far less critical, which is surprising.

The narrative waxes articulately about fines against BP, lack of technology, corporate responsibility, criminal charges. Good points, all, but BP (formerly known as the rogue corporation which backed the coup against a democratically elected president in Iran, 1953) is merely a minor symptom of a larger chronic disease.

Because while the world's attention is on the Gulf, the wetlands, the bird refuges, the end of the fishing industry in an area just devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the air continues to be polluted, the climate continues to warm with carbon and methane emissions, the polar ice caps continue melting.

And where is the urgency for global smog alerts? Where is the play by play, up-to-the minute coverage on increased lung-choking particulates in the air? Where are the news agencies who have hired experts to look at the "spill" and confirm it's greater than what BP has suggested (BP, the corporation which with CIA support returned the ogre Shah of Iran to his country to cancel all democratic reforms and make lucrative deals)?

The narrative has been disciplined by the corporate line. The lawyers may also remember what happened to poor Oprah and her hamburger fiasco.

This bigger global catastrophe of what is benignly called Global Warming has become virtual background noise, barely noticed anymore, like the US war crimes in the Middle East, Guantanmo prison, its occupations of Afghanistan, drone bombing of Pakistan, pacification of Iraq, and always, always its utilization of Israel as its mercenary.

The larger threat that is arguably linked to many of our industrial-age ailments is overshadowed by the current militarization of the US/Mexican border, not because Nicaragua has threatened to invade, as Reagan once lied to beef up defense spending; and not because immigrants from Mexico are staging uprisings and pillaging their new homes, but rather because a sad majority of Americans have turned their wrath over or economic chaos on poor, migrant [brown] workers and not on the atrocious capitalist nation-state.

So while dust ups go on here and there, our lungs are slowly starved of oxygen, particulates will fill the air, our major corporations will leech toxins into their products, rain forests felled, honey bees grow extinct, ... and, yes, it IS a spill in the Gulf that has us in a convulsion.

If we could turn the persistent air pollution into an oil slick, it would cover much of the world, but we've been diverted to a horrendous accident in the Gulf but not nearly as catastrophic.

The Gulf is a spill of a microcosm - environmental damages, localities ill affected, wildlife killed, waters poisoned, lack of preparedness, a nation underprepared to deal with the Frankenstein monster of its own making, etc - of what is happening all over the world.

Radical Communities

Nina Simone was once quoted as lamenting the civil rights movement of the 1960's warped into disco in the 1970's. The quote may be false, the observation is very reasonable. This weekend Long Beach hosts the second in the country's LGBT Pride celebrations, following Las Vegas, and preceding by a few weeks those in Los Angeles and San Francisco, which will mark its 40th.

Has the Stonewall Riot of 1969 warped into a weekend of commercial booths, non-profit outreach, and lots of men and women dancing to Martha Wash?

From one view, we do not in fact have any progressive or radical institutions to turn to. Those the LGBT community does have are fine, middle-of-the-mainstream-road agencies. They seem singularly focused on gaining marriage equality. The Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU, and many local state groups and LGBT centers have doggedly pursued this civil right. And it is a civil right as long as the state makes it available to some and not to others.

But from another point of view, Simone's observation misses the motives of governments who rightly want to diffuse the growing assault against it by large sectors of its populations. These growing assaults persist, in fact, to this hour. Not only in turbulent Greece but also in the UK, where a coalition government seeks to perpetuate itself in power for five fixed years, or in Spain whose socialist prime minister is instituting austerity measures against popular demand. In the US it continues to rebuff the popular will - be it in health care reform or foreign, costly wars - for what the establishment want.

Our rhetoric often confuses the governments' desires, which have become further anti-democratic, against that of the populations, which support social programs and an end to Mideast wars and occupations.

This not-so-new trend against the people became clearest to me when poll after poll in the UK showed its citizens resolute in their opposition to US-led wars in Afghanistan and toppling Iraq and the quagmire that followed: yet, this had little effect on the members of Parliament whose support is directly connected to the government of the day. Tony Blair and his government should have fallen, and he didn't. Gordon Brown should never have succeeded him, but he did.

As the queen herself is accurately quoted saying "there are forces in this country about which you do not know."

Indeed, not only is the ruling class obscured but also our radical histories are hidden to us, and from us. In most Western industrialized countries you can go as close as your local library and discover the radical roots within the LGBT, Black, Latino/Chicano, Asian, Native American, and women's movements. But you will scarcely see evidence of them at Pride celebrations.

Quiz yourself now, and ask what you know of them? Do you know that Harry Hay, the founder of the first gay rights organization modelled the Mattachine Society from his organizing work with the Communist Party USA? Hay was a lifelong communist radical, and when he saw the Simone's proverbial Disco set in, he balked, critiqued, and was ridiculed into silence. So he went off and formed the Radical Faeries.

Did you know that Rosa Parks, despite that horrid mythology of the seamstress who refused to give up her seat was trained as a labor organizer by the communist party at the Highlander School in Tennessee? She then became executive secretary of the NAACP and organized to end segregation on buses.

These labor organizers and their communist, socialist, and anarchist backers were virtually liquidated by the US government. Interestingly, as a young college student, US Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, wrote her senior thesis on the eradication of the socialists from New York City in the 1930's.

Carrots and sticks being what they are, succeeding generations may have felt a natural sense that something is not quite right, but they had few in the community to learn from. The radicals had either been killed, had gone underground, or had been thoroughly house-broken.

The Black community offers two interesting worlds.

On the one hand, we have the narrative of Blacks migrating north, as if this were the most natural thing to do. But a hundred years ago, while the US government condoned Jim Crow brutality in the South, it encouraged strike breaking in the north. Northern labor organizers were winning rights in factory after factory, again with no small help from the US Communist Party. The bosses lured cheap, Southern, Black labor north to break these newly formed unions in the exact same way cheap labor from across the "border" is lured in to lower wages and keep labor organizers firmly in check.

Yet at the same time Blacks were used as scabs, other Blacks like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, Rosa Parks, Richard Wright, and Angela Davis organized with the Communist Party USA to build broad coalitions and win labor rights for all workers.

If you attend any of the Pride celebrations this spring and summer, you won't see any of the radical history behind that movement. Harry Hay was ostracized until he was near death, and, of course after death he may be listed here and there as an icon. But I remember when this man was vilified by the LGBT press.

While it is progress in itself that gay men and lesbians can come out in the open, dance, cruise, and have fun without the local police rounding them up as they did as recently as the 1970's. That's real, measurable progress that must be appreciated.

But despite the hard organizing work done by our predecessors, I daresay the achievement of being able to dance under the golden sun reflects the limited goal of the Closeted and the Conformist. They would not join Harry Hay and the activists-organizers but remained in the shadows in fear of being exposed. Their limited agenda of simple assimilation, ironically, seems to have won the day: they've become a commodity along with the other commodities our capitalist economy nurtures.

It's about your income, your wealth, your disposable income. So when new ground began to be broken for LGBT's in the early 1990's it was framed as a community with buying power: we were young, we had no children, we had money.

But like any community, this misses the vast majority - as vast as those European populations no longer represented by their governments. That LGBT majority is forced into wage-slavery, low income, no health care, housing issues and sees a leadership advocating marriage equality and not housing rights, the enumerable benefits to marriage and not worker empowerment, stories about partners denied inheritance benefits not guaranteed single-payer, universal health care for all.

No doubt as I write this, there are other radical LGBT writing and organizing, but who has time for that when there's a party?

Priorities: a union movement first, a union second, eliminate the bosses and managers third

The recent withdrawal of Robert Harding's name to head the US Transportation Security Administration [TSA] is the second Obama nominee to fail to win Senate confirmation for this post. While news reports point to dealings Harding had had as a contractor in Iraq, the untold story is the working conditions at TSA itself due in large part to its lacking a union.

Both of Obama's nominees to head the agency openly supported TSA officers having the collective-bargaining rights every other federal employee has, and this support made their appointment "controversial."

But the conflict "on the front lines" is muted completely.

But why would it be otherwise? Our newspapers of record do not record the shenanigans of managers at Home Depot or Starbucks, toward retail workers, agricultural workers, or hotel employees as worthy to cover. Our newspapers have "Business" but no "Labor" section. Those workers are speaking for themselves without the papers.

Why would they care about TSA officers?

The uproar in progressive circles should be that a federal work force has been created out of the neo-liberal globalization nightmare of powerful, unaccountable managers, bloated executive staffs, and a work farm of laborers.

This cannot be the wave of the future. The establishment of TSA without union rights is a huge step back from the ultimate goal of a labor struggle. That is comes from the federal government sets an alarming tone for all workers.

The dilemma might be that too many of those disgruntled and disaffected workers are conscious of the mythic power of a Union, but they themelves do not perceive their role in making that myth a reality.

Several months ago, a coworker asked me how tiny Europe could have conquered landmasses as great as Africa, the Asian subcontinent, and the Americas.

I replied with a Question: how do the manager class, the Bosses, who are few, conquer the masses of workers under them, who are a multitude?

Find the answer to that, and you may understand how Queen Victoria colored a quarter of the earth red under her empire.

Another dilemma is enough of that multitude value organizing collectively ... but only in the abstract, they make demands of the Bosses ... but only to each other.

But are enough willing to stage an insurrection to make it happen?

Insurrection can come in many, many forms and does not necessarily point to violence in the popular sense. Insurrection is persistent challenges to their abuses. That can be very disruptive. It is the bricks and mortar of a union movement.

But the insurrection can only come when the nature of the relationship between me the worker and them the bosses is understood.

The union itself must come second to this understanding, which is about class consciousness. It is understanding that in our current arrangement workers are reduced to the merest pawn to be told when to sleep, when to wake, when to labor, and when to break ... and knowing how coarsely degrading this has to be on that multitude of humanity who must work for wages.

Ultimately, the Union must not stop with gaining marginal reforms within a system that still dictates our comings and goings by "operational needs."

Ultimately, the Union must run and operate the factory, the business, be it Starbucks or The Home Depot, or the vital work done by the TSA officers.

Ultimately the workers are their own boss, as it should be.

As it stands, two unions are vying for TSA officer support, the hefty American Federation of Government Employees and the leaner National Transportation Employees Union. They both do good work; and they are both mediocrities, too. They have saved many officers' jobs. But they also often look like the marketing battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

These two unions are essentially conservative, not having the ultimate goals I list but rather gaining a Contract and promising more Money within a system that still dictates and is only less arbitrary. TSA officers would still be cattle, albeit Jersey cows perhaps.

It will be a cloudy day in Hell when, in our present state of docility, a union is provided TSA officers, and they won't know what the Hell to do with it ... except, of course, pay dues.

The last thing workers need is another oppressive, flashy institution that takes our money under the guise of helping us.

I don't know who said it first, but it's true that a union is only as good as its members, its rank and file.

If those members don't see the necessity of throwing the proverbial Molotov cocktail at the proverbial edifice, workers will have another worthless institution to awe, then grow cynical of, but the dues will be paid just as surely as the IRS will get its money.

May Day approaches. I suggest in honor of the Haymarket Massacre that won labor rights we make that day alternatively "Kick your Boss in the Ass Day 2010."

Obama DADT reform tells LGBT servicemembers to shut up and stay in the closet

Our Goldman Sachs liberal president has done his ObamaCare victory one better. After handing over a captive market of unruly customers to the private insurance companies and calling it reform, he has handed the gay bashing baseball bat up the military's chain of the command to higher ranking generals to beat openly LGBT service members out of the armed forces.

Some of my leftist comrades opposed ObamaCare for what it is: a boon for corporate health and Wall Street and the promise of a future invoice to Main Street, a bill we do not know they can afford where "access" and "cannot be denied" means I must sell you this bridge: please, pay promptly!

Other of my leftist comrades drank the Kool-Aid and supported it, urging that it was not perfect, that it's just a start. After tens of thousands drop dead for want of care and unable to afford it even when insurance companies can't deny them I wonder what we will start.

I am a Black gay man, and know about the Go-Slow smoke of Southern liberals when the civil rights/slave insurrection movement got too hot.

Famous friends of the "Negro" urged a steady pace, incrementalism, which allowed the Black population to be depicted as either a dark threat to "our way of life" or the clownish wide-eyed buffoon to be scoffed - two figments of the same captive population.

I am a Black gay man who has not gotten yet with this Go Slow nonsense his 40 acres and a Mule but, it seems instead, a SuperFund site and a jackass.

Go Slowers are elitists who have disengaged themselves from the terrors of real working-class people, LGBT's, and racial minorities.

Obama has topped his victory of health care reform with his Defense Secretary Robert Gates tackling his promised opposition to Don't Ask Don't Tell. But like his maiming of old concept universal health care as a public option - the US ultimately makes everything into pornography - Obama is further maiming LGBT service members, the LGBT community, even those like me who find the military and marriage peculiar institutions that only a moth should fly in to.

Instead of some lower-ranked flunky outing a same gender-loving warrior, this outing will have to be certified (whatever that means), will have to come from something like a 4-star general.

Star Chamber, anyone? I guess the bashed, ousted LGBT service members will get a certificate with their dishonorable discharge.

The news so far is making much on the newly implemented restrictions, like, if you come out to your doctor that can't be used to bash you like a second-class citizen: well, how many doctors in the armed forces were opening their patient-doctor confidentiality agreements by outing their patients? I want to know because I suspect this is more ObamaSpeak: change-is-coming flourishes spliced into his TelePrompter.

This reform is reported as ending third-party outings: like, I know you're queer so I'm going to report you. This is benign twin of the I know you're a Terrorist so get thee to Guantanamo without a lawyer or trial.

This new reform reportedly limits being dismissed to being openly LGBT.

What?

This means, unlike our industrialized allies who have open lesbians and gays in their armed forces, LGBT's here still can't serve openly in the military. Hide your partners, letters, and get that sashay out of your march, girls.

In a country where Go Slow during the civil rights/slave insurrection meant unleash the fire hoses on women and children while Washington fiddled, where the public's overwhelming demand for the public option means enrich the insurance companies (where at the same time this week the US president defended the democratic aspirations of the Cuban people), while people die, reform of a bigoted policy means to tell LGBT service members to shut up, and shoot.

More Obama reform. Three years to go!