17 January 2010

If you are wondering where your child's teachers, counselors, and arts programs are look no further than the US federal police apparatus

When I was a kid growing up in 1970's California there was a popular myth after every tremor that California would one day fall into the Pacific Ocean. Child stuff, right? But I am snug in the midst of my adulthood, and the state has fulfilled our childhood prophecies, albeit metaphorically, economically.


How did this creature crumble? How did this lovely, promising swan defy evolution and turn into such an ugly duckling? So many metaphors to mix to note the abject failure of the state and ... as California goes, so goes the nation?


For example, at one time in my lifetime, California schools - I mean its public schools - rated top in the nation.


But the first pair of bookends to fell this mighty giant was 1978's Proposition 13. The second bookend is the Obama Administration's Secy of Education, Arne Duncan's Race to Dismantle Public Schools.

As Chicago educator Marva Collins said many times, it wasn't the Soviets who destroyed our schools, it was us ourselves.


Of course, our woes have much more breadth than the To Do List of this obviously mediocre president and the obvious intentions of the Democratic wing of our single Capitalist Party they dutifully serve.

We want universal health care: make us buy it from the private companies. We want marriage equality: send your federal lawyers to enforce Defense of Marriage Acts. We want troops out of Afghanistan: escalate, baby! Send those drones in and massacre more innocent men, women, and babies.

Workers, a forgotten but growing lot, still have no voice, but they do have sense. Some workers, like Dept of Homeland Security officers, cannot speak out at all and have only their obviously mediocre managers, deputies, gulags of executive staffs to drivel that there is no problem, that all is well, that we are giving the Homeland 110%: this prattle truly is a motif for workers' struggle in the United States.


What happened? It starts with the police state forming all around us, in full view ... well, sort of. The police state is forming to stop the inevitable disintegration of the Western, Christian leviathan [thank God!] but while other disgruntled thugs from the Dark Ages place incendiaries in their underwear [boxers or briefs?].

One Dark Age should not replace another.

Our Dark Age modern terrorism is documented, if only it be studied in the open air of a library or bookstore, versus the They-hate-us-because-we-are-Free line, which wouldn't even pass for a child's bedtime story.

Al Qaeda may not really exist, and I doubt that it does. There is real, valid anger from the Other Side of the world where the West drew a map and installed princes and potentates who have kept their populations under foot like any good Confederate slave master: keep them ignorant and unlearned and hungry.

But they themselves want those princes and potentates gone, and have pleaded to their sponsors [that would be the West] to cease and desist. Our response is to send in the soldiers, draw up No-Fly lists, and criminalize the colonial world [nothing new there].

It is too bad rather than watch the scaffolding of the police state go up and the dismantle of our public schools we could get these two Dark Age surrealists, East and West, in the Coliseum together to fight it out to the death. The survivor would be duly fed to those lovely Roman lions, and the world would be rid of that trash forever.

No such luck. Prospects are bleak. So while teachers all over the state of California will either be fired, face larger unmanageable classes and students loads, and made to run a federally sponsored three-legged race to Oblivion, our security services are a growth industry.

The Dept of Homeland Security has taken the wage of your local public school teacher and given it to a rabble who couldn't pass a Civics test, but they are watching you, and they are finding other places to watch you.

That BART policeman who shot in the back a passenger on the deck of the Fruitvale train station in Oakland, Ca., was nothing but a Tonton Macoute, and there are more inevitably to come as rabble is elevated to titled status to pry and prod into our lives.

14 January 2010

Haiti is not the latest Katrina, but Haiti predicted it by some 200 years

The US Marines are en route to earthquake-devastated Haiti where they will be greeted as liberators once again, saving the Haitian revolution by further destroying the society. The sound of the bugle is a carrion call for more destruction ahead.

One wonders looking at the grimmest press reports how this island nation hobbled on for so long since its liberating inception. But if you look at Haiti as a nation, you are under a delusion. It lies somewhere between Hell and a Napoleonic colony. One wonders where the infrastructure is to help the wide swathes of suffering that appear to be more and more unimaginable, but one wonders under this delusion.

Plantations do not have infrastructure. Plantations have laborers and tools, masters and guns to keep the two classes very much apart, thank you very much.

Haiti is not a state because it has never been allowed this dignity to match the indignity of driving out the powerful French, bankrupting the rogue Napoleon to such an extent he was forced to sell the middle section of what is now the United States of America. This indignity has been called a "pact with the devil" by that man-o-God, Pat Robertson, who is a terrorist to humanity.

My Haitian brothers and sisters, Haitian friends, its political class may be offended at my revelation, but it is not meant as an insult. Haiti waged a courageous and bold slave rebellion in 1804 and became a free republic, but the price of that freedom would drain the remaining survivors' blood into Western coffers.

The West - by which I mean the imperial West that had enslaved the island - would not recognize the independent Black republic for almost two generations, and only on the condition that it pay war reparations to imperial France.

There was no USSR to turn to in the late 1800's, no Hugo Chavez, not even a Taliban. Queen Victoria in the UK had a quarter of the globe under her; King Leopold of Belgium was creating his personal Hell in the Congo; and the US was solidifying its hold over the Western landmass and peering toward Asia. Independent Haiti was forced to submit to Treaty of Versailles principles.

Ladies and gentleman: I give you Christian civilization in spades!

By submitting to this demand, Haiti would never be able to develop itself and so was continuously at the mercy of foreign intrigue on the one hand, domestic unrest on the other. It would remain a plantation with a class of degenerates given princely titles and no power except to kill.

We in the US know well how intriguing US foreign policy can be and how domestic unrest is best handled: the US Marines, installing a thug, like Papa Doc Duvalier, and murdering civil society. How else, as one revolutionary put it, can a government unpopular to the people stay in power if not by brutal force?

The images broadcast from Port au Prince are alarming. And they remind us of Katrina. Indeed, the official response is pretty much ... intriguing. As a Chinese flight cooled on the Haitian runway with emergency supplies, the US was wringing its hands and having reconnaissance flyovers, like mad scientists watching lab animals die.

Bill Clinton has been the special UN envoy. UN troops had been deployed. One has to wonder what mischief they have been doing these years. But no: we see the product of their good works all over the roads to and fro Port-au-Prince.

But Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans cannot match the official response to Haiti's 1804 independence. But that response foreshadowed the crimes the West would commit to the only God it has ever loved: Commerce.

So while I remain numb about the state of affairs of the Haitian people, my blood curdles at the bugle sounding the entry of God's Marine warriors.

10 January 2010

Our new international communist conspiracy and the persistent decimation of demoralized wage-workers

What is the new international communist conspiracy? The old one was a figment of the malicious minds of Western powers whose grossest imperial impulses had been tamed with revolution movements all over the colonial world: the Western powers' answer to this insurgence was to sloppily link each and every one to the Soviet Menace, the Red Scare.

Just so, everything from Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam to Maurice Bishop in Grenada to Cheddi Jagan in British Guyana, to India, Angola, Ethiopia, Nelson Mandela ... practically every labelled terrorist and rogue state of the Cold War was a movement to divorce itself from the clutches of the former empire. And they were all apparently guided by Moscow and the international communist conspiracy.

We knew then it wasn't true, and it has only recently become permissible to say as much among the ruling circles.

But old habits are hard to break, especially if you are one of the last Confederate soldiers, a Frenchman who still claims Algeria is part of France, persons for whom Rule of Law means British Rule, even if it extends to the Malvinas Islands, or the present-day Western powers.

Today, we have a concoction called Al-Qaeda, a nonsense that purports to link every half-wit incendiary maker, upper-educated dreamer, chattering class officianado, or malicious attempt to some central casting office in the caves of Afghanistan.

To look at the list, this is equally true of any profession, from teacher to lawyer to doctor to president of the United States. We in the proofessional classes have not had any more luck than the fictitious al-Quaeda to attract the best of the best: whatever that means. But we aren't stupid enough to link all attempts to political or professional office to some global conspiracy.

Why then this al-Quaeda?

Why international communism except that it keeps our cities in disrepair, workers barely meeting ends, schools in a shambles, and the police state inevitable, if not more prisons. Meanwhile, our common wealth remains privatized, irritating among other things not only the housing crisis in foreclosures but also the homeless crisis on the streets (note how this had become a norm and not a headline in the last generation).

To rob us, our masters have created a new enemy, a new Cold War, and a rationale to oppress us, which is the only way we will submit en masse to the pirates.

Reporter Helen Thomas distinguished herself at a recent press conference by persisting to ask "Why?" I couldn't understand the vapid reply, but to borrow the commentary of another activist:why is because the US has made the Taliban look like Day-Care Center workers.

08 January 2010

Obama orders renewed security measures but continues US massacre in Afghanistan

Much was made of the near 300 lives the Nigerian bomber nearly extinguished on Christmas 2009. But interestingly and painstakingly, no mention is ever made of the many hundred of thousands of lives extinguished by our Nobel Peace Laureate's drone bombings of soft targets or the hearts and minds darkened on the ground in Afghanistan, the region, and the world.

The only voices worth hearing are the saber rattlers. They loathe a civilian trial for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber and son of a prominent Nigerian banker, because they loathe fundamentally democracy.

And while the blow back blows, Obama signals a tightening of airport security. While Afghan bleeds, the president fiddles with some high-tech junk equipment.

To add insult to this injury, the List of Countries continues, Cuba being the strangest among them. But maybe Cuba is illustrative.

Why Cuba?

Cuban terrorism goes back to its 200,000 troops sent to assist Angola in the 1970's and 1980's against Apartheid South Africa incursions. Secy of State Henry Kissinger warned Cuba to stay out of the conflict. The Carter Administration followed suit. Reagan iced the cake in March 1982 by labelling Cuba, because of this war, a state-sponsor of terror.

Angola wanted to be free not only of imperial Portugal but also of racist South Africa. Angola did not want to become another East Timor, which following the pullout of Portugal in the mid 1970's was invaded by US-backed Indonesia.

Angola didn't ask the USA because the USA was Apartheid South Africa's best friend, next to the UK. Recall that both US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher labelled Nelson Mandela a "terrorist."

The US funded, trained, and supported the apartheid regime.

But the vicious, white racist apartheid regime was not put on any US terror list. It was not admonished by successive US or UK administrations to pull back, tone down, hold free and fair elections (if you think the US cares about free and fair elections, just looks at Iraq and Afghanistan ... hell, look at the US itself). The US armed the racists and blockaded Cuba.

Cuba troops moved in, and South Africa was driven back, and for this crime against world order it is listed as a state sponsor of terror.

Knowing this might be enough to look at the other countries on the list. What are their crimes?

Revealingly, not one imperial power is on the list. The list comprises a Who's Who of the Colonial World. This is really disciplined stuff, because a look at just the post-WWII record shows the UK, France, and the USA blood spill of civilians, sabotage of elections, assassinations, infiltrations of labor and human rights groups, and right up to unthinkingly training a Afghan Mujahadeen in the very methods it now uses against its teachers, the USA and its boys and girls in uniform.

One can glean from this atrocious record that former colonies who lift their heads are terrorists, and the Western forces who massacre them are liberators.

But the saber rattlers, who keep to a narrative that, say: they want to kill us because they hate our freedoms. This is kept on the public plate, as if it makes any sense.

The only security measure Obama the president and Obama the Peace Laureate should consider is what the Afghans want ... and what the Syrians want. The Jordanians want. The Saudis want. The Pakistanis want. The Egyptians want. This is approximately an end to Western support of its brutal, Dark-Aged dictators and a full pull out of US and "coalition" troops.

05 January 2010

A 6% solution is a corporate dream come true and a public nightmare

A quorum is the majority of a group, and it is so designated as enabling the group to do its business. Anything less than a quorum, the group cannot act, cannot legislate, cannot change the status quo, cannot repeal. Imagine if one or two members sat in the House and passed legislation. Much the of the public - if they bothered to pay attention or the august press bothered to tell - would be outraged. But what would be the reaction if our legislators stopped completely to make laws and this responsibility were outsourced to the Forbes Top Wealthiest Corporations?

Democracy US style appreciates such stunning examples as what passed for an election a few weeks ago here in Long Beach, California. At a time when schools are treated like the crazy wicked step cousin, in charge of a constituency without a voice or vote, decimated since the late 1970's Proposition 13, a school board member was elected with only 6 percent turnout.

Six percent should cause alarm, but not as much as the context the power shifts beneath our unfunded, privatized, neoliberal feet.

Now, we cannot force people to vote, but we can look at the options given them. Our political establishment in our so-called free land has long restricted the power share to two purported parties. I argue it is one party with two wings, because they share the same assumptions, marginalize the same lower classes, elderly, children, ... and are paid for by the same corporate entities that have no interest in public welfare, only private profit.

It is the corporate power that should make headlines more than the 6% turnout.

While most school board elections are not partisan elections, the entities paying for them are the same. Those not fiscally supported haven't a chance in Hell.
Many reasons might exist for the 94% staying home or not bothering to send in their mail-in ballots. They haven't drunk the corporate Kool-Aid.

Candidate One loves kids and after-school programs, and Candidate Two loves kids and pre-school programs. Both love the Arts, of course. But neither will lift a finger to legislate or rob the public purse on behalf of the rights of children, who only get one childhood, who cannot, like a Losing Candidate, seek a new career as a Consultant or a Lobbyist.

These are cynical options that do not inspire voter confidence and are meant not to.

Our California governor, who probably rejects being handed his post in that infamous recall of Gov. Gray Davis, felled by Enron shenanigans with the express help of George W Bush, whined today about not getting a fair share of taxes from the federal government. This is rich coming from a man who won't raise taxes or repeal the sweet-heart tax breaks given the rich of the state ... to pay for our children and their education.

He did make some very dangerous proposals to further privatize our prisons.

With such a disastrous formula, why vote indeed? Why be complicit in the further eroding of our society by making another generation of our youth no better than the generation Pres. Franklin Roosevelt found being drafted into the Second World War: underfed, undereducated, and underachieved. This prompted him to embolden public education nationwide.

Now we find ourselves raising generations of ricket-minded youth who will become ricket-minded adults. They are not likely to pay attention to voter turnout, election rules which keep worker-lead political parties off the ballot. They won't know who rules them. They will not only be qualified for low-wage jobs, but statistics show they won't vote either. But more, they are less likely to make cogent demands of the political class, which satisfies very well those corporate entities who don't want the public to get in their way.