A Brief Word on Bradley Manning

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

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

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

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

They are my peers. They are a high standard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Development Myth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their development cured you of your development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is this developing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is happening everywhere.

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

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

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

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

Development of this sort is mass murder.

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

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

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

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

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

Whose Independence Day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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