We won't have creole socialism in the US because we still don't acknowledge our creoleness

Why were these black and brown children asked to leave a pool site in the city of brotherly love? Why were several bars in liberal San Francisco found to be charging black and brown men cover charges when none existed, more for cocktails, and showed a pattern by a city attorney investigation of not hiring black and brown bartenders?

I've just returned from seeing BRUNO, a shocking, in some ways brilliant, gross, hilarious collection of Sasha Baran Cohen being the court jester he is and making deliberate mockery of our civilization. Go Girl!!!

The movie previews made my mind turn to the those children at the pool in Philadelphia and my old news reportage on those bars in San Francisco's Castro District who demonstrated a pattern of the sort of racism one might expect to find in the Jim Crow South.

The previews were well-crafted, nicely edited for shock and suspense and laughs, and were 99.99% white and just as close to being blond. Such is the cultural trash our enterprises continue to litter the landscape and hide the truth of our differences, even to the harming of young children.

Does this country know from whence it came?

Recently, in an interview printed widely in Europe in general, the UK in particular, Mariela Castro, niece to Fidel and daughter of current Cuban president, Raul, was interviewed. She was asked to speak at an LGBT Pride rally in London last week, and the interviews were perhaps more the usual publicity of her visit.

Ms. Castro has had a lot to say about LGBT rights and been a staunch advocate for enshrining these rights in Cuba's constitution. We in the US probably wouldn't know about this since Cuba has long ago been reduced to an old, bearded revolutionary named Fidel after it had long been a Caribbean casino for US jet-set, new class. Most things, including most movies, are grossly simplified.

Ms Castro was also asked the usual political questions about socialism and Cuba, and she used a term that resonated: in saying Cuba always strived to be authentic and participatory, she distinguished its "creole socialism."

These are two concepts alien to the US popular and political cultures. But the first is a reality we continue to ignore - hence those dreadful movie previews and the ousting of those children from an afternoon of fun; the other is a reality we must evolve toward if we are to meet the needs of humanity.

Creole. Socialism.

James Baldwin wrote in his last book that white people do not hate black people: if they did, he observed, they'd be all black. Please digest that. Digest it ,and know it extends to all the colors of what one colonial Mexican writer described not as creole but rather as the "cosmic race." The continent is not white and has never been. It is not the extension of a racist fantasy of a handful of Europeans on the make, but the continent has been victimized by their efforts.

Ignoring this creole or cosmic race has perpetuated Nazi, eugenicist films with white, blond people and maybe a minority side kick tossed in, ghettoized our literature, and shocked the good white people of Philadelphia to storm the dark children away like fumigators.

For more info: BBC Mundo entrevista con Mariela Castro Espin [español]

The public option

The latest, twisted argument from establishmentarians - conservative and liberal - against socialized medicine is that setting such a public option up against the private option would ruin the private option.

This is further proof our capitalists are capitalists in name only and have betrayed their spiritual godmother, Ayn Rand. They are in reality orphans wanting government to protect their meal-ticket at any cost. An historical argument suggests that this is the very purpose of government: to protect commerce and enterprise. They do not want a free marketplace of anything but a monopoly of power and to be the deciders of who lives and who dies, who gets benefits and who does not. They themselves and they alone want to right to ration health care.

That this argument has been floated in the public airwaves and debated with any credibility is alarming, as alarming as George Bush's chat with Jesus to be reborn to drop bombs on innocent men, women, and children; as alarming as a serious, cogent debate about Santa Claus's circumnavigation.

I fear another set up. I do not want to wake and hear another sober, serious estalishmentarian lament the failure to set up universal health care because it unfairly threatens other options.

Other options being private for-profit health care corporations.

I am a socialist. Putting something so critical as health care in the hands of any private interest is short-sighted at best. Basing something so critical on the ability to pay approximates a human rights violation.

But I accept that we do not live in a socialist utopia. I accept the private option will not be eliminated any time soon. But this persistent argument, given so much weight, that a public option will undermine the private is wrong on its face.

Countless times, I have mentioned the US Postal Service. This is a public option. For a very small price you can mail a letter any place in the country, no matter how rural and sparse or metropolitan and dense. This is has not undermined the United Parcel Service, DHL, or Federal Express.

I have mentioned the nation's public school system. This too is a public option. A cost assumed by the public for the public good does not undermine private schools no more than the nation's public universities undermine private universities. Stanford or Harvard Universities do not attack Univ of Massachusetts or California State Univ. Long Beach for undermining their existence.

So public options in and of themselves do not undermine private options. What these Chicken Littles are betraying is the knowledge how little public support they enjoy. It is not a question of lesser of two evils: the private health care option for those under 65 is the only evil option. The public is in a prison, and what the private health care profiteers do not want is for the prison doors to be opened. The profiteers know we will flee, and they know we will not shed a tear for their demise.

I do believe not only that the private option will fail due to lack of popular support but also that it should fail. They have only themselves to blame. Regardless, what will happen is the surviving private companies will merge like the baby bells phone companies to serve the privileged few, while the many will enroll in the public option, which should be modelled after the French, British, or Canadian systems. Purely tax funded.

July 4th 1776 a day humanity took a big step backward led by the merchant greed

In a country without any holidays, January through December, July 4th is included among Christmas and Mother's Day as a purely commercial days. The US being a commercial enterprise from its beginning has no holy, spiritual, or religious days and has thus become untethered from any meaningful human values.

This will make public services impossible.

Some 200+ years ago, the merchant businessmen of the day set the Reagan Revolution in motion by getting government off their collective backs. This is supposed to be heroic stuff if you follow the narrative-script written for us. These men are heroes, Founding Fathers, Framers, the master race.

Whether you are a Univ of Chicago laissez-faire economist nut or if you only follow the empty hype about freedom and liberty behind this barbecue day, I would suggest taking the red pill. See now? Those African slaves are not dancing and they were not born with slash marks on their bodies. A wife is not to her husband as a child is to its parent, as court decisions of the time determined allowing husbands - even ex-husbands! - to beat their wives. This is what freedom from British rule looks like.

Waiter: reality check, please.

King George III may or may not have been a tyrant. If one is looking for moral low-points, the directing his colonial governors to serve British interests and not give free reign to these new class merchants cannot be as low on the list as, say, the massacre of Indians tribes and land theft. George's sons were drunks and womanizers, producing scores of children by women they did not marry. His own granddaughter, Queen Victoria, thought better than her politicians and made an end-run to stop her government from recognizing the Confederacy.

So we have been faced with a is-it-Barabas-or-Jesus moment, and we have put our fate on the side of the mercantile death squads for whom any body that obstructs their thirst for profits must be a dead body. The use or abuse of any body for the furtherance of said profits is by definition moral and just. These are the heroes we not only put on our currency but are our currency.

Is this the foundation for any civilization?

The US neighbor to the north, Canada, had no colonial revolution, remained within the British empire, became liberalized somewhat in the 19th century, and today is an independent member of the Commonwealth with the British monarch as their titular head of state. The scourge of royal-appointed governors that our own colonial revolting merchants had a problem with? They still exist. Canada, Jamaica, Bermuda, Barbados, etc., have governors who act on behalf of the British queen. The current Canadian governor-general is a Black woman from Haiti. Canada has national health care.

Ronald Reagan didn't start the Reagan Revolution, but he accelerated it. Bill Clinton kept the pedal to the metal. Barack Obama continues to speed the getaway car.

It's those merchants and their merchant values, which if we had any eyesight we would see these values are blowing the brains and body parts off our young we send to secure market value in Iraq. Those merchants continue to run the country, turning humanity on its head, dropping napalm, nuclear bombs, and welcoming the transfer of billions of public dollars into their pockets while people live homeless, hungry.

It is time to re-think July 4. With all honor and remorse to the Jews, gypsies, and gays of mid-20th century Europe, July 4th should be renamed to National US Holocaust Memorial Day.

The modern world's sea change: it will be rough, and it is inevitable

Marxism arranges the past in a series of stages of development, beginning with communalism, followed by slavery, then feudalism, finally capitalism. Where we go from there is something worth thinking about by wider circles of the popular classes. That we are in fact moving is unnstoppable. Of course, Marxists say the next stage is supposed to be colored red.

A quick summary of the stages.

Communalism encompasses that period when humanity was more nomadic, foraging for food and water, and tending to a more sensible vegetarian diet since animal products had to be hunted and eaten quickly. Ownership of land was an unknown concept, hence the idea since no one owned it everyone did. The state as we know it today, with its cabinets, bureaucracies, and bloated militaries did not exist because they didn't need to. On a recent extended camping trip, a squirrel came up to my tent with a morsel of something in its little hands. I watched it munch away and realize that squirrels do not conspire to fight other squirrels because they spend too much of their day making sure they get enough calories.

The emergence of the state - in the later feudal era - is more or less viewed an apparatus to keep the chain of command in place, and property protected.

The slave stage emerged with the settling of these nomadic people on land from which food could be grown. The land - which had been a highway and open-air market - took on a special importance. Livelihood came directly from that plot. This stage includes not only agricultural laborers needed to increase yield of the plot but also women and their enslavement to property. Since it became critical for land to go to my progeny of its owner, the female partner's delivery of only children of said ladowner had to be ensured. Otherwise, my plot of land would be dispersed too vastly to support my family. Another phenomenon of this period is the world's oldest profession: women who were unable to access land had to make means in other limited ways.

Feudalism continued the importance of agriculture, peasants tied to the land, the defining/enslaving of gender roles, and wars, which were about the conquest of better land for better sustenance for inevitably growing populations. The state solidified as a force to protect property rights in the same vein that men's roles had solidified earlier to protect their private plot of land, and women's to be subservient to the same. One of the turning points is Henry VIII's break from the Catholic Church, when Europe-wide, Rome-dominated Christendom disintegrated and state power rose. Essentially, by Henry stealing Church assets he was marking a shift in the power of the tiny English state and the depreciation of Rome.

The capitalist stage is what we high school social studies teachers call the Modern World. It is marked with the French and US revolutions - at least that's where the textbook curriculum starts. It is also marked by imperialism. The capitalist era is the rise of urban merchants who were not the elite agricultural landowners [nobles] who had access to state power [the king and court]. This new merchant class were commoners, albeit increasingly rich ones who wanted a voice at court and government policy. Their wealth was in global trade, particularly the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of Africans from their homeland. When the United States could no longer provide textiles to the British, the merchant class turned state power on India.

The sea wearing away at rock is slow, methodical.

Unlike the acts of a staged play, one stage did not end abruptly and the new the next. It was not like an end-of-the-year sale where everything must go to make way for the new. The change could take several generations and hundreds of years to complete. To be in at the end of the nomadic period, for example, did come with headlines or fireworks. Invariably there were the Conservatives who wanted to keep on the move and the Liberals who wanted to try something new, like staying put and building permanent settlements.

With these decisions came new sets of values - monogamy, fidelity to home and king, private property but also racism, sexism, and homophobia. Part of this view of the historical record is that our supposed morality is a gift not from any god but rather a sort of by-product of our aims. For their times, they were necessary to an established order.

What would Henry do?

So it is strange to me to find modern people reaching back to slavery-age texts, like the Bible, as if anyone - especially the Christians! - would ever go back to that.

The Modern World is in just such a paradigm shift, a change of stages. Where we are is not as easy as referring to the clock on the corner of a YouTube video, but the evidence is in. If old King Henry VIII were alive today his spiritual brethren would not be found at Windsor Castle but Hanoi, Johannesburg, Havana, and possibly a cave on Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

Caliphate rumba, anyone?

Franken's victory against Coleman icing on a cake baked by British MP George Galloway

Finally, Democrat Al Franken, comedian turned talk-show host, has been declared the winner in Minnesota's contested race for the second US Senate seat. Outgoing and defeated Republican, Norm Coleman, who lost by just over 300 votes, conceded and sent a congratulatory message to his new senator.

But dark clouds cast over Coleman a few years ago. It might be a tale compared to the old adage: he who lives by the sword, dies by it. In this case the sword was the United States of America's concocted invasion and occupation of Iraq, from which nothing good has come.

A US senator and chair of a powerful committee had just after the US assault against Iraq set about making allegations that a certain British member of Parliament was part of the smoking gun. The smoking gun was Saddam Hussein's non-complicity with al-Quaida; his penetration of British airspace with superbombs; and moneys given the "dictator" and by whom.

A US senator and chair of a powerful committee alleged something about oil for food and implicated this British MP.

George Galloway is no pussy cat. He bows and scrapes to no one. So for a US senator and chair of a powerful committee to name that particular Briton as someone secretly funneling cash to the Iraqi regime (which I suppose fuels its non-involvement with al-Quaida!) revealed pretty quickly his capacity for duty. Galloway stood up to Tony Blair and the New Labour complicity in the US-led, US orchestrated war, and he was thrown out of his political party for speaking truth to power. He ran for Parliament again, under a newly formed political party, won, beating a prominent Blair ally. He famously stood up to journalist Christopher Hitchens. He lambasted the BBC for ignoring the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Galloway authored a splendid biography of his friend, Fidel Castro.

Galloway took the US senator and chair's allegations serious enough where he flew to the US on May 17, 2005, to sit before the committee in charge - the whole committee did not show up, only two. Galloway dressed down its chairman mercilessly making me wonder how with Britons like Galloway and American politicians like Coleman did the British colonies ever free themselves from King George III.

That a US senator and chair of a powerful committee was none other than Norm Coleman. Ask not for whom the Gong Show tolls.

For more info: I am not, nor have I ever been, an oil trader: Galloway to the US Senate * Youtube Vid of Galloway dressing down Norm Coleman

Conn. white firefighters victory shows the stategy errors of civil rights movement

Whatever the implications to judicial nominee Sonia Sotomayor, the US Supreme Court favoring the New Haven, CONN., white firefighters can be viewed as another defeat in the civil rights strategy to the lift the least affected by white racism, colonialism, imperialism into the universities, boardrooms, and public life while leaving the country's racist institutions untouched.

Besides touching on the test results favoring white firefighters over blacks and the dread this might open the city to civil rights lawsuits, news reports have focused on Federal District Court judge Sotomayor's role in supporting the city's nixing of the test results to ensure racial diversity.

But both of these points miss a greater one. Anyone seated to take such a test, black, white, or otherwise, has already surpassed some incredible odds: their physical fitness in a fat country being just one. These were rare specimens if ever there were any. Just look at any city firefighter, who are rigorously kept in peak performing form and have already passed other skills tests.

The minority test takers were cleaved from the creme de la creme of their communities. In other words, these minorities were ones who were least affected and suffered less the scourge of white racism in the United States - not a mean feat by the way given the statistics regarding black men revolving in and out our criminal justice system.

These minority test takers were the beneficiaries of a deal with the devil made a few generations ago when affirmative action was the brain child of human rights activists in this country. Like the city government of New Haven, these human and civil rights activists had nothing but good intentions.

That deal they struck basically accepted a talented tenth of minority talent in once-exclusive circles of national life, and it left the woefully neglected, racist institutions of this country unreformed and practically forgotten.

This was to create not a level playing field between aspirants to these spots. The white establishment would never accept that and has continued ever since to keep - as they used to say openly - the black man in his place.

The white establishment created an accommodation whereby certain space was allotted to a minority of the minority - be they blacks, "hispanics" (the term of art coined at that exact time), and women. Women have been the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action, but their status still desires much improvement, as our Congress, boardrooms, and public life show. This minority by being less hungry showed more prowess and could show the country had changed, when it really had not.

The more daring way to begin to address this disparity is a cradle to grave funding equity for all children, their programs, our public schools, and colleges and universities. Because as long as this country tolerates the persistence of underfunded, all-black, all-poor schools full of undernourished and malnourished children, we will continue to roll the dice as to which of those unfortunate kids will be blessed with the right combination of god-knows-what to choose one option over another, again and again until he or she is qualified to submit an application to be a public servant or enroll in a four-year university or become a union organizer to kick ass for the working class. He might even become president.

Progress Report: Obama abandons his base on multiple counts, earns an F grade

The forked tongue of Pres. Barack Obama is becoming a legend in these short 6 months. So the former teacher I am, I will give Obama a Progress Report:

Mideast Occupation: F

Health care: F

LGBT rights: F

The Economy: F

The constituencies of these interests represented solid, high-turnout supporters among Democrats and progressives, yet Obama seems wholly disinclined to even humor them. Instead, he earns high marks from the homophobes, free-marketeers (Obama was affiliated with the University of Chicago after all, the Vatican of Milton Freidman), military-industrialists, and health-care company shareholders, who want to earn profits on death.


And five months into his change-is-coming administration, Obama has shown troubling signs towards making health care universal, has continued US occupation of Iraq including the bombing of soft targets a week into his administration (soft targets comprising neighborhoods, schools, hospitals ... noncombatant, children, women), has bizarrely defended the Clinton-Era bigoted Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which Obama himself opposed during the campaign, and he continues to remain inactive on his promise to extend collective bargaining protection to all federal workers, including officers at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). You know these workers if you've flown anywhere in the last seven years, as they -we! - are the ones who screen your baggage, you, and not only make you take your shoes off, take your tubes of toothpaste and bottles of shampoo and water, but also keep countless weapons off the flights you and your family have taken.

As a candidate he can put these issues squarely on the shoulders of the Establishment, critique them, show their heartlessness. Once in power, a government must act reasonably quickly and decisively to correct these horrors. Pulling immediately out of Iraq may not be possible, funding an increase in the war under different rhetoric is no better than the get-us-out-of-Vietnam candidacy of Richard M. Nixon. Obama, like Nixon, seems to be finding a way to escalate the war, therefore the casualties, therefor the loss of US soldiers, who are merely boys and girls. The blood of collateral damage from the soft target bombings is now on Barack Obama since he directed it as commander-in-chief. Bigotry toward the LGBT community is extended yet another day by his inexplicable defense of DOMA [is this a "I opposed it before I supported it" moment?]. And while it is far out of most people's radar, easing collective bargaining rights for all US workers would begin to correct much that is wrong with the economy.

That a portion of federal workers asked to protect the flying public work unprotected and at the whim of many incompetent supervisors, managers, and federal security directors who think they are running Third-World sweat shops is a disaster waiting to happen (and why would they think otherwise, when there is no law to stop them?).

So when blow-back occurs in the Mideast, as the partners of hospital patients are denied access to their lovers, some as they die, as health care is denied yet another patient when just across the northern border all workers are guaranteed access, or when an airline catastrophe happens, it will be the Obama Administration at fault.

If first impressions are meaningful, Obama is showing himself to be without much depth or substance. Simple, there is no there there, which is amusing in light of the controversial criticism against him by Mrs de Rothschild, who dared called Obama an "elitist." It would seem, like an elitist, he likes to hear the sound of his own voice regardless what it's saying and himself alone puts great weight to his thoughts and expects everyone else to follow suit.

Check out my other articles: Betrayal of LGBT elites toward its base * Phony Populism * Break workers, declare bankruptcy

Obama makes overtures to the AMA while he shuts out single-payers

Pres. Barack Obama wants to solve the US health care problem by making overtures to the Sweeney Todd of Public Medicine, the American Medical Association (AMA). The AMA has long opposed national health care, and opted for our current rationing system which distributes care based on employment and wages, not based on human need.


A few months ago, when the president hosted a health care summit at the White House, congressional supporters of single-payer health care - like what Europeans enjoy - were intentionally uninvited.


For single-payer supporters, it has been an uphill battle ever since. Only the protests of supporters got us a seat at the Obama table. But the president remains compliant to keeping the for-profit model while giving lip-service to universalizing health care.



Has he not learned with all his years of schooling that public services are not longer at the public's disposal when they are controlled by for-profit interests?


We populists, progressives, liberal democrats must continue to protest. I have written and do consider that Obama might be attempting to make a speedy transition into a National Health care system by setting up a two-tiered system, by which the for-profit, rationing system, which leaves thousands uninsured and fuels bankruptcies and is supported by the AMA members will whither and die into the compost heap of history.


He might be.


Since these things are not guaranteed, and since I do not know what the intent of this man who was so heavily funded by Wall Street: we single-payer, universal health, socialized medicine advocates must barrage our legislators with threats that if they do not support a rational health system, we will vote them out and replace them with someone who will.


It is really that simple.


Obama knows as a politician and community organizer the importance of getting constituents "on board." Unlike those of us on the outside, in our armchairs, in the trenches, in our columns, Obama truly must deal with some unsavory cretins, like the AMA. We supporters of universal health do not: we can speak to our choirs.


So there is a lot to scrutinize with this president, who has already inherited the mantle of Iraqi Invader by funding US occupation rather than withdrawal; he has given raw meat to the bigots, by defending the offensive Defense of Marriage Act against the LGBT community that massively supported him, authored by the other duplicitous liberal, Bill Clinton.


But we must scrutinize our own selves. What sort of society are we really demanding, as progressives, populists, as socialists? Do we want a good life at the expense of world poverty? This is what the US military budget is partly about.

World's top military budgets hide the truths of Western lifestyles

A recent report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute you won't see in the papers of record finds that the United States of America leads the planet in military spending, followed by our Communist friend and nemesis, People's Republic of China (PRC), old Europe's France falls in third, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain (UK), our loyal lieutenant, fourth.

You won't find this reported in your papers of record because it might beg the obvious question: what recession?

As unemployment in the tarnished state of California climbs near 12%, as homeless encampments are being formed and torn up - even in some of our state parks I just visited, as the safety net to the poor, sick, disabled, public school students K-12, talks of furloughs and lay-offs abound, the diversion of trillions of Western tax dollars into the Ultimate Killing Machine should make a single-parent struggling to make ends meet ponder.

Pres Dwight Eisenhower called it the "military-industrial complex" and warned against its growing power in his farewell address. Some scholars Eisenhower was well placed to make such a criticism: while an agent of the imperial dominion of the US specifically and the Western world generally, as a high-ranking military man and war hero, he also had a pragmatism when it came to military matters that he saw spin out of executive control during his two terms.

But why have a Killing Machine?

My late grandfather, Lowell B Denny, I, said many, many times that the US never emerged from the Great Depression; that it was intensive military spending that artificially swelled our economy, and now - the crack addicts that we are - we cannot put down the pipe (the crack flourish is mine, not my grandfather's).

The US became an imperial power with the close of the US frontier, 1890. The economy began to dip, so what better than to wage a war with Spain and take the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and remotely Cuba.

Empires and markets are the other reason to have a Killing Machine: foreign nationals - men and women with moderate intellect - won't willingly give up their rich natural resources cheaply [oil, diamonds, gold, rubber, spices, et al]. So the West imposes military regimes and fortifies a client class of super rich to keep the masses tortured. Essentially, this is why the US is in Iraq and why Obama is so slow to pull us out.

To those of us with better sense and a bit of morality of the bonds of humanity, the suppression of our brothers and sisters is an abomination. Our populism is nothing if it does not seriously and fundamentally revolutionize our high-flying way of life. It's not only bad for the planet; its bad for our peers around the world.

But a different, albeit simpler, way of life is exactly what out papers of record cannot broadcast: their funders, the advertisers, have made big business out of shaping Western appetites to be the pigs we are.

But now I am demeaning pigs. They don't gang up and fight territorial wars.

The fight against single-payer health shows the hypocrisy of the free market pirates

The opposition to single-payer health service, ie., universal health or socialized medicine, is beginning to show the gross hypocrisy of our political elite toward free market principles. Growing up, I suffered Ronald Reagan's Magic of the Marketplace to resolve any and all social problems rather than what the elites called the heavy hand of government imposing such resolutions, thereby enslaving the American people.

The heavy hand is not, however, from the left, from progressives, from socialists like me. The heavy, anti-laissez faire, centralized-planning position is coming from the right wing elites and the establishment. They do not want to relinquish private, for-profit controls over health care, despite over 70% of Americans wanting it. They do not want a marketplace of choice, where the average citizen might leave the private option for the public one. And to the extent a choice may happen, they are demanding the private option limit enrollment and/or be restricted from charging less than the pirates.

Aren't cartels, like OPEC, which jointly fix prices, illegal in the US?

Central Planning is nothing new, and I am not the first comment-monger to note this is not a purely capitalist system, nor was the USSR or Cuba purely communist. When it comes to the flow of profits, the establishment and their servants in the so-called think-tanks and in Congress, will stoop to any low.

President Obama may be more calculating than I thought. He knows a single-payer system will never leave a Congressional committee. Why he won't with the stroke of his pen eliminate the age requirement for Medicare by Executive Order perhaps has to do with the political points he will have to spend fighting the fall out. Instead, he is offering to set up an alternative system, a public health care system.

Then, by the highest, noblest principles of capitalism, the magic of the marketplace will whither and die and the Establishment can entomb in their mausoleum.

Rosa Luxemberg's body found but capitalism's corpse has yet to be buried

More than ninety years after her brutal extra judiciary 1919 execution by German officials, the corpse of communist activist Rosa Luxemberg has been identified. Her legacy to humanity must also be recognized despite the right wing political elite's 90 year attempt to torture and dump it in the German river.


What does a corpse from nearly 100 years passed have to do with the present? I wrote a brief note in the wake of the terrible Air France crash over the Atlantic. In it I noted that the flight path was a trade route for colonial slave ships bringing their human captives to work new world plantation. These slavers often threw bodies overboard and Africans themselves often threw themselves overboard. Should their remains be found - several hundred years passed - that would be quite a funeral reckoning for the West.

"Those who do not move do not notice their chains."


So Rosa is but a yesterday, within the lifetimes of some of my own surviving family members. Her work was devoted to the working class revolution that was to replace capitalist exploitation and militarism, which she warned about. She wanted the working class to be the grave digger for the capitalist corpse.


Among her famous contributions was the Spartacus League, which became the German Communist Party, the Red Flag newspaper, leadership in the German revolution not only to get rid of the German emperor, grandson of Queen Victoria, but also to institute a social democracy.

The political elite that control the press and textbooks might have you forget this woman or say that she failed. They will not say they had her captured, tortured with the end of a rifle, shot, and dumped in the river.

A forensic crime scientist could read a lot into the manner of her murder, about what it says about the state of mind of the murderer[s]. Take note: they are our our rulers, and this is the same Social Democrat Party of Angela Merkel, German president.

Like the late communist poet, Audre Lorde, Luxemberg saw through the suggestions of reform. Unfortunately, like Che, she learned that with a revolution, one either wins or dies. Luxemberg was literally an instructor to up and coming social democrats, but when she was seen to take her ideas seriously, and they themselves turned to reformism, her pupils sent death squads to capture her and later slaughter thousands of her activist comrades who agitated for a communist revolution in Germany. Russia had just preceded them and rather than opt for reformism, the revolutionary government remained true to its word and took Russia out of war.

The German left is organizing an official burial ceremony in its "cemetery of Socialists."

"The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles ... Social democracy ... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone."

For more info: BBC report on discovery of Luxemburg * GARA (Basque) report * Granma (Cuba) Spanish translation of GARA article

Why the US cannot maintain an empire abroad and a democracy at home

Unless Americans were savages and relished making bloodsport of foreign nationals and sacrificing their own for such adventures, the people must be lied to, coerced, manipulated to maintain over 100 years of US empire: and this is no foundation for a democracy.

It is the foundation for feudalism.

The lies started in the yellow press of the late 19th century when the ruling class wanted to expand US power to Asia [Guam and the Philippines] and the Caribbean [Puerto Rico and Cuba]. Later, the government sent troops into Haiti and other parts of Latin America.

If I wash and wax a car with no engine, bad tires, and stolen, and sell it to you as a new, pristine car, you've made a decision based on a blatant lie and can rightfully sue for your money and possibly get me thrown in a deep dark jail.

The US government has been just this kind of creepy car salesman, and the US voter the unlikely buyer.

In California, there is a lemon law to protect consumers from this sort of thing. Democracy - if it is to mean anything - must have a lemon law as well to hold liars in high office, who may employ false pretenses to send our children to foreign deserts and jungles to die, to account for their actions.

A Truth Commission is just a beginning. A Nuremberg Trial is required. Bigots are foaming at the mouth that bourgeois lesbian and gays who want to marry will destroy Traditional Marriage. These bigots need better be concerned with the state of our democracy and less with bourgeoisie who would rather little Chinese girls sew their designer garments to keep costs low.

The list of lies the Bush Administration disseminated to manipulate the public to support the Middle East occupations is legendary. But all those administration officials walk freely while there are still captives in Guantanamo who may never, ever see the light of day. This disconnect is corrosive. The US is no better than the convict colony it started as.

The new Obama administration has not been an improvement, offering us another set of lies about how conditions keep us as an occupying force. New guidelines are thrown in our faces to keep the troops as overlords.

We hold teachers and clergy to rigorous standards because they are in positions of power and influence. Why don't we hold our elected officials to these same standards? What does our cynicism say about our own belief in the democratic process.

In a 1968 interview, former Cuban president, Fidel Castro, noted that underdevelopment is not only economic - not only lacking in resources and technical skills. Underdevelopment, he said, is also intellectual, because a free people must first believe it is within their powers to activate radical social change.

Empires, like ours, like Great Britain's, like France's, like Belgium's, like Spain's, like Portugal's, like Germany's, like the Netherlands' are built on lies, and lies will only get you bad merchandise.

What the office of the US presidency really thinks about the working class

Pres. Barack Obama spent a warm evening in Saudi Arabia, with a Western-installed monarch who reigns over a brutal regime that is anti-women, anti-gay, anti-infidel, anti-immigrant. He spent today in Egypt, giving an hour-long speech a country not ruled by a monarch or sheik but a president for life who silences opposition, is anti-women, anti-gay, and next to Israel - another Western crime - the highest recipient of US tax money.


When Ronald Reagan bemoaned Welfare Queens he was not speaking of Israel or Egypt, but of those within the US border, Black, Brown, and White women who were said to be cheating the US taxpayer. Black, Brown, and White sisters who make pennies on the dollar to their male counterparts.


Working class men fair little better. The class of able bodies who have been cut off from social life support continues to grow as this president fulfills the legacy of the high office in going the extra mile for the bottom line, which is not humanity.

The other day, just before the Organization of American States voted to rescind its expulsion of Cuba, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fled Honduras. She did this to avoid the embarrassment at being the only American continental government to oppose Cuba's revolution and re-inclusion into the OAS.

Pay attention to the disconnect. Obama embracing Saudi sheiks and Egyptian torturers. Clinton prattling about Cuban democracy. $30 billion to General Motors. State governments consider or are in the process of removing critical social safety nets and laying off teachers. Where's the Employee Free Choice Act?

Alone these and other officials display a bit more sense. Some can be downright compassionate. Obama, for example, as he climbed his way up the political ladder supported universal, single-payer health care. Under the spell of his Office, he continues crimes against humanity.

Class consciousness is the greatest social disease of our time. Workers would do well to know their class, their class interest, and not only throw the bums out but build jails for them.

Break the workers, declare bankruptcy

General Motor's long day's journey into bankruptcy might be summed up by a San Francisco Bay Area city. In 2008, Vallejo, a city east of San Francisco, declared bankruptcy with the aim of breaking its union contracts and retirement plans.

What's at the source of this mess is basically two things: the United States has become a sort of colony to world finance, especially the quarterly subsidies of countries like China and Japan. These two countries top the list of those investing in our treasury bonds. The second, as I has pointed to over and over without hyperbole, is the US belief system in the aura that is Ayn Rand.

Of course one would expect Ayn Randism to pervade the business class, given their belief in themselves and capitalism. It is quite disturbing Rand seems to have passively penetrated the working class who would empty their pockets of $30 billion to fund a bankrupt company, like GM.

Or, like declaring bankruptcy, taking public funds (which seemed in short supply for homes, education, infrastructure, public health) and then forcing an end to collective bargaining contracts.

The masters of the universe badly maneuvered the United States into a country with a low savings rate, high cost of living, and hospital bills being the number one engine to personal bankruptcies. They also maneuvered us into a familiar arrangement: export raw materials and buy back the manufactured goods.

When I heard of the export/import data from the number one shipping port I knew the country had come full circle. Long Beach Port exports mostly raw materials and imports manufactured goods. My basic history directed me not to the first world but the third, to the colonies, from whence the US started.

Exporting cheap raw materials and having a captive audience to consume expensive manufactured goods was the whole point in attaining and fighting to the death by the UK's, Frances, Belgiums, Germanys, ad nauseum.

High wages are over. As long as our export/imports run at this level, the jobs created will be more low-wage jobs. This does not mean we cannot protect workers rights, cannot have decent schools, public housing, and universal health care. These needs can be met when the ghost of Ayn Rand, the doctoress of Frankenstein, is sent permanently to Hell. We must lose all faith in these masters in the business class, their doctrines about "competition," and force a rational distribution of our precious resources.

Workers of the world, beware.

For more information: The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas * BBC Story of GM * Countdown to Collapse (UK Guardian)

The false populism of false prophets in a phony democracy

A recent Newsweek magazine article by a former Marxist who is now firmly in the neoliberal, globalization, screw-the-workers Establishment camp illuminates the diversionary tacticts and false promises of US "democracy." It also illuminates how much our government establishment is firmly planted in the last century and not the future.

Jorge Castañeda's talking point is Cuba but his commentary says a lot about the country he champions, the United States.

A car collision of sorts is about to happen at an upcoming Organization of American States (OAS) meeting where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, representing the Cold Warrior of the 20th century, will run headlong into the 21st century present and future, which at best admires Cuba's achievements since its 1959 revolution; at worst is willing to tolerate it along with the other forms of government, even those to which one might be extraordinarily rendered. This event occasions Castañeda's piece and gives him the opportunity to hold an old friend, Communist Cuba, to a standard he would not hold his own homeland, Mexico.

The United States, for reasons peculiar to its peculiar democracy, will not leave the Cold War in the dustbin of history. It cannot for fear of losing the class war against the poor and unleashing the masses to do unthinkable things, like seize back public properties and convene war-crimes tribunals. Casteñeda deploys some verbiage that reminds me of Nixon's "war on crime," which in reality was a war on Blacks. Behold the double ententre. The US embraces the Cold War, tries to dress it up its rhetoric, as Secy of State Clinton will certainly do at this upcoming OAS meeting, and convince US workers it's all to their benefit.

Except only for the United States of America, the OAS now wants the1962 expulsion of Cuba rescinded. Revealing the uneven power dynamic in this relationship, the US Establishment is calling for a "compromise" even though it has long ago lost this debate.

Cuba avowedly will not rejoin such an organization as the OAS, which it dismisses as a US Colonial Office.

Castañeda, a former Mexican government official, is now firmly with the Establishment: Cuba should not be re-admitted, he argues in his article. The expulsion should not be rescinded. He betrays the US form of democracy by reiterating US-authored OAS directives:

"In 2001, nations in the region came together to sign the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which states explicitly that representative democracy is a condition for belonging to the OAS, and defines it as "respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms," "periodic, free and fair elections based on secret balloting," separation of powers between truly independent branches of government and a pluralistic system of political parties and organizations. Needless to say, Cuba meets none of these conditions, and thus any attempt to invite Cuba back to the OAS should founder."

How many US friends meet these standards? For generations, the US supported apartheid South Africa and labeled Mandela and the African National Congress terrorist organizations. Currently, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, are among our closest friends with blood and torture on their hands, and no free elections.

Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Not only does the US itself fall short of these standards but also this is code. Human rights and fundamental freedom is not about food, land use access, and union organizing but rather the rights to exploit and corporations free from public regulations. It is a fundamental freedom of the US that the pursuit of property be its national religion.

Periodic free and fair elections. Remember this directive is passed George W Bush's first year in office, thanks to a compliant US Supreme Court and thousands of uncounted ballots.

Separation of powers between truly independent branches of government. History knows where the US obsession with liberalizing old-world regimes, like the British Empire, began. Post WWII, the US demanded Britain dismantle its empire, not because the US cared about human rights but rather because liberalized, separated governments are easy to penetrate. Truly independent is more code to simply to draw suspicion to the "hard-left" as Casteñeda calls them, from the business class, which inherently has the nations best interests at heart - that is, Ayn Rand's heart of coal.

Before we begin a meaningful and constructive dialogue about political reform in the state and the country, we must understand from whence we came. Castañeda's article draws heavy underlines under US hypocrisy at home and abroad. We must inoculate ourselves from the myth makers who speak a phony populism as if they had any depth of feeling for human rights or humanity's rights.

US policy towards Cuba succeeds where US domestic policy is dangerously anemic; there is a symbiosis. It is fashionable for ex-Administration officials to pooh-pooh the US blockade as ineffective. But the whole US rhetoric against Cuba succeeds because it has made the average American believe Fidel is a Caribbean Hitler and Cuba a gulag of 10 million people. Ergo, nothing good could come out of such a dungeon - no new models of sustainable farming, no new free education K - university models, no free medical care programs, and no democratic political reform.

Ask the average American about Cuba and they will accuse it of committing the heinous crimes actually committed by the US's most dear and trusted allies. But Cuba has long instituted workplace, neighborhood, regional, and national democracy. Try this at some of the popular union-busting companies in the US. Cuba has addressed these social ills to such an extent it exports doctors and technicians to other part of the Third World.

So while the state of California chases for the bottom position alongside Mississippi and Alabama, cutting social services to the sick, the poor, the disabled, and students, we would not collectively fathom that a poor, Caribbean revolution might have begun to address these problems two generations ago. We would not collectively imagine it because Cuba is the bogeyman of the hemisphere, and the OAS is in fact a Colonial Office of the US government.

Today we need solutions from other models, like Cuba, and not be taught more ancient lessons from the people who have failed us.

If you liked this article, check out: California Supreme Court upholds Prop 8 * California gov drops H-bomb on the poor * Employment should be s social right

California governor drops H-bomb on poor, sick, unemployed

California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has dropped an H-bomb on the state poor, sick, unemployed. He has proposed balancing the huge budget deficit by ending state social safety, CalWorks.

We are not entering the twilight zone. This is not uncharted territory. We have not lost control of our televisions. We have relinquished control and are being driven steadily back to a bygone century of child labor, high death rates for the poor, prostitution, and slavery.

If these human rights crimes seem beyond the pale and impossible for a civilized country to contemplate, look at the US government's friends, like the dictatorships in the Middle East our spokespersons say nothing about while the enslavement of South Asians and child labor persists for profits in their midst. There is no depth unknown in this moral dungeon into which we are being plunged.

If I am sounding alarmist it is because I am alarmed. I am alarmed that the governor has decided in his infinite wisdom to throw our most vulnerable, our most sacrificed into the sea as maliciously as a US-backed Latin America general was known to drop leftists dissidents literally into the oceans.

Health officials have been clear: people will die. Mental health treatments denied. HIV antiretroviral drugs denied. Services to drug addicts denied. Medical services to prison population denied. These affected will head not to Sacramento for emergency care but rather to their local clinic and hospitals, which will have less funds since the governor is "borrowing" from local funds for three years. Remind the families of the dead the money borrowed will be paid back with interest.

The governor says the state would be insolvent without these cuts. The truth is our right wing political culture - which includes the Democrats who reply they hope not to make all the cuts proposed, so will allow one person to live and another die - has wanted to dismantle our social services for more than a generation. Reagan and the Dept of Education. Welfare queens. The privatization of social security. Welfare reform. Not to forget successive Howard Jarvis "tax revolts," like the infamous Prop 13, which dropped another bomb on California's once-stellar public school systems. Prop 13 cannot be mentioned enough for it was the canary in the mineshaft - to those who care about the condition of miners, that is.

This is not a natural disaster but a political one. The governor can as easily cut food to the hungry and medicines to the sick as he can take the gluttonous third helping from the rich or raise their taxes. But we don't live in that kind of country, do we? There is no God to these creatures but the ghost of Ayn Rand.

If you liked this article, check out: Jury system answer to direct democracy * California is being waterboarded in special election * Race war seethes beneath the class war in LA

For more info: Health care cuts would mean higher costs and possibly deaths * From golden state to 19th century backwater

California Supreme Court uphold Prop 8 - Activists need to call a boycott of state

The California Supreme Court has upheld the voter-backed, discriminatory Prop 8. When Prop 8 passed last November, I suggested to a men's chat group I frequented that we launch a Boycott against the state of California. This would discourage anyone except in a family emergency from coming to this state for a vacation or a convention, dissuade them from spending any money here. The men were against such a boycott.

It's time now for a boycott of California. The people and our courts stand against us.
I want the bigots - for, that is what they are, regardless how they dress their prejudices up in their false love of the Family or Children - to know their hate has a cost. And if opponents of Gay Marriage want this state to look like Mississippi, they will soon find themselves in a minority.
Sadly, California is behind the curve. Again. It ruined is phenomenal public education system in the late 1970's and is now whistling Dixiecratism with regard to its LGBT citizens.

Local boycotts can be very effective. When right-wing Cuban-Americans, bent on returning Revolution Cuba to it colonial status, stopped a planned visit of Nelson Mandela to Miami, FL, the Black community launched a boycott of the city's tourist industry. Mandela, of course, is a good friend of Fidel and made his first visit outside South Africa to Cuba to thank that country for its contributions in fighting apartheid specifically and training African doctors and technicians generally. The US and its partner in crime, the UK, had deemed Mandela a terrorist and backed apartheid South Africa. In Miami, 3 years and $50 million in lost revenues later, the city capitulated.

California, like the rest of the country, is in bad fiscal shape. Gay Marriage is not my top priority in this political crisis - I still maintain that social rights are community rights, not to be assigned to those who marry, and only marry "up." Housing, public education, and health care for all is a very attainable goal if these public services are taken out of the hands of profiteers. And crushing further the state's economy is not an idea I relish.

But since these bigots seem to have no human bones in their bodies, we must reach their bellies, their wallets and purses.

The Court ruling allows the nearly 20,000 LGBT marriages to stand, weirdly creating a tier within a tier in the LGBT community.

In the meantime, supporters of Gay Marriage contemplate yet another ballot measure to undo this ruling. A boycott of those businesses in our communities which have opted to remove themselves from civil society, do not believe in communities of values by funding bigotry, is also necessary.

For more info: List of Business Supporting Prop 8 * California Supreme Court Ruling

Hawaiian Gardens Gang arrests speaks to a race war beneath a class war in LA

Hawaiian Gardens gang arrests speaks to a race war seething beneath the class war. This morning's police arrest of nearly 150 members of the gang who have allegedly avowed to kill Blacks points to something our press ostriches within our borders but easily points to in other countries. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. Holocausts. But never, ever in the United States.
But what world government ever admits to ethnic cleansing rather than make some excuse or other?

Why would a Latino gang hunt down Blacks for indiscriminate killing? Why would Black gangs hunt down Latinos for indiscriminate killing? The Los Angeles Times reports the aim was to drive Blacks from Hawaiian Gardens. The better answer can be found perhaps in that Sacramento promises deep cuts to California's social programs, attacking further the poor, pitting one program against another. They say nothing about raising the tax burden on the rich. It's simply not on their proverbial boardroom or editorial tables.

Of course the rich don't want a class war. The rich don't the anger and energy of this Latino gang aimed at It, or the same anger of a Black gang. The rich want free reign to move public services around like our lives were a Monopoly game. And they don't want the poor, the underemployed, unemployed to direct their righteous ire against them. Better they kill each other, hate each other, suspect the Black of being lazy or the Latino [code word for immigrant] for stealing tax money.

It's called a red herring. The reality is a corporate gang which is never featured in our newspapers of record, because the corporate gang owns the corporate press and our corporate political system.

These gangs of poor are pretty low on the food-chain for turning to Klan tactics. No future Weather Underground or Black Panthers in their midst. The corporate gangs intent to drive public services from our neighborhoods are no better. Single-payer, socialzed medicine for all will not pass their lips.

Lacking class consciousness can be forgiven in these Los Angeles Times, which has made clear whose side it is on. LA Times attacks schools from one side while the state of California attacks from the other. The collateral damage might include a few sprigs of green but sadly also includes these LA gangs, which are but a phenomenon of the attack on the poor generally, social services specifically. It is a wonder we don't have larger gangs of hate in this region.

But like any disease, different bodies deal distinctly with infection. The stronger may ride it out and learn something of the battle. The weak are scarred. So too the body politic, which is not made stronger by the dark clouds on the horizon which foretell deep cuts in services whose beneficiaries the LA Times won't tell you about.

Model the Jury System to make democracy more robust

Could a legislature seated by jury work much better than our present arrangement where anyone who can raise money from private interests is asked to serve for the public interest? George Bernard Shaw said democracy is a system that guarantees we will be governed no better than what we deserve.


The recent sleaze in UK politics that has not spared even a member of its noble families [the US abolished noble titles but not ruling families]. It has made for fast and furious debates within the palace of Westminster [aka, Parliament], the streets, and the pages of the UK Guardian. Depending on where you rank nobility, the falling Lord Hailsham either tops of trails a growing list of casualties for pilfering the public money, which is in short supply due to our irrational economic system.



You won't find the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, or OC Register having such a debate, laying so many sacred institutions on the table.


Even the British monarchy is suggested for the chopping block in the UK, its oldest institution and still the source of power in the UK system. Another commentator called the Queen a "lame duck" for having but not being able to use her ancient powers to simply fire the prime minister, close Parliament [it is, after all, a royal palace], and call a new election.


Contrast the British outrage to what resulted after the 2000 fracas when Al Gore's plurality of votes was contradicted by the Constitutional Electoral College appointment of George W Bush? Our press lords are deafeningly silent. In the early 1960's, when the Queen hand-picked the Earl of Home to be prime minister over a more popular choice, the Conservative Party instituted elections of their party leaders to prevent such a power from being exercised.



The US slowness to reform is not due to the public but rather our rulers, who unfortunately don't have their old titles so can't be escorted to the guillotine ... figuratively speaking of course. They simply don't want to give up power and wo't let their organs in the pressrooms let you know they weild power.



In California, in the wake of last Tuesday's sound failure of Sacramento's pedestrian measures to lessen our growing debt and ineptitude, and our High Court playing with LGBT rights as if they were capricious children and we just one of too many toys.




We might begin with Legislature Reform. Presently, we might as well have a House of Lords - to continue too far the British comparison. Republican and Democrat may not be able to pass a Budget; they are very effective in keeping their favorites in power, even while they rotate every two terms, or speakership from north to south and back again. They are mostly unremarkable.



Why not implement a Jury Legislature? A jury is a sacred and evolved piece of our court system, giving adults access to shaping court rulings and the accused a guarantee that the public will be included in the adminstrration of justice. If its good enough for the courts and the accused, why not the community as a whole?



A jury of legislators could be picked at random to sit for two-year terms not only in Sacramento but also locally as well.

Unions & The Spokespeople of the Workers

I have the union movement and workers on my mind and their place in the public imagination - if the public imagines them at all - and how to get them there.

My worry persists about the Kool-Aid the Los Angeles Times has drunk, recently exemplified by its columnist Sandy Banks in her newspaper's assault on public school teachers. More that the Times is pulling the Jim Jones Kool-Aid Drinking Game and making the rest of us imbibe their venomous attacks on the LA public school system and its teachers. But the union movement also strikes closer to my proverbial home and makes me think of the TSA officers at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), among whom I work. The public must not imagine us too well if you follow the conventional wisdoms.

When President George W Bush started the US Dept of Homeland Security and TSA he argued that allowing collective bargaining for the agency would inhibit its security function. Most of the Democrats, not to be outdone, allowed this travesty. TSA employees are the only federal workers denied collective bargaining rights. The seven terminals at LAX are run like little fiefdoms, the TSA officers the mere vassals of their immediate supervisors and managers.
Fiefdoms, the whims of a chain-of-command who might or might not know how to manage, flexible workforce are some of the results of TSA officers - and any wage-worker in this country - not having collective bargaining.

And what is so bad about collective bargaining? Has collective bargaining inhibited the Border Patrol or CIA or the Coast Guard from fulfilling its functions? I am unfamiliar with the campaigns to strip these agencies of union rights. I have not heard any Republicans or Democrats run for office to end unions in the federal system or bash unionized federal workers, like the LA Times enjoys punching our city's teachers.

I have not heard much about the unfair, arbitrary treatment of TSA employees, the long, two-year probationary period, the ridiculous and transparent "incentive" program, which we are all forced to sign into, which no TSA officers finds fair. I fought this program last year when asked to sign up for the current fiscal year. I refused to sign, made my arguments that I'd rather opt-out and take my chances with the standard federal raise. I was told my job was incumbent on me signing. Then, why am I signing?

I had hoped Obama's "Change is coming" mantra might mean a deep, purging sweep of TSA upper echelons and the implementation of fairer rules for TSA officers and the beleaguered traveling public. No such luck. When I put the question of a certain local high official to Jane Harman [D-California], weapons-lover, on a local radio station she seemed amazed. She said she'd heard nothing but good things about the official I asked about. She was undoubtedly following newspapers of record and not talking to TSA officers. I knew then without a doubt that Harman was ripe for plucking from her Congressional office if not her committees.

Since my tenure began at TSA, the officers job responsibilities have increased. Our pay has not. I know a bit about this from my 10 years as a public school teacher, where our own class sizes increased; but I had a union UESF to fight for us. TSA has none.

A union would address this and tell TSA to pay for its work. Then TSA officers and the traveling public will see how really necessary some of these things really are.

Where might you read about the plight of the workers, those 6 million who have lost their lost jobs and those who still hang on to theirs? Not the papers of record. You will not read favorable things about unions and unioinzing in the Los Angeles Times, which is the paper whose owners also want a flexible workforce, which means the ability to hire and fire as their balance book dictates. You won't hear this from politicians, like Harman.

The AFGE*, AFL-CIO, SEIU, IWW, Teamsters, Retailworker websites are considered unfavorably biased, yet the corporate sponsored LA Times is esteemed as objective and trustworthy. Denied the ability to speak to the Press, denied a Union to speak for us, all the public hears is what comes from the TSA management: What they have told the public is a mixture of lies and propaganda. What they have told the public flies directly in the face of the low-morale TSA officers have.

Any newspaper on a campaign against working people is an anti-social cretin, a vile toxin poured into the community well.

As newspapers are forced to revamp their business models, we should look back at a history. An array of news sources, strongly taking disparate positions, once existed. The Morning Star of the UK is the only full-service Marxist daily newspaper I know of in the English language.
The struggles of those who labor, the workers, the underemployed, those to whom the land should belong [to quote Paulo Freire] needs a newspaper, a news agency, with a Labor Section more than a Business Section.

Joe and Suzy Public don't want disaffected, underpaid teachers educating their children in swollen classrooms with no support, or the children of their neighbors and community. I would hope they wouldn't want the TSA officers hired to protect their flights similarly disgruntled and overburdened. TSA officers aren't yet disgruntled. But they are weary and cynical and according to the federal governments own surveys the most disaffected employees in the federal workforce.

I tell my colleagues a Union will set workplace rules but it won't keep TSA from hiring incompetent managers. In a country where Bonzo's monkey can be president for two terms, anyone can be a TSA manager. Some are promising; many seemed to have won their positions in a lottery. A union will set a known, fair pay rate for our work but it won't stop some of the ridiculous security measures, under-staffings, under-resourcing, which functionaries paid to do nothing else hand down from Mt. Ignoramus. But the place to have these debates is in public, and the public must be informed.

(* For the record, I do not belong to AFGE, the union that has fought for TSA union rights since the founding of the agency)

For more info: American Federation of Government Employees * American Federation of Labor- Congress of Industrial Organizations * Service Employees International Union * International Brotherhood of the Teamsters * Industrial Workers of the World * Retailworker Forum * United Educators San Francisco * United Teachers Los Angeles. * TSA Screeners Union