Why I am an Anarchist

A manifesto of sorts, admonishing us not to be happy and submissive but to be angry, queer, and insurgent.

Perils of Supervision

The other day, a supervisor gave us an after-work "briefing" in which he said he didn't "like the negativity" going around the workplace, and for us to be "more happy, more positive." He told us to be happy we had a job as there were so many out there who did not. He offered no specific cause of this negativity, as this might have elicited a rebuttal; like, he made no mention of the terminations that have been happening to our coworkers who are being sent among the unlucky people with no jobs; no mention of the "zero-tolerance" and draconian punishments resulting for what used to be minor infractions.

Like all our elites, from top to bottom, from the coarsest, foul-mouthed factory floor over-seer to the more refined, elegant and ruthless corporate Eichmann, and every follow-orders gentleman and lady in between: these sorts of briefings are as common as Bush's admonishment as the Towers fell: to keep shopping.

Ignore the man behind the Curtain: the great Oz has laid an egg.


If our supervisors and managers mean anything in these declining, austere times it is exemplified in this: they are rather impotent except where it comes to coerce our obedience. This they must do to eek out one more week of profits from disgruntled labor forces.

Gone are the golden days when they were problem solvers and trouble-shooters. With so many of our comrades unlucky to be without work, the lucky ones are easily replaceable,  their chains being tightened, and yet told by these underlings not to flinch: Be happy. Otherwise, these lucky ones are guaranteed to be replaced with the growing population of Unlucky.

What the lucky ones don't seem to realize with all their good fortune is: this is really no different than chattel slavery, where the slaves were physically beaten for not complying, the wage slaves are coerced psychologically.

The employed are told so often by their managers that they are lucky, that many workers even repeat it to others, and repeat it to themselves in the mirror. To those who want to keep repeating they are lucky to have a job without examining the conditions of that job, consider this: Blacks enjoyed full employment during slavery.

This good fortune of having a job has clearly taken the place of any further advancement in the labor movement from, say, the mid-19th century. An eight-hour work day and minimum wage were barely won with blood staining the streets - the managers pulled the triggers and the workers took the bullets.

But not too much advancement, since at the same time as a giant step was made in trades-unionism, chain-gangs populated with former Black slaves continued to offer free labor to build what the West erroneously calls its "civilization;" some of the former slaves were used to break Northern unionism when Black men not in the chain-gang were lured North to places like Chicago and St Louis and Los Angeles; and later: immigrants fleeing free-enterprise miracles of the global South found themselves just one wrung above the chain-gangs doing menial, backbreaking work for pennies on the dollar. Good liberals condone this arrangement on the grounds that no one from this country would do such work for such a pittance.

A slave system has imposed itself within the freest and most prosperous country in the world, just as an apple with a rotten core is still an apple, so they might say. Workers are not supposed to note the contradictions of wealth and poverty created by the system, nor flinch when we are shown how expendable we are to them, nor question the legitimacy of a Master-Worker system. This is the "negativity" that supervisor-manager warned against. Negativity inhibits the bottom line of the stock market, the Overall Mission of profits - the rationale of a tyrannical state.

We No Longer Cure Diseases, We Manage them too

From the more militant beginnings of labor insurgency, when it was not only the worker we were concerned with but understandably the society the worker labored under, reform competed with revolution for the central modus operandi: can we tinker with the existing institutions [reformism] or must we do away with them altogether [revolution]? Regardless, the institutions have remained virtually untouched as power centers beholden to the same things a stock broker is beholden to, so meaningful reforms would always be tenuous. Revolution impossible.

It's no wonder our powerful governments go limp with helplessness to do anything jobs are transferred in whole factories from entire communities and sent like chain letters to deeper, more remote parts of the global South, out of the reach of US labor laws. It is not workers or communities, children or the health of our bodies, the very old or the newborn baby it is concerned with: stock brokers might be fine to tolerate but not in charge of the upbringing of a child.

The assault on workers and our treatments is akin to a plague being prescribed a placebo: the Haymarket militants - even the most docile of them - would look at us in the 21st century with our "lucky to have a job" excuses and the privilege of working two and three to make ends meet, no health care, education- and community-funding austerity measures, housing and food insecurity, while the logic of capitalist keeps apace to create fortunes for a few, and wonder if they had not been transported back to the the 1500's.

Our problems have worsened, and our elites predictably offer a strange array of solutions, no stranger than how they seem to address health issues: as AIDS activists have pointed out, after 30 years of that so-called viral epidemic, no cure is found, rather a host of expensive tests and treatments, which benefit pharmaceutical corporations.Similarly, our elites' prescriptions are rhetoric and more belt-tightening.

Multiply that 30 years and labor solutions function much the same way, making the poor worse off, and the rich more bloated. For example, it is considered an advance that 23 states are now right-to-work states, where unions can no longer be an obstacle to what elites like to euphemistically call improving the economy. Why we should allow the interests of health, like HIV, to be in the hands of those seeking to maximize profits is as amazing as allowing the same interests to decide what's best for workers - that is, the best decidedly being to have as little as possible.

And naturally any prescription cannot credibly come from workers or from unions, since we don't know what is good for us.

Our Best Unions No Better than Junior Members of a Corporate Board of Directors

Our unions, thanks largely to a campaign of disinformation, sabotage, extermination, and purges have nearly fossilized into relics. They may look nice from afar, but they are brittle to the touch.

If publicly traded, NYSE-type corporations are only interested in maximizing profits every quarter and controlling a larger market share, it is not unreasonable to conclude the boards of directors is interested in nothing less. Each board member plays a carefully scripted role in meeting this end: it is not in unschooled, illiterate circles that this statement is controversial. It is among the well trained and well schooled, who learn absolutely nothing of the power and role of corporate power in an average high school civics class: to them, to these matriculated, to suggest corporate power is a conspiracy is something to be filed away with our not really having landed on the moon.

But the members of the board know if they do not play their particular role to meet the only goal for the quarter, they will loose their lucky job and find themselves padding up their resume in search of a new one. Even the junior members of the board - like VP for Human Resources - knows this.

So when its has become a popular smoke screen for certain firms to stage workplace democracy, many of those well-schooled, well-greased, well-matriculated proletariat inhale the smoke screen deeply.

An Employee Council established by the boards of directors, staffed and vetted by the boards of directors [or not, since that VP of Human Resources can downsize anyone at any time] is not workplace democracy: it is an extension of the board of directors, which is interested in one thing and one thing only, and it is not the condition of the workers, their wages, their levels of satisfaction, their empowerment to make meaningful changes.

The Employee Council, like that VP for Human Resources, is a junior member of the board.

What does this have to do with unions? If there is a difference today between our better unions and these Employee Councils, it might be that one has the audacity to charge you dues for the indignity to represent the bottom-line interests of the board of directors: that is all. The hot air they expend in order to collect those dues from you does what hot air always does: rises high into the heavens where it is never to be seen or heard from again.

And if this is a sad thing to say about our better unions, the worst ones are not worth mentioning.

Funny how this works for many people: if the electric company kept making excuses why your power wasn't being turned on, even though you were current on your bill, the board of directors might be happy that their coffers continued to be filled, but this would not mitigate you not having any lights.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of it. This sham extends, as it must, to the polling place, where our elections are rigged to favor business interests over any popular control. Many examples of this exist, but a notable one is that contrary to 70% of those polled want a European, government-controlled, universal health system, 99% of the corporate interests do not: the stock broker wins again.

Capitalism basks in the glory of their exploits: the exploited bask in race pride, nationalism, culture wars, and the chivalrous defeat of Sin

But this is the nature of the conspiracy: the well-oiled, well-tooled machine that seems to make clean, sweeping movements on the outside, but underneath, gears are grinding into each other, and we are none the wiser, precisely because we have been educated.

The harassment of anarchist and communist union agitators taught us to watch what we say and around whom we say it.

The extermination anarchist and communist union agitators in the 1930's taught us to hide.

The official purging anarchist and communist union agitators in the 1940's from the union rolls taught us to stop learning their lessons.

Then their presence is not mentioned in the official history books, so your silence and obfuscation is no match for your child's ignorance to why they are sitting in classrooms laid out in rows, like a factory, with the teacher at the head of the class, like their future manager.

We are well educated.

And lacking a meaningful knowledge about how our authoritarian system functions - who holds power, who wields it, and on whose behalf, we are left to debate feminism, gays in the armed forces, race, abortion, unwed mothers, moral degeneration causing natural disasters - to name just a few absurdities: because these issues are really about who can fly closest to the Sun, the center of Power, access the wheels and levers, without the wax melting from your wings.

The debate is not about women or gays and lesbians or white purity: it is about an iron will to preserve intact a predatory, unequal, malicious system, then: to create appropriate fables to support it, like the inferiority of women, the perversion of queers, and the supremacy of whites. And these justifications can come from science, which asks us to look at the data; Bibles, which demand we emulate the morality and superstition of a persecuted ancient North African-Roman tribe; or televangelists, who really should know better.

Ceasar and Pharoah and their exploits, the blood they spill, the mass graves, the riches they inherit: they get away with murder.

Political Paradigms yoke us to complicity, Ridding Ourselves of Sexual Delusions might be our best hope

So who will rid us of this turbulent prince? Moses led his tribe to freedom; a Divorce Decree rid us of the Roman Catholics; the beheading of a few Godly kings rid us of absolute monarchism; Cromwell rid us of monarchy altogether for a time; Puritans and Calvinists rid us of Anglicanism; Magna Carta rid us of arbitrary convictions; the Viet Cong and Cuban revolutionists rid us of US military supremacy; China rid itself of British occupation in Hong Kong, and the Panamanians - despite Ronald Reagan's protestations - rid itself of the US; Russia rid itself of Czars and its global South economy ...

And what did this give us? An armed, predator nation in the Middle East; Henry became the pope of an English church; the free French not only held liberty, equality, fraternity to their hearts but they also tried to hold colonies, like Haiti, just as fervently; the Christian-fanatical Pilgrims began the holocaust of Native Americans; Victorious Vietnam has implicated itself into the global market system, along with China, as the go-to place for cheap, regulated, oppressed labor.

Plus ca change, c'est la meme chose!

Maybe it's time to put down our Bibles and our Marx, Lenin, and Henry George, and kill John Wayne. Those of us inclined to follow the supposed Word of a Jewish carpenter in the ancient desert persist in consulting those texts for answers; while those of us who have purportedly freed ourselves from such superstition dive head first into another catechism of communism. Each and all sides insist we need only perfect the Message, and we have been doing this for a few hundred to a few thousand years. In our efforts we have replaced one pope for another, then another.

John Wayne is a product of our imaginations: that is not even the actor's real name. He was not a cowboy but an actor. He is the model for our brutish behavior, machismo, the West, Civilization, the white hero come to rescue the damsels and pluck one to wed, reprimand the natives, and kill the extras as a show of bravery: in short, a thug. He has become a model for Manhood itself, in sharp contrast to a pan-sexual, empathetic, culturally embracing, humble, intellectually thoughtful human being which the world arguably needs.

What seems to really hinder our human progress into a better future is whatever our catechism, we adhere to the model of John Wayne: we probably find something as comforting in that icon as we might a military parade. I have seen the doctrinaire Christian, and he is no better than the doctrinaire Socialist. We keep cultivating the worst characteristics in our children, trying our best to model them ourselves, and the result is a kink in our moral evolution, if not our economic.

The Syndicalists can rightly advocate a worker-owned and managed factory, but watch who asserts themselves and how, and who is marginalized and with what tactics: and the meeting room will be laid out just like the classrooms of their youth, with the master at the head.

A therapist once told me we should not vilify those who seek counseling; if anyone, we should vilify those who do not. Even, the women who joined the ranks of the Black Panther Party in the 60's found they were expected to make coffee, something the Southern Baptists would have given a hearty "amen" to.

At this point any man or woman who wants to evolve needs a little queer in them; but this is a tough task until we put enough queer in society.

And if the church wardens are uneasy thinking I am referring to sex: good. I am glad to make them uneasy and knock a few pedestals over. But I am not talking about sex: that is already going on, between men and women, women and women, and men between men. Despite Dr Kinsey's findings, we persist in saying things like 7% of the population is homosexual, when sex between men, and between women, is much more frequent than that and would qualify at least 25%-40%. But this fact has never jived with the alpha-male, John Wayne frontier conqueror we aspire to be, so cognitive dissonance simply removes the facts for the fiction.

Recently, after having sex with a guy, he told me he was born-again Christian, and showed me the photos at the river and a Bible within arms reach to prove it. He then went on about the Word of God: how being gay was a sin because it was clearly stated and irrefutable in the Bible: how he could do what we just had done within spitting distance of the framed, color photo of him being dunked in a cold river is called discipline. He was the bad person, not the text, which he argued must be correct because it has endured so long [like, say, Homer's "The Odyssey"? Sappho's poetry?].

This might seem like a strange case to many, and it is strange: but it is far from unusual. Again, given what Dr. Kinsey reported in his two published studies, we seem quite comfortable with norms and directives handed down from the Master Teachers, Supervisors, and Management; and guilty and full of shame and doubt about our own natural impulses.

No change, including the most modest, significant social change, let alone radical change, can happen under such a paradigm. You can recite all the Lenin or Mao or St. Peter you want: as Bernard Shaw wrote "Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."

For the sake of not only humanity but also the other species - known and unknown, the water, land, and air, we must change our ways.

The state of things as they are will lead to greater exterminations: this is not a prediction, but rather a prognosis of what is happening right now. Neither religious zealotry nor political dogma nor supplicating our masters' foolish directives to "be happy" can tip the scales in humanity's favor: this is worse than moving chairs around on the deck of the Titanic:  it is akin to trying to find the most comfortable one to sit in. And the Captain is not going down with this ship. So he must be thrown overboard.

Anonymous exposes Long Beach city officials

A recent article in the Long Beach Post reveals some interesting but obvious things in our elite narrative and the direction current activism is taking, and they are worth noting.

Our elites have always responded harshly to signs of dissent, often disproportionately. So a peaceful protest as what happened in the infamous Kent State antiwar march in 1970 saw Ohio state militia shooting and killing activists. The Democratic Convention in Chicago, 1968, is commonly accepted to be a "police riot." And of course, most recently, Oakland Police shot a protestor in the head, seriously wounding him [that he happened also to be an Iraq War veteran seemed to garner him special attention by the mainstream media, as if any other activist might have deserved this brutality].

So it goes without saying that what Anonymous claims to be doing in exposing malfeasance in the Long Beach, CA, city government is characterized as a "warning" by elite thought, as if it is activists and organizers who are menacing officials.

You rarely read such headlines as Long Beach Police "warn" Occupy Long Beach activists; or Long Beach city council "warn" medical marijuana advocates; or Long Beach Mayor Foster "warns" free speech rights of photographers.

What elites do is - by mafia standards - by definition correct.

It's one thing for the insular, pro-corporate world of the political beltway to think this of themselves; it's quite another when our media do it for them. But this is why our mainstream media is so dreadful: it serves the elites on bended knee.

The elites hold the convention that "the king can do no wrong," which is an obsolete, medieval method of protecting the power structure from popular scrutiny.

Seventeenth century British elites re-established the monarchy after Cromwell's interregnum to keep popular demands out of reach of the power structure: the monarchy was the one institution able to keep itself away from the public; or as the British elites are fond of saying, "above politics."

The US and its allies have rammed through similar institutions under the guise of global "free" trade that are also "above politics," like the World Trade Organization. These institutions make decisions for the financial industry, the 1%, and are insulated from the demands of people.

The Long Beach Post's headline is by far not the most egregious example of elite narrative, and as an alternative news source to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, it must be commended for even featuring the item. But the question remains why our newspapers of record do not scrutinize such behavior as a city police force detaining photographers: such behavior would warrant a White House Press Conference if done by one of the US's official enemies.

Obviously, even in a sleepy suburb of Los Angeles, like Long Beach, is culpable of serving elites, and is not above scrutiny by activists.

Bottom line, our elites are only continuing a class war, and their overall intention has been loudly expressed in the business press. They want to make the US better for business, not for workers; so they break unions [Indiana being the 23rd state to ban closed-shop trades unions, aka, right-to-work]. The elites want to bring the 19th century sweat shops back home, because they want to compete with places like China.

Should we even be competing with such a labor atrocity as China is never asked among elite media; only "how" can we compete.

So it is encouraging that groups like Occupy, Wikileaks, Anonymous, and Black Bloc tactics are employed. In an open democratic society, such tactics and non-hierarchical organizations would not be needed. We wouldn't need subversive organizations to expose what our governments were doing, at home and abroad: the civil rights abuses, like those alleged against the city of Long Beach, the anti-labor practices like compromising collective-bargaining rights; the war crimes, like those of Abu Graib, Guantanamo, etc., or the broken United Nations conventions to which the US itself is signatory.

These dissident groups are not brick-and-mortar, IRS-ordained groups, like the ACLU or Human Rights Campaign, which can do meaningful work but are often beholden to the same financial industries our mainstream politicians, and Long Beach officials, are beholden to for funding.

So the radical changes we need are not likely to come from above, from these elites and their clients.

It will be the persistent work of these insurgent groups and their tactics that will bring the radical change we need, not more handouts to the elites.

Keeping the rabble in their place

The most recent developments in Greece should not surprise anyone familiar with the historical record. The elites and the management class have always responded in proportion and to excess against any popular, democratic movement. These movements have always been a direct threat to the existence of elite culture and the so-called profit motive. And the historical record is clear that the elites, its managers - the little Eichmanns - and their police powers are forever on the watch to stamp out the menace of popular will and participation.

So Greece is not only bearing severe austerity measures, which even the official press acknowledge will prevent it from making any advances in social development for many years to come, but also the EU and banking elites have successfully imposed a pliable government on the Greek people. What devastating effect this has on the Greek people is not open for serious discussion, no more than the consequence of Western pioneer culture had on indigenous communities in the Western hemisphere.

The rabble do not matter.

But even EU machinations has proven difficult to pacify that ancient country.

Just as the elites of the 17th century found they could not trust even Parliament against popular insurgencies in Great Britain, and so had to re-establish the monarchy as the one institution "above politics" [meaning: outside popular control], the EU and its little Eichmanns have planted a virtual viceroy over the Greek economy, and imposed measures some have compared with the vicious measures imposed on Germany after World War I.

We have to pay attention to this. We cannot be docile to these machinations.

True enough, our brothers and sisters in the global South have endured this sort of disrespect for democratic institutions for as long as the imperial boot pressed on the neck of the real producers of the colonies - the indigenous, the African slaves, the wage-slaves reduced to sweat-shop labor for the "Metropolis" - Madrid, Paris, London, New York, ad hitlerium.

Haitian popular organizations under Lavalas had to be ignored, vilified, or crushed so the US elites could dare go and "teach" that island nation a different kind of democracy - the democracy for the elites.

This perpetuation of failed states - states without any democratic institutions, because those are dangerous - is a practice well developed by elites. It's policy. We could learn a lot from the global South: what they endured and tactics to resist.

Well, me must learn. Greece represents the sort of assault long imposed on our colonies but now imposed on the so-called global North, the West.

It's odd: Reagan haunted us with images of Nicaraguan Sandinista revolutionaries marching up the peninsula to invade Texas, when really it was our own masters who are the threat.

If they came for them at night, they will come for you in the morning.

Austerity measures have been hitting sectors of the global North for more than a generation. Those sectors include racial and ethnic minorities, women (especially single mothers), whites educated for nothing more than to be be factory workers, which means they weren't educated at all.

It is interesting to be hearing this recent angst about our failed public education system, since it was one of the first institutions attacked by the elites in the late 1970s, with such taxpayer-rights initiatives, like Proposition 13. This decimated California public schools for those most needing them; but there was scarcely any talk among official media about the side effects of taking vast sums of money from public education and what this would logically do to the poor.

Now, under Republican and Democratic regimes, we see what was an attack on various sectors of the global North expand to include things like middle-class suburban housing, white-collar service jobs, and university education costs.

Only now, the movement - Occupy this or that - gets a bit of attention.

Well, Greece proves that worse is to come for us.

Our elites and their managers will not impose a monarchy on us - that's very old school. What they have been imposing on us for the last generation are institutions similarly immune from any popular scrutiny or control, like the monarchy. And the rationale for these things is not much different: the rabble can't be trusted to do the right thing.

It's not just Apple Computers, lauded as a Silicon Valley giant when it basically exports its workforce to areas where the US labor, health, and safety standards cannot touch it: to sweat-shops in China that our forbears would recognize as what sparked militant trades-union movements [which of course were responded to with utter brutality and extermination].

It's not just these US-based corporations, with headquarters in our infamous metropolises, outsourcing work beyond the reach of US law and popular will; it is also the creation of global financial institutions, like NAFTA, which impose from beyond "trade" laws to enrich the elites and impoverish wider sectors of the global North.

The jobs we are left with are Target and Starbucks jobs, jobs to sell the products of slave labor.

The only good response to this is to respond at all, first. Like learning to ride a bike, some things can be learned from books, from our forbears, from previous insurrections; but we have to set out in practice and be ready to fall down, re-examine, reflect, and pick up our proverbial or actual weapons and move on in a sustained, organized insurrection of our own, disciplined or not - whatever that means ultimately.

There is no petition to bring about a social and economic revolution, so we can't wait around for it.

If they screw with Greece tonight, drones will come for you at dawn.

What did the Queen know and when did she know it:? A 60-year Retrospective

A recent article in Truthout.com highlights the criminal nature of Tony Blair and his term in office. Writes, John Pilger: "[Gareth] Peirce's book achieves the impossible on Blair: it shocks. In tracing the "unjustifiable theses, unrestrained belligerence, falsification and willful illegality" that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, she identifies Blair's assault on Muslims as both criminal and racist."

This criminal nature is not controversial except to mainstream media and apologists for power and war, for whom any means justify the ends.

While the article presents the agreed-upon facts of the matter of Blair, it omits entirely the nature of the British government and its particular fashion of wielding power against growing majorities - often active majorities.

Recall, for example, that the anti-war members of Blair's own Labour Party had to ask his permission to debate the oncoming war against Iraq in the House of Commons. It was up to Blair whether to consent to have this debate or ignore his rank-and-file altogether.

This illustrates a bit about power in Great Britain and should be understood. It must be understood for its own sake - for, it is important to acknowledge the different ways power manifests over us. It must also be understood to allow the broadest discussion possible.

Certain dissenting voices have broadened this discussion, but predictably have been marginalized. Political activists, like Tony Benn and Willie Hamilton, have focused on the root of the British decay: the British Establishment, its antiquated laws and customs, and its undemocratic nature.

I am referring to the monarchy.

During that chapter in British history known as the interregnum, after a civil war and one king had his head cut off to be replaced by a commoner to head a republic, activists were already agitating for a democracy where they'd be ruled by neither a king nor by Parliament. Years of corruption, followed by the execution of a king probably shook what was left of the rose-colored glasses off the faces of the masses.

They also must have realized that killing God's alleged representative on earth did not send them straight to Hell. So energized and enlightened, they were safe to push the issue of throwing off all yokes and chains of their oppression.

Now, these activists wanted more. And this agitation scared some Hell into the ruling classes, whose heads had not been cut off, as a future socialist Ken Livingstone advised newly elected Hugo Chavez to do. 

As historian Christopher Hill details in his work, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, the English establishment that lingered after the execution trusted neither the army or Parliament to close ranks and save the nation for the upper classes, as these were filled with still too many popular forces.

So, Hill argues, the monarchy was restored. It was the one institution immune from public scrutiny and public pressure - no one votes in or out a king. Widening parts of the electorate could influence Parliament. More and more working-class men could enter the armed forces. These institutions were not entirely trustworthy.

But the monarchy was for a select, insulated few.

Which takes us back to this recent article in Truthout, and other articles like it in progressive circles. These articles correctly go so far as to call Tony Blair a war criminal, demand investigations and trials, but none dare to say the same of the Queen or to implicate her.

That calling the Queen a war criminal, suggesting she be at least subpoenaed, seems beyond the pale is exactly the point. Were this a rogue regime from the Axis of Evil, with a monarch at its head, the Queen - like Germany's kaiser or Japan's emperor - would not be overlooked as a charming relic or a figurehead. There would be interest in her involvement, investigations, and questions of "what she knew and when she knew it."

Even among many Western progressives there is a powerful spell upon them: all that glistens must be gold.

Elizabeth Windsor Mountbatten has held the position of queen of the United Kingdom for 60 years now. Every prime minister has kept their conversations with the monarch secret, but they have at the same time acknowledged, one by one and every one, that she is informed of everything, that all secret papers are funneled through her desk for review, that no law becomes a law until the queen signs it, no Church prelate or Supreme Court jurist is appointed without her.

"The Queen received all Foreign Office telegrams and papers," Labour historian Ben Pimlott quotes an official. "And so in some ways she was better informed in advance of the operation than many members of the Cabinet."

Those infamous Red Boxes, lined with lead and waterproofed, go to her from prime ministers, cabinet ministers, MI5. The highest ranks of the military often meet with her privately.

So what did Tony Blair tell his queen in the lead up to the war in Iraq, about weapons of mass destruction or extraordinary rendition or torture?

These are the sort of questions a trial or truth commission might ferret out. But they would not end with the UK involvement in the war in Iraq.

In her 60 years as unelected head of state, from 1952, a lot of other international crimes have been committed. Britain can ostensibly decide its own form of government, so being an unelected head of state is as much its own business as having unelected institutions in the US control our economy, which should be our cause for alarm and agitation.

The crime is what the UK does outside its borders. The crime is what it does to others. And these crimes have been significant.

Here is a sample, taken from Marxist historian Walter Rodney, Ben Pimlott, J.M. Roberts, and from Intervention and Exploitation: US and UK Government International Actions since 1945:

Kenya: 1952-1956
A liberation campaign is launched by the Mau Mau. The British response is "to close the 149 schools of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association, 21 schools of the Kikuyu Karinga Education Association, and 14 other independent schools."  "They were," writes historian Walter Rodney, "considered training grounds for rebellion." The British then impose a state of emergency and brutally suppress the Mau Mau. ,British forces conduct human rights atrocities, establish Nazi-style concentration camps and ‘resettle’ hundreds of thousands of people in ‘protected villages’. Around 150,000 Africans die.

Guyana: 1953
October - Britain suspends Guyana's constitution. "The People's Progressive Party," writes Rodney, "was the first mass party in Guyana and it was also a multi-racial party. It was at that time the only pparty in the West Indies which had any pretensions about having a scientific socialist outlook or Marxist outlook or working-class outlook." Predictably, he notes, the PPP came into "conflict" with its British imperial masters, so Britain sends in troops and installs an interim administration after democratic elections for parliament produces a result not to its liking.

Libya: 1953
December 7 - Britain imposes military bases in Libya for a period of 20 years, ostensibly in return for economic subsidies, which never reach the people but prop up an Arab facade.

Egypt: 1956-1957
"The British, French, and Israelis conspire to overthrow [Gamel Abdel Nasser] in the Suez adveture, the last fling of old-style imperialism," according to historian J.M. Roberts. The incident is notable also because in the frenzy to dispatch troops to Egypt, the British prime minister had to get the signed approval of the Queen. According to historian Ben Pimlott, "the hastily prepared Proclamation" was given to her for signature while she was away at a horse race. "Her approval was required before it could be read out in the House of Commons the same afternoon."

In the wake of the failed Suez invasion, MI6 (Britain's spy service) plans and carries out several assassination attempts against Pres. Gamel Abdel Nasser. The US were also involved, recruiting the Saudis and Iraq to help them. Britain had already made plans to assassinate Nasser, even before he nationalized the Suez Canal.

Yemen: 1959
Federation of Arab Amirates of the South created as an autonomous territory under British protection. Britain occupied parts of Yemen in 1837, the year Victoria became queen.

Guyana: 1961
Despite a campaign against the PPP by the Guyanese elites and the churches, PPP organizes gains ground. Guyana is granted internal self governance, with Britain retaining control over external and defense matters; Chetti Jagan of the PPP becomes prime minister.

Kenya: 1961
The British are forced to introduce a new policy which allows Africans to buy and farm the White Highlands. Kenya's first pre-independence general elections are held. The KANU defeat the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU). The KADU (led by Masinde Muliro, Daniel Arap Moi, and Ronald Ngala) represents smaller and less advantaged ethnic groups of the Great Rift Valley and coastal areas, including the Kalenjin. The KADU advocated Majimboism (regionalism in Swahili) which would create ethnic-based, semi-autonomous regions.

The KADU had been formed with the covert assistance of the British government and British businesses, in an effort to get a more 'moderate' government after independence. The British stopped supporting it when they saw it could not beat the KANU.

By selling at a high price the land previously seized by the white settlers, not only do the settlers make a great deal of money, but it is ensured that the land passes into the hands of a either wealthy individuals who will protect European business interests or people trapped by the debts they incur in borrowing money to buy the land.

Guyana: 1962
The US concludes that Dr. Jagan is a Communist and although all alternatives to Dr. Jagan are terrible, the US backs Jagan's opponent under an independent British [sic] Guyana, which would cause the U.S. fewer problems than a government under Dr. Jagan.

Jagan announces a budget which is widely praised by international commentators, but the opposition condemn it and use it as an excuse to incite violent protests. The opposition is supported by local labor organizations who receive support from certain US union groups funded by the CIA. The British Governor-General initially refuses to send troops to quell the disturbances, but eventually does so after arson, looting and deaths in the capital. Jagan is forced to withdraw the budget.

Yemen: 1962
MI6 begin covertly providing arms, funding, and logistical support to pro-British "rebels" in dirty war against pro-Egyptian republican forces. In this the Briitsh government colludes with Israel's Mossad and the Saudi regime. Around 200,000 die in the war.

Yemen: 1963
Britain rejects a UN call for it to withdraw and permit self-determination.

Australia: 1975

The government of prime minister Gough Whitlam is plagued by resignations and the blocking of its budget by the upper house of the parliament. In an unprecedented move, the UK governor-general, the official representative of the British queen, dismisses the Whitlam and the government. A caretaker administration is installed.

The speaker of the Australian House of Commons writes to the Queen to ask her to restore Whitlam to office, but she declines to intervene, saying it is not proper for her to do so.

It later transpires that the CIA had apparently encouraged Kerr to dismiss Whitlam, because he was raising issues about the the US running a control center for spy satellites in the Australian outback, amongst other things.

The Falkland Islands [The Malvinas]: 1982

Even after the UK claimed sovereignty over the islands in 1833, Argentina contested this. In 1982, the military junta of Argentina seized the island - which lay just off its coast - prompting the British to send in warships and wage a 74-day battle. The British re-took the islands, but to this day Argentina disputes this.

When then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher went to the Queen to send troops, Parliament was only notified afterward.

Ireland. A pope gave Ireland to Henry VII, and tried to take it away when Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic church. Nevertheless, the UK has held all or part of the island ever since the 15th century, culminating in the "Troubles" of the 1970's.

What is notable is the steady decline of British mischief, which roughly corresponds to its stature as an imperial power. What has not declined, even in an age of greater indifference to the monarchy, greater press scrutiny of all things official, less deferential treatment of our "betters" is the hands-off treatment the British monarchy is given. The International Criminal Court readily indicts Gaddafi and wants his son for questioning, but nothing of British crimes or wanting answers from its high officials, like the queen.

This is comparable to the hands-off treatment our own US press give our own unelected power brokers and the deferential treatment afforded our financial centers, which is corrupting.

The British prime minister is allowed powers most democratically elected presidents are forbidden. Its actions and its crimes are, like the queen, "above politics" and outside public scrutiny. It is allowed these powers because it is said to act on behalf of the monarch, whose powers are nearly absolute: war, peace, treaties, etc.

This is exactly what those 17th century ruling classes wanted after the interregnum, an unchecked power to act on its behalf and for its profit. It is not only important to understand who rules Britain [or any modern state] but also how power is distributed and to whom it is accountable.

In 1992 the Queen said "No institution: city, monarchy, whatever should expect to be free of the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don't."

Passing Briefs ...

MLK the Socialist firebrand * How many slaves do you own? * Cancer Barbie vs AIDS Barbie * Technically colorblind * Purge of left-wing Federal employees? * Ancient civilization before the Hun? * Escaping monkeys * When Mr. Galloway came to Washington


While I do not like the definitive title of this Youtube clip, but the sentiments from King impressed me a long time ago. He was a "socialist" [not a "Socialist!]."

I am not a Christian in any form, but I am impressed by the example of the Jewish rabbinical carpenter who spoke about justice and our only human birthright: each other, who was executed by Rome, as I am impressed by the Baptist preacher who spoke of a just society, who demanded we do in deed and word to act against Our Rome, who was also executed by Rome.

***

HOW MANY SLAVES DO YOU OWN?

I listened to an NPR-radio discussion this morning about the controversies around an infamous Apple Corporation plant/labor camp in China, where workers are committing suicide due to horrific work conditions and treatment.

The moderator asked the audience "how much more would you be willing to pay for you Apple products, and would you pay double" to ensure all the workers in the development were paid well and afforded labor rights?

Can you imagine an abolitionist asking such a morally bankrupt question in 1850? NO! Only a slave trader would pose such a question.

The question to ask our iPhone- and ePad-loving society is Derrick Jenson's: How many slaves do you own?

Further, it is the wrong question posed by our masters: how should we compete with China? The correct question is: Should we?

***

There used to be a lively, radical 'zine in San Francisco put out by activists from ACT UP/SF (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) called DISEASED PARIAH NEWS [DPN], which featured "AIDS Barbie" complete with photos of her swathed in KS lesions and stories about her vomiting from the side effects of those noxious drugs. MATTEL tried to sue.

DPN packed a punch back in those street marching, AIDS-phobic times.

Now I wonder if we're at risk of normalizing a cancer pandemic among women without really solving it. And I wonder what Mattel's contribution - who dropped the lawsuit earlier because these activists weren't dumb enough to incorporate and list their names - is doing with cancer Barbie.

What eats at me is we no longer have a health industry but rather a pharmaceutical economy. We no longer end disease but find expensive, patented treatments to enrich big pharm.

***

"Technically it's not mine"

... aka technically it's not my canal, technically it's not my land, technically it's not my oil, technically it's not my country, ... but we're going to bomb it/steal it/drain it anyway ... funny how lack of values spread like a plague and WHO is permitted to commit the crime and who is presumed guilty prima facie.

Color blind my ass. The undercover video shows who we are in word vs deed.

***

“I think an intelligent conservative wants the right federal employees delivering the right services in a highly efficient way and then wants to get rid of those folks who are in fact wasteful, or those folks who are ideologically so far to the left, or those people who want to frankly dictate to the rest of us,” Gingrich said in response to a question from a federal employee at the forum.

Yeah, I just got a copy of TSA's Office of Human Capital's Management Directive HB Addressing Unacceptable Performance & Conduct ... 15-day suspension, 15-day suspension, Removal from Federal Service, Removal from Federal Service.

Gingrich wants to frighten federal employees into silence and submission. The ground has already been plowed by the current administration!

***

And this BBC story is supposed to be a surprise, that civilization began with the Western religions and Conquest??

Civilization ended with the Western religions and the Conquest. The barbarians - by sheer, brute force forged from whence they came: barren, cold Europe - imposed themselves on the richest, most civilized parts of the world to extract resources to make the wasteland of Europe into an industrial power house.

***

This story from Brazil about some ingenious monkeys is proof that not only are other species smarter than we credit them but also these monkeys are smarter than most of us.

At least they have the sense to try and escape from their prisons while we keep endorsing, collaborating, defending, justifying our failed state, waiting like characters from old Greek drama for the Deus ex machina to come down from stage left to right all wrong.

***

This 43-minute Youtube video is might seem somewhat dated coming from 2005. But in case you missed the original airing and in light of the alleged US troop withdrawal from Iraq - almost 10 years later!! - it's worthy to note how George Galloway undresses and owns our useless US Senate.

Galloway is a firebrand socialist and, at the time, a member of the British Parliament. Then British prime minister, Tony Blair, orchestrated Galloway's removal from the Labour Party for his criticism of the illegal war. Galloway bashed back by forming his own political party, running against a Labour MP, and winning.

Go, George!

Often apologists and revisionists gloss over historical atrocities saying the ancient times weren't thinking as advanced as we [supposedly] are. This is a lie. Fr de las Casas made sermons against the Spanish extermination of the indigenous population in the Americas. He was ignored. The British Anti-War movement, and members of the British Parliament, like Galloway and Glenda Jackson, spoke loudly through the smokescreens of the rationales for war.

There is always someone speaking out.

The Coffee Cure

A recent article touting the benefits of drinking coffee for women has been gnawing at me. The coffee study purported to link treating depression in women with a daily cup of coffee. I know of these studies. Ever since I became an avid coffee drinker in college 20+ years ago, and ever since I quit a few years ago, then resumed on an occasional basis, I have seen these studies: some purport to say coffee is harmful. Others report the opposite. This seems to have been a constant conflict for at least 20 years.

But that is not what bothered me with this recent finding that coffee could treat depression in women. Then it dawned on me:

Why are women depressed? That is the Question.

When you're standing outside History and know it, a certain kind of challenge, a certain kind of consciousness, must always be engaged.

You have to beware and be highly suspicious without lapsing into paranoia at how arguments are framed for you and the parameters set around those arguments. Because, to put it another way, one of the reasons certain judge and cabinet appointments, certain activists, and certain arguments cannot be entertained is the establishment - the victors! - want to control the argument.

In this case, in our contentiousness about caffeine and our pill-popping culture, having a cup of coffee without regret is supposed to be the focus of this so-called study.

That is why determining the reasons for depression in women is not the operative issue, and it should be. Like, "why they hate us," this cannot really be discussed.

Why would they be depressed, making 70 cents on the mighty dollar; less if you are Black or Latina; much, much less if you are a native American woman?

Why would they be depressed if, besides making less wages, despite their population they trend toward lower-skilled, blue collar professions?

Why would they be depressed if they face harassment in the workplace, glass ceilings toward advancement?

Why would they be depressed if they are alone in shouldering the rearing of their children with no affordable child care?

Why would they be depressed if many men and much of society view them as punching bags to vent their frustrations [who needs that cup of coffee?!]?

We are not supposed to ask such questions. We are not supposed to tell the emperor he is naked. The reactionaries I unfortunately know - and too many of them presently - in their role as supporter of the establishment will attack the woman's will power, her character, her inflated sense of entitlement ... because there is nothing otherwise amiss.

I say, if a woman is depressed she might just need to break something, literally. If the system is too big to break at the moment, try some of the machinery at the job that oppresses her (a radical group of contract employees did just this in San Francisco in the 90's). This can have a liberatory effect on the spirit, short of walking out on your wage-slavery, which can have unforeseen consequences. Break up the romantic relationship. Break off the engagement. Break patriarchy. Break some dishes.

I don't know where to start, but a cup of coffee seems a peculiar place. Don't pick a commodity picked by under-waged workers, many of whom are women. But that's the point, isn't it?

Why Tyranny?

Something exciting is happening on Facebook in the last week, where a groundswell of candid photos from Occupy Wall Street and other cities, blog articles, declarations, and personal observations have become the norm and the cascade of banal cuteness has finally abated. It is engaging to see so many people engaged. Social networking has reached a high-water mark.

But the outcomes to these movements is no where guaranteed if we look at the present and at history. Just today, the mainstream news is celebrating the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American, killed by a drone in Yemen. On the orders of Pres. Obama, this citizen - without a trial of any kind - was targeted for murder, "on or off a battlefield." Reading the reports carefully you can glean why, like bin Laden, no trial could have been held.

Words like "reportedly," "possibly," "credited," and "linked" would not have withstood a fair and open court hearing. So, true to our Southern Justice roots, the US just goes out and lynches al-Awlaki, thereby adding to its list of war crimes.

Of course, history is a brutal panorama of vicious campaigns against those who seriously challenge the power base, who seriously attempt to dismantle a system celebrated in the founding Federalist Papers that "those who own the country should run it."

Civil Rights activists, labor organizers, socialist, anarchist, communist party insurgents, anti-war militants have all been infiltrated, discombobulated, and targeted for extermination by the state - with great success: witness the pathetic state of our labor-unions, which are more collaborationist than changing the social and economic order, which was their birthright. This reformist tendency in our labor movement is simply because there is "no there there:" the militants were driven out by law or killed.

For the current movement against neoliberalism and globilization to succeed, we must be engaged in whatever capacity with the present, while seeing far into the future. We must anticipate the state may tolerate auditoriums and parks filled with critics bearing home-made signs; the state does not as easily tolerate its destruction - even at the hands of the majority.

We must also anticipate in these broad-based, mass gatherings, which are beautiful to behold, are a range of political ideas, from libertarian socialism to Ron Paul Tea Party activists, all with legitimate gripes against an horrific system.

If these movements grow, expect the Tea Party to want to assume the helm as the rightful leadership. Given their closer proximity to state power structures, the establishment will maneuver to back them, and whatever "revolution" that happens will be on those reactionary lines with some reforms made to neoliberalism only.

A friend asked me the other day why I describe my workplace as a tyranny. The word struck him as something ancient or better suited to a foreign country. Hierarchies are always at great risk at becoming tyrannies, be they in the home or at work, more so when the work imposed is antithetical to human needs.

When so many garments must be produced by a few tired hands, or so many passengers processed through a security checkpoint by a few understaffed officers, or food processed by a time clock by underpaid cooks, you must have someone's boot on the worker's neck at all times. That boot must inflict pain on those who do not produce fast enough.

That is a tyranny.

Fidel asked in his indictment of the US-backed dictatorship: "How can an unpopular regime, inimical to the interests of the people, stay in power unless it is by force?"

The same could be asked not only of our present governments, which increasingly oppose peoples' desires but also equally important, this can be asked of our workplaces, which are tyrannies.

9/11 and our apparent complacency to war: a long-view perspective

The upcoming ten-year anniversary of 9/11 is a cause for mourning on a few fronts. We are reminded of the 3,000 lives lost in the Twin Towers. But our thoughts can never be far from the greater carnage that's come from the aftermath due to the US assault.

Activists from the progressive side may mark this anniversary with a very mixed progress report. Their activism was intense - and predictably ignored - under the Bush junta.

The US government flouted international law, silenced dissent, imprisoned hundreds of unnamed people in secret and not-so-secret prisons from so-called "battlefields", extraordinarily rendered countless more to their torturers in our client regimes, like Mubarak's Egypt - in short, our government was a war criminal.

But for the duration of Obama's first term, the progressive left has been silent and made myriad excuses for Obama, this tool of Wall Street and the right-wing. The Bush crimes are still fully in force, and the current administration has added a war in Libya.

It must seem hypocritical to lament so publicly the needless deaths of 3,000 souls and yet be so mute to the slaughter of 300,000 lives.

Ten years is not a long time, but it is too long to be bombed and menaced by a Super Power. Reagan stupidly imagined the revolutionary government of Sandinistas marching across the border from Nicaragua to invade the US. But imagine if that poor nation had done so, and persisted in its assault for 10 full years of meddling in our politics, bombing soft targets like neighborhoods and hospitals, and imprisoning civil-rights activists in the name of Nicaraguan socialism.

Would you be so complacent?

Just Cause? So since many a Bostonian Irish-American funded the Irish Republican Army in the 70's, I guess Her Majesty's Government would have been justified to send the royal navy to bomb Boston harbor.

9/11 also marks the US-sponsored coups d'etat in Chile. 1973, when it toppled the democratically elected government of Marxist Salvador Allende and installed a dictator/general, Augusto Pinochet. Would a free Chile be justified now in hunting down Henry Kissinger and airing his execution on prime time TV?

But if we can't imagine such things as: the villainy we teach being executed right back on us, how can we see the greater crimes that persist right under our noses?

Our collective responses to the crimes of our times has also been a mixed one.

Here are a few notable examples:

[1] The Hundred Year's war against workers, which roughly began during the Industrial Revolution.

Rural laborers and sharecroppers were driven from the land in the 1800's and into urban ghettos to work in factories. The so-called captains of Industry made wage-slaves out of rural laborers and newly arrived foreign immigrants, with poor working conditions, low wages, and even employing children.

The overseer contingent from the plantation era became the management class, from literal whip to write-ups and reprimands, to watch the workers and punish those who do not perform.

Sure, activists have made gains in labor rights since then - eight-hour work days and minimum-wage rights, for example - but these hard-won gains have always been within the confines of the master's industrial design, within those urban ghettos. Can a Nazi credibly reform a death camp, or must that death camp be abolished?

In other words, we have been content to carve out from within this prison camp a small measure of humanity, not content to destroy it.

This small measure of humanity is minute because it must never impede on the purported rights of corporations to reap profits wherever and however it can.

[2] A 500 Year's War against the global South, also known as the Third World, the colonies.

Many books have been written and careers made on justifying this war.

I remember in college being handed a paper by the late UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, which argued the poor of Central America were not culturally averse to being brutalized by US-backed dictators, because their very lives were already utterly miserable. This shit passed for scholarship at Washington University, my alma mater.

This war on the global South is based on one fact, and one unmentioned fact alone: most of the global North is not fit for human life. To make it fit for human life and to create a palatial estate of golf courses and industrial wealth, the global North needs to pirate the resources and labor of the global South. It's that simple. You won't likely survive a Norwegian winter without oil.

For civilization to thrive, Europe has had to underdevelop the global South, and if certain people of the global South don't like it, they will have to face a dictator armed by the US, France, Spain, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium ... the usual suspects. If they dare try to organize a union, they will have their heads blown off with rifles made in the USA.

But, as the infomercials say, there's more:

[3] The Ten Thousand year's War on the land base has, as one activist called it, been a wound on the planet.

It was 10,000 years ago the agricultural revolution changed the shape of so much of humanity. We are told this has been for the better, but the ecosystems might say otherwise, if they could speak.

This revolt against nature - demonstrated by Nature's defiance to fight back with every weed - not only began the destruction of the habitat, the destruction of old-growth forests, decimation of rainforests, and millions of exterminated species; it has also poisoned the water and air and threatened humanity.

Land settlement and agriculture meant a dramatic change in human interactions unknown until that time. Archeological excavations show the contrast from before the agri-revolution, where our nomadic communities distributed its resources equitably and lived for tens of thousands of years without menacing the land base.

I repeat: in North America, we had communities living and thriving for tens of thousands of years and did nothing to harm the environment like "civilization" has in just a few hundred.

This is in sharp contrast with post-agriculture, when the implications of land ownership for sustenance changed forever relations between sexes, beginning that wedge between men's wealth [land] and women, who either became subjects of men or turned to abject prostitution, which are the same things.

Class war was born between those who controlled the land and those who came to work the land. Activists have seemed to cede the argument by demanding those who own be taxed more rather than that they should own nothing.

Slave religions were born, to justify the lot of the poor - slaves will always be with us! - the pirating of the rich, and our obedience to hierarchies.

These slave religions obviously metamorphasized into top-down power structures, like mega-Churches, like the Roman Catholics, divine-rights of kings, and the cultural celebration of the titans of industry - the billionaires.

These atrocities have become fixtures on the cultural landscape as accepted as the old redwoods used to be, with some resistance to reform them, make them less pungent to the smell.

So there you have it, a sea of complacency from beginning to end.

If the current US war is no longer talked about but an elephant in the room, our wars on workers, resource-rich regions in the global South, and on Nature has become as much a fixture as wallpaper and not even discussed.

How different are those who are silent different than the Germans during the blight of Naziism? Those Germans followed orders or claimed not to know about the heinous crimes against humanity being committed. How many times have my sheepish coworkers shrugged their shoulders and said, "that's the way it is"?

We have lived so long away from the land, in our urban work prisons, within an artificially designed system that benefits only the Master, that we have mistaken this urban wage-slavery for Nature itself, and - dangerously - our local markets as the source of our food.


Our lifestyles, particularly the last hundred years and less, have been dominated by an increasing power of the state for the obvious purpose to defend the power base. That power base could be the king, a nobility, and old order, the corporation/multinational. But this power base must be protected from us, which is why it is critical that not only we impose failed states on the conquered but endure them our own selves.

Name one democratic institution in the United States of America. I dare you.

If that is not history in a nutshell, I do not know what is. Because, both the corporation and its evil offspring, civilization, have been a menace to society and would not thrive without armies and navies and secret police and court systems to ensure we do not get out of line.

The Stirrings in the workforce our Masters don't want us to talk about

Since Reagan's Revolutionary "recovery" after he and Congress drove the economy into the free market ground worker satisfaction with our "jobs" has diminished across the economy.

No wonder why. The jobs this country has created in every recovery are lower waged, less skilled, and, far worse, without benefits of pension, retirement, or the ability to save for that future when Wall Street dreams of grasping its evil hands on that leaden lock box called Social Security.

The shrinking of union work is suggestive too, but since our unions are increasingly reformist - accommodating corporate structures in exchange for a "cut" in union dues and prestige - unions are a far cry from their militant origins, when its goal was worker control of production, not high wages, no management except self-management.

So late 20th century and 21st century workers find themselves in a predicament. They were driven into the strategic hamlets we call cities over a century ago in the wake of the Industrial Revolution; they were trained to work on a treadmill [viz., factory floor, pushing paper in a cubicle]; and they can now can do little more than survive by keeping the wheel of their own destruction spinning ... spinning the twine to make the noose that hangs them.

When ends don't meet, they spin faster, and have even a generation ago begun to send their teen-aged children to work the treadmill. Because, to blow the mill out of the universe - to destroy it - would leave too many workers with a skill-set barely enabling them to tie a shoe but little else.

We can't farm. We can't build. Many can't even pull apart their car engines and rebuild them. The urbane existence we are supposed to consider a pinnacle of civilization has in reality done what the antebellum slave master could not do: many of those African slaves risked life and limb to read and write and to escape. We are grown, illiterate children.

My Tennessee grandparents talked a lot about this in my youth, when they rued the next Depression. The one they survived in the 1930's they survived because while they were dirt poor, they had food from their land and practical skills to sustain themselves.

We deeply loathe our employment, but the Stockholm Syndrome says we are one with it too. Our jobs do less and less for us, except eek out the barest minimum existence, but this basic we've turned into ..."I am lucky to have a job" and bow and curtsey, tug-at-your-locks obedience.

So we are caught between the proverbial rock of joblessness and no means to feed/house ourselves and the hard place of work.

Two reasons employers are not fretting about this.

One must be their deep-seeded faith that we workers will not seek alternatives beyond what the master provides. Thanks to lessons learned in the factory system of education, we've learned to shut up. Otherwise, I should think an employer who has even 50% of his workforce actively seeking work elsewhere would be alarmed.

Two that where the employer may lose a portion of that job-dependent 50% to another job, there's another job-dependent 70% waiting to step in - if only for a moment.

The wasted costs of training and the signal that your workers' minds are elsewhere is no concern, possibly because the training is so minimal, the work not critical. Ask yourself in whatever job you labor if you'd trust a surgeon or even an dentist to operate on you with the level of training you and your colleagues got. If the answer is No, your training is probably over-blown and over-hyped.

Make no mistake. This is a powder-keg. What will ultimately ignite it is hard to pinpoint; and how that coming disaster will destruct is hard to predict. Because when workers take a page from the stockbroker and stop looking at the picture but at the broader canvass - even into the next economic quarter - all Hell will break loose.

Tottenham

There's a specter haunting the West. It is the specter of the colonials over-running the White Race and its 1,000-year old faux civilization. In the 60's the West was haunted by the specter of the Blacks over-running their cities, so it mobilized the White Race and extended Slave Codes - Jim Crow, Counter-Reconstruction, Red-lining, etc - over the mostly urban population, criminalized a host of behaviors, and put that population through the meat grinder of the criminal-"justice" system.

By West, I do not mean the populations but rather the governments, who are empowered to maximize any thing that brings profits to corporations. In fact, it's difficult to distinguish the government from the corporations. Just look at the current US president's Cabinet.

By White Race, I cannot mean White people, most of whom are working class and victims of this economic system. White Race is a clever guise by which corporations can justify its existence, can pit one set of workers against another.

But the West's actions to mitigate the threat of the colonials - a pre-cursor to the war on "Terror," in fact - could never come to a conclusion. History is literally against the West, and deep in the bowels of its banks, it knows this.

More and more of the US states are passing or contemplating racist laws purportedly to "control" colonials from the global South. This of course pre-supposes the White Race in the Americas is not illegal and is not the creature that should be controlled. Despite such maneuvers as NAFTA and the utter decimation of Mexico's rural life, the theft of water from Peru and India, etc., the criminal behavior of the West's governments is an exoticism left to college seminars and rogue radicals in black masks throwing bottles filled with inflammables. It is not to be discussed among serious people.

So the Tottenhams - site of the recent London "riots" - always, always come as a surprise to the gullible. But the serious people with any sense are scared. Good.

In the UK right now, signs that its government have never really assimilated its former colonials - West Indian and African Blacks and East Asians - are literally burning the streets down in London and reaching up to Liverpool.

While the US has made some pedestrian, window-dressed steps to assimilating its former slaves [see Richard Rodriguez' "Hunger for Memory"], the UK has maintained essentially a 50-year guest-worker program and kept its imports in Old World ghettos.

It isolated these "Black Britons" to bantustans in perpetuity, thrown in some vocational training for jobs that didn't exist, accessorized it with a royal charity [The Prince's Trust], and otherwise ignored these non-people while the "country" pretended it relived some medieval tribal fantasy.

So when the colonials get restless at a lack of a means to support themselves, the weight of the foot of royal police on their necks, or shooting of their children like they were foxes in the pastoral hunt, the hierarchy's press people pretend to wonder why, official community leaders condemn the violence, and the government threatens to bring out the water canons, etc., etc.

These governments - all over Europe - are scared shitless that this series of events might mark their inevitable twilight.

What began in Tottenham did not really begin there, but must be seen as a continuum that stretches to one side in Cairo, to Yemen, to Tunisia, to India. It also extends back to the burning cities of the 60's, Mexico and Paris in 1968, the Pink Tide spreading across Latin America, the riots after the Simi Valley verdict acquitting the LAPD of gross misconduct, the riots after the Oscar Grant slaughter in Oakland, which saw that young man's murderer walk free, and countless other agitations that keep getting explained away as peripheral.

These are not only riots. They are uprisings. The compromised Western media and the bought Western politician will of course condemn the burning, the looting, the trashing because in Britain they must really believe that ancient legal convention that "the Queen can do no wrong."

But whether they believe in Queen and Country or not, they know the score. These governments and their other halves, the corporations, are in a tough spot. Their very existence, their successes, their wealth, have been built directly on the backs of the colonials' labors and the colonials homelands. But the score card pretty clearly shows sooner or later, this specter will in fact overwhelm them.

They know they are a chilled shriveling corpse that must live on the blood, sweat, gold, oil, etc., etc., of persons that must - legally speaking - be deemed as their inferiors, which takes us back to those Slave Codes.

This legal convention can be seen in the racist nature of every single institution on both sides of the swamp.

There is nothing about the modern age that alters basic biology. Although we are in the the 21st century, this has not changed the need of the parasite for its host, any more than modernity makes tiny, inhospitable Europe a terrain fit for human life. It is not. It is cold, damp, and barren, and to sustain any vibrancy it must suck the life-force from the global South.

This is why - at bottom - these degenerate governments have swarmed like locusts into the Arab world, why it begs China, loots Libya, menaces Cuba, and, why, at any cost - believe me - they will put down these colonial upstarts wherever they raise their defiance: in London, in Cairo, in Caracas, in Oakland or in Bensonhurst.

It will not be enough for these uprisings to bring down the Coalition government between the Conservative and Liberal-Democrat Parties. Although that would be a small gain indeed.

Our systems of government, on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout the Western world are less an expression of popular voice and more like the crude, barbarism of the management class. We know our managers at our work places: part drones, part pre-historics, all brute force to keep the rabble in line. They are not coaches; they are coercive.

Coercion is the only way to keep humans from being human and to make them into machines to toil for one purpose and not agitate.

This is the essence of our Western democracies, and this is why we seemingly have no control over our public policies, foreign or domestic, why war crimes we are against continue to be perpetrated in our name, why we cannot get a decent community need met.

But bombs can be dropped on soft targets in the global South. Rogue leaders who do not follow the management directives can be run out or assassinated. And guest workers in the metropolises - London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris - can be set upon like sport.

This is why we must throw the managers to the dogs and burn not only the institutions to the ground but also our addled dependence on them.

The existence of this system obviously makes problematic any "justice" for the colonials from these governments - the Blacks, the Browns, the working-class Whites, the Southasians and East Asians, the Indigenous are not likely to find any reparation or revolution from this system.

Che Guevara's famous admonition was to give birth to 100's more Vietnams, 100's more "slave" rebellions against the global North. Who knows what will finally spark this mass uprising to burn the dead brush from the landscape: will we look back at Tottenham like we who know better look back at the Haymarket riots in Chicago?

Following Orders

Among anarchist circles exists the primitivist contention that civilization is bad and needs dismantling and the anti-primitivist response that were the primitivist reality come to pass, "people will die" without the many benefits modern society has given humanity. I've hear this so many times it's become a TV jingle in my head.

But I don't hear a similar response from aspects of the broader left when it comes to neoliberal policies attacking social programs, and I wish I did. The anarchists debates are real debates between dismantling management structures and replacing them with worker-owned, worker-run job sites or doing away with the agricultural-industrial model altogether to free us.

Liberals don't have real debates, particularly when it comes to neoliberalism. These policies did not begin in the 80's but gained an intensity under Reagan and Thatcher with a selling off of public goods, attacks on the poor, women, minorities; continued under Clinton with Welfare Reform; and just now driven further into the heart of the New Deal under the hammer of Pres. Barack Obama, Wall Street's Boy Toy and menace to society.

The debt-ceiling deal just signed is catastrophic. And while I am more sympathetic than not with the primitivist, anti-civilization arguments, I find myself employing its opposition's "people will die" refrain when it comes to policies clearly being passed.

People will die.

Because, unlike the primitivist arguments, which has little consensus and no legislative support, the neoliberal program is real and in the here and now ... and aside from attacking Head Start, education funding, community health centers, Medicare, health programs for women, like breast cancer screening, food programs it will also eliminate federal jobs and employment programs.

This time, for real, people will die. What do we think happens to a woman who cannot get early breast cancer screening except that she will likely die? What do we think happens to the poor who cannot access food programs except they will get sick and die?

I'm often asked about people's lack of response. Why in the face not only of the mass extermination of Nature, the salmon, the wetlands, the rain forests, 100's of species per hour but also the incremental extermination of human beings, politically driven famines in the global South, like in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Haiti, austerity measures in the North and South cutting off food supports, access to health care, and selling off natural reserves do we not counter-attack?

Why don't the collective masses rise up and cut off the heads of these degenerates and obliterate the system which clearly and empirically oppresses us? All kinds responses - form the so-called passive to the so-called violent - would seem to be on the table, but few are.

Why do we follow orders?

The Factory System imposed on our public education system of model of obedience onto students being prepped to be industrial workers. Indeed, much of public education was motivated to assimilate former rural farm workers and immigrants into the industrial system.

As at your workplace, rewards came by sitting in your chair, not challenging the teacher or the system. Disruption was met with various kinds of progressive discipline up to and including expulsion [firing]. It was a weeding out process of good workers from bad. And the better workers learned the degenerate lessons that you keep your head down, your thoughts to yourself, and obey the manager/master/teacher.

The obvious problem is besides creating a nation of slaves to whatever system is in place is that system can evolve into a NAZI Germany or a 21st century global North [e.g., USA, UK, France, Spain, et al] so dependent on the resources of the global South - this dependence proof of the primitivist argument, by the way - the global North has broken every domestic or international law or human rights convention or basic human civility and commit crimes against humanity, war crimes, and savage act.

And the docile, well-trained, well-schooled "workers" - those who learned the lessons best - will keep their heads down, run the mill, the factory, the workplace, or even drop bombs on innocents and just keep following orders.

So our only hope is from those who refuse to follow orders.

What's left of the labor movement

It's hard to read recent labor news with any optimism. Further it's hard to put any more credibility in a US labor movement as workers get assaulted and trades-unions seem to capitulate.

What it will mean in a few years to have a labor-union is a depressing thought.

The state of Wisconsin has just rammed through a measure which strips its public-employee unions of collective-bargaining rights. Indiana followed suit. Ohio was next in what proves to be, given the neoliberal climate, a very long chain of brutal assaults on workers.

Like a vicious wildfire, this menace to working people moves virtually unchecked.

Yes, some state legislators have gone into hiding to prevent the Wisconsin bill from passing. Yes, there's a lot of wailing at the wall from progressive lawmakers. Yes, the protests have been loud and numerous against this assault.

But my pessimism tells me this will ultimately have as much affect on this neoliberal attack as ... the millions who oppose the US war in the Middle East (this holds true for the populations of Western Europe, who differ sharply from their political masters, so we are approaching a 10 Years' War).

The trades-union movement, if we can call it that anymore, has for so long implicated itself with the neoliberal model its meaning was eroded a long time ago.

Observe to some of these union chiefs:

On the federal level, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) gears up for a union vote of its officers. Bush II denied TSA officers collective-bargaining rights when he established the agency, rights afforded to every other federal agency.

So this vote would seem to be a victory after hard-fought efforts by officers, and the two unions vying for officer support.

But, like recent anti-labor moves, TSA chief, John Pistole, has effectively negotiated the contract unilaterally.

In a recent NPR interview, National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) president, Colleen Kelley, responded to TSA's Pistole Wisconsinesque maneuver to take security issues, wages, discipline policies, testing, qualifications off the bargaining table as non-negotiable.

 Kelley said her union can assist TSA officers with transfers to other airports and work schedules. But the competing union, American Federation of Government Employees [AFGE], can do little more.

Closer to my home, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has authorized over 5,000 lay off notices.

According the LA Times, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union president, AJ Duffy, responded with "This large number of proposed layoffs shows that LAUSD has clearly abandoned its all-too-frequent, and hollow, promise to 'keep cuts away from the classroom."

Acceding to the promise that jobs cuts be kept away from teachers and, implicitly, other workers is problematic. It really seems to come not from a union leader, who should know better, but rather the rest of the population who are kept ignorant of the vital role of non teaching staff in public schools. So when that non teaching staff disappears, the general public don't notice and are therefore unlikely to agitate.

A union head of teachers should know that the various staff members at a school - counselors, office staff, even maintenance workers and janitors - are extremely vital to the community of a school. And he should also know, as the saying goes: an injury to one really is an injury to all.

But this is exactly what generations of concessions have won trades-unionists: no power, one layoff after another, being taken for granted numerous times by "their friends in Congress".

You can hear a pin drop to their official challenges to an overall corrupt system. The all-things-on-the-table war - to limit it to my life time - should have been declared in the early 1980's.

When Pres. Ronald Reagan (himself a former union chief!) fired the air-traffic controllers: that should have been the next chapter in a class war.

Instead, Reagan's move was a class purge.

[Question: just how many workers have to be laid off and left with no means of support before "you" put all options rhetorically back on the table? - just a thought.]

As modern, collaborating unions concede to neoliberal doctrine, union bosses' best defense for its existence is pedestrian.

We hear how breaking up unions is shrinking the middle class; that it was the union movement that swelled the ranks of good wage-earners, but this defense is also problematic.

On wages.

The fetish for good wages in a corrupted system leads to the very social and economic inequalities we see today and have always seen, notably, in the global South where trades-unionism was not tolerated by Uncle Sam. It seems now Uncle Sam won't tolerate unionism within its own borders.

Making wages a central issue is a co-conspirator defense to essentially partner with a neoliberal system, inherently corrupt, to take a cut of the spoils. It is also not the sum of what it means to be a trades-union activist.

To reduce the union movement to wages not only dismisses a long and militant history that brought us our cherished labor rights - in and outside the union [i.e., the eight-hour workday benefits all workers] but also misses issues around the legitimacy of private ownership, management, and what makes for an ideal society.

In other words, today, a harsh wage[-slave] system is defended, just as chattel slavery was, by putting the very reward central to the argument. The union movement has conceded the argument.

And on management.
A major issue is management. When I state point-blank that we should get rid of management, I am often asked "then who will manage?", which implies laborers, like chattel slaves, as being too untrustworthy to be let loose without the ever-present overseer with his whip.

In most workplaces the workers know and often articulate that they themselves can make better decisions in running affairs than the ones being made by their overseers, but this conflicts with what the ghosts of the Federalist Papers have taught us about democracy: it's not a good thing.

Democratic workplaces, worker self-management will not survive a neoliberal paradigm. Profit is key. Wall Street is key. And the more immediate that profit the better. 

The role of management is to keep the workers from benefiting one another, the workplace, and the community. Their role is to preserve at all costs the central importance of Wall Street [erroneously called "The Economy"].

More importantly management is vital to preserve a governance system which demands, not competence, but rather obedience from workers. It is there to remind us to know "our" place.

This is what traditional trades-unionism resisted. Modern unions may find my thinking from Mars.

By why this refusal to fight back by trades-unions, why this acquiescence to the dominant neoliberal paradigm that welcomes with open arms wage-slavery, why concede an inch to management?

This government waged a vicious hot and cold war against the early labor movement: mass deportations with the Palmer Raids, assassinations, imprisonments, of anti-war activists, leftists, communists, and anarchists. Then to cap it off Congress prohibited the inclusion of anarchists and communists from US labor unions with the 1947 Taft-Hatley Act, which encoded into law attacks against "militants", weakening labor unions, and establishing right-to-work states, where unions are prohibited. The air was sucked right out of a militant movement and it has left us today gasping.

Those who survived that historic assault must have very small lungs and weak voices.

Whose Shopping Therapy?

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive with hyper consumers, rich and poor, not only ready to pull out the checkbook or credit card at the drop of a hat (or point of a GI gun, threat of eviction, cloud of starvation), but also willing to line up at the check-cashing place for a more expensive "loan."

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if it promises that every wish can be fulfilled, every heart's desire met through that checkbook, credit card, or however much you can squeeze out of the check cashing rock.

A hyper-consumer society will persist only when so-renamed "consumers" [formerly known as "citizens"] can only see their desires met from the array of treasures, trinkets, gadgets, wovens, and concoctions offered in the display case - no more and no less. No imagination required. Imagination is discouraged.

A hyper-consumer society can only exist within a strategic hamlet, where the consumers are made to consume through purchases authorized by the powers-that-be, the state, and never outside or free from that state's authority.

A hyper-consumer society will only exist if said hyper consumers cannot distinguish needs from wants, and so see nothing "hyper" or "schizo", or "pathological" about their consuming patterns. After all, they might argue: what society does not consume? From the Pre-historic (strange, ill-fitting term), Classical (overstated), feudal, or modern: they all consume something, food and air and water.

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if the consumers feel entitled to the treasures and trinkets in the display case.

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if the consumers feel someone else is less entitled to those treasures - if they are apt to feel anything at all. Those less entitled will be given a lower step on the ladder and bestowed with various names: but they are ultimately and empirically Slaves.

A hyper-consumer society will always exist in close proximity - by rail, plane, boat, or canal zone - to a slave society, because hyper consumers depend on extracting their treasures from those slaves (and call the relationship "trade," "purchase," "enterprise zones," "treaty rights").

A hyper-consumer society is a society without a soul, not only because the extent of its desires and imagination are limited to those display cases but also because it persists in meeting those desires on the backs of [its] slaves. It must by definition keep the slaves down (e.g, put the n*gger in his place, guard the border, hunt down "illegals," etc), be content that while the slaves may be entitled to little, that is all they can handle because they are deemed "backwards." The hyper consumers are always entitled to more than enough. This pathological dichotomy will be rationalized in academic studies and political white papers.

A hyper-consumer society will persist in trying to fill its soul with treasures from the display case, which means never lifting its boot from the slaves' necks, because hyper consumer's imagination is as limited as the slave's liberty. And consumers are bred to consume: that is all they are taught to know.

A hyper-consumer society, having little developed insight, no real intuition, will be forever puzzled at its own crises, its poverties, its slums, its crime rates, because hyper consumers - who used to be citizens - are so limited in their imagination and intuitiveness they cannot fathom what impoverishes a man, woman, or child as robbing their treasures from them will certainly do, and why that man, woman, and child must be made a slave.

A hyper-consumer society exists on the precipice but must refuse to acknowledge that, like their neighbors, they may be the next easy victim.


[For Jasmine: the student who teaches the teacher]

Signs of the times!

Guy Fawkes

Confirmed: Cuts will hit poorest hardest * Cuts will hit women twice as hard as men, Commons research shows * California jobless rate is stuck at 12.4% *   Spending cuts: Liverpool facing 'worse than the worst-case scenario' * California state, county and city agencies, beset by plunging revenues, make their biggest payroll cuts in decades, and more layoffs are ahead, analysts forecast * US announces $2bn military aid package for Pakistan * Queen asked for poverty grant to heat palaces * French lessons: pension protests * Amid Reforms, Cubans Fret Over Food Rations Fate * Mass protests overshadow Greek prime minister's austerity speech * Councils plan for exodus of poor families from London * U.S. unemployment rate for blacks projected to hit 25-year high * Hispanic unemployment: Latinos hardest hit by recession * Child Poverty Over 30% In Chicago, As Recession Cripples Families