90th Anniversary of the Soviet Revolution

Reportage being what it is, it's best to follow the old-school reporter's adage: "Even if your mother says she loves you, fact-check it." This has been clear the last week with the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution that began the USSR [being on an older calendar, our November was their October]. Predictably, the Western press has nothing good to say about the Soviet Union and has reduced that long history to an aspect of Joseph Stalin's years as leader.

I did read one clever joke which goes like this:

The Soviet Union is founded and Lenin dies and goes to Hell. Soon after, the Devil becomes so agitated with Lenin trying to organize the doomed residents of Hell he calls God and asks for a trade, Lenin for God's worst angel. God makes the trade. Later on, the Devil calls God to see how things are going, but his call is answered by a bureaucrat Angel who tells the Devil "God doesn't exist."

Funny, but what the USSR did was serious. It took an exploited country in peonage and reorganized its resources to become a First-World Industrial country and "power". It did this despite a bank-imposed Western economic Depression of the 1930's and invasions by the capitalist West. Keep that in mind: while the US and UK witnessed bread lines and a shrinking of available money, this backward, mystical Czarist-ruled country was building factories, universities, and seeing the first rural to urban migration of an educated cadre of people.

Enter Stalin in the Western nightmare. Since we cannot focus on the achievements of the USSR during these years, AND LEARN FROM THEM, Uncle Joe is trotted out as a tyrant and murderer of millions of people, period.

Can you hear the liberals and conservatives howl if "I" were to reduce the US Revolution to the slaughter of millions of Native Americans? The Native Americans got in the way of Western imperial expansion. As Primo Levi would say, those who could not be complicit, perished. So too in Stalin's years: how many of us know people stuck in their old ways and who refuse - as Che put it - to be "housebroken"? Stalin exterminated them for holding on to their peonage and peonage values, and this is just as cruel. But just as our liberals and conservatives would say US history is more complicated than just bleeding the lives of Natives, the USSR's is too.

When I worked at San Francisco's YMCA - one of the best jobs I have ever had - I met many Russian retirees who were patrons. They were very proud of what the USSR did and the technical education it afforded them. They would always introduce themselves as Russians who had post-doctoral degrees in [fill in the blank].

Similarly, at the end of the Ibero-American Summit in Chile, Spain's king told President Hugo Chavez to shut up. Predictably, this was badly reported. Of course, the end of the story is King Juan Carlos hailed a hero in Europe for "putting Chavez in his place." No irony here, which should remind us that Spain is still part of Europe.

The reports I read from the BBC and the Miami Herald reported that Chavez called former Spanish PM a "a fascist," and current PM Zapatero interrupted to ask for more civility. Chavez persisted, and the king stepped in using the verb tense you would use with a child "Why don't you shut up?" No mention that Aznar was behind backing the coup against Chavez's elected government. The BBC and Miami Herald are silent on this. Chavez, like Stalin, cannot be credited with sanity or achievement, only insanity.

Our Shared Values - The Rulers Speak

A week ago, the king of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, an absolute ruler who is known to oppress women, ethnic minorities, and torture dissidents was fetted by none other than the queen of United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland. Since nothing the queen says publicly is of her own making but approved by the government, her lavish of praise of this man should alert conscious people. I daresay it will not.

The Queen toasted this potentate noting "our shared values." Why shouldn't we be immediately frightened and incensed enough by this transparent assault on the public dignity to rid the world of both their royal offices? For whom do they speak?

The world is now noting - in some dark corners celebrating - the significance of the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Predictably, the Western press has nothing good to say about this, depicting it as one long, bloody Stalinist nightmare. NPR is depicting present-day Russians as under some kind of voodoo spell for longing for the Stalin days. Could it be that in the 1930's while the West was plunged into a manufactured economic depression, the USSR was industrializing, ending peonage, building universities and outpacing the West in GNP?

May I suggest we examine our shared values?

The other day our Retard in Chief, Bush, said some words about Cuba being a GULAG, desiring democracy in Cuba, dissidents of conscience, and never budging an inch from the blockade against the island until multi-party elections were allowed.

Former First Minister to HER MAJESTY'S government,. Tony Blair, has been quoted as saying some rude things about Fidel and Cuba's government as well.

The Saudis don't get such bile from the Free World. No Presidential Medals of Freedom for any of the Disappeared in Saudi dungeons. So what then are the shared values if the Saudis can disappear, torture, subjugate huge swathes of its population and be fetted by the Queen and fawned over by the prince of Wales?

Could the shared value be the primacy of personal profit, even if human slavery is required, the laboring and starving of children to meet the bottom line, the brutalization of women, sexual & ethnic minorities to keep our minds in the Dark Ages, the destruction of the environment is concerned?

The proof is in their pudding. Katrina: the poor and Black literally abandoned in full view of the world to die, and our Dry Drunk kept to the line: GOOD JOB BROWNIE!

Believe them.

Believe the queen when she speaks of the shared values, and look ahead and behind you. As Maya Angelou said: when someone tells you they're crazy, believe them the FIRST time.

US Civics 101: Gay Cruising

"I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport." Sen Larry Craig.

That was the only true statement he made, this closeted liar who is another hypocrite who backed DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act].

"I am not gay. I never have been gay." This is a LIE and queerly rendered phrase, "never have been".

Let me give you a quick lesson about your country and how it has treated gay men.

CNN and the major media in the first 24 hours of this news release that Craig was caught in a bathroom police sting at the Minneapolis airport: are treating his behavior as a psychotic episode rather than an indictment on what the West has wrought on gay men.

Veteran journalist and MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews tonight wants to draw a distinction between the gay lifestyle and breaking the law.

Mr. Matthews, laws are lines in the sand written by men with power and can sweep any class of person into a prison cell. Not too long ago, gay lifestyle AND cruising a park were equally illicit acts, at the very least deserving the person a good beating by your local police.

I resist being made into the moral equivalent of hegemonic straights, being asked to follow their line.

It was not until a stone's throw away that we've seen a proliferation of gay night spots, raves, journalism of many stripes, stars coming out, Republicans endorsing civil unions.

But I remember as a teen in the 80's and even into the 90's that there was only THE ADVOCATE, a rather right-wingish gay magazine that was kept tucked away in some magazine stores in the PORN SECTION. Mind you: THE ADVOCATE is strictly a news magazine, nothing pornographic about it, but the very topic "gay" was enough to have it hidden in certain magazine shops where we knew where and how to get it. This was the Reagan Era.

Meeting each other as youth meant relying on the good graces of older gay men who would open their homes for our parties and our youth-organizing meetings, which I sneaked away to every Tuesday. In St Louis where I went to college and the Inland Empire where I mostly grew up: there were no gay bars. None! You had to drive to East St. Louis or Hollywood for that. Meanwhile, Gay men of many various reputations met in the park. It actually was a social thing, laughing, joking, and checking out ... always aware that the St Louis police would descend on us at any moment and make arrests. Missouri was one of 24 states where being gay was illegal.

We also knew that many gay men met in public bathrooms of airports and bus stations. The locker rooms of gyms were also known spaces to meet gay men.

If you don't know the signals we would give each other, read the Craig story: the peering, the foot tap ... Craig sounds really dumb having an excuse for these signals. Straight men do not peer into closed bathroom stalls, tap the foot of men in neighboring stalls, or make hand gestures under the stall to other men. This is a private tale of gay men, mostly gay men of a certain time.

For mystical reasons from Heaven, this same phenomenon exists in Mexico where I spent three months and Cuba, where I spent a month. The famous park in central Havana, La Copelia, is a big cruising ground for gay men. La Copelia is known in Latin America as the place to get the best ice cream, and Cubans line up for hours for a scoop. Sweets and Sweets at La Copelia!!

When I worked at the YMCA men were often caught being naughty in the sauna or elsewhere. My straight coworkers and my younger gay coworkers could not relate to this phenomenon, but I had had enough of their bafflement and had to let them know what country they lived in.

Now you know. By the way, the new so-called openness in the gay community has thrown our gay elders to the trash, since the young no longer need their good graces, but that is another diatribe.

20 Years of ACT UP's Infamous Support of Capitalism

Larry Kramer is correct about at least one thing: IT IS EVIL that the poor and marginalized are mistreated by government and pharmeceutical companies, that profits are put before human beings, and that they are allowed to make excuses while the poor die.

The ACT UP phenomenon, born from Kramer's efforts at the beginning of what was known as HIV/AIDS, challenged this social evil. It was also to be the last breath of activism in the United States of America. Since then, we have slumbered - a drug-induced slumber perhaps since even our anxiety has been stigmatized into a condition to be treated - to do not a godd*mn thing. Kramer is also right to ask, not rhetorically, "where is the outrage," given the state of working class people. Working class toil on, and the wealthy grow richer with government diversion of more resources to them. Remember, the rich don't make money, they are simply as allowed their piracy as Drake was for Queen Elizabeth I.

But activism's last breath is a sour-smelling one. It fed right in to the march of obsene capitalism guided by figures like Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. It is interesting to glance at their own empowerments, the Reagan victory and the Tory landslide which got Thatcher the requisite invitation to Buckingham Palace. A Reagan victory hung in the balance with Prsident Carter, the controversy being the hostages in Iran - it is speculated that those hostages were kept until after Reagan won, by design, to keep the Carter support low. Meanwhile, US espionage had been spying on the Labour government that preceeded Thatcher due to its leftist policies, union support, and its stance against the US war in Viet Nam. There are forces in the country about which you do not know, the current Queen warned.

The 1970's. The Trilaterals had already warned us, too, of the Crisis of Democacry, their own white paper speaking to the consequence to government of an empowered people. The rabble had to be tamed.

Economies were slowing, we were told. This meant nothing to the poor but spoke to the need of new frontiers for global capital.

Rightwing governments, which would bust unions and further empower a western capitalism with a new frontier that was direly needed. One of those frontiers would be the drug industry, which had helped win many battles in public health with public funding ... but how would profits continue to be made in a world without disease? Forces were at work to assure Reagan and Thatcher assumed the helms of power to deliver these frontiers.

HIV's link to AIDS was decided exactly 23 years ago by such a rightwing government in an April 1984 press conference with a political appointee who choked on her words as she spoke.

Public funding into medical research was starved by such a rightwing government.

Opportunities for drug companies to fund and control this research in universities was provided by such a rightwing government.

An old industry that was threatened with redunancy was reborn, and HIV-AIDS came along at a perfect time when government was getting out of the business of public health and capitalism let in to meet its bottom line, not needs of the people.

But the gay men of ACT UP did not demand the dismantle of capitalism. While theirs was a heritage that blended the elements of the 1960's civil rights era they also had direct ties to the modern world itself, and the modern world is structurally capitalist.

ACT UP was loud, angry, and theatrical, as they should have been; they used all sorts of strategies and antics to dramatize their purpose - this is a page lifted from the Black civil rights movement. But these were also the children of privilege. White men who had the same stake in being recognized as their merchant-class forbears who had to cut the head of a king off the begin the modern world. The modern world begins in France: more precisely, it begins somewhere when those slave-trading merchants grew richer and richer but were not acknowledged by an Old Regime of royalty and titled nobility. Those merchants - the bourgeoisie ... and I would add the American colonists - give us a better class picture of the ACT UP anger.

Their demand was not to dismantle or to question capitalism but rather to demand more drugs and drugs to be provided faster down the pipeline. AZT was dusted off the shelves and allowed to murder thousands of gay men. AZT had been shelved in the 1960's as being too toxic for the general population, but deemed fine to murder faggots.

So it was without surprise that the other day I heard veteran AIDS activist, Cleve Jones, founder of the AIDS Quilt, put his efforts behind the crystal meth "epidemic" and demand still more "treatment" - this means drugs and drug profits.

More drugs means more enrichment of pharmaceutical companies with funds that should be spent on the poor. In the ensuing years, where public health has become a shell of its former self and global capital is allowed to determine treatment, we already see the resurgence of diseases the world had once combated. We see them, and since the afflicted have no money and no power, they go neglected.

Memoir from Black Gay L.A.

I grew up in mostly white neighborhoods and attended mostly white schools, and in high school gifted classes was the ONLY Black male, so my romantic crushes and sexual pursuits were after white boys. I spent most of this time in Southern California enclaves of Santa Barbara, Claremont, and Alta Loma, so it was surfer dudes and soccer players who mostly caught my eye. There was no one else around. My first beau was a horseback show rider.

When I went away to college at Washington University in St. Louis, I got my first real taste of other ethnicities, not of Blackness - Wash U was fondly called the Harvard of the Midwest, and we are still talking about the 80's, when multiculturalism was but a flicker in an academic's eye and few were even giving lip service to class disparities. At Wash U, I met East Coast Jewish boys, sephardic, hairy chested. They became an exotic crush until our politics diverged year by year, they to defend Israel, me to question her and why the US was giving this apartheidesque, nuclear-armed state so much money.

Then I moved to San Francisco, shacked up with a motley crew of an aspiring actress, fellow aspiring writer, and a Frenchman, who was not aspiring to be an American, thank god; later joined by a French girl who daily hung her bed clothes out the front window. My surroundings were more diverse, but only slightly more Black. More Latins. More Asians. San Francisco is a wee more than half non-white in population, according to the data at the time. I say at the time, before the working class was driven out by dot-com mania and Willie Brown, a Black politco who adroitly strokes the heads of brown babies with one hand and with the other hands the keys to their food supply to profiteers. In San Francisco, I dated a few guys, a white SF state film student, a UC Berkeley Black student, a Vietnamese Berkeley grad student activist extraordinaire, a Thai man. I joined Queer Nation. Blackness at this point came to me in the weekly suggested readings the white facilitators photocopied: [the late] Audre Lorde and [evolving] bell hooks became familiar to me. The names of June Jordan and Angela Davis were dropped like pop culture. But also white Marxist gay activist Harry Hay. In part, the white-led progressive Queer Nation led to its downfall, when the lesbians and the colored began to agitate for the things these writers of color were telling us. We imploded.

As always, when the going gets rough, I seek a seminal book. My comrade, Alex Chee, a worker bee at A Different Light Bookstore handed me this book by the recently deceased James Baldwin. I knew the name Baldwin. I minored in creative writing at Wash U, that white school, read many a nice and boring classic, but never Baldwin. Freshman year the rage writers were the Alan Greenspan mentor, Ayn Rand, and Brett Easton Ellis' "Less Than Zero." Worn copies of both circulated the dorm.

Chee handed me Baldwin's last book, "The Evidence of Things Not Seen." A slim book. The book blew my mind. Without exception, every time I re-read the book, a nugget exposes itself and knocks the wind out of me. The book remains my favorite and the most penetrating narrative of racism in the West. Baldwin is the Jose Marti of the US without question. Blackness was for all intents and purposes an ideology, a radical ideology. I read a little Malcolm, but much preferred CLR James and Walter Rodney, the Marxists, the non-Americans.

When I relocated to Oakland's Lake Merritt ... the OTHER side of the lake, readers! The side bordering East Oakland. I was surrounded by Blackness. On the buses, in the stores, everywhere. A few whites. A few Asians. More Latins. Many Blacks. It was the photo negative of what I'd lived in San Francisco. I did not react in shock or horror to this, but quickly grew to see Black men as complex objects of what Rodney, Badlwin, hooks, et al, had written about. But I also confronted a side not included in their poetry.

Despite the enormous history presented to me of the Black and African Diaspora, time and time again, the Black men I encountered were cowards, not dreamers: they lived here on the DL and/or had such a visceral reaction to whiteness, they despised the fact I associated with them, dated them, sexed with them, which is apparently why they refused the terms GAY or CLOSET ... worst of all: I was indicted many times for the whiteness of my speech. If I was to be so indicted, what of the Baldwins, Lordes, hooks, Rodneys, James ... and Malcolms? Malcom X was of course suspiciously a cypher, nothing more than an "X" on a cap, and an excuse to unleash untreated hatred on whites, far worse. It was such an irony that the few gay white men I encountered in the neighborhood even told me that, and that they wanted a real Black man[!], not me.

For other reasons [I think], I moved to Los Angeles. I considered that not only might a move improve my career but also my love life with my Black brothers. Neither has been the case. I have found a decimated, shame-filled population of pathetic Black Gay men. Hurricane Katrina came through here, I imagine, and no one reported it. I think I should have read the more dense writing of Franz Fanon along with Rodney, Fanon who goes into the psychoses of colonialized Black men.

The Black community in LA had yesterday been a middle class community, but evidently it did not produce much. The public education system is a Third-World atrocity, with a conservative 50% drop-out rate. Worse is what years of middle-class jobs did for this community and how they used it to supply themselves with houses, stuff, cars, and no sense, let alone not a single institution. When the defense industry floor was ripped from beneath them, they did not hum the Internationale or storm the Bastille, or wage a peasants' war ... they smoked more weed. They bought more weed, a point which cannot be missed. More weed was available to sell. Who's selling? Who's profting from this? At any rate, I've met Black men who proudly grew up in LA, educated in their schools, jobless, marginally employed, or employed in the underground, drug economy. This doesn't speak well for the 50% who do matriculate.

The local white men have learned. White men my age will not touch me, period. White men who have spent any time here catch on a lot quicker to what lies on the other side of the tracks. Race puts me automatically on that other side. Baldwin did comment he loved but did not like all Black people, so I guess I can safely say the same now, but it makes the dilemma no less complicated. I can't take these weed-smoking, meth-addicted men home to my mother and don't want them in my bed for a fling. I've had my periods of misery and joblessness and had to take lower-wage jobs and never thought to turn to alcohol or weed. "My head is bloody but unbowed," wrote Henley. Henley's poem, "Invictus," ranks for me along with Kipling's "If," and Cavasky's "Ithaca" as poems every child should know by heart. They are poems that may sound nice to a 9th grader but will continue to explain a Journey, which we all make alone. I guess for some, the poetry of the Old and New Testaments resonate.

But not these Black people. There is no poetry or holy commandment. A few years ago, Bill Cosby seemed to have a meltdown when he deigned to criticize the Black community; more recently, a prominent Black Harvard scholar, Henry Louis Gates, and talk show diva, Oprah Winfrey, added their voices to this criticism. Knowing what a risk this criticism entails, I can only imagine the private frustration these public people brought to their public comments. Cynically, we expect white America not to care, and are dismayed to find Black America equally pathetic. The Black community - if you can call a small cadre of ageing activists no one listens to a community - is broken when its elders are ridiculed. Really, guys, what has been going on here? I wish Mike Davis, socialist historian, would conduct an anthroplogical study of what went on in this city all those years.

I speak as a Black Gay SINGLE man who desires, like most gay men, to make connections with other gay men. We really are social animals. But this is problematic in a phenomenon like Los Angeles. If a rise in hardcore drug use is an indication of hopelessness, LA is at the pit. Crystal Meth is used in epidemic proportions here and a deal breaker if you're trying to meet someone for a fling. Heavy weed smoking slows the brain and clogs the plumbing from working, if you get my drift! (I know I am a teetotaler, but I am a teetotaler who knows that putting SMOKE of any kind into your lungs is counter-intuitive) The new, fashionable hatred for Whiteness dismisses not only white allies but identifies any sign of progress, like good grammar, as suspect. The Down Low phenomenon is not really different from my generation's construct of The Closet, but DL comes out of a rejection of whiteness. Gay is white. Language is white. And White is a deemed a social negative.

All men are brothers, Baldwin told us again and again in sometimes agonizing terms. Like other admonishments, ancient and biblical and kindergarten, we do not heed their instruction. Life is always more complicated than a commandment. But we must all stop and ask ourselves, in light of the state of our post-Katrina society, what would we say to a drowning man who would quibble about the color of the life jacket you would throw to save his life?

I'm in Love with Todd Oldham

Cable TV's BRAVO Network has kept me tuned in the last few months with its reality shows in particular and to the dying species of television in general. I never got hooked to the early generation of reality shows on network tv, people getting voted off islands and tribes being formed and reformed, and ever since the production of "Alf" in the 90's and the appointment of Michael Powell to the FCC in the same decade, this writer has witnessed a precipitous downfall into thinner blonde jobs and thinner plot lines.

Having grown up a gay creative wanna-be strangely fascinated with Julia Child and William Alexander and the arts behind what they did in those half-hour shows on pre-historic PBS, BRAVO's presentation of some ambitious designers-artistes ["Project Runway" hosted by supermodel Heidi Klum, "Top Chef" hosted by Padma Lakshmi, and "Top Design" hosted by Todd Oldham] have caught me in their nets. I never thought "reality" could be so interesting.

I was hooked on "Runway' in the second season when the show still held a gay aesthetic. I suspect by season three the producers rather than put up a NO GAYS sign and shut down, simply edited footage to keep things toned down for our middle countrymen whom they wanted to buy soap. And I suspect this is what happened in a revealing moment in its sister show, "Top Design." The men are interesting. The women strike me as either what we used to call Fag Hags or are Elegant, which means they have more white collar gay friends perhaps. Klum, the hostess, seems to be competing the 9 births of Queen Victoria, but she remains tres elegante herself. And between her and Miss Tyra Banks one has to admire they will not go softly into the Night like Cheryl Tiegs or Christy Brinkley.

The fact that some of the "Project Runway" contestants were openly gay or were secure enough in their sexuality to take on a gay mannerism or two like a tasteful pair of shoes hooked me more. Here they were in a space where their art mattered, not their sexuality. Ironically, when your sexuality is not a threat, gay and straight men can open up and be their fluid selves, aggressive, flirtatious, demure.

When "Top Chef" hosted by Indian actress Padma Lakshmi was announced to take "Project Runway's" time slot, I was discouraged and suspicious: could lightning hit twice? Nope. Where were they taking Heidi [labor and delivery perhaps]? Would I be denied chances to see grown men behaving naturally and creatively? "Top Chef" seemed butch, so I tuned out until the 3rd episode or so. Geez!! Hooked again! It was in fact less gay, and yet seeing these young men and women create to outdo their peers' creations was a war of the gods worth seeing. My vote in season three was for the diabetic New York head chef. The Latina had my vote until she got to whining. The handsome young Jew, Ilan, who eventually won seemed a reasonable choice.

Then "Top Design" hosted by designer Todd Oldham was announced to replace "Top Chef" I feared we were going into "Rockey V" territory. Again, I thought they'd gone too far and had run out of creativity. Who cares about the design of a room? Thanks to the paltry offerings on network tv, I tuned in during the 2nd or third episode and found they'd hit on the magic again ... and TODD OLDHAM!!!

Yeah, I'm in love with Todd Oldham, the show's host. He's my cup of tea. Cute, successful, unassuming, geeky. My kind of gentleman caller. So call me, Todd!! I'm in LA and single and have a room you could dress up.

The show's first season doesn't measure up to the best of "Project Runway", but it has that gay chic the other, earlier shows, albeit toned down. Goil (like Gargoyle, he reminds us ... and I am enamored with that CURTSEY he executes), Michael, John. So I was a little disappoinnted when in one of the early episodes one of the gay contestants announced he was HIV+, the cast was shown to just stare at him, including the several men I suspected were gay. The contestant is then says he's leaving the room to take a bath, and the cast is shown just lounging. Any comment was reserved for their one-on-ones with the camera filmed later. But what would I have them say? FAGS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! In the very same episode he is ousted, which I call TIMING. The Challenges don't feel as refined as "Project Runway's", like they may have been put together at the last minute.

Back to Todd: the cameras never seem to hover on Oldham more than a few seconds at a time. True, he's not the beauty that Klum or Lakshmi are, but he's a Catch. At least let me see what the man is wearing!

If it seems like Todd and Goil and Michael are John are only holding my interests, you would be wrong. Todd first. Goil reminds me of a perfect composite of a few men I have dated - Daven and Andy, who were perfectly LOVELY men, and I was a creep. As I said, the challenges on the show seems a bit contrived, but then: look at my room! Look a my clothes! I am neither fashion queen or design maven.

Auf Wiedersen!!

The Alternative Health Care System in this Country is called TYLENOL: Stop * Think

The bill for a recent, sudden illness and stay in the hospital was $67,403.23. I don't even have a fraction of that kind of money, but I am fortunate to be one of a shrinking number of people in the US with "health care." Even that oft-used term must be deconstructed.

But that my co-pay for my hospital stay was only $250 is a relief.

Why is the United States of America the only industrialized country without a public health care system? It's not for lack of talk, not for lack of Congressional hearings, not for lack of funds - we have plenty of all.

We are triangulated in this country by a party system funded, guided, and run by an oligarchy of capitalists. Support of the Republicans yields a perpetuation of this system; support of the Democrats yields the same. Writer Gore Vidal once called the Insurance Industry the Piggy Bank of the Rich. If this is true, it would explain why they have kept health insurance private, costly, and relentlessly advertized as the best in the World.

The worst example of what perpetuates this health care system is not from elites within this party system - they know their limits, so continue to frame the issue as "affordable health care" - but from Progressives. Respected writer and honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America dissed Ralph Nader and backed John Kerry in 2004. The Communist Party USA has been favoring the Democratic Party lately, and this has made its magazine, Political Affairs, a depressing thing to behold.

There have been insurgents within the Democrats, but their fate has always been crash and burn: to date [late winter 2007], I have only heard Demcratic candidates John Edwards and fellow vegeatarian Dennis Kucinich define the solution as UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE.

I do believe Universal Health Care was First Lady Hillary Clinton's goal in her early endeavor, which is why she attemtped and was vilified for shutting out the oligarchy. Universal Health Care is not the goal of US Senator and Presidential Candidate Clinton, as we have heard. Our Press and Elites are fond of pointing to the real power behind the Iranian presidency, the Mullahs - these Islamic chieftains - but not the oligarchs that stand behind the thrones of the West.

In a recent, wide-ranging interview on C-Span, Ehrenreich said "The Alternative Health Care System in this Country is called TYLENOL." In fact, our so-called health care system is not about health but rather about chemo/medicine-centered industry, the power of which also keeps us away from a health-centered health care system.

A headache is not the body's deficiency of aspirin, and yet we are conditioned to be pill-centered in the treatment of our ailments. Our treament of many ailments - and it seems more are discovered everyday just when a new pill is concocted - are chemicalized. How often do you hear a discussion of our diet, especially in the US? Our heavy consumption of carcasses - excuse me, meat products - can be linked to the rise in disease, where at once time in the recent past our diets were more vegetable centered, less meat; and now it is the inverse, often no vegetation at all. Our animals now are even being fed animal products - the cow and bull are vegetarians by nature but are fed animal products and steroids and antibiotics to make them into the fattened creatures we've come to recognize as cattle.

Further, I learned during my extended hospital stay, that I had gotten a very special, dangerous bacteria in my intestines: campenella. This comes from chickens. Not to indict chickens, they are also fed steroid and antibiotics, and this is what makes these bacteria and fungus even more powerful: when they survive this chemical stew, they are resistant in your intestine as well.

So not only has our medical industry been chemicalized but so has food production, the long-term consequences of both scarcely discussed but met with the creation of more drugs.

After Reagan and Thatcher let for-profit drug companies into the universities research centers and starved them of public funds to work in the public interest, research has been geared to medicines not for the poor but for yuppies and the rich. Drug companies have quarterly reports and shareholders to always consider. They have no interest, fiscally, in drugs for the poor when the government won't pay full price for them or that the poor themselves cannot afford.

So while we should demand universal health care, this health care must be rational and address the planet, our food supply, and our diets primmarily. Drugs must be a last option. Prince Charles of the UK was recently heard to whisper to an Arab prince how McDonald's restaurants could be banned. The movie, "Super Size Me," would highlight this argument.

But people's needs will never be heard in an anti-democratic system, like the US, with its capitalist party system.

Stranger Than Fiction: AIDS on Trial ... for real this time

In Charles Ortleb's book, The Closing Argument, he chronicles the trial of a Black man accused to have attempted murder by spreading the HIV virus through unprotected sex and puts the HIV-AIDS theory on trial by challenging the science behind it. Ortleb was the publisher of The New York Native, a writer, and printed many of the early dissident pieces from Celia Farber, who recently released Serious Adverse Events about the controversies surrounding the invention of HIV as a deadly virus.

Australia in 2006 has brought fiction to reality. An Australian, Andre Chad Parenzee, 35, has been convicted of endangering the lives of three female sex partners with whom he had "unprotected" sex. Like the lawyer in Ortleb's novella, Parenzee's lawyer turns the tables on the government's case by putting a huge question mark next to HIV's potency as a killer virus.

A recent story in The Australian provides some details.

It has been horrifying enough that sex between men is demonized and found yet another rationale to be curbed, chained, proscribed, then outright made illegal - isn't it ironic while we pretend to celebrate gay rights, we demonize gay sexuality unless it strives for "marriage" rights! But if straights are to be also convicted of the kind of sex their parents and grandparents performed, we have truly entered a tortured musical comedy.

The judge in the trial has just set aside the conviction to put essentially HIV on trial. Dr. Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a noted HIV dissident, has been flown in as an expert witness. She has been asked if HIV causes AIDS and replied in an interview that there was no such proof, and she proceeds to lay out her counter-argument.

Dr. Eleni is not alone among those in the scientific community who, from the infamous 1984 Press Conference, has resisted the HIV-AIDS link. David Rasnick is another. But the most famous is a former star and National Academy of Sciences member, Univ. of California researcher, Peter Duesberg.

The Fraud Behind US Elections

I remember growing up as a political junkie, intrigued with the drama of debates, and watching the televised presidential debates. These debates were always sponsored by what was to my young mind a strange group, The League of Women Voters. To me it sounded like a militia of warrior women defending the election system.

Whatever they were, this League crumbled when sponsorship was taken from them by the financiers of the US two-party junta.

It did not actually begin wth H. Ross Perot's invitation to join the debates, but that was the straw on the two-parties' back. The problem stirred with the historical challenge posed by Dr. Lenora Fulani, socialist, early gay-rights advocate, feminist, and presidential candidate from the New Alliance Party [in some states, aka Peace & Freedom Party]. Fulani had qualified from 1980 onward for Federal matching funds, had qualified to appear on the ballots of all 50 states, and yet was ignored by mainstream media.

She challenged the League of Women Voters to invite her to join the presidential debates, and the League refused with some garbage about her percentages not being high enough.

Enter Perot. His percentages met the League requirements, so to the chagrin of the two-party elite, he made his famous appearance between tweedle dee and tweedle dummer. But it would be the last time.

In a coups, the Democratic and Republican Parties snatched the historic debates from the League and created the Commission on Presidential Debates, which we have to this day. It should have been called the Commission to Keep the Two-Party System, because it assured no other party would grace the stage and be known to masses of people ever again.

This is YOUR democracy.

I tell this story because as we approach another election in a few weeks, we are stuck in the old narrative on national, state, and local levels.

Why bother voting when the choices given us at that critical point have been pre-screened and pre-weeded by interests diametrically opposed to working people and the poor? Fidel, after the Cuban Revolution, 1959, promised to hold elections. But when he saw what the US was planning by heavily funding candidates who would give Cuban lands back to the US, the revolutionary government cancelled the elections: he noted, in the 2nd Declaration of Havana, what elections in the West actually are: ways for the US, the monopolies, and Cuba's ruling class to offer versions of their policies and the people given the indignity to ratify them. To what end? Not to the benefit of working people certainly.

Interestingly, when Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega pondered whether to hold elections in the late 1980's after 10 years of bloody US-backed Contra war, Fidel cautioned him what would happen, and certainly did happen. The US CIA flooded Violeta Chamorro's election coffer with millions of dollars, and she handily beat Ortega and plunged Nicaragua's poor into pre-revolution poverty.

I hope Iraq's dissidents are taking note as the US tries to bring democracy there.

Green Party and Socialist Party USA candidates are being ignored by the press and excluded from televised debates all over the US. They are told that they are not known, they are told that people usually vote for Democrats or Republicans so their presence would be a distraction, they are told they are not polling high enough to qualify.

Peter Camejo, Green Party gubernatorial candidate in California, is a member of a party which has polled high enough to be recognized by California's Secretary of State [the Socialist Party USA has not]; he polled third in the infamous run-off between Schwarzenegger and Grey Davis ... and yet, he will not be covered, has not been covered by the press, and was not allowed into the debate between the current Republican governor and Democrat Phil Angelides.

Meanwhile, we are in a state of angst about Electronic Voting Machines, worried that our votes might not be fairly counted, demanding a paper receipt.

So what if they are or aren't counted when what we are being offered to vote for has been pre-treated and homogenized by corporate interests and ruling elites?

Why vote at all? Moreover, why vote when we apparently have no democracy in which to participate? I think it was Emma Goldman who said that Voting was the Opiate of the masses, and that every 4 years they doped themselves.

I cannot think of any significant social movement won at a ballot box: the abolition of chattel slavery, voting rights for women, the 8-hour work day, the minimum wage ... not even the end of the British colony soon to be known as the United States of America. None came to us by ballot but by struggle and organizing and war.

Obama, another rising and falling star ... so no blinking!

This love fest for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is interesting in that we who read history know that we have been here before, presented with a minority darling of whom we are amazed at his intelligence. The outcome to these careers is predictable. White America, by whom we really mean CORPORATE US (The CU), since whites and especially poor whites have nothing to do with this and are as forgotten a species as anyone in the working class, love this Black man who embraces the Middle. Colin Powell is preceived as another MIDDLE lover. The CU think they can safely back and fund this ethnic minority who won't tread on their tax breaks or on the role of the US government in the commercial world - their role is to open doors and where they don't open to bomb them open. This, while giving crafty lip service to the poor, is THE MIDDLE.

Where the CU err time and time and time again since Jacksonian Democracy in the US, and the Great Reform ACT in the UK, when the rabble had to be contended with for votes[!] is that Obama constituency - Blacks, minorities, progressives, the poor - will be dazzled by him at first, seeing him as one of them, but they will quickly find him more an active member of the CU and an honorary member of the Wage-Slave, beholden to the CU, making excuses for the CU and sticking it to the poor.

The poor will abandon him, his legitimacy will fall, and there goes his public career. He will remain a senator and get fat or become a senior fellow at a bourgeoise think-tank, and in between head an "Initiative" to solve some global crisis.

Fidel broke through this dilemma down pretty handily a year after the Cuban Revolution, 1959. He said he could have abandoned the reasons for the revolution for accommodation with the plantation owners and the US embassy or he could have done we he had to do to keep his promise to change Cuban society. This change could not come from United Fruit or the US military, so since both had lost both were asked to leave. Obama will not do this

NAMBLA & Rep. Foley: More Capitalist Collateral Damage

Interestingly, just before news of Congressman Foley's illicit advances toward young high school students, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured a short "expose" on the evils of NAMBLA. I daresay most people outside the above-35 gay male community don't know what NAMBLA is or why I would link it to Foley. NAMBLA is the North American Man Boy Love Association. In my younger years, just coming out, it seemed to get a lot of backpage press in alternative gay news organs - this is like off-off Broadway. Gay rights activists fought with each other whether to include or attack this entity. I remember that Harry Hay, gay civil rights activists and communist, was a lone voice not in supporting NAMBLA, but discouraging attacks from gay men as showing division to the enemy.

Not surprisingly, Oprah with her soccer-mom demographic was livid at the existence of such an organization and wondered why it would be allowed. She was given a lecture by an NBC reporter on the First Amendment: expression is one thing; an act is something else altogether, Oprah.

This seems to be Foley's defense thus far: pointing to his abuse by a church elder and checking himself into alcoholic rehab. He engaged in inappropriate internet chatter. His spokesmen have said he is not a pedophile, that he never had sex with any under-aged boys.

Oprah's Show also featured an NBC journalist who has gained note and ratings for his Dateline NBC: Catch a Predator series, where grown men are caught on camera meeting under-aged boys and girls. When they confess, they all say they have never done this before, never gone to meet an under-aged girl or boy, never had sex with a child.

This is all supposed to disturb us and we snicker as Foley's confession as we do these men who claim never to have done this before. We are supposed to be disturbed by this. It is supposed to be inexcusable, right?

Well, the thing that excuses this sort of behavior is the history of Capitalism. Wherever you have a system which unevenly distributes resources - or doesn't distribute resources at all - you set up a privileged group and another which will be preyed on. Not ironically, we are told to emulate the pirates - the privileged - and despise the prey with all kinds of names, some from the streets and many from the Academy.

This time, the prey are children.

The history of women under Capitalism has been full of predatory acts. The predator was Capitalism and men were its privileged agents. Since women were denied access to wealth - land, income of their own [it was often given to the husband by right] - they had to prositute themselves, whether with tricks or with suitor-gentlemen. In many major US cities, a single woman could not rent an apartment without her father's co-signature within my lifetime. It doesn't really matter on some level how one prostitutes.

While we would like to imagine we come from a long line of lovers, we have to face the reality that most of our grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on, and even our own mothers in many parts of the world have to marry predators - men who have been given access to even a small part of wealth where the woman has none.

Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators? She has too many preyed-upons in her audience. Will she expose the crime we do to children by divesting them of rights? Not likely.

My comparison of women to children is in their treatment. Both are marginalized not by Nature but by Law.

By legal definition, a boy has few rights. Beyond this, the boys that NAMBLA seeks are poor ones, Third World ones, who are not only with fewer rights but fewer options. The Congressional pages preyed upon by Foley will statistically go on to College and better jobs and perpetuate this Division, the poor ones will produce children who will have to hustle.

In one segment on The Oprah Show, they are shown on hidden camera to be arranging a trip to Mexico to find boys, and they boast how they money will go further their.

The other side to this is equally sad. In fact, one can go to such places as Mexico and the boys will often offer themselves to you, not for love, but for money, because they have none ... because their governments are corrupt and have taken land and water rights from them to benefit corporations or global agreements.

Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators?

Unfortunately, by legal definition, children are without power. It is over the top for even many socialists to acknowledge the sacred family unit as, like the British monarchy, a feudal institution, and needs remedy before anything meaningful happens. And until we are ready for that remedy, children WILL be preyed on and no law, no speech will stop a congressman, a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a parent from preying on and abusing a child. It's the Power, stupid.

31 Reasons Why the US opposes Fidel, Socialism, & The Cuban Revolution

1. overthrew a us-backed dictator, fulgencio batista
2. returned cuban land and mineral resources to the cuban nation
3. in 72 hours repelled a us-backed invasion at Playa Giron [Bay of Pigs]
4. eradicated illiteracy in one year
5. achieved one of the highest kindergarten-9th grade retention rates
6. highest number of school teachers per capita
7. free publically funded education from kindergarten to doctoral studies
8. lowest infant mortality 60 per 1000 in the hemisphere, lower than many US cities
9. increased life expectancy by 15 years with its universal health care system
10. highest number of doctors per capita
11. commercial-free tv, where public-service announcements inform
12. eradicated racist Jim Crow laws imposed on Cuba from the US
13. no paramilitary death squads
14. development of sport and culture
15. supported Algerian nationalists against France
16. supported and sent troops to aid Angola against US-backed apartheid South Africa
17. supplied weapons to Algeria to fight off US-backed Moroccan invasion
18. sent a brigade to aid Syria in defense of the Golan Heights against Israel
19. supported Patrice Lumumba in the Republic of Congo and his supporters
20. supported Congolese freedom fighters against US-backed Mobutu
21. aided in the independence of Portuguese colonies with Amilcar Cabral
22. Cuito Cuanavale!
23. stood in solidarity with the people and struggle of Viet Nam from 1960 on
24. aided economic development of Grenada until US invasion
25. internationalist missions of doctors, technicians, and teachers
26. supported Nelson Mandela when Reagan and Thatcher called him a terrorist.
27. offered and was refused to dispatch first responders after Katrina
28. spoke on behalf of children who do not have even a piece of bread
29. offered political asylum to Black and Puerto Rican activists, like Assata Shakur
30. thwarted 686 CIA assassination attempts made public through US Congress
31. Survived the machinations of Eisenhower, the Kennedy Brothers, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton ... and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover

for these crimes against the new world order, fidel must be punished.

Gracias, Fidel!

Case Against Israel, Part One

Let me be the first non-candidate on the Left to call for Israel to be packed up and dispersed back to Europe and its small laboring class Ethiopian Jews back to Africa. This farce has gone on quite long enough and added gross injury and death and misery to the horrific, unbelievable crime of the German Nazi Holocaust. There is no justice in Israel's existence. It is as much a thorn in a foreign land as the Dutch settlers in South Africa and resulted in similar crimes. Their present war in Lebanon smells so much like the US war in Guatemala, 1954, where the US claimed to be assaulted and democratic aspirations had to be crushed. Israel is our Hessian.

You will not hear the US political party system saying anything remotely like this. Congress just further proved their uselessness by coming together and passing a resolution supporting Israel's act of war.

So it's not surprising as I write this is a whisper of ground assault trickle into the air.

Israel is not my friend. US administrations are fond of saying this, with deep compassion in their voices. But it is not the 11th commandment that Israel "exist."

Several years ago, to the glee of the West, the Cold War was won and a whole complex Soviet republic disappeared. Since its creation, it has been the thorn of the West, a threat to the West, because it existed, because of its model of socialism-communism. The USSR herself committed errors and atrocities along the way for which is cannot be forgiven either. I never heard a Western politican say the USSR was a friend or that they believed in its existence.

But let us look at the 20th century, that modern world just passed us by, and ask ourselves which country is the more sensible invention: a socialist state or a religious one? One seems to fit into the forward momentum of the world, the sense that resources cannot be horded by a few and the rest be benefitted, or as Socialst Party USA member, Helen Keller, instructed a British friend, votes for women is an afterthought when 90% of Briton's land and wealth is controlled by 10% and the remaining wealth left to the 90%.

The other state seems to take us far backwards, maybe to the 16th century, when religious wars began, the Roman Catholics were splitting up, and lines were being drawn in the sand with blood.

One is the longtime enemy, USSR, and the other is our friend, Israel.

Why Israel? Historically that territory is its home, and the racist persecution by European ruling classes, ruling families, civil society fed their dream of an Eden. But the world is heavy with historical territory, the US being entirely just that, from sea to sea, and heaven help the soccer moms and the land barons when some mighty power decides to replace the USA with the nations of the Cherokee, Choctau, Iroqois, et al, et al.

That too would be absurd. Ethnic states. Religious states. Do these represent steps forward or back into the European-inspired Dark Ages?

Globalization has existed since the slave trade, was part of the slave trade, and was fueled by the slave trade. Cargo. Peoples. For all kinds of reasons, they began moving around, fleeing or in search of something. The face of what was believed to be pure nations dramatically changed. And after all that mixing was well underway, the West, imposes a religious state in the middle of the former Ottoman Empire, its own corpse just buried, a few swim strokes north from Africa.

The world will never except Israel, because it is a nuisance, a non-sequitor, and the resurrection of a time left in history. Though the bankers and investors may since this Frankenstein creation is an anchor to Our Interests, and Evangelicals do because they are eager for the End of the World and Christ's return. That is a subject for part 2.

Why George W Thinks He's a KING

A comment GW Bush made early in his presidency bothered me. Then he repeated it a few months later, and it bothered me much more. He said that politics would be easier if he were a dictator, but that he wasn't.

As the economy dipped further into the royal dungeon, I waited for the man who'd been handed the election by the US Supreme Court to do something dictator-like. Then, as Lincoln would say, the war came ... 9/11.

Bush has attacked the press, dared say it should shut up about what he's doing, tested the limits and crossed the lines of Congressional statutes, exposed secret agents, jailed journalists, and is now investigating a famous newspaper.

This strikes liberals as odd, leftists as treasonous, and even many on the right get tongue-tied trying to defend this strange man.

But all we need to do is look at our biggest ally and friend, our lieutenant in arms, as Gore Vidal called the island/aircraft carrier: The United Kingdom.

The UK is a constitutional monarchy. The Executive Branch, legally headed by the Queen, conventionally guided by the prime minister, has enormous wiggle room to do what it pleases without input from its legislator under something called the Royal Prerogative. War can be waged in the Falklands, and Parliament not consulted at all. It was eerie for a person in the US to watch members of Parliament ask Tony Blair if they'd be allowed to debate an Iraqi Misadventure.

This mini-lesson in the ancient royal prerogative explains GW's open contempt for the law in general and the press in particular. Bush believes he has magically, despite the US Constitution, inherited these divine rights of kings.

Day to day, the queen no longer exercises this ancient prerogative, but the prime minister does in her name. The Royal Prerogative extends to war powers, like Iraq. Peace terms. Treaties. Trade. Coinage. Diplomats. The prison system. Even when Parliament opens and when it closes. Which men and women comprise HER government. No law becomes a law without the queen's approval, not by signing her name but with the flourish la reine le veult.

The press has fewer liberties than it does in the US. The press can be restricted from reporting certain information.

Parliament, in case you didn't know, is to raise money for the Executive. The purse in modern days is the only pull the legislature would have on an executive with theoretical unlimited power. A decent legislature would use this pull. A cowardly one would buckle every time to whatever whim of the Executive Branch. Where a legislature was cowardly you might hope for an independent courts system to stand up to the Executive. Even in the UK, there is a measure of judicial review as far back as the 1600's

The US Congress is a coward. Ot is not just a purse. It is an independent branch. And it has allowed, from the appointment of George Bush to all its bluster and no bite over every abuse committed by his presidency.

It is no longer far-fetched that we may, at this rate, elect a man who would declare himself president for life and lay his hands on his favorite son as heir and our Congress knock each other over to support him.


One of White House counsel's infamous memos to the effect embraced the history of common law as giving the president his powers. Common Law. In case you didn't know this was a royal invention of Henry II where he sought to have law applied equitably in the kingdom by travelling from town to town and holding court to adjudicate.

Angelina Jolie, Refugees, & The Politics of Easy Answers

Actors are often not the best personalities to help us frame social issues. I don't know why this seems so, but whether it be a conservative Mel Gibson or a liberal Susan Sarandon or the irony of ironies of a life-long dope addict like Liz Taylor stomping for AIDS money, Hollywood, like its movies, can only deal best with the shallowest aspect of our world. British actress, Glenda Jackson, found the best remedy for this simplicity was to give up acting and join a socialist political party, where she today sits in Parliament. Angelina Jolie, whom I would like to play Wonder Woman if Hollywood would tire of re-makes of Superman, is stomping for the world's refugees. She herself orchestrated an interview on CNN. She has also made a name for herself adopting Third World children. And true to Hollywood form, we are getting a global pandemic framed in the most narrow way, which limits the questions we ask and the solutions we propose.

This is not Jolie's fault. The UN has a World Refugee Day. It does not have a World Dispossessed of Land Day. The UN has a Children's Fund. It does not have an agency for parents. Paulo Freire began his literacy lessons with the words "The Land belongs to the tiller." Jolie needs a lesson from the Brazilian educator, Freire.

So in light of our attention being drawn to the sorrowful plight of refugees and the needs of babies in need of food, water, and love I would like to pose some fundamental questions outside the range book-ended with dire need and Jolie herself.

[1] If these are Refugees, why aren't we asking where their homes are, their lands, their farms?

[2] Where are the parents of these orphans, and if they are no longer on this earth, where are the grandparents, aunts, uncles?

Where is the land? Some farm land in the Third World has become unfarmable. This is due to a combination of really bad colonial farming practices imposed for decades upon decades by imperial powers to extract as much wealth as fast as possible without regard to the health of the soil.

Bad land is also due to bad farming by peasant farmers themselves. You might argue they learned these worst practices from their Masters, but who knows: you can't write a law and make bad clay into good soil, so there's no use crying over that split milk.

But much of the land of the dispossessed has been confiscated by Third World governments beholden to Western Capital. They have debts to pay or they want financing, and this comes with Strings, and the Strings are to sell this, sell that, end government ownership of public utilities and allow private, Western companies to take them. And these Third World governments have used their militaries and their thugs to drive people off susbsistence farmlands to sell the rights to that land for global purposes.

Enter your refugees, framed narrowly by the camps on one side and Angelina Jolie on the other.

Orphans are just the middle step child of the Refugee Crisis. While you certainly can pinpoint cases of whole families being wiped out save a baby, these cases are the exception. What is happening is that these families - be they mother and/or father and/or grandparents - simply cannot afford another mouth to feed, since their land has been taken and they are dispersed hither and yonder in various encampments across the former colonial world. Their water rights privatized and sold to Western interests. They are no longer just poor, they are destitute, and a murderous band of thugs is at their heels driving them away from their real estate. Look at Sudan.

Look at MEXICO. The Mexican government and ruling class removed the land rights citation from the Mexican Constitution in the 1980's. Pres. Salinas signed it. It was this action that sparked the organization of the Zapatista Movement. It also drove subsistent, poorly educated farm people off their land, into the cities, where they faired no better, and eventually into the streets of the US, where they now ask for RIGHTS.

Refugees do not come from the Heavens. They come from political decisions. These aren't Refugee Crises or Orphans at all, but people being starved from the source of their lives, people who are being dropped further down the scale of the Capitalist Food Chain.

Ambassador Jolie's advocacy for them, her pleas for money, does not end that Food Chain or raise their place on it. Oscar Wilde once said you cannot end poverty by keeping the poor alive; just so, why are we fundraising to keep these desert camps operating, by definition based in areas that are unfarmable and unsaleable.

So we are evolving into a system where Poor Farmers have no land to sow, Third World women can no longer care for their babies, where Third World families cannot even give the basics, not because of some Natural Disaster but because of a Man-made one.

And Betchel's stock rises as it secures even the rights to RAIN WATER in South America!

98 Blacks Out of 4800 [the dark cream of some dark cream of a dark lense]

Ninety-eight select Black undergrads have been selected to join the incoming freshman class at a public university, University of California Los Angeles. Ninety-eight. This is the lowest number admitted to this public university since the early 1970's. The University said it is troubled by the trend and is open to suggestions. One of those publicly backed laws a few years ago prevents them from considering race in their admissions, and they admit to having turned many away as not meeting the criteria.

The Black Civil Rights Gentry have predictably come out and demanded the university bring more in anyway, that the university go back and re-assess those rejected applicants. And so just out of the gate, the discussion looks rigged to frame an education debate outside of ever discussing the state of, direction of, purpose for schooling in the US. Just so, we won't discuss the provocative things in these high school graduates they are letting loose on the streets, in the public name.

We cannot change our schools. Since we are the Greatest Country in the World, why should we? This is the brain-dead logic of an old US Civil War general. Technology has changed for better or worse in Britain's Queen's 50-year reign. At the start of her reign, she could not have imagined being able to eat her cornflakes from tupperware containers. Now she is said to enjoy them very much this way.

Our public schools are stuck in the Industrial Revolution [but so is the British monarchy!] where they no longer just miseducate our children, they are also making mules ... I mean JACKASSES of them. Rather than look at this horrific state of affairs, some want UCLA to re-assess its entry requirements.

We've been at this junction before. Richard Rodriguez, who somewhere must be penning something on this matter, one hopes, which will be ignored, one hopes not, explains what happened at the genesis of the affirmative action movement, circa 1968. Would it be numbers [bean counting, critics later called it] or would it be reforming a bad system that harmed most poor children, Black, white, Latin, Native, Asian?? Rodriguez explains in his HUNGER FOR MEMORY memoir the civil rights hegemony chose Numbers, which guaranteed that those Black children least affected by the ravages of white racism would be culled from the ghetto and placed - alone - in white schools ... where they would exist in some kind of limbo land. The Blacks danced and whites sighed with relief. Limbo meant those Blacks wouldn't go passed Human Resources Captains ... for godsake, don't let them near the Bank!

Our school system, which educator Marva Collins said was a Soviet plot done to ourselves by ourselves without Soviet direction to stupify generations of US children and guarantee that while the USSR had to change, the US ... well, we would remain in the Industrial Age and cause the inevitable fall to be from a higher ledge.

Nobody look down, please!

Don't think the other 4702 undergrads who got in to UCLA are any better off. These kids are schooled dumb but have benefitted from SAT preparation classes at $500 a session.

Los Angeles schools are the worse I have ever seen. People ask me if I think about returning to teaching, but all I need to do is look at the useless social trash these schools are making of a generation of beautiful human souls. Why would I contribute to the Mission of making young men and women socially and economically inept, let alone incapable of getting through the doors of a public university? Fifty percent of the minority kids are reported to not make it through the system. The LA Solution? Build MORE schools.

Isn't General Motors and Ford, the Laurel and Hardy of MBA's, falling ceremoniously apart from adding woe to their misery by producing more recallable steel boxes no one wants to buy?? I guess as GM goes ... but this is a punch line.

The United States slides ever so gently into becoming an international joke. We shall be lucky to pick cotton for the Chinese - the we being the graduating class of 2010 at UCLA, that is.

Dateline: NBC reveals the US Police State [Child "Predators," & The US Penal Mentality]

NBC News Dateline and Chris Hansen have scored top ratings for their stings "To Catch a Predator" in which they trap Internet child predators on camera. Most of us don't condone adult sex with children - altho a recent spat of blonde female schoolteachers jaunting with their young boy students is looked upon as another case of boys will always be boys, even celebrated in a Charles-&-Diana-style interview on Larry King's CNN broadcast. Men as the adults in these realtions is viewed more serious, and the public has enjoyed watching man after man get scooped up on prime time.

Yet, I remain very troubled by this version of tv justice. Maybe it's the vast array of people from all walks of life. Actors. Clergy. Teachers. Government employees. Upper-end white-collar managers. These can be jaw-dropping moments as we scale the upper end of the class system. The poor are inbred anyway, so we expect nasty behavior from them. Ruthlessly, what we don't conclude about our social codes from this multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-class parade is troubling. When I was a first-year school teacher, I often made class rules out of a sense of frustration. Invariably, they didn't work: like, demanding absolute silence for silence sake. This is corrosive to a class. You learn as a teacher never to make a rule you cannot enforce. When rules were obviously ludicrous, a product of my naivete, the answer was not to come down harder on the rule but to do away with it and find a new way. Just so, such social codes that make masses of people criminals are equally corrosive to the community: as much as we think we know what child predators look like and have strong social rules against it, that people from literally all walks of life have been caught in NBC's sting should demand, finally, a frank discussion of sex in our society. I found it odd that these men, driving long hours to break the law, cross a line, would bring condoms. There are things here we need to discuss.

But we will not discuss anything, and this is the other most troubling thing about these programs. We enjoy watching the fantasy of the police getting their man, event after event. In the Florida shoot, the police routinely tackle the men the ground in the denouement. Nowhere in the program do we get a sociologist or psychologist speaking to any context of this problem, this crime. We have been trained not to care. We have not, thus far, even gotten a defense lawyer's stand on behalf of their clients: we do not care. This is liberal crap. What would a trial serve since these perverts are clearly guilty? This is the skew of these very, very disruptive programs: show an infraction in a social code which needs to be re-examined and then show the solution in the arms of the police force. Welcome to the makings of a police state.

News Release: GAYS NOT THE CAUSE OF HIV [another typical whitewashed western redemption tale]

The whole point of a story circulating on the web, that Gays are not the cause of HIV, but rather Africa is not just the propaganda purposes to keep saying AIDS effects us all, when demonstrably it has not after 25 years; the purpose to this story is also to heap more blame on the Dark Continent, a popular and convenient receptacle: a heathen hunter/gatherer and a green monkey! And we are to believe that from this strange consummation in some other epoch, believable only and uniquely because it is AFRICA, gay men in major urban areas began a preciptous dropping off like flies in 1981.

These scientists admit to a great many holes in their theory, a great many unknowns, yet they are comfortable putting this nonsense forward probably because it plays on the West's established stereotypes about Africa. And we all know Black men are sexual predators. Unfortunately in present day, poorly educated US, Whites as much as Blacks are prone to give in to these racist assumptions. Remember the AFRICANIZED bees, courtesy not of Ghana or Angola but rather Central America?!

Another hole: why didn't the colonial masters of these African colonies get impacted first and disproportionately? The Belgians. The French. The British. They were right there at ground zero, probably bareback raping African women and African men. Why then the US, which had no colonies in Africa, and why gay men? The scientists are stupefied. No matter: blame Africa.

We have left the corridors of science long ago and have been asked to participate in Magical Thinking, not the exemplary kind of a Garcia Marquez but a remedial kind like Uncle Remus.

HIV, whatever it might be, it does not cause AIDS. That it may or may not exist in human beings along with countless other microbes the ORIGINS of which we do not yet know demonstrates how little we know at all. That HIV - and every other germ - can affect without infect is widely demonstrable: that is science 101. That AIDS happens with or without HIV is also widely demonstrable.

Ergo ... The "cause" of HIV is probably an unimportant. The cause of death, critical. It is nice for some that a coroner can list AIDS on a death certificate now and loved ones have no idea what KILLED their son, daughter, mother, father. Nice, too, that we can train our eyes off the cause of misery in the swath of the globe where these deaths occur: the colonies and its children, the poor, the outcast. Globalization that has judiciously taken lands and water rights and plunged the poor into destitution is not the Cause of Death. It is AIDS, AIDS, AIDS.

The Age of AIDS Revisionism [or, Frontline does David Lean one better]

Frontline's production, The Age of AIDS, was only interesting in how it revisted a chronology many of us have forgotten. It offered visuals to events I was too young to witness so added a dimension to history, maybe like being able to see Queen Elizabeth I recite her Tilbury speech to troops fighting Spain. But it glossed over shamelessly the historical record. Not mine, theirs. Like, those early patients, whom the doctors were quoted as saying were healthy one day and sick the next with PCP pnuemonias. Really? Their own literature documents these gay men had had multiple std infections, were drug users, including poppers [amyl nitrates, implicated in Kaposi Sarcoma], and had had regular treatments of antibiotics. These are not immune builders but toxins. So keep in mind this is what "their" doctors describe as healthy. They truly white washed the AZT controversy: yes it was developed in the 50's as a cancer treatment, but they failed to tell us why it was not on the market from the 1950's to the 1980's: its toxicity. Apparently it was bad for the general population but just fine for gay men. At any rate, their own studies report that AZT disproportionately ill-effected BLACK men. This was also not said. There were no doctors like the ones I have come across who use terms like "kill" and "murder" when they express remorse about administering AZT to any patient. There were none of the other scientists at all actually. Injection drug use was casually referenced but never linked from the LA beginning to Thailand to the former Soviet bloc where AIDS is allegedly rising. Needles. Could it be what's IN the needles and not the needles themselves? The April 1984 news conference with Secy of Health Margaret Heckler is the stuff of legend. It was unprecedented since at that juncture, no consensus had been formed as to the cause of AIDS, more scientists than the Gallo and Montaigner were trying to solve this riddle, yet there she was literally choking on her words with the controversial Dr Gallo at her side. I had often referred to and read about that news conference, and last night got to see it for the first time. Then there was the overshadowing character, much like the expansive and overwhelming desert was in "Lawrence of Arabia," of AFRICA. AFRICA The Sinister. The Dark Continent. From beginning to end, the lone hunter/gatherer in the bush and his strange ways with the green monkeys. Those monkeys. Savages!! I realized the empire is a weak sickly thing that can only rely on pushing old buttons to weave its ridiculous tales. One wonders at this point if the germ theory - barely a hundred years old - has any credibility. I am close to declaring it not. No where in this movie did I see what THEY call long-term nonprogressors. These are people who have been told they have HIV and after 5, 10, 20 years have had no unusual illnesses. They uniquely do not take those medicines, which are said to save but also explode your liver, collapse youe kidney, destroy bone marrow, wear awar at your joints, cause blindness, nausea, vomiting, rashes. Remember: healthy one day, sick the next? They call them long-term nonprogressors: some of us are just made to question whatever HIV might be, it does not cause AIDS.

Church-Think vs University-Think [Bring Back the Lions II]

When I was in my first year at college, living in Liggett dorm [Washington University], our dorm advisor took us Black men and women aside one night for a chat. We were few back then, maybe 7 or 8, and while this Black male dorm advisor pretended to give us advice, I think he was actually wrestling in the middle of things himself. His subject was dating and marriage, and he suggested that we would have to be open to dating outside our "race" as we got further in our educations. If that campus was any indication he was correct. But St. Louis had a large Black population: couldn't we date or marry among them? His argument, further, was that what we'd encounter was something that wouldn't jive with the mindsets being shaped as undergraduates and graduate students: that, professionally we would be set apart and intellectually would have different set of tools with which to view the world than a partner who'd only gone as far as high school. Fast forward 20 years, and I think more and more about that fireside chat. My mind has grown more curious, more disciplined, more thirsty for what goes on in the world and how it operates. I have posed questions about a range of topics. What I have experienced - in a generality - is that there is truth to a Black resistance to exploring ideas, asking questions, interrogating "facts" versus an openness among Whites to all that. This is the trend, not an absolute. But it is strictly Black gay men who ban me from online discussion groups, Black gay men who will not date me for my politics. I have not met a white gay man to date who has reacted that strongly. White men, tending to have had educations beyond high school, may not agree with me but they respect the idea of Interrogation. It is not seen as disrespectful. It is not dangerous. Black men, tethered to a Church whose ideas are somewhat medieval, a hierarchy, keep their head down and the loudmouth in the group is a threat to survival. I would be the loudmouth. Unlike Bill Cosby, I do see the socio-economic basis for this - half of Black students dropping out of high school in LA; those who do graduate, many cannot read, etc., etc. Stupidity has been imposed on us somewhat. But this is not enough: something must spark the poor to awaken, to see that education is a duty to oneself. It is also a duty to the Democracy, and this is what uttermost is in peril. The Democracy. Regardless who I come to date, we cannot have a democracy with part of the population unable and unwilling to weigh Issues. Question motives. Interrogate the status quo. Strive for Competence.