A rather self-righteous friend called me into question because of my government job, saying that I was part of the System and not really against it. In some liberal and progressive minds and nonconformist minds there actually exists a chasm passed which the true at heart have not crossed. The line of this chasm is arbitrary, depending upon where one's leftistism is, but it holds certain occupations up to strict scrutiny and places others on the Right Side.
I schooled my self-righteous friend that while it was important to have personal tastes as to what profession you are suited to, and to be aware of the consequences of one's moral actions, the idea that certain jobs lay outside scrutiny while others are reproachable is not of the real world we live in: and I mean the state capitalist world of wage-slavery - where we are all wage-slaves.
Every enterprise that involves the exchange of the official currency - from drug dealing, online porn, and prostituting to public school teacher, faux counselor at the "community" nonprofit to police officer on the beat to the soldier in the foreign field - is part of the same universe that is our moral conundrum. It is part of the same moral conundrum for the simple reason it involves the exchanging of the official currency.
Don't be misled by the ragings of the left and right on the Congressional floor or your local pulpit that certain things in our universe are beyond the pale. Look closer.
The problem is that many on the left or right look at the official currency only as an economic tool, much like a means of bartering, without any moral weight to it. It might me. The official currency is viewed simply a means to pay rent, buy underwear, pay your utilities.
But the official currency of the state is also a political tool to shape public choices and form a public consciousness. This is the point missing from a lot of analyses and my friend's unexamined moralizing.
The official currency is not only a means to purchase things. Currency is much more than that. An official currency is also a means to construct choices, to narrow those choices, to limit our liberty. It is a system of reward for falling in line as it is a punishment for those who do not.
To illustrate with two examples: how the West created Strategic Hamlets in its imperial conquests.
The British classically took over territory in Africa during what is ominously called in our modern textbooks as "The Age of Exploration" by creating these strategic hamlets to get the natives to work.
Because the native African population wouldn't willingly work for their aspiring conquerors, Britain used its military might and expropriated the best lands. They told the natives they were welcome to stay on expropriated lands if they paid rent. Rent had to be paid in the official currency of Britain. The only way to get this currency would be to earn it by working for Britain. That work was strictly defined not to benefit the local communities but rather for the British Crown: the Empire. We know the history: mines, fields, etc., all commodities for export. Naturally and intentionally, this altered these African societies, the fallout of which we still see today.
The US acted no better in its attempt to stop dominoes from falling in Southeast Asia.
When rural workers in Vietnam tended to support the nationalist, insurgent Viet Cong, the US response was for the Kennedy administration - to the silence of the US population [unimaginable today] - to launch a bombing, napalming, and crop eradicating campaign on the peasantry. This had the desired effect of not only slaughtering many men, women, and children civilians but also driving the survivors into the cities, into strategic hamlets, where they became dependent on the US puppet regime for their every need.
We all live in strategic hamlets where through an employment system and a propaganda model we are strictly tamed into certain behaviors. Better if our views fall in line, but this is not important: sit home and admonish the government all you like as long as you display obedience to the System.
The strategic hamlet of our urban centers are tools of an equally onerous class war, and our choices may seem broad but they are actually very narrow.
Who has access to greater amounts of currency and who has access to none is a political decision. Our urban centers - even the great ones, like New York City, Seattle, and San Francisco - liberal they may seem, are not immune. They are highly designed, highly disciplined machines, and we are no more than factory workers.
In fact, these urban metropolises are more critically disciplined than the rural Wyoming prarie, which might be why one sees a different kind of insurgence from outside the urban centers than from within.
So my self-righteous friend who labors at an urban nonprofit, to put it coarsely, may be doing good work. But he is not working for the Taliban or Weather Underground or the Black Panthers or the Revolutionary Communist Party, and this is not an error. Whether my friend knows it or not, that nonprofit is proscribed from certain behaviors and encouraged in others. It's part of the same moral conundrum.
18 June 2010
05 June 2010
AIDS Politics and Why HIV deterrents don't work except to fill jails and fund big pharmaceuticals
In Seattle, WA., Oliver Moreno, a male prostitute, has been arrested for knowingly spreading HIV to tricks who hired him and exposing them to the virus that causes AIDS. Reportedly, the tricks asked Moreno if he was "clean," and Moreno replied he was.
In a country that festishizes making crimes out of any and everything for reasons that need intense discussion, I guess it is not surprising that HIV should become a crime to feed our prison industry. It's perfect. It is a disease believed to haunt gay men, whom the country is kept at constant unease about because we are trying to destroy Marriage and disrupt its combat forces. So, yes: if you can no longer jail them for being queer, HIV works perfectly well.
And, there are always prisons and jails to be filled somewhere in this decadent country.
Additionally, the continued spread of HIV almost 30 years after it emerged as a gay cancer is baffling. It is only equally baffling to the scientific community's paltry offerings in response. (This is not meant to indict the many doctors, nurses, health clinic workers, sex workers, and researchers who want to see an end to this epidemic, but the initial direction HIV research was driven unilaterally is also up for intense discussion).
An online contact, a fellow gay man equally concerned about the continued spread overall and among gay men asks: "Why do you think HIV prevention efforts failed so miserably?"
The answers are multi-tiered and refute some common assumptions and myths about HIV/AIDS prevention. It is worth summarizing.
For one, "HIV prevention efforts"assumes it has been the intent to stave off the spread of HIV. I am old enough to remember that US President Ronald Reagan never spoke of it, and given the proportion infected given our supposed 7% of the population, there was very, very little hue and cry, even from liberal circles. People were simply allowed to die.
My alma mater, Washington Univ [St Louis] was the second university in the country to install condom machines in the bathrooms throughout the campus. This was 1986 or so. It caused an uproar from predictable circles, and quietly the machines were removed. Again: 1986, almost 10 years before the miraculous "retrovirals" when many gay men went from infection to death in a matter of months. 1986, when death came quickly. And who cared?
Second, it was controversially the main aim of the HIV/AIDS activists - AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) - to bring more and more medicines in the pipeline. This demand was not unreasonable, but it did not go without criticism from the ranks of activists (and many in the scientific community).
I joined Queer Nation/San Francisco in 1990. ACT UP/SF was already huge, and our QN meetings got up to 500 lgbtq's. A vocal minority of us questioned the reasonableness of asking for a Marshall Plan of MEDICATIONS for HIV rather than look at sociological factors, like poverty and employment, as some pointed to how and where this plague seemed to be fast spreading. We were frightened this was some social purification scheme, given Reagan's silence. Given the values of our establishment, how could we be wrong? And we were ignored. Meds make money. Poverty costs. There are many, global examples of this paradigm, including in Central Africa, were old diseases aren't profitable. AIDS, Inc., is.
Third, the sex message has continuously been nuanced from one dimensional to flat, but it is still a message to a marginalized community. Marginalized communities are historically removed from humanity even by liberal circles and expected to make water into wine, rouse themselves from deep poverty and get on their bicycles to find jobs [as one Thatcher crony dictated] as if we function in some Twilight Zone awaiting white papers and health department edicts to inspire us.
In the real world, look at anti-drug, anti-early pregnancy, anti-std campaigns and see where they have succeeded and failed and emerges a pattern a high school student could discern. Our establishment will not.
Where there is affluence, where there is a perceivable pathway "up" behaviors can be [self-]modified. This is usually, but not always, among whites with obvious exceptions. Anti-early pregnancy campaigns, for example, have worked best when women were given access to higher education, equal employment, Title IX, and breaking the glass ceilings: they themselves will hold off having children [and marrying or not] later (and I am not at all saying marriage/single motherhood is a good or bad thing, just stating what I understand to be the facts).
Nevertheless, the early "Safe Sex" message to gay men was on par with JUST SAY NO, a harsh command you'd give to a farm animal. Not to accept in full this message drew any respectable gay man into question. The harshness of the message was observed by HIV activists. We protested the framing of this message and were accused of making excuses for "reckless behavior", etc. We stated this message would never - and has never - been directed at straight men.
At some point in the mid-90's the medical community got less myopic, and "safer" sex was born. It was a far cry from the Safe Sex message from my doctor telling me to use a plastic sandwich bag on my partner and to keep my tongue in my mouth when kissing [1989].
"Safer" sex still ignores the human impulse and social conditions we urged be attended. So, predictably, HIV is reportedly fast growing among women of color, and gay men of color: marginalized communities within a marginalized community. Should this really be a surprise? What other indices do we know about these - our! - communities? And why are these indices ignored from my beginnings with Queer Nation to this hour?
I "know" exactly who Oliver Moreno is. He is an un-/under-employed queer of color whose had little or very poor schooling and is only meant to be a source of cheap labor for or capitalist economy. He can rent his body picking grapes, stocking a shelf at Wal-Mart, or turning a trick.
The men who believed he was "clean" are the same men who believe he is a loyal Wal-Mart associate.
AIDS Wiki & Celia Farber * Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science * HIV treatment response and prognosis ... * Peter Duesberg
In a country that festishizes making crimes out of any and everything for reasons that need intense discussion, I guess it is not surprising that HIV should become a crime to feed our prison industry. It's perfect. It is a disease believed to haunt gay men, whom the country is kept at constant unease about because we are trying to destroy Marriage and disrupt its combat forces. So, yes: if you can no longer jail them for being queer, HIV works perfectly well.
And, there are always prisons and jails to be filled somewhere in this decadent country.
Additionally, the continued spread of HIV almost 30 years after it emerged as a gay cancer is baffling. It is only equally baffling to the scientific community's paltry offerings in response. (This is not meant to indict the many doctors, nurses, health clinic workers, sex workers, and researchers who want to see an end to this epidemic, but the initial direction HIV research was driven unilaterally is also up for intense discussion).
An online contact, a fellow gay man equally concerned about the continued spread overall and among gay men asks: "Why do you think HIV prevention efforts failed so miserably?"
The answers are multi-tiered and refute some common assumptions and myths about HIV/AIDS prevention. It is worth summarizing.
For one, "HIV prevention efforts"assumes it has been the intent to stave off the spread of HIV. I am old enough to remember that US President Ronald Reagan never spoke of it, and given the proportion infected given our supposed 7% of the population, there was very, very little hue and cry, even from liberal circles. People were simply allowed to die.
My alma mater, Washington Univ [St Louis] was the second university in the country to install condom machines in the bathrooms throughout the campus. This was 1986 or so. It caused an uproar from predictable circles, and quietly the machines were removed. Again: 1986, almost 10 years before the miraculous "retrovirals" when many gay men went from infection to death in a matter of months. 1986, when death came quickly. And who cared?
Second, it was controversially the main aim of the HIV/AIDS activists - AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) - to bring more and more medicines in the pipeline. This demand was not unreasonable, but it did not go without criticism from the ranks of activists (and many in the scientific community).
I joined Queer Nation/San Francisco in 1990. ACT UP/SF was already huge, and our QN meetings got up to 500 lgbtq's. A vocal minority of us questioned the reasonableness of asking for a Marshall Plan of MEDICATIONS for HIV rather than look at sociological factors, like poverty and employment, as some pointed to how and where this plague seemed to be fast spreading. We were frightened this was some social purification scheme, given Reagan's silence. Given the values of our establishment, how could we be wrong? And we were ignored. Meds make money. Poverty costs. There are many, global examples of this paradigm, including in Central Africa, were old diseases aren't profitable. AIDS, Inc., is.
Third, the sex message has continuously been nuanced from one dimensional to flat, but it is still a message to a marginalized community. Marginalized communities are historically removed from humanity even by liberal circles and expected to make water into wine, rouse themselves from deep poverty and get on their bicycles to find jobs [as one Thatcher crony dictated] as if we function in some Twilight Zone awaiting white papers and health department edicts to inspire us.
In the real world, look at anti-drug, anti-early pregnancy, anti-std campaigns and see where they have succeeded and failed and emerges a pattern a high school student could discern. Our establishment will not.
Where there is affluence, where there is a perceivable pathway "up" behaviors can be [self-]modified. This is usually, but not always, among whites with obvious exceptions. Anti-early pregnancy campaigns, for example, have worked best when women were given access to higher education, equal employment, Title IX, and breaking the glass ceilings: they themselves will hold off having children [and marrying or not] later (and I am not at all saying marriage/single motherhood is a good or bad thing, just stating what I understand to be the facts).
Nevertheless, the early "Safe Sex" message to gay men was on par with JUST SAY NO, a harsh command you'd give to a farm animal. Not to accept in full this message drew any respectable gay man into question. The harshness of the message was observed by HIV activists. We protested the framing of this message and were accused of making excuses for "reckless behavior", etc. We stated this message would never - and has never - been directed at straight men.
At some point in the mid-90's the medical community got less myopic, and "safer" sex was born. It was a far cry from the Safe Sex message from my doctor telling me to use a plastic sandwich bag on my partner and to keep my tongue in my mouth when kissing [1989].
"Safer" sex still ignores the human impulse and social conditions we urged be attended. So, predictably, HIV is reportedly fast growing among women of color, and gay men of color: marginalized communities within a marginalized community. Should this really be a surprise? What other indices do we know about these - our! - communities? And why are these indices ignored from my beginnings with Queer Nation to this hour?
I "know" exactly who Oliver Moreno is. He is an un-/under-employed queer of color whose had little or very poor schooling and is only meant to be a source of cheap labor for or capitalist economy. He can rent his body picking grapes, stocking a shelf at Wal-Mart, or turning a trick.
The men who believed he was "clean" are the same men who believe he is a loyal Wal-Mart associate.
AIDS Wiki & Celia Farber * Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science * HIV treatment response and prognosis ... * Peter Duesberg
27 May 2010
The Nation-State is a plague on all our houses*
"What would ultimately be necessary would be a breakdown of the nation-state system - because I think that's not a viable system. It's not necessarily the natural form of human organization; in fact, it's a European invention pretty much. The modern nation-state system basically developed in Europe since the medieval period, and it was extremely difficult for it to develop: Europe has a very bloody history, and extremely savage and bloody history, with constant massive wars and so on, and that was all part of an effort to establish the nation-state system. It has virtually no relation to the way people live, or to their association, or anything else particularly, so it had to be established by force. And it was established by centuries of bloody warfare. That warfare ended in 1945 - and the only reason it ended is because the next war was going to destroy everything. [1]
"The capitalist or bourgeois class is no longer capable of guiding the uninhibited development of science and technology - again because these objectives now clash with the profit motive. Capitalism has proved incapable of transcending fundamental weaknesses such as under-utilization of productive capacity, the persistence of a permanent sector of unemployed, and periodic economic crises related to the concept of "market" - which is concerned with people's ability to pay rather than their need for commodities. Capitalism has created its own irrationalities, such as vicious white racism, the tremendous waste associated with advertising, and the irrationality of incredible poverty in the midst of wealth and wastage even inside the biggest capitalist economies, such as the United States of America [2]
"The nation-state system was exported to the rest of the world through European colonization. Europeans were barbarians basically, savages: very advanced technologically, and advanced in methods of warfare, but not culturally or anything else particularly. And when they spread over the rest of the world, it was like a plague - they just destroyed everything in front of them. They fought differently, they fought much more brutally, they had better technology - and they essentially wiped everything else out. [1]
"The American continent's a good example. How come everybody around here has a white face, and not a red face? Well, it's because the people with white faces were savages, and they killed the people with red faces. When the British and other colonists came to this continent, they simply destroyed everything - and pretty much the same thing happened everywhere else in the world.
"Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed he island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor. [3]
"Now from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals."
"So the process of colonization was extraordinarily destructive, and it in turn imposed the European nation-state system on the world, kind of a reflection of internal European society, which of course was extremely hierarchical and unequal and brutal. And if that system continues, I suppose it will continue to be hierarchical and unequal and brutal. [1]
"Europeans used the superiority of their ships and cannons to gain control of all the world's waterways, starting with the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of North Africa. From 1415, when the Portuguese captured Ceuta, near Gibbraltar, they maintained the offensive against the Maghreb. Within the next sixty years, they seized ports such as Arzila, El-Ksar-es-Seghir, and Tangier, and fortified them. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguse controlled the Atlantic coast of Morocco and used its economic and strategic advantages to prepare for further navigations which eventually carried their ships round the Capeof Good Hope in 1495. After reaching the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese sought with some success to replace Arabs as the merchants who tied East Africa to India and the rest of Asia. I the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Portuguese carried most of the East African ivory which was marketed in India; while Indian cloth and beads were sold in East and West Africa by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French. The same applied to cowry shells fro the East Indies. Therefore, by control of the seas, Europe took the first steps towards transforming the several parts of the Africa and Asia into economic satellites." [2]
[All the text in this submission are by the authors listed, not by me. During a recent swim workout I literally conceived this theme and assembled this conversation between these great thinkers - LBD]
[1] Noam Chomsky. Understanding Power. The New Press, 2002
[2] Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press, 1972
[3] Howard Zinn. A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. HarperCollins, 1980
"The capitalist or bourgeois class is no longer capable of guiding the uninhibited development of science and technology - again because these objectives now clash with the profit motive. Capitalism has proved incapable of transcending fundamental weaknesses such as under-utilization of productive capacity, the persistence of a permanent sector of unemployed, and periodic economic crises related to the concept of "market" - which is concerned with people's ability to pay rather than their need for commodities. Capitalism has created its own irrationalities, such as vicious white racism, the tremendous waste associated with advertising, and the irrationality of incredible poverty in the midst of wealth and wastage even inside the biggest capitalist economies, such as the United States of America [2]
"The nation-state system was exported to the rest of the world through European colonization. Europeans were barbarians basically, savages: very advanced technologically, and advanced in methods of warfare, but not culturally or anything else particularly. And when they spread over the rest of the world, it was like a plague - they just destroyed everything in front of them. They fought differently, they fought much more brutally, they had better technology - and they essentially wiped everything else out. [1]
"The American continent's a good example. How come everybody around here has a white face, and not a red face? Well, it's because the people with white faces were savages, and they killed the people with red faces. When the British and other colonists came to this continent, they simply destroyed everything - and pretty much the same thing happened everywhere else in the world.
"Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed he island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor. [3]
"Now from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals."
"So the process of colonization was extraordinarily destructive, and it in turn imposed the European nation-state system on the world, kind of a reflection of internal European society, which of course was extremely hierarchical and unequal and brutal. And if that system continues, I suppose it will continue to be hierarchical and unequal and brutal. [1]
"Europeans used the superiority of their ships and cannons to gain control of all the world's waterways, starting with the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of North Africa. From 1415, when the Portuguese captured Ceuta, near Gibbraltar, they maintained the offensive against the Maghreb. Within the next sixty years, they seized ports such as Arzila, El-Ksar-es-Seghir, and Tangier, and fortified them. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguse controlled the Atlantic coast of Morocco and used its economic and strategic advantages to prepare for further navigations which eventually carried their ships round the Capeof Good Hope in 1495. After reaching the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese sought with some success to replace Arabs as the merchants who tied East Africa to India and the rest of Asia. I the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Portuguese carried most of the East African ivory which was marketed in India; while Indian cloth and beads were sold in East and West Africa by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French. The same applied to cowry shells fro the East Indies. Therefore, by control of the seas, Europe took the first steps towards transforming the several parts of the Africa and Asia into economic satellites." [2]
[All the text in this submission are by the authors listed, not by me. During a recent swim workout I literally conceived this theme and assembled this conversation between these great thinkers - LBD]
[1] Noam Chomsky. Understanding Power. The New Press, 2002
[2] Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press, 1972
[3] Howard Zinn. A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. HarperCollins, 1980
Why is BP spill being called the biggest environmental disaster? It's not by a long shot
It was announced this morning on NPR radio that the British Petroleum (BP, the corporation formerly known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company) oil "spill" was the biggest environmental disaster in history, surpassing the Exxon Valdez crack-up of March 1989.
But you have to really be a good, disciplined student of government and corporate propaganda to believe this obvious overstatement. Really, the biggest disaster in history?
Funny, because most moderate apologists are usually more critical of official facts in other matters. Take racism and colonialism. If I mention the unprecedented horrors of the African slave trade, forced migration, a multi-generational holocaust, cultural genocide, many moderate liberals will attempt the balance the historical record with the Jewish holocaust, the Armenian genocide, East Africa, My Lai, Stalin ... Rightly or wrongly, they will bring these other crimes in, unknowingly acknowledging a norm that would disturb keep a child up at night.
With BP's "spill" [spill? this is not an "oops" moment], our mainstream narrative is far less critical, which is surprising.
The narrative waxes articulately about fines against BP, lack of technology, corporate responsibility, criminal charges. Good points, all, but BP (formerly known as the rogue corporation which backed the coup against a democratically elected president in Iran, 1953) is merely a minor symptom of a larger chronic disease.
Because while the world's attention is on the Gulf, the wetlands, the bird refuges, the end of the fishing industry in an area just devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the air continues to be polluted, the climate continues to warm with carbon and methane emissions, the polar ice caps continue melting.
And where is the urgency for global smog alerts? Where is the play by play, up-to-the minute coverage on increased lung-choking particulates in the air? Where are the news agencies who have hired experts to look at the "spill" and confirm it's greater than what BP has suggested (BP, the corporation which with CIA support returned the ogre Shah of Iran to his country to cancel all democratic reforms and make lucrative deals)?
The narrative has been disciplined by the corporate line. The lawyers may also remember what happened to poor Oprah and her hamburger fiasco.
This bigger global catastrophe of what is benignly called Global Warming has become virtual background noise, barely noticed anymore, like the US war crimes in the Middle East, Guantanmo prison, its occupations of Afghanistan, drone bombing of Pakistan, pacification of Iraq, and always, always its utilization of Israel as its mercenary.
The larger threat that is arguably linked to many of our industrial-age ailments is overshadowed by the current militarization of the US/Mexican border, not because Nicaragua has threatened to invade, as Reagan once lied to beef up defense spending; and not because immigrants from Mexico are staging uprisings and pillaging their new homes, but rather because a sad majority of Americans have turned their wrath over or economic chaos on poor, migrant [brown] workers and not on the atrocious capitalist nation-state.
So while dust ups go on here and there, our lungs are slowly starved of oxygen, particulates will fill the air, our major corporations will leech toxins into their products, rain forests felled, honey bees grow extinct, ... and, yes, it IS a spill in the Gulf that has us in a convulsion.
If we could turn the persistent air pollution into an oil slick, it would cover much of the world, but we've been diverted to a horrendous accident in the Gulf but not nearly as catastrophic.
The Gulf is a spill of a microcosm - environmental damages, localities ill affected, wildlife killed, waters poisoned, lack of preparedness, a nation underprepared to deal with the Frankenstein monster of its own making, etc - of what is happening all over the world.
But you have to really be a good, disciplined student of government and corporate propaganda to believe this obvious overstatement. Really, the biggest disaster in history?
Funny, because most moderate apologists are usually more critical of official facts in other matters. Take racism and colonialism. If I mention the unprecedented horrors of the African slave trade, forced migration, a multi-generational holocaust, cultural genocide, many moderate liberals will attempt the balance the historical record with the Jewish holocaust, the Armenian genocide, East Africa, My Lai, Stalin ... Rightly or wrongly, they will bring these other crimes in, unknowingly acknowledging a norm that would disturb keep a child up at night.
With BP's "spill" [spill? this is not an "oops" moment], our mainstream narrative is far less critical, which is surprising.
The narrative waxes articulately about fines against BP, lack of technology, corporate responsibility, criminal charges. Good points, all, but BP (formerly known as the rogue corporation which backed the coup against a democratically elected president in Iran, 1953) is merely a minor symptom of a larger chronic disease.
Because while the world's attention is on the Gulf, the wetlands, the bird refuges, the end of the fishing industry in an area just devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the air continues to be polluted, the climate continues to warm with carbon and methane emissions, the polar ice caps continue melting.
And where is the urgency for global smog alerts? Where is the play by play, up-to-the minute coverage on increased lung-choking particulates in the air? Where are the news agencies who have hired experts to look at the "spill" and confirm it's greater than what BP has suggested (BP, the corporation which with CIA support returned the ogre Shah of Iran to his country to cancel all democratic reforms and make lucrative deals)?
The narrative has been disciplined by the corporate line. The lawyers may also remember what happened to poor Oprah and her hamburger fiasco.
This bigger global catastrophe of what is benignly called Global Warming has become virtual background noise, barely noticed anymore, like the US war crimes in the Middle East, Guantanmo prison, its occupations of Afghanistan, drone bombing of Pakistan, pacification of Iraq, and always, always its utilization of Israel as its mercenary.
The larger threat that is arguably linked to many of our industrial-age ailments is overshadowed by the current militarization of the US/Mexican border, not because Nicaragua has threatened to invade, as Reagan once lied to beef up defense spending; and not because immigrants from Mexico are staging uprisings and pillaging their new homes, but rather because a sad majority of Americans have turned their wrath over or economic chaos on poor, migrant [brown] workers and not on the atrocious capitalist nation-state.
So while dust ups go on here and there, our lungs are slowly starved of oxygen, particulates will fill the air, our major corporations will leech toxins into their products, rain forests felled, honey bees grow extinct, ... and, yes, it IS a spill in the Gulf that has us in a convulsion.
If we could turn the persistent air pollution into an oil slick, it would cover much of the world, but we've been diverted to a horrendous accident in the Gulf but not nearly as catastrophic.
The Gulf is a spill of a microcosm - environmental damages, localities ill affected, wildlife killed, waters poisoned, lack of preparedness, a nation underprepared to deal with the Frankenstein monster of its own making, etc - of what is happening all over the world.
14 May 2010
Radical Communities
Nina Simone was once quoted as lamenting the civil rights movement of the 1960's warped into disco in the 1970's. The quote may be false, the observation is very reasonable. This weekend Long Beach hosts the second in the country's LGBT Pride celebrations, following Las Vegas, and preceding by a few weeks those in Los Angeles and San Francisco, which will mark its 40th.
Has the Stonewall Riot of 1969 warped into a weekend of commercial booths, non-profit outreach, and lots of men and women dancing to Martha Wash?
From one view, we do not in fact have any progressive or radical institutions to turn to. Those the LGBT community does have are fine, middle-of-the-mainstream-road agencies. They seem singularly focused on gaining marriage equality. The Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU, and many local state groups and LGBT centers have doggedly pursued this civil right. And it is a civil right as long as the state makes it available to some and not to others.
But from another point of view, Simone's observation misses the motives of governments who rightly want to diffuse the growing assault against it by large sectors of its populations. These growing assaults persist, in fact, to this hour. Not only in turbulent Greece but also in the UK, where a coalition government seeks to perpetuate itself in power for five fixed years, or in Spain whose socialist prime minister is instituting austerity measures against popular demand. In the US it continues to rebuff the popular will - be it in health care reform or foreign, costly wars - for what the establishment want.
Our rhetoric often confuses the governments' desires, which have become further anti-democratic, against that of the populations, which support social programs and an end to Mideast wars and occupations.
This not-so-new trend against the people became clearest to me when poll after poll in the UK showed its citizens resolute in their opposition to US-led wars in Afghanistan and toppling Iraq and the quagmire that followed: yet, this had little effect on the members of Parliament whose support is directly connected to the government of the day. Tony Blair and his government should have fallen, and he didn't. Gordon Brown should never have succeeded him, but he did.
As the queen herself is accurately quoted saying "there are forces in this country about which you do not know."
Indeed, not only is the ruling class obscured but also our radical histories are hidden to us, and from us. In most Western industrialized countries you can go as close as your local library and discover the radical roots within the LGBT, Black, Latino/Chicano, Asian, Native American, and women's movements. But you will scarcely see evidence of them at Pride celebrations.
Quiz yourself now, and ask what you know of them? Do you know that Harry Hay, the founder of the first gay rights organization modelled the Mattachine Society from his organizing work with the Communist Party USA? Hay was a lifelong communist radical, and when he saw the Simone's proverbial Disco set in, he balked, critiqued, and was ridiculed into silence. So he went off and formed the Radical Faeries.
Did you know that Rosa Parks, despite that horrid mythology of the seamstress who refused to give up her seat was trained as a labor organizer by the communist party at the Highlander School in Tennessee? She then became executive secretary of the NAACP and organized to end segregation on buses.
These labor organizers and their communist, socialist, and anarchist backers were virtually liquidated by the US government. Interestingly, as a young college student, US Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, wrote her senior thesis on the eradication of the socialists from New York City in the 1930's.
Carrots and sticks being what they are, succeeding generations may have felt a natural sense that something is not quite right, but they had few in the community to learn from. The radicals had either been killed, had gone underground, or had been thoroughly house-broken.
The Black community offers two interesting worlds.
On the one hand, we have the narrative of Blacks migrating north, as if this were the most natural thing to do. But a hundred years ago, while the US government condoned Jim Crow brutality in the South, it encouraged strike breaking in the north. Northern labor organizers were winning rights in factory after factory, again with no small help from the US Communist Party. The bosses lured cheap, Southern, Black labor north to break these newly formed unions in the exact same way cheap labor from across the "border" is lured in to lower wages and keep labor organizers firmly in check.
Yet at the same time Blacks were used as scabs, other Blacks like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, Rosa Parks, Richard Wright, and Angela Davis organized with the Communist Party USA to build broad coalitions and win labor rights for all workers.
If you attend any of the Pride celebrations this spring and summer, you won't see any of the radical history behind that movement. Harry Hay was ostracized until he was near death, and, of course after death he may be listed here and there as an icon. But I remember when this man was vilified by the LGBT press.
While it is progress in itself that gay men and lesbians can come out in the open, dance, cruise, and have fun without the local police rounding them up as they did as recently as the 1970's. That's real, measurable progress that must be appreciated.
But despite the hard organizing work done by our predecessors, I daresay the achievement of being able to dance under the golden sun reflects the limited goal of the Closeted and the Conformist. They would not join Harry Hay and the activists-organizers but remained in the shadows in fear of being exposed. Their limited agenda of simple assimilation, ironically, seems to have won the day: they've become a commodity along with the other commodities our capitalist economy nurtures.
It's about your income, your wealth, your disposable income. So when new ground began to be broken for LGBT's in the early 1990's it was framed as a community with buying power: we were young, we had no children, we had money.
But like any community, this misses the vast majority - as vast as those European populations no longer represented by their governments. That LGBT majority is forced into wage-slavery, low income, no health care, housing issues and sees a leadership advocating marriage equality and not housing rights, the enumerable benefits to marriage and not worker empowerment, stories about partners denied inheritance benefits not guaranteed single-payer, universal health care for all.
No doubt as I write this, there are other radical LGBT writing and organizing, but who has time for that when there's a party?
Has the Stonewall Riot of 1969 warped into a weekend of commercial booths, non-profit outreach, and lots of men and women dancing to Martha Wash?
From one view, we do not in fact have any progressive or radical institutions to turn to. Those the LGBT community does have are fine, middle-of-the-mainstream-road agencies. They seem singularly focused on gaining marriage equality. The Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU, and many local state groups and LGBT centers have doggedly pursued this civil right. And it is a civil right as long as the state makes it available to some and not to others.
But from another point of view, Simone's observation misses the motives of governments who rightly want to diffuse the growing assault against it by large sectors of its populations. These growing assaults persist, in fact, to this hour. Not only in turbulent Greece but also in the UK, where a coalition government seeks to perpetuate itself in power for five fixed years, or in Spain whose socialist prime minister is instituting austerity measures against popular demand. In the US it continues to rebuff the popular will - be it in health care reform or foreign, costly wars - for what the establishment want.
Our rhetoric often confuses the governments' desires, which have become further anti-democratic, against that of the populations, which support social programs and an end to Mideast wars and occupations.
This not-so-new trend against the people became clearest to me when poll after poll in the UK showed its citizens resolute in their opposition to US-led wars in Afghanistan and toppling Iraq and the quagmire that followed: yet, this had little effect on the members of Parliament whose support is directly connected to the government of the day. Tony Blair and his government should have fallen, and he didn't. Gordon Brown should never have succeeded him, but he did.
As the queen herself is accurately quoted saying "there are forces in this country about which you do not know."
Indeed, not only is the ruling class obscured but also our radical histories are hidden to us, and from us. In most Western industrialized countries you can go as close as your local library and discover the radical roots within the LGBT, Black, Latino/Chicano, Asian, Native American, and women's movements. But you will scarcely see evidence of them at Pride celebrations.
Quiz yourself now, and ask what you know of them? Do you know that Harry Hay, the founder of the first gay rights organization modelled the Mattachine Society from his organizing work with the Communist Party USA? Hay was a lifelong communist radical, and when he saw the Simone's proverbial Disco set in, he balked, critiqued, and was ridiculed into silence. So he went off and formed the Radical Faeries.
Did you know that Rosa Parks, despite that horrid mythology of the seamstress who refused to give up her seat was trained as a labor organizer by the communist party at the Highlander School in Tennessee? She then became executive secretary of the NAACP and organized to end segregation on buses.
These labor organizers and their communist, socialist, and anarchist backers were virtually liquidated by the US government. Interestingly, as a young college student, US Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, wrote her senior thesis on the eradication of the socialists from New York City in the 1930's.
Carrots and sticks being what they are, succeeding generations may have felt a natural sense that something is not quite right, but they had few in the community to learn from. The radicals had either been killed, had gone underground, or had been thoroughly house-broken.
The Black community offers two interesting worlds.
On the one hand, we have the narrative of Blacks migrating north, as if this were the most natural thing to do. But a hundred years ago, while the US government condoned Jim Crow brutality in the South, it encouraged strike breaking in the north. Northern labor organizers were winning rights in factory after factory, again with no small help from the US Communist Party. The bosses lured cheap, Southern, Black labor north to break these newly formed unions in the exact same way cheap labor from across the "border" is lured in to lower wages and keep labor organizers firmly in check.
Yet at the same time Blacks were used as scabs, other Blacks like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, Rosa Parks, Richard Wright, and Angela Davis organized with the Communist Party USA to build broad coalitions and win labor rights for all workers.
If you attend any of the Pride celebrations this spring and summer, you won't see any of the radical history behind that movement. Harry Hay was ostracized until he was near death, and, of course after death he may be listed here and there as an icon. But I remember when this man was vilified by the LGBT press.
While it is progress in itself that gay men and lesbians can come out in the open, dance, cruise, and have fun without the local police rounding them up as they did as recently as the 1970's. That's real, measurable progress that must be appreciated.
But despite the hard organizing work done by our predecessors, I daresay the achievement of being able to dance under the golden sun reflects the limited goal of the Closeted and the Conformist. They would not join Harry Hay and the activists-organizers but remained in the shadows in fear of being exposed. Their limited agenda of simple assimilation, ironically, seems to have won the day: they've become a commodity along with the other commodities our capitalist economy nurtures.
It's about your income, your wealth, your disposable income. So when new ground began to be broken for LGBT's in the early 1990's it was framed as a community with buying power: we were young, we had no children, we had money.
But like any community, this misses the vast majority - as vast as those European populations no longer represented by their governments. That LGBT majority is forced into wage-slavery, low income, no health care, housing issues and sees a leadership advocating marriage equality and not housing rights, the enumerable benefits to marriage and not worker empowerment, stories about partners denied inheritance benefits not guaranteed single-payer, universal health care for all.
No doubt as I write this, there are other radical LGBT writing and organizing, but who has time for that when there's a party?
01 April 2010
Priorities: a union movement first, a union second, eliminate the bosses and managers third
The recent withdrawal of Robert Harding's name to head the US Transportation Security Administration [TSA] is the second Obama nominee to fail to win Senate confirmation for this post. While news reports point to dealings Harding had had as a contractor in Iraq, the untold story is the working conditions at TSA itself due in large part to its lacking a union.
Both of Obama's nominees to head the agency openly supported TSA officers having the collective-bargaining rights every other federal employee has, and this support made their appointment "controversial."
But the conflict "on the front lines" is muted completely.
But why would it be otherwise? Our newspapers of record do not record the shenanigans of managers at Home Depot or Starbucks, toward retail workers, agricultural workers, or hotel employees as worthy to cover. Our newspapers have "Business" but no "Labor" section. Those workers are speaking for themselves without the papers.
Why would they care about TSA officers?
The uproar in progressive circles should be that a federal work force has been created out of the neo-liberal globalization nightmare of powerful, unaccountable managers, bloated executive staffs, and a work farm of laborers.
This cannot be the wave of the future. The establishment of TSA without union rights is a huge step back from the ultimate goal of a labor struggle. That is comes from the federal government sets an alarming tone for all workers.
The dilemma might be that too many of those disgruntled and disaffected workers are conscious of the mythic power of a Union, but they themelves do not perceive their role in making that myth a reality.
Several months ago, a coworker asked me how tiny Europe could have conquered landmasses as great as Africa, the Asian subcontinent, and the Americas.
I replied with a Question: how do the manager class, the Bosses, who are few, conquer the masses of workers under them, who are a multitude?
Find the answer to that, and you may understand how Queen Victoria colored a quarter of the earth red under her empire.
Another dilemma is enough of that multitude value organizing collectively ... but only in the abstract, they make demands of the Bosses ... but only to each other.
But are enough willing to stage an insurrection to make it happen?
Insurrection can come in many, many forms and does not necessarily point to violence in the popular sense. Insurrection is persistent challenges to their abuses. That can be very disruptive. It is the bricks and mortar of a union movement.
But the insurrection can only come when the nature of the relationship between me the worker and them the bosses is understood.
The union itself must come second to this understanding, which is about class consciousness. It is understanding that in our current arrangement workers are reduced to the merest pawn to be told when to sleep, when to wake, when to labor, and when to break ... and knowing how coarsely degrading this has to be on that multitude of humanity who must work for wages.
Ultimately, the Union must not stop with gaining marginal reforms within a system that still dictates our comings and goings by "operational needs."
Ultimately, the Union must run and operate the factory, the business, be it Starbucks or The Home Depot, or the vital work done by the TSA officers.
Ultimately the workers are their own boss, as it should be.
As it stands, two unions are vying for TSA officer support, the hefty American Federation of Government Employees and the leaner National Transportation Employees Union. They both do good work; and they are both mediocrities, too. They have saved many officers' jobs. But they also often look like the marketing battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
These two unions are essentially conservative, not having the ultimate goals I list but rather gaining a Contract and promising more Money within a system that still dictates and is only less arbitrary. TSA officers would still be cattle, albeit Jersey cows perhaps.
It will be a cloudy day in Hell when, in our present state of docility, a union is provided TSA officers, and they won't know what the Hell to do with it ... except, of course, pay dues.
The last thing workers need is another oppressive, flashy institution that takes our money under the guise of helping us.
I don't know who said it first, but it's true that a union is only as good as its members, its rank and file.
If those members don't see the necessity of throwing the proverbial Molotov cocktail at the proverbial edifice, workers will have another worthless institution to awe, then grow cynical of, but the dues will be paid just as surely as the IRS will get its money.
May Day approaches. I suggest in honor of the Haymarket Massacre that won labor rights we make that day alternatively "Kick your Boss in the Ass Day 2010."
Both of Obama's nominees to head the agency openly supported TSA officers having the collective-bargaining rights every other federal employee has, and this support made their appointment "controversial."
But the conflict "on the front lines" is muted completely.
But why would it be otherwise? Our newspapers of record do not record the shenanigans of managers at Home Depot or Starbucks, toward retail workers, agricultural workers, or hotel employees as worthy to cover. Our newspapers have "Business" but no "Labor" section. Those workers are speaking for themselves without the papers.
Why would they care about TSA officers?
The uproar in progressive circles should be that a federal work force has been created out of the neo-liberal globalization nightmare of powerful, unaccountable managers, bloated executive staffs, and a work farm of laborers.
This cannot be the wave of the future. The establishment of TSA without union rights is a huge step back from the ultimate goal of a labor struggle. That is comes from the federal government sets an alarming tone for all workers.
The dilemma might be that too many of those disgruntled and disaffected workers are conscious of the mythic power of a Union, but they themelves do not perceive their role in making that myth a reality.
Several months ago, a coworker asked me how tiny Europe could have conquered landmasses as great as Africa, the Asian subcontinent, and the Americas.
I replied with a Question: how do the manager class, the Bosses, who are few, conquer the masses of workers under them, who are a multitude?
Find the answer to that, and you may understand how Queen Victoria colored a quarter of the earth red under her empire.
Another dilemma is enough of that multitude value organizing collectively ... but only in the abstract, they make demands of the Bosses ... but only to each other.
But are enough willing to stage an insurrection to make it happen?
Insurrection can come in many, many forms and does not necessarily point to violence in the popular sense. Insurrection is persistent challenges to their abuses. That can be very disruptive. It is the bricks and mortar of a union movement.
But the insurrection can only come when the nature of the relationship between me the worker and them the bosses is understood.
The union itself must come second to this understanding, which is about class consciousness. It is understanding that in our current arrangement workers are reduced to the merest pawn to be told when to sleep, when to wake, when to labor, and when to break ... and knowing how coarsely degrading this has to be on that multitude of humanity who must work for wages.
Ultimately, the Union must not stop with gaining marginal reforms within a system that still dictates our comings and goings by "operational needs."
Ultimately, the Union must run and operate the factory, the business, be it Starbucks or The Home Depot, or the vital work done by the TSA officers.
Ultimately the workers are their own boss, as it should be.
As it stands, two unions are vying for TSA officer support, the hefty American Federation of Government Employees and the leaner National Transportation Employees Union. They both do good work; and they are both mediocrities, too. They have saved many officers' jobs. But they also often look like the marketing battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
These two unions are essentially conservative, not having the ultimate goals I list but rather gaining a Contract and promising more Money within a system that still dictates and is only less arbitrary. TSA officers would still be cattle, albeit Jersey cows perhaps.
It will be a cloudy day in Hell when, in our present state of docility, a union is provided TSA officers, and they won't know what the Hell to do with it ... except, of course, pay dues.
The last thing workers need is another oppressive, flashy institution that takes our money under the guise of helping us.
I don't know who said it first, but it's true that a union is only as good as its members, its rank and file.
If those members don't see the necessity of throwing the proverbial Molotov cocktail at the proverbial edifice, workers will have another worthless institution to awe, then grow cynical of, but the dues will be paid just as surely as the IRS will get its money.
May Day approaches. I suggest in honor of the Haymarket Massacre that won labor rights we make that day alternatively "Kick your Boss in the Ass Day 2010."
25 March 2010
Obama DADT reform tells LGBT servicemembers to shut up and stay in the closet
Our Goldman Sachs liberal president has done his ObamaCare victory one better. After handing over a captive market of unruly customers to the private insurance companies and calling it reform, he has handed the gay bashing baseball bat up the military's chain of the command to higher ranking generals to beat openly LGBT service members out of the armed forces.
Some of my leftist comrades opposed ObamaCare for what it is: a boon for corporate health and Wall Street and the promise of a future invoice to Main Street, a bill we do not know they can afford where "access" and "cannot be denied" means I must sell you this bridge: please, pay promptly!
Other of my leftist comrades drank the Kool-Aid and supported it, urging that it was not perfect, that it's just a start. After tens of thousands drop dead for want of care and unable to afford it even when insurance companies can't deny them I wonder what we will start.
I am a Black gay man, and know about the Go-Slow smoke of Southern liberals when the civil rights/slave insurrection movement got too hot.
Famous friends of the "Negro" urged a steady pace, incrementalism, which allowed the Black population to be depicted as either a dark threat to "our way of life" or the clownish wide-eyed buffoon to be scoffed - two figments of the same captive population.
I am a Black gay man who has not gotten yet with this Go Slow nonsense his 40 acres and a Mule but, it seems instead, a SuperFund site and a jackass.
Go Slowers are elitists who have disengaged themselves from the terrors of real working-class people, LGBT's, and racial minorities.
Obama has topped his victory of health care reform with his Defense Secretary Robert Gates tackling his promised opposition to Don't Ask Don't Tell. But like his maiming of old concept universal health care as a public option - the US ultimately makes everything into pornography - Obama is further maiming LGBT service members, the LGBT community, even those like me who find the military and marriage peculiar institutions that only a moth should fly in to.
Instead of some lower-ranked flunky outing a same gender-loving warrior, this outing will have to be certified (whatever that means), will have to come from something like a 4-star general.
Star Chamber, anyone? I guess the bashed, ousted LGBT service members will get a certificate with their dishonorable discharge.
The news so far is making much on the newly implemented restrictions, like, if you come out to your doctor that can't be used to bash you like a second-class citizen: well, how many doctors in the armed forces were opening their patient-doctor confidentiality agreements by outing their patients? I want to know because I suspect this is more ObamaSpeak: change-is-coming flourishes spliced into his TelePrompter.
This reform is reported as ending third-party outings: like, I know you're queer so I'm going to report you. This is benign twin of the I know you're a Terrorist so get thee to Guantanamo without a lawyer or trial.
This new reform reportedly limits being dismissed to being openly LGBT.
What?
This means, unlike our industrialized allies who have open lesbians and gays in their armed forces, LGBT's here still can't serve openly in the military. Hide your partners, letters, and get that sashay out of your march, girls.
In a country where Go Slow during the civil rights/slave insurrection meant unleash the fire hoses on women and children while Washington fiddled, where the public's overwhelming demand for the public option means enrich the insurance companies (where at the same time this week the US president defended the democratic aspirations of the Cuban people), while people die, reform of a bigoted policy means to tell LGBT service members to shut up, and shoot.
More Obama reform. Three years to go!
Some of my leftist comrades opposed ObamaCare for what it is: a boon for corporate health and Wall Street and the promise of a future invoice to Main Street, a bill we do not know they can afford where "access" and "cannot be denied" means I must sell you this bridge: please, pay promptly!
Other of my leftist comrades drank the Kool-Aid and supported it, urging that it was not perfect, that it's just a start. After tens of thousands drop dead for want of care and unable to afford it even when insurance companies can't deny them I wonder what we will start.
I am a Black gay man, and know about the Go-Slow smoke of Southern liberals when the civil rights/slave insurrection movement got too hot.
Famous friends of the "Negro" urged a steady pace, incrementalism, which allowed the Black population to be depicted as either a dark threat to "our way of life" or the clownish wide-eyed buffoon to be scoffed - two figments of the same captive population.
I am a Black gay man who has not gotten yet with this Go Slow nonsense his 40 acres and a Mule but, it seems instead, a SuperFund site and a jackass.
Go Slowers are elitists who have disengaged themselves from the terrors of real working-class people, LGBT's, and racial minorities.
Obama has topped his victory of health care reform with his Defense Secretary Robert Gates tackling his promised opposition to Don't Ask Don't Tell. But like his maiming of old concept universal health care as a public option - the US ultimately makes everything into pornography - Obama is further maiming LGBT service members, the LGBT community, even those like me who find the military and marriage peculiar institutions that only a moth should fly in to.
Instead of some lower-ranked flunky outing a same gender-loving warrior, this outing will have to be certified (whatever that means), will have to come from something like a 4-star general.
Star Chamber, anyone? I guess the bashed, ousted LGBT service members will get a certificate with their dishonorable discharge.
The news so far is making much on the newly implemented restrictions, like, if you come out to your doctor that can't be used to bash you like a second-class citizen: well, how many doctors in the armed forces were opening their patient-doctor confidentiality agreements by outing their patients? I want to know because I suspect this is more ObamaSpeak: change-is-coming flourishes spliced into his TelePrompter.
This reform is reported as ending third-party outings: like, I know you're queer so I'm going to report you. This is benign twin of the I know you're a Terrorist so get thee to Guantanamo without a lawyer or trial.
This new reform reportedly limits being dismissed to being openly LGBT.
What?
This means, unlike our industrialized allies who have open lesbians and gays in their armed forces, LGBT's here still can't serve openly in the military. Hide your partners, letters, and get that sashay out of your march, girls.
In a country where Go Slow during the civil rights/slave insurrection meant unleash the fire hoses on women and children while Washington fiddled, where the public's overwhelming demand for the public option means enrich the insurance companies (where at the same time this week the US president defended the democratic aspirations of the Cuban people), while people die, reform of a bigoted policy means to tell LGBT service members to shut up, and shoot.
More Obama reform. Three years to go!
04 March 2010
Worse than failed states and corrupt political class is our empty anti-war left
The protests that mobilized before the 1991 and recent 2003 US invasions in the Middle East were indeed historic events rarely paralleled in history. Even if we compare the mass marches to the iconic 1960's, those of the recent era are distinguished in enormity and the fact they came before the imperial assaults.
Whereas there were no such marches in the mid 50's or early 60's as the US escalated military presence in Indochina, only long after.
But the power structure responds in kind. I remember in the 1991 march in San Francisco coming home and finding the network news shrinking the thousands that filled Market Street from the Castro District to City Hall to a few measly hundred and describing us banally as "expressing our concern" about imminent US invasion of Iraq.
Of course, the political class, its corporate elites, and its media elite conspire to manufacture the illusion that all is well, and when thousands take to the streets these agents will lie to the many more who are not in the streets.
Hundreds expressing concern is an outlier, something to be dismissed like a tea party activist (who should not be dismissed) ... thousands may suggest a paradigm shift, and a threat to the world order.
But what of those marchers themselves, who were large in 1991 and even larger in the drum-roll up to the current invasion and occupation?
Not much. Our leftist, anti-war movement is like a hollow egg. From the outside you see a proportioned oval shell, but the yolk has been sucked from it.
So where there is quite ample opposition to both wars, against dismantling public schools, against neglecting infrastructure, against enriching the banks with public bailouts while instructing the poor and underemployed in civic values, against giving a captive audience to the health-care industry, the yolk - as it were - is who this movement continues to support at the ballot box.
Barack Obama gave us every indication where his loyalties to the corporate class lay when he flip-flopped his opposition to the invasion and courted the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The DLC is that brainchild of Bill Clinton who wanted to distance the Party from its traditional base and court corporate validation ... and Reagan Democrats.
Obama got the blessing of the DLC and became the Goldman Sachs candidate.
And those leftist, anti-war activists voted for him.
This is what always happens, and I can't figure out why except maybe we live in a country with a lot of bad marriages, so electing candidates whom you hope won't beat you again is par for the course.
I started my political life a monarchist in 7th grade, realized the US was a republic and voted as a Republican in 12th grade, was b*tch-slapped awake freshmen year of college and became a social[ist] democrat, and when crafty Bill Clinton maneuvered the Democratic nomination in 1991, I not only left forever that strange political party but also actually fled the country for Mexico and a new life (which lasted only three months until my money ran out). Ten years as a public school teacher solidified my socialism.
In other words, I may learn slow, but I learn. But these anti-warriors have swelled impressively in their ranks and numbers on the one hand, and grown equally dumb on the other.
Dumb? Oh, I meant that with kindness, as Dame Edna would say.
Because not only do they continue to turn to their abusers in local, state, and national elections, but they keep doing it. Every Tuesday. Then Saturday, they put on their marching clothes, rehearse the chants, and demand the troops be brought home; or schools be funded; LGBT rights; or the public option be put on the table.
I would no sooner expect a drunk driver to steer straight.
When the Ross Perot or Ron Paul emerged, they were treated like folk heroes. Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and the tea party is feted.
Whereas many on the left continue to this day to attack Ralph Nader for Al Gore's loss. Others take him as seriously as any other in our third party basement. He can't win, so why vote for him, is the all too common excuse. So he won't win, and you get what you paid for.
The left not only scorns its own rebels. It scoffs at Palin and the tea party, forgetting the "thumping" an unknown, unrehearsed George W Bush gave Gov. Anne Richards in Texas.
The left, progressives, even socialists, and communists commit the sin of their beliefs on Friday, then bow their heads like vassals to the Democratic Party church on Sundays. Our communities and our country will not change into the things we march for, picket for, and diatribe for as long as they continue to give credibility to their oppressors.
We are the masses. The worker's party is us.
Whereas there were no such marches in the mid 50's or early 60's as the US escalated military presence in Indochina, only long after.
But the power structure responds in kind. I remember in the 1991 march in San Francisco coming home and finding the network news shrinking the thousands that filled Market Street from the Castro District to City Hall to a few measly hundred and describing us banally as "expressing our concern" about imminent US invasion of Iraq.
Of course, the political class, its corporate elites, and its media elite conspire to manufacture the illusion that all is well, and when thousands take to the streets these agents will lie to the many more who are not in the streets.
Hundreds expressing concern is an outlier, something to be dismissed like a tea party activist (who should not be dismissed) ... thousands may suggest a paradigm shift, and a threat to the world order.
But what of those marchers themselves, who were large in 1991 and even larger in the drum-roll up to the current invasion and occupation?
Not much. Our leftist, anti-war movement is like a hollow egg. From the outside you see a proportioned oval shell, but the yolk has been sucked from it.
So where there is quite ample opposition to both wars, against dismantling public schools, against neglecting infrastructure, against enriching the banks with public bailouts while instructing the poor and underemployed in civic values, against giving a captive audience to the health-care industry, the yolk - as it were - is who this movement continues to support at the ballot box.
Barack Obama gave us every indication where his loyalties to the corporate class lay when he flip-flopped his opposition to the invasion and courted the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The DLC is that brainchild of Bill Clinton who wanted to distance the Party from its traditional base and court corporate validation ... and Reagan Democrats.
Obama got the blessing of the DLC and became the Goldman Sachs candidate.
And those leftist, anti-war activists voted for him.
This is what always happens, and I can't figure out why except maybe we live in a country with a lot of bad marriages, so electing candidates whom you hope won't beat you again is par for the course.
I started my political life a monarchist in 7th grade, realized the US was a republic and voted as a Republican in 12th grade, was b*tch-slapped awake freshmen year of college and became a social[ist] democrat, and when crafty Bill Clinton maneuvered the Democratic nomination in 1991, I not only left forever that strange political party but also actually fled the country for Mexico and a new life (which lasted only three months until my money ran out). Ten years as a public school teacher solidified my socialism.
In other words, I may learn slow, but I learn. But these anti-warriors have swelled impressively in their ranks and numbers on the one hand, and grown equally dumb on the other.
Dumb? Oh, I meant that with kindness, as Dame Edna would say.
Because not only do they continue to turn to their abusers in local, state, and national elections, but they keep doing it. Every Tuesday. Then Saturday, they put on their marching clothes, rehearse the chants, and demand the troops be brought home; or schools be funded; LGBT rights; or the public option be put on the table.
I would no sooner expect a drunk driver to steer straight.
When the Ross Perot or Ron Paul emerged, they were treated like folk heroes. Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and the tea party is feted.
Whereas many on the left continue to this day to attack Ralph Nader for Al Gore's loss. Others take him as seriously as any other in our third party basement. He can't win, so why vote for him, is the all too common excuse. So he won't win, and you get what you paid for.
The left not only scorns its own rebels. It scoffs at Palin and the tea party, forgetting the "thumping" an unknown, unrehearsed George W Bush gave Gov. Anne Richards in Texas.
The left, progressives, even socialists, and communists commit the sin of their beliefs on Friday, then bow their heads like vassals to the Democratic Party church on Sundays. Our communities and our country will not change into the things we march for, picket for, and diatribe for as long as they continue to give credibility to their oppressors.
We are the masses. The worker's party is us.
03 March 2010
If this economy is as good as it gets, then what?
Our political class, full of optimism, themselves, and tipping the next election or poll in their favor, has been on the Mother of All Campaign Trails to assure us the economy is on the mend, has dodged the bullet, has rounded the corner, is showing signs of revitalization ... you've heard it ad nauseum. Maybe you are encouraged by it. Maybe you are knowing more and more people who just got laid off.
It's probably an article of faith that the political class speak with such optimism. It keeps us from getting anxious. It can also forestall the revolution.
But what did the Romans say as their empire withered away? What pronouncements did the Egyptians utter as they went from being a mighty, African empire to a ward of Rome? What of the Spanish, whose power and wealth pinnacled until England blew its armada into the channel. The British Empire colored a fourth of the globe in red, the sun never setting, and Churchill swore he did not become the king's first minister to dismantle the empire.
For all Winston's bluster, he lost; the empire won ... its independence, that is. India started the dominoes. Vietnam kicked the French, then the United States of America, out. And Fidel still lives.
None of them admitted that the sun was setting on their reigns and rules. None.
So why should the US in particular and the West in general be any different?
What if the promised jobs weren't coming back? What if the economy we have now is the new "normal," the new baseline?
The US economy is not, after all, like the seasons, where a brutal summer folds into a gentle fall, then a turbulent winter, but spring is around the corner. The globe is littered with the artifacts of civilizations risen and fallen and buried under the foliage.
Rather that look back soberly at these fallen, our tenured moralists in high academe whisper that sodomites brought down Rome. Egypt, Spain, France, the United Kingdom are rarely assessed at all, which may be because they are too close for comfort.
The thesis that this is as good as it gets comes not from what is plain as the nose on your face, as well as the state of our neighborhoods, cities, and public services, but also from the busy ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.
According to the $ multi-billion port, its top imports include crude oil, electronics, plastic goods, furniture, and clothing.
Fine.
According to the port, its main exports include petroleum coke, refined petroleum, waste paper, foods, chemicals.
Now, this port along with Los Angeles, is one of the busiest in the world: top five. It clearly shows what is happening to our economy. We are importing billions in manufactured goods - stuff we enjoy, our toys, our comforts, our beds, desks, computers, iPhones; while we are exporting our trash and agri-business produce.
Does a country tending to this really need legions of inner-city kids to go to college, let alone complete high school? Do we need so many managers and white collars except to manage and discipline wage-slaves?
No.
The sun will have reached its pinnacle and began its steady descent with this awesome trend, which flies in the face of our political optimism about the next fiscal quarter.
So we must re-organize if we are to save our civilization. The catastrophes in Haiti and Chile should demonstrate that we are loathe to dismantle any of our public services and infrastructure: Monsanto will not warm us, and Archer Daniels Midland will not feed us if some natural or supernatural disaster befalls us. They aren't now.
This re-organization can only be orchestrated and directed by government, accountable to the public and not shareholders. This re-organization points to that bogeyman of the Reagan revolutionists: central planning. And this dismisses to the trash pile of history their magic of the marketplace with its water torturing trickle-down economics.
Civilization is at stake, not just the cause of socialism, which I firmly believe is the way. I am not so full of Churchillian bluster as to think we are exceptional, we are unique in not being buried by history. And I know the examples of our economic system do not find or wage-slaves exceptional but expendable and will, at the downturn of a fiscal quarter, bury us in the present!
It's probably an article of faith that the political class speak with such optimism. It keeps us from getting anxious. It can also forestall the revolution.
But what did the Romans say as their empire withered away? What pronouncements did the Egyptians utter as they went from being a mighty, African empire to a ward of Rome? What of the Spanish, whose power and wealth pinnacled until England blew its armada into the channel. The British Empire colored a fourth of the globe in red, the sun never setting, and Churchill swore he did not become the king's first minister to dismantle the empire.
For all Winston's bluster, he lost; the empire won ... its independence, that is. India started the dominoes. Vietnam kicked the French, then the United States of America, out. And Fidel still lives.
None of them admitted that the sun was setting on their reigns and rules. None.
So why should the US in particular and the West in general be any different?
What if the promised jobs weren't coming back? What if the economy we have now is the new "normal," the new baseline?
The US economy is not, after all, like the seasons, where a brutal summer folds into a gentle fall, then a turbulent winter, but spring is around the corner. The globe is littered with the artifacts of civilizations risen and fallen and buried under the foliage.
Rather that look back soberly at these fallen, our tenured moralists in high academe whisper that sodomites brought down Rome. Egypt, Spain, France, the United Kingdom are rarely assessed at all, which may be because they are too close for comfort.
The thesis that this is as good as it gets comes not from what is plain as the nose on your face, as well as the state of our neighborhoods, cities, and public services, but also from the busy ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.
According to the $ multi-billion port, its top imports include crude oil, electronics, plastic goods, furniture, and clothing.
Fine.
According to the port, its main exports include petroleum coke, refined petroleum, waste paper, foods, chemicals.
Now, this port along with Los Angeles, is one of the busiest in the world: top five. It clearly shows what is happening to our economy. We are importing billions in manufactured goods - stuff we enjoy, our toys, our comforts, our beds, desks, computers, iPhones; while we are exporting our trash and agri-business produce.
Does a country tending to this really need legions of inner-city kids to go to college, let alone complete high school? Do we need so many managers and white collars except to manage and discipline wage-slaves?
No.
The sun will have reached its pinnacle and began its steady descent with this awesome trend, which flies in the face of our political optimism about the next fiscal quarter.
So we must re-organize if we are to save our civilization. The catastrophes in Haiti and Chile should demonstrate that we are loathe to dismantle any of our public services and infrastructure: Monsanto will not warm us, and Archer Daniels Midland will not feed us if some natural or supernatural disaster befalls us. They aren't now.
This re-organization can only be orchestrated and directed by government, accountable to the public and not shareholders. This re-organization points to that bogeyman of the Reagan revolutionists: central planning. And this dismisses to the trash pile of history their magic of the marketplace with its water torturing trickle-down economics.
Civilization is at stake, not just the cause of socialism, which I firmly believe is the way. I am not so full of Churchillian bluster as to think we are exceptional, we are unique in not being buried by history. And I know the examples of our economic system do not find or wage-slaves exceptional but expendable and will, at the downturn of a fiscal quarter, bury us in the present!
25 February 2010
Not even Jerry Lewis could save Obama health care telethon fiasco
It will be like watching water boil. Milk spoil. Bananas rot. I am not referring to the return of Jay Leno to the late-night Siberia that is network TV but rather Barack Obama's health care summit, notable for who will not be there: the public option, aka, universal health care. What our allies in Europe embrace as socialized medicine.
Socialized medicine is such a failure that even the British right, the Conservative Party, fight to keep it. France, of course. The Canadians, too. Yes, Sweden. Our longtime enemies, the USSR had it, and our persistent enemy, Cuba, maintains it while it also sends doctors to poor countries to administer health care.
But the US under the yoke of a corporatocracy, is bent onf distinguishing itself from the civilized pack.
Just as many of our corporations are showing their irrelevance, racing to mediocrity with our manager class, the USA is becoming as prominent a dot on the map as Long Beach, CA., must appear to the man in the moon. The USA has raced another step down with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean recently joining forces to create a trade bloc ... without us.
So, enter Obama, who has prefaced this six-hour TV telethon for private health care with expressions of his utter belief in capitalism. This is pretty redudant stuff: it must be for the tea-baggers, birthers (yes, they persist in claiming Obama is a foreigner), and the descendants of US Chief Justice Roger Taney; because anyone who would be so heavily funded by and, in turn, bail out, Goldman Sachs, must believe fundamentally in nothing else but capitalism.
Rather than watch this Blair House corporate telethon, I will watch the water boil in my tea pot: at least I will get a cup of tea out of it and not more bullsh*t.
Without the likes of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, or any of the Progressive Congressional Caucus, whatever comes out of this exclusive, maudlin farce will hopefully fall as flat as Obama's progressive promises.
Meanwhile, the 2010 purge I predicted is happening. Poor us!
Socialized medicine is such a failure that even the British right, the Conservative Party, fight to keep it. France, of course. The Canadians, too. Yes, Sweden. Our longtime enemies, the USSR had it, and our persistent enemy, Cuba, maintains it while it also sends doctors to poor countries to administer health care.
But the US under the yoke of a corporatocracy, is bent onf distinguishing itself from the civilized pack.
Just as many of our corporations are showing their irrelevance, racing to mediocrity with our manager class, the USA is becoming as prominent a dot on the map as Long Beach, CA., must appear to the man in the moon. The USA has raced another step down with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean recently joining forces to create a trade bloc ... without us.
So, enter Obama, who has prefaced this six-hour TV telethon for private health care with expressions of his utter belief in capitalism. This is pretty redudant stuff: it must be for the tea-baggers, birthers (yes, they persist in claiming Obama is a foreigner), and the descendants of US Chief Justice Roger Taney; because anyone who would be so heavily funded by and, in turn, bail out, Goldman Sachs, must believe fundamentally in nothing else but capitalism.
Rather than watch this Blair House corporate telethon, I will watch the water boil in my tea pot: at least I will get a cup of tea out of it and not more bullsh*t.
Without the likes of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, or any of the Progressive Congressional Caucus, whatever comes out of this exclusive, maudlin farce will hopefully fall as flat as Obama's progressive promises.
Meanwhile, the 2010 purge I predicted is happening. Poor us!
04 February 2010
California schools go back to basics
Long Beach Unified School District [LBUSD], like most California public school districts, is launching the mother of all back-to-basics campaigns. Forget No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top or any other neo-liberal fad du jour in sheep's clothing.
LBUSD is coming close to dismantling its schools giving a rather Victorian meaning to the back-to-basics mantra.
Soon there will be no pretense that our school are just day care for poor children until they are old enough to turn to crime, work at Wal Mart, or Be All a Militarist society wants them to Be.
Grade school teachers, high school instructors, counselors, programs are to be axed.
Thanks to the taxpayers' revolts of the 1970's, the new centrality of Reaganomics, the perpetual invisibleness of our children, and our mediocre president's Race to the Top it is not an understatement to say that California is throwing generations of young into the toilet and flushing it.
When I was a child growing up here, us kids had heard that California was destined to fall off into the ocean after the Big One. Only now this catastrophe is not caused by a great tremor as we thought, but rather by our own hands, or our own complicity, or our own silence ... which is all the same thing.
Obama has horded federal funds and is throwing them like rations into the circus ring for the strongest beast to devour. The weak be damned.
The other day I listened to a "discussion" on national corporate radio, as the guests framed the education debate as a competition between arts and sports funding. This takes real discipline, especially as the station stridently begs for money from its listeners.
What might the public say if the competition were pit between school funding and war funding? Educating our kids' minds, free- and reduced-lunch programs, arts and sports programs against foreign war funding which kills and maims our young and theirs?
I know the answer.
As I have said, it is a disturbing irony that for every one of these 750 school teachers to be fired by LBUSD, how many jobs are being met with the war economy? War is soldiers. War is the police state. War is the excessive security apparatus at our borders and within our airports: functionaries largely, who are forced to rationalize their positions by creating much more mischief than that school bully who will now be under served because his teacher is overburdened and the school psychologists are being dismissed.
The otherwise shallow radio discussion proposed an interesting idea as tax season is upon us: just as we can opt to fund federal campaign coffers on our 1040, the radio guests we opt for funding schools' programs.
I would take this direct democracy much further: fund the war machine or not? Please check the box.
See also: LA Unified plans to fire more non-tenured teachers
LBUSD is coming close to dismantling its schools giving a rather Victorian meaning to the back-to-basics mantra.
Soon there will be no pretense that our school are just day care for poor children until they are old enough to turn to crime, work at Wal Mart, or Be All a Militarist society wants them to Be.
Grade school teachers, high school instructors, counselors, programs are to be axed.
Thanks to the taxpayers' revolts of the 1970's, the new centrality of Reaganomics, the perpetual invisibleness of our children, and our mediocre president's Race to the Top it is not an understatement to say that California is throwing generations of young into the toilet and flushing it.
When I was a child growing up here, us kids had heard that California was destined to fall off into the ocean after the Big One. Only now this catastrophe is not caused by a great tremor as we thought, but rather by our own hands, or our own complicity, or our own silence ... which is all the same thing.
Obama has horded federal funds and is throwing them like rations into the circus ring for the strongest beast to devour. The weak be damned.
The other day I listened to a "discussion" on national corporate radio, as the guests framed the education debate as a competition between arts and sports funding. This takes real discipline, especially as the station stridently begs for money from its listeners.
What might the public say if the competition were pit between school funding and war funding? Educating our kids' minds, free- and reduced-lunch programs, arts and sports programs against foreign war funding which kills and maims our young and theirs?
I know the answer.
As I have said, it is a disturbing irony that for every one of these 750 school teachers to be fired by LBUSD, how many jobs are being met with the war economy? War is soldiers. War is the police state. War is the excessive security apparatus at our borders and within our airports: functionaries largely, who are forced to rationalize their positions by creating much more mischief than that school bully who will now be under served because his teacher is overburdened and the school psychologists are being dismissed.
The otherwise shallow radio discussion proposed an interesting idea as tax season is upon us: just as we can opt to fund federal campaign coffers on our 1040, the radio guests we opt for funding schools' programs.
I would take this direct democracy much further: fund the war machine or not? Please check the box.
See also: LA Unified plans to fire more non-tenured teachers
17 January 2010
If you are wondering where your child's teachers, counselors, and arts programs are look no further than the US federal police apparatus
When I was a kid growing up in 1970's California there was a popular myth after every tremor that California would one day fall into the Pacific Ocean. Child stuff, right? But I am snug in the midst of my adulthood, and the state has fulfilled our childhood prophecies, albeit metaphorically, economically.
How did this creature crumble? How did this lovely, promising swan defy evolution and turn into such an ugly duckling? So many metaphors to mix to note the abject failure of the state and ... as California goes, so goes the nation?
For example, at one time in my lifetime, California schools - I mean its public schools - rated top in the nation.
But the first pair of bookends to fell this mighty giant was 1978's Proposition 13. The second bookend is the Obama Administration's Secy of Education, Arne Duncan's Race to Dismantle Public Schools.
As Chicago educator Marva Collins said many times, it wasn't the Soviets who destroyed our schools, it was us ourselves.
Of course, our woes have much more breadth than the To Do List of this obviously mediocre president and the obvious intentions of the Democratic wing of our single Capitalist Party they dutifully serve.
We want universal health care: make us buy it from the private companies. We want marriage equality: send your federal lawyers to enforce Defense of Marriage Acts. We want troops out of Afghanistan: escalate, baby! Send those drones in and massacre more innocent men, women, and babies.
Workers, a forgotten but growing lot, still have no voice, but they do have sense. Some workers, like Dept of Homeland Security officers, cannot speak out at all and have only their obviously mediocre managers, deputies, gulags of executive staffs to drivel that there is no problem, that all is well, that we are giving the Homeland 110%: this prattle truly is a motif for workers' struggle in the United States.
What happened? It starts with the police state forming all around us, in full view ... well, sort of. The police state is forming to stop the inevitable disintegration of the Western, Christian leviathan [thank God!] but while other disgruntled thugs from the Dark Ages place incendiaries in their underwear [boxers or briefs?].
One Dark Age should not replace another.
Our Dark Age modern terrorism is documented, if only it be studied in the open air of a library or bookstore, versus the They-hate-us-because-we-are-Free line, which wouldn't even pass for a child's bedtime story.
Al Qaeda may not really exist, and I doubt that it does. There is real, valid anger from the Other Side of the world where the West drew a map and installed princes and potentates who have kept their populations under foot like any good Confederate slave master: keep them ignorant and unlearned and hungry.
But they themselves want those princes and potentates gone, and have pleaded to their sponsors [that would be the West] to cease and desist. Our response is to send in the soldiers, draw up No-Fly lists, and criminalize the colonial world [nothing new there].
It is too bad rather than watch the scaffolding of the police state go up and the dismantle of our public schools we could get these two Dark Age surrealists, East and West, in the Coliseum together to fight it out to the death. The survivor would be duly fed to those lovely Roman lions, and the world would be rid of that trash forever.
No such luck. Prospects are bleak. So while teachers all over the state of California will either be fired, face larger unmanageable classes and students loads, and made to run a federally sponsored three-legged race to Oblivion, our security services are a growth industry.
The Dept of Homeland Security has taken the wage of your local public school teacher and given it to a rabble who couldn't pass a Civics test, but they are watching you, and they are finding other places to watch you.
That BART policeman who shot in the back a passenger on the deck of the Fruitvale train station in Oakland, Ca., was nothing but a Tonton Macoute, and there are more inevitably to come as rabble is elevated to titled status to pry and prod into our lives.
How did this creature crumble? How did this lovely, promising swan defy evolution and turn into such an ugly duckling? So many metaphors to mix to note the abject failure of the state and ... as California goes, so goes the nation?
For example, at one time in my lifetime, California schools - I mean its public schools - rated top in the nation.
But the first pair of bookends to fell this mighty giant was 1978's Proposition 13. The second bookend is the Obama Administration's Secy of Education, Arne Duncan's Race to Dismantle Public Schools.
As Chicago educator Marva Collins said many times, it wasn't the Soviets who destroyed our schools, it was us ourselves.
Of course, our woes have much more breadth than the To Do List of this obviously mediocre president and the obvious intentions of the Democratic wing of our single Capitalist Party they dutifully serve.
We want universal health care: make us buy it from the private companies. We want marriage equality: send your federal lawyers to enforce Defense of Marriage Acts. We want troops out of Afghanistan: escalate, baby! Send those drones in and massacre more innocent men, women, and babies.
Workers, a forgotten but growing lot, still have no voice, but they do have sense. Some workers, like Dept of Homeland Security officers, cannot speak out at all and have only their obviously mediocre managers, deputies, gulags of executive staffs to drivel that there is no problem, that all is well, that we are giving the Homeland 110%: this prattle truly is a motif for workers' struggle in the United States.
What happened? It starts with the police state forming all around us, in full view ... well, sort of. The police state is forming to stop the inevitable disintegration of the Western, Christian leviathan [thank God!] but while other disgruntled thugs from the Dark Ages place incendiaries in their underwear [boxers or briefs?].
One Dark Age should not replace another.
Our Dark Age modern terrorism is documented, if only it be studied in the open air of a library or bookstore, versus the They-hate-us-because-we-are-Free line, which wouldn't even pass for a child's bedtime story.
Al Qaeda may not really exist, and I doubt that it does. There is real, valid anger from the Other Side of the world where the West drew a map and installed princes and potentates who have kept their populations under foot like any good Confederate slave master: keep them ignorant and unlearned and hungry.
But they themselves want those princes and potentates gone, and have pleaded to their sponsors [that would be the West] to cease and desist. Our response is to send in the soldiers, draw up No-Fly lists, and criminalize the colonial world [nothing new there].
It is too bad rather than watch the scaffolding of the police state go up and the dismantle of our public schools we could get these two Dark Age surrealists, East and West, in the Coliseum together to fight it out to the death. The survivor would be duly fed to those lovely Roman lions, and the world would be rid of that trash forever.
No such luck. Prospects are bleak. So while teachers all over the state of California will either be fired, face larger unmanageable classes and students loads, and made to run a federally sponsored three-legged race to Oblivion, our security services are a growth industry.
The Dept of Homeland Security has taken the wage of your local public school teacher and given it to a rabble who couldn't pass a Civics test, but they are watching you, and they are finding other places to watch you.
That BART policeman who shot in the back a passenger on the deck of the Fruitvale train station in Oakland, Ca., was nothing but a Tonton Macoute, and there are more inevitably to come as rabble is elevated to titled status to pry and prod into our lives.
14 January 2010
Haiti is not the latest Katrina, but Haiti predicted it by some 200 years
The US Marines are en route to earthquake-devastated Haiti where they will be greeted as liberators once again, saving the Haitian revolution by further destroying the society. The sound of the bugle is a carrion call for more destruction ahead.
One wonders looking at the grimmest press reports how this island nation hobbled on for so long since its liberating inception. But if you look at Haiti as a nation, you are under a delusion. It lies somewhere between Hell and a Napoleonic colony. One wonders where the infrastructure is to help the wide swathes of suffering that appear to be more and more unimaginable, but one wonders under this delusion.
Plantations do not have infrastructure. Plantations have laborers and tools, masters and guns to keep the two classes very much apart, thank you very much.
Haiti is not a state because it has never been allowed this dignity to match the indignity of driving out the powerful French, bankrupting the rogue Napoleon to such an extent he was forced to sell the middle section of what is now the United States of America. This indignity has been called a "pact with the devil" by that man-o-God, Pat Robertson, who is a terrorist to humanity.
My Haitian brothers and sisters, Haitian friends, its political class may be offended at my revelation, but it is not meant as an insult. Haiti waged a courageous and bold slave rebellion in 1804 and became a free republic, but the price of that freedom would drain the remaining survivors' blood into Western coffers.
The West - by which I mean the imperial West that had enslaved the island - would not recognize the independent Black republic for almost two generations, and only on the condition that it pay war reparations to imperial France.
There was no USSR to turn to in the late 1800's, no Hugo Chavez, not even a Taliban. Queen Victoria in the UK had a quarter of the globe under her; King Leopold of Belgium was creating his personal Hell in the Congo; and the US was solidifying its hold over the Western landmass and peering toward Asia. Independent Haiti was forced to submit to Treaty of Versailles principles.
Ladies and gentleman: I give you Christian civilization in spades!
By submitting to this demand, Haiti would never be able to develop itself and so was continuously at the mercy of foreign intrigue on the one hand, domestic unrest on the other. It would remain a plantation with a class of degenerates given princely titles and no power except to kill.
We in the US know well how intriguing US foreign policy can be and how domestic unrest is best handled: the US Marines, installing a thug, like Papa Doc Duvalier, and murdering civil society. How else, as one revolutionary put it, can a government unpopular to the people stay in power if not by brutal force?
The images broadcast from Port au Prince are alarming. And they remind us of Katrina. Indeed, the official response is pretty much ... intriguing. As a Chinese flight cooled on the Haitian runway with emergency supplies, the US was wringing its hands and having reconnaissance flyovers, like mad scientists watching lab animals die.
Bill Clinton has been the special UN envoy. UN troops had been deployed. One has to wonder what mischief they have been doing these years. But no: we see the product of their good works all over the roads to and fro Port-au-Prince.
But Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans cannot match the official response to Haiti's 1804 independence. But that response foreshadowed the crimes the West would commit to the only God it has ever loved: Commerce.
So while I remain numb about the state of affairs of the Haitian people, my blood curdles at the bugle sounding the entry of God's Marine warriors.
One wonders looking at the grimmest press reports how this island nation hobbled on for so long since its liberating inception. But if you look at Haiti as a nation, you are under a delusion. It lies somewhere between Hell and a Napoleonic colony. One wonders where the infrastructure is to help the wide swathes of suffering that appear to be more and more unimaginable, but one wonders under this delusion.
Plantations do not have infrastructure. Plantations have laborers and tools, masters and guns to keep the two classes very much apart, thank you very much.
Haiti is not a state because it has never been allowed this dignity to match the indignity of driving out the powerful French, bankrupting the rogue Napoleon to such an extent he was forced to sell the middle section of what is now the United States of America. This indignity has been called a "pact with the devil" by that man-o-God, Pat Robertson, who is a terrorist to humanity.
My Haitian brothers and sisters, Haitian friends, its political class may be offended at my revelation, but it is not meant as an insult. Haiti waged a courageous and bold slave rebellion in 1804 and became a free republic, but the price of that freedom would drain the remaining survivors' blood into Western coffers.
The West - by which I mean the imperial West that had enslaved the island - would not recognize the independent Black republic for almost two generations, and only on the condition that it pay war reparations to imperial France.
There was no USSR to turn to in the late 1800's, no Hugo Chavez, not even a Taliban. Queen Victoria in the UK had a quarter of the globe under her; King Leopold of Belgium was creating his personal Hell in the Congo; and the US was solidifying its hold over the Western landmass and peering toward Asia. Independent Haiti was forced to submit to Treaty of Versailles principles.
Ladies and gentleman: I give you Christian civilization in spades!
By submitting to this demand, Haiti would never be able to develop itself and so was continuously at the mercy of foreign intrigue on the one hand, domestic unrest on the other. It would remain a plantation with a class of degenerates given princely titles and no power except to kill.
We in the US know well how intriguing US foreign policy can be and how domestic unrest is best handled: the US Marines, installing a thug, like Papa Doc Duvalier, and murdering civil society. How else, as one revolutionary put it, can a government unpopular to the people stay in power if not by brutal force?
The images broadcast from Port au Prince are alarming. And they remind us of Katrina. Indeed, the official response is pretty much ... intriguing. As a Chinese flight cooled on the Haitian runway with emergency supplies, the US was wringing its hands and having reconnaissance flyovers, like mad scientists watching lab animals die.
Bill Clinton has been the special UN envoy. UN troops had been deployed. One has to wonder what mischief they have been doing these years. But no: we see the product of their good works all over the roads to and fro Port-au-Prince.
But Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans cannot match the official response to Haiti's 1804 independence. But that response foreshadowed the crimes the West would commit to the only God it has ever loved: Commerce.
So while I remain numb about the state of affairs of the Haitian people, my blood curdles at the bugle sounding the entry of God's Marine warriors.
10 January 2010
Our new international communist conspiracy and the persistent decimation of demoralized wage-workers
What is the new international communist conspiracy? The old one was a figment of the malicious minds of Western powers whose grossest imperial impulses had been tamed with revolution movements all over the colonial world: the Western powers' answer to this insurgence was to sloppily link each and every one to the Soviet Menace, the Red Scare.
Just so, everything from Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam to Maurice Bishop in Grenada to Cheddi Jagan in British Guyana, to India, Angola, Ethiopia, Nelson Mandela ... practically every labelled terrorist and rogue state of the Cold War was a movement to divorce itself from the clutches of the former empire. And they were all apparently guided by Moscow and the international communist conspiracy.
We knew then it wasn't true, and it has only recently become permissible to say as much among the ruling circles.
But old habits are hard to break, especially if you are one of the last Confederate soldiers, a Frenchman who still claims Algeria is part of France, persons for whom Rule of Law means British Rule, even if it extends to the Malvinas Islands, or the present-day Western powers.
Today, we have a concoction called Al-Qaeda, a nonsense that purports to link every half-wit incendiary maker, upper-educated dreamer, chattering class officianado, or malicious attempt to some central casting office in the caves of Afghanistan.
To look at the list, this is equally true of any profession, from teacher to lawyer to doctor to president of the United States. We in the proofessional classes have not had any more luck than the fictitious al-Quaeda to attract the best of the best: whatever that means. But we aren't stupid enough to link all attempts to political or professional office to some global conspiracy.
Why then this al-Quaeda?
Why international communism except that it keeps our cities in disrepair, workers barely meeting ends, schools in a shambles, and the police state inevitable, if not more prisons. Meanwhile, our common wealth remains privatized, irritating among other things not only the housing crisis in foreclosures but also the homeless crisis on the streets (note how this had become a norm and not a headline in the last generation).
To rob us, our masters have created a new enemy, a new Cold War, and a rationale to oppress us, which is the only way we will submit en masse to the pirates.
Reporter Helen Thomas distinguished herself at a recent press conference by persisting to ask "Why?" I couldn't understand the vapid reply, but to borrow the commentary of another activist:why is because the US has made the Taliban look like Day-Care Center workers.
Just so, everything from Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam to Maurice Bishop in Grenada to Cheddi Jagan in British Guyana, to India, Angola, Ethiopia, Nelson Mandela ... practically every labelled terrorist and rogue state of the Cold War was a movement to divorce itself from the clutches of the former empire. And they were all apparently guided by Moscow and the international communist conspiracy.
We knew then it wasn't true, and it has only recently become permissible to say as much among the ruling circles.
But old habits are hard to break, especially if you are one of the last Confederate soldiers, a Frenchman who still claims Algeria is part of France, persons for whom Rule of Law means British Rule, even if it extends to the Malvinas Islands, or the present-day Western powers.
Today, we have a concoction called Al-Qaeda, a nonsense that purports to link every half-wit incendiary maker, upper-educated dreamer, chattering class officianado, or malicious attempt to some central casting office in the caves of Afghanistan.
To look at the list, this is equally true of any profession, from teacher to lawyer to doctor to president of the United States. We in the proofessional classes have not had any more luck than the fictitious al-Quaeda to attract the best of the best: whatever that means. But we aren't stupid enough to link all attempts to political or professional office to some global conspiracy.
Why then this al-Quaeda?
Why international communism except that it keeps our cities in disrepair, workers barely meeting ends, schools in a shambles, and the police state inevitable, if not more prisons. Meanwhile, our common wealth remains privatized, irritating among other things not only the housing crisis in foreclosures but also the homeless crisis on the streets (note how this had become a norm and not a headline in the last generation).
To rob us, our masters have created a new enemy, a new Cold War, and a rationale to oppress us, which is the only way we will submit en masse to the pirates.
Reporter Helen Thomas distinguished herself at a recent press conference by persisting to ask "Why?" I couldn't understand the vapid reply, but to borrow the commentary of another activist:why is because the US has made the Taliban look like Day-Care Center workers.
08 January 2010
Obama orders renewed security measures but continues US massacre in Afghanistan
Much was made of the near 300 lives the Nigerian bomber nearly extinguished on Christmas 2009. But interestingly and painstakingly, no mention is ever made of the many hundred of thousands of lives extinguished by our Nobel Peace Laureate's drone bombings of soft targets or the hearts and minds darkened on the ground in Afghanistan, the region, and the world.
The only voices worth hearing are the saber rattlers. They loathe a civilian trial for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber and son of a prominent Nigerian banker, because they loathe fundamentally democracy.
And while the blow back blows, Obama signals a tightening of airport security. While Afghan bleeds, the president fiddles with some high-tech junk equipment.
To add insult to this injury, the List of Countries continues, Cuba being the strangest among them. But maybe Cuba is illustrative.
Why Cuba?
Cuban terrorism goes back to its 200,000 troops sent to assist Angola in the 1970's and 1980's against Apartheid South Africa incursions. Secy of State Henry Kissinger warned Cuba to stay out of the conflict. The Carter Administration followed suit. Reagan iced the cake in March 1982 by labelling Cuba, because of this war, a state-sponsor of terror.
Angola wanted to be free not only of imperial Portugal but also of racist South Africa. Angola did not want to become another East Timor, which following the pullout of Portugal in the mid 1970's was invaded by US-backed Indonesia.
Angola didn't ask the USA because the USA was Apartheid South Africa's best friend, next to the UK. Recall that both US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher labelled Nelson Mandela a "terrorist."
The US funded, trained, and supported the apartheid regime.
But the vicious, white racist apartheid regime was not put on any US terror list. It was not admonished by successive US or UK administrations to pull back, tone down, hold free and fair elections (if you think the US cares about free and fair elections, just looks at Iraq and Afghanistan ... hell, look at the US itself). The US armed the racists and blockaded Cuba.
Cuba troops moved in, and South Africa was driven back, and for this crime against world order it is listed as a state sponsor of terror.
Knowing this might be enough to look at the other countries on the list. What are their crimes?
Revealingly, not one imperial power is on the list. The list comprises a Who's Who of the Colonial World. This is really disciplined stuff, because a look at just the post-WWII record shows the UK, France, and the USA blood spill of civilians, sabotage of elections, assassinations, infiltrations of labor and human rights groups, and right up to unthinkingly training a Afghan Mujahadeen in the very methods it now uses against its teachers, the USA and its boys and girls in uniform.
One can glean from this atrocious record that former colonies who lift their heads are terrorists, and the Western forces who massacre them are liberators.
But the saber rattlers, who keep to a narrative that, say: they want to kill us because they hate our freedoms. This is kept on the public plate, as if it makes any sense.
The only security measure Obama the president and Obama the Peace Laureate should consider is what the Afghans want ... and what the Syrians want. The Jordanians want. The Saudis want. The Pakistanis want. The Egyptians want. This is approximately an end to Western support of its brutal, Dark-Aged dictators and a full pull out of US and "coalition" troops.
The only voices worth hearing are the saber rattlers. They loathe a civilian trial for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber and son of a prominent Nigerian banker, because they loathe fundamentally democracy.
And while the blow back blows, Obama signals a tightening of airport security. While Afghan bleeds, the president fiddles with some high-tech junk equipment.
To add insult to this injury, the List of Countries continues, Cuba being the strangest among them. But maybe Cuba is illustrative.
Why Cuba?
Cuban terrorism goes back to its 200,000 troops sent to assist Angola in the 1970's and 1980's against Apartheid South Africa incursions. Secy of State Henry Kissinger warned Cuba to stay out of the conflict. The Carter Administration followed suit. Reagan iced the cake in March 1982 by labelling Cuba, because of this war, a state-sponsor of terror.
Angola wanted to be free not only of imperial Portugal but also of racist South Africa. Angola did not want to become another East Timor, which following the pullout of Portugal in the mid 1970's was invaded by US-backed Indonesia.
Angola didn't ask the USA because the USA was Apartheid South Africa's best friend, next to the UK. Recall that both US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher labelled Nelson Mandela a "terrorist."
The US funded, trained, and supported the apartheid regime.
But the vicious, white racist apartheid regime was not put on any US terror list. It was not admonished by successive US or UK administrations to pull back, tone down, hold free and fair elections (if you think the US cares about free and fair elections, just looks at Iraq and Afghanistan ... hell, look at the US itself). The US armed the racists and blockaded Cuba.
Cuba troops moved in, and South Africa was driven back, and for this crime against world order it is listed as a state sponsor of terror.
Knowing this might be enough to look at the other countries on the list. What are their crimes?
Revealingly, not one imperial power is on the list. The list comprises a Who's Who of the Colonial World. This is really disciplined stuff, because a look at just the post-WWII record shows the UK, France, and the USA blood spill of civilians, sabotage of elections, assassinations, infiltrations of labor and human rights groups, and right up to unthinkingly training a Afghan Mujahadeen in the very methods it now uses against its teachers, the USA and its boys and girls in uniform.
One can glean from this atrocious record that former colonies who lift their heads are terrorists, and the Western forces who massacre them are liberators.
But the saber rattlers, who keep to a narrative that, say: they want to kill us because they hate our freedoms. This is kept on the public plate, as if it makes any sense.
The only security measure Obama the president and Obama the Peace Laureate should consider is what the Afghans want ... and what the Syrians want. The Jordanians want. The Saudis want. The Pakistanis want. The Egyptians want. This is approximately an end to Western support of its brutal, Dark-Aged dictators and a full pull out of US and "coalition" troops.
05 January 2010
A 6% solution is a corporate dream come true and a public nightmare
A quorum is the majority of a group, and it is so designated as enabling the group to do its business. Anything less than a quorum, the group cannot act, cannot legislate, cannot change the status quo, cannot repeal. Imagine if one or two members sat in the House and passed legislation. Much the of the public - if they bothered to pay attention or the august press bothered to tell - would be outraged. But what would be the reaction if our legislators stopped completely to make laws and this responsibility were outsourced to the Forbes Top Wealthiest Corporations?
Democracy US style appreciates such stunning examples as what passed for an election a few weeks ago here in Long Beach, California. At a time when schools are treated like the crazy wicked step cousin, in charge of a constituency without a voice or vote, decimated since the late 1970's Proposition 13, a school board member was elected with only 6 percent turnout.
Six percent should cause alarm, but not as much as the context the power shifts beneath our unfunded, privatized, neoliberal feet.
Now, we cannot force people to vote, but we can look at the options given them. Our political establishment in our so-called free land has long restricted the power share to two purported parties. I argue it is one party with two wings, because they share the same assumptions, marginalize the same lower classes, elderly, children, ... and are paid for by the same corporate entities that have no interest in public welfare, only private profit.
It is the corporate power that should make headlines more than the 6% turnout.
While most school board elections are not partisan elections, the entities paying for them are the same. Those not fiscally supported haven't a chance in Hell.
Many reasons might exist for the 94% staying home or not bothering to send in their mail-in ballots. They haven't drunk the corporate Kool-Aid.
Candidate One loves kids and after-school programs, and Candidate Two loves kids and pre-school programs. Both love the Arts, of course. But neither will lift a finger to legislate or rob the public purse on behalf of the rights of children, who only get one childhood, who cannot, like a Losing Candidate, seek a new career as a Consultant or a Lobbyist.
These are cynical options that do not inspire voter confidence and are meant not to.
Our California governor, who probably rejects being handed his post in that infamous recall of Gov. Gray Davis, felled by Enron shenanigans with the express help of George W Bush, whined today about not getting a fair share of taxes from the federal government. This is rich coming from a man who won't raise taxes or repeal the sweet-heart tax breaks given the rich of the state ... to pay for our children and their education.
He did make some very dangerous proposals to further privatize our prisons.
With such a disastrous formula, why vote indeed? Why be complicit in the further eroding of our society by making another generation of our youth no better than the generation Pres. Franklin Roosevelt found being drafted into the Second World War: underfed, undereducated, and underachieved. This prompted him to embolden public education nationwide.
Now we find ourselves raising generations of ricket-minded youth who will become ricket-minded adults. They are not likely to pay attention to voter turnout, election rules which keep worker-lead political parties off the ballot. They won't know who rules them. They will not only be qualified for low-wage jobs, but statistics show they won't vote either. But more, they are less likely to make cogent demands of the political class, which satisfies very well those corporate entities who don't want the public to get in their way.
Democracy US style appreciates such stunning examples as what passed for an election a few weeks ago here in Long Beach, California. At a time when schools are treated like the crazy wicked step cousin, in charge of a constituency without a voice or vote, decimated since the late 1970's Proposition 13, a school board member was elected with only 6 percent turnout.
Six percent should cause alarm, but not as much as the context the power shifts beneath our unfunded, privatized, neoliberal feet.
Now, we cannot force people to vote, but we can look at the options given them. Our political establishment in our so-called free land has long restricted the power share to two purported parties. I argue it is one party with two wings, because they share the same assumptions, marginalize the same lower classes, elderly, children, ... and are paid for by the same corporate entities that have no interest in public welfare, only private profit.
It is the corporate power that should make headlines more than the 6% turnout.
While most school board elections are not partisan elections, the entities paying for them are the same. Those not fiscally supported haven't a chance in Hell.
Many reasons might exist for the 94% staying home or not bothering to send in their mail-in ballots. They haven't drunk the corporate Kool-Aid.
Candidate One loves kids and after-school programs, and Candidate Two loves kids and pre-school programs. Both love the Arts, of course. But neither will lift a finger to legislate or rob the public purse on behalf of the rights of children, who only get one childhood, who cannot, like a Losing Candidate, seek a new career as a Consultant or a Lobbyist.
These are cynical options that do not inspire voter confidence and are meant not to.
Our California governor, who probably rejects being handed his post in that infamous recall of Gov. Gray Davis, felled by Enron shenanigans with the express help of George W Bush, whined today about not getting a fair share of taxes from the federal government. This is rich coming from a man who won't raise taxes or repeal the sweet-heart tax breaks given the rich of the state ... to pay for our children and their education.
He did make some very dangerous proposals to further privatize our prisons.
With such a disastrous formula, why vote indeed? Why be complicit in the further eroding of our society by making another generation of our youth no better than the generation Pres. Franklin Roosevelt found being drafted into the Second World War: underfed, undereducated, and underachieved. This prompted him to embolden public education nationwide.
Now we find ourselves raising generations of ricket-minded youth who will become ricket-minded adults. They are not likely to pay attention to voter turnout, election rules which keep worker-lead political parties off the ballot. They won't know who rules them. They will not only be qualified for low-wage jobs, but statistics show they won't vote either. But more, they are less likely to make cogent demands of the political class, which satisfies very well those corporate entities who don't want the public to get in their way.
29 December 2009
Dec 25th attempted bombing not a systemic failure but an institutional one
I woke Dec 26th to the startling news that a terrorist attack was launched against a commercial airline. Possible links to the all-ominous "al-Qaeda" were mentioned. Nigeria linked. A plane headed for Detroit, Michigan. Yemen
It seemed a long way from 9/11 and so many suspiciously failed attempts to commit terror on US soil again, and this particular young man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the son of a prominent Nigerian banker, reportedly had the noxious ingredients to do the deed. But once again, he was foiled by his own stupidity.
At any rate, fortune, not the highly funded, bloated US security services had it that the passengers and crew arrived safely for Christmas.
Pres Barack Obama offered a mea culpa, saying this goof was a systemic failure.
But he is as wrong as US Dept of Homeland Security policy, thankfully no longer a secret from the masses after another goof published its Standard Operating Procedures on the Internet.
Inasmuch as this story of the Nigerian would-be bomber is truth, inasmuch as this was an organized terrorist attack, what this represents is an institutional failure, not a systemic one. And the only thing our defense systems are doing is keeping the population in fear so as to continue the evil Bush doctrines of robbing us of our rights in secret trials, secret prisons, renditions, and police powers.
Eight CIA agents will never again celebrate a holiday with their friends and families, and this is sad. But that they were killed in the midst of the US occupation and assault on Afghanistan and the region should give us pause. These agents weren't there to plant crops or dig ditches to install plumbing for clean, running water to the poor villages.
Conventional wisdom out of Washington says they were there protecting the US. Well, they weren't protecting our freedoms, since those seem to continue to get carved away. Wiser more astute heads will recall the history or at least know the earth has no Chosen People, not even the exceptionalist US.
But all that secrecy and why a lone, Nigerian bomber, like Abdulmutallab, (or a small cabal of them) should want to cause destruction on such a holy day must not be answered with cries that they hate our freedoms.
The more unpopular, penetrating question is how are our purportedly noble institutions creating these villains and why should they want to attack our troops, our commercial airlines, and even eight CIA agents.
Could our occupations of huge swaths of the Mideast and Asia have anything to do with it? Might the US support of brutal dictatorships who suppress the people and keep them in a virtual Dark Age of religious superstition? How about those drones who continue to bomb soft targets - that is, neighborhoods, men, women, and children noncombatants? Do these things win hearts and minds, and does the US really care about their hearts or minds unless they are splashed against bullet-riddled masonry?
I cannot intentionally say much factual about this Abdulmutallab, so I do not want to demonize him or aggrandize him into a terrorist attacker. Scores of Black and Brown and Poor people are killed daily in the US, many by the police, but these are diminished in the back pages.
I am intrigued that Abdulmutallab is not the first educated person to be swayed to the supposed Dark Side. John Walker Lindh is serving a 20-year sentence for his role. Another educated American, Anwar al Awlaki, became a convert to Islam and left for Yemen where he embraced Jihad and reportedly met with said Nigerian.
These people aren't motivated by systemic failures and goofs but rather by Western institutions, and we need to face this.
It seemed a long way from 9/11 and so many suspiciously failed attempts to commit terror on US soil again, and this particular young man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the son of a prominent Nigerian banker, reportedly had the noxious ingredients to do the deed. But once again, he was foiled by his own stupidity.
At any rate, fortune, not the highly funded, bloated US security services had it that the passengers and crew arrived safely for Christmas.
Pres Barack Obama offered a mea culpa, saying this goof was a systemic failure.
But he is as wrong as US Dept of Homeland Security policy, thankfully no longer a secret from the masses after another goof published its Standard Operating Procedures on the Internet.
Inasmuch as this story of the Nigerian would-be bomber is truth, inasmuch as this was an organized terrorist attack, what this represents is an institutional failure, not a systemic one. And the only thing our defense systems are doing is keeping the population in fear so as to continue the evil Bush doctrines of robbing us of our rights in secret trials, secret prisons, renditions, and police powers.
Eight CIA agents will never again celebrate a holiday with their friends and families, and this is sad. But that they were killed in the midst of the US occupation and assault on Afghanistan and the region should give us pause. These agents weren't there to plant crops or dig ditches to install plumbing for clean, running water to the poor villages.
Conventional wisdom out of Washington says they were there protecting the US. Well, they weren't protecting our freedoms, since those seem to continue to get carved away. Wiser more astute heads will recall the history or at least know the earth has no Chosen People, not even the exceptionalist US.
But all that secrecy and why a lone, Nigerian bomber, like Abdulmutallab, (or a small cabal of them) should want to cause destruction on such a holy day must not be answered with cries that they hate our freedoms.
The more unpopular, penetrating question is how are our purportedly noble institutions creating these villains and why should they want to attack our troops, our commercial airlines, and even eight CIA agents.
Could our occupations of huge swaths of the Mideast and Asia have anything to do with it? Might the US support of brutal dictatorships who suppress the people and keep them in a virtual Dark Age of religious superstition? How about those drones who continue to bomb soft targets - that is, neighborhoods, men, women, and children noncombatants? Do these things win hearts and minds, and does the US really care about their hearts or minds unless they are splashed against bullet-riddled masonry?
I cannot intentionally say much factual about this Abdulmutallab, so I do not want to demonize him or aggrandize him into a terrorist attacker. Scores of Black and Brown and Poor people are killed daily in the US, many by the police, but these are diminished in the back pages.
I am intrigued that Abdulmutallab is not the first educated person to be swayed to the supposed Dark Side. John Walker Lindh is serving a 20-year sentence for his role. Another educated American, Anwar al Awlaki, became a convert to Islam and left for Yemen where he embraced Jihad and reportedly met with said Nigerian.
These people aren't motivated by systemic failures and goofs but rather by Western institutions, and we need to face this.
07 December 2009
The great purge of 2010
I will give no credit to George Bush, but that he kept his base in tow seems to adhere to a basic political rule. Our new president will celebrate a year in office next month, and in this time he has managed to follow a different course. He has disenchanted, disillusioned, and frankly shat on his base of optimistic supporters.
So the whisper in the streets is that the with this base unmotivated and the right-wing energized, the Republican wing of our ONE party state will resume control of the US Congress in 2010, at minimum. Progressive forces within marginal states could face the guillotine as well.
A purge may be on the horizon in 2010.
I give no credit to Bush because even his base is a coerced concoction. Things like culture wars are set up to divide "them" against "us", satiating their taste buds with the red meat of racist, homophobic attacks. These bases - left and right - are managed with varying skill levels, and in truth do not represent the majority of voting aged in the US: those became disenchanted long ago, as was the goal of the crisis managers of democracy. They were made disenchanted to keep growing, sophisticated populations from making actual demands of their governments.
The next best thing to Siberia is to get that 50% to simply drop out of the system and ease up on the pressure.
Obama. One pundit rightly asked, "where is the community organizer?" His decision last summer to back the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was surprising even to me, who opts for queer liberation and liberation generally vs. equality with the slave, settler state. But in backing DOMA, Obama outraged even the elites of the LBGTQ community, which doesn't show much political sophistication on his part.
Even the managed minorities need red meat, and Obama has not even done this. Iraq. Afghanistan. Guantanamo. LGBT rights. Yes, there are still liberals out in the prairies who continue to sing the praises of this Goldman-Sachs candidate, hope upon hope, and admonish the critics for not "trusting" what may come at the dawn.
I find these optimists, like I find many of our hardcore religious, rather medieval and mystical in their outlook. Imagine if someone were to have said this about George Bush, war criminal: to just wait, trust that these secret prisons will turn out alright.
But I suppose we fundamentally live in a mystical country which has replaced men in priestly robes for men in suits who have bought congressional districts.
If this is true, the coming purge will be shattering to the so-called Left in the US. The gullible masses will see the End of Worlds.
Yes, the pundits will continue to chatter. One more eloquent and glamorous one will ask for the responsible bureaucrat's head on a bed of lettuce. But the base, the voters, the minor activists, the community organizers will be traumatized as Obama's remaining single term (yes) will be driven by the right, and Obama will look less and less competent to do anything but plant a garden on a superfund site.
For my part, I hope this shift drives more than the usual trickle to our active and marginalized Other Parties, like the Peace & Freedom Party, Party for Socialism & Liberation, Socialist Party USA, even the Green Party. That is but one step.
The next is to reform our ballot access and our access to broadcast, official debates, where the public at large can know we have viable, leftist candidates who will not concede the successes of the capitalist coda.
Capitalism is bad for your health, bad for your community, bad for employment. Despite what Ayn Rand told us, there is nothing heroic about the class of people who rape and pillage, literally and metaphorically, to make money off the backs of enslaved poor people. We called those bullies when I was a school teacher. And we can do quite well without these heroes.
Up to the moment, any suggestion of this is met with a corporate press and alternative party inaccessibility. Horror stories about socialism are framed with the myth that we are free and rich.
More than a working class party, the United States is desperate for working class access to the reigns of power.
So the whisper in the streets is that the with this base unmotivated and the right-wing energized, the Republican wing of our ONE party state will resume control of the US Congress in 2010, at minimum. Progressive forces within marginal states could face the guillotine as well.
A purge may be on the horizon in 2010.
I give no credit to Bush because even his base is a coerced concoction. Things like culture wars are set up to divide "them" against "us", satiating their taste buds with the red meat of racist, homophobic attacks. These bases - left and right - are managed with varying skill levels, and in truth do not represent the majority of voting aged in the US: those became disenchanted long ago, as was the goal of the crisis managers of democracy. They were made disenchanted to keep growing, sophisticated populations from making actual demands of their governments.
The next best thing to Siberia is to get that 50% to simply drop out of the system and ease up on the pressure.
Obama. One pundit rightly asked, "where is the community organizer?" His decision last summer to back the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was surprising even to me, who opts for queer liberation and liberation generally vs. equality with the slave, settler state. But in backing DOMA, Obama outraged even the elites of the LBGTQ community, which doesn't show much political sophistication on his part.
Even the managed minorities need red meat, and Obama has not even done this. Iraq. Afghanistan. Guantanamo. LGBT rights. Yes, there are still liberals out in the prairies who continue to sing the praises of this Goldman-Sachs candidate, hope upon hope, and admonish the critics for not "trusting" what may come at the dawn.
I find these optimists, like I find many of our hardcore religious, rather medieval and mystical in their outlook. Imagine if someone were to have said this about George Bush, war criminal: to just wait, trust that these secret prisons will turn out alright.
But I suppose we fundamentally live in a mystical country which has replaced men in priestly robes for men in suits who have bought congressional districts.
If this is true, the coming purge will be shattering to the so-called Left in the US. The gullible masses will see the End of Worlds.
Yes, the pundits will continue to chatter. One more eloquent and glamorous one will ask for the responsible bureaucrat's head on a bed of lettuce. But the base, the voters, the minor activists, the community organizers will be traumatized as Obama's remaining single term (yes) will be driven by the right, and Obama will look less and less competent to do anything but plant a garden on a superfund site.
For my part, I hope this shift drives more than the usual trickle to our active and marginalized Other Parties, like the Peace & Freedom Party, Party for Socialism & Liberation, Socialist Party USA, even the Green Party. That is but one step.
The next is to reform our ballot access and our access to broadcast, official debates, where the public at large can know we have viable, leftist candidates who will not concede the successes of the capitalist coda.
Capitalism is bad for your health, bad for your community, bad for employment. Despite what Ayn Rand told us, there is nothing heroic about the class of people who rape and pillage, literally and metaphorically, to make money off the backs of enslaved poor people. We called those bullies when I was a school teacher. And we can do quite well without these heroes.
Up to the moment, any suggestion of this is met with a corporate press and alternative party inaccessibility. Horror stories about socialism are framed with the myth that we are free and rich.
More than a working class party, the United States is desperate for working class access to the reigns of power.
12 November 2009
Afghanistan
An official daily newspaper quoted a high-ranking official thus: "[College] students should view their degrees as an honor but not necessarily as a ticket to a professional career." While this could be a rare, honest lament of a US cabinet member it was Fidel Castro.
Why haven't our rulers made such frank assessments? Why have our public schools continued to channel the young through poor education and into the "honor" of a debt for which there are no jobs?
The answer? In Warren Beatty's monumental film, "Reds," Jack Reed answers a similar question cryptically: "Profit."
The answer is also in Pres. Barack Obama's strange television escalation. The US - true to the words of the president - is still in denial that it is a terrorist nation and will dress its foreign policy up in the sheep's clothing of "Values." I am discouraged that it will ever admit that it is a warring nation.
Not only is profit the easy answer but also that momentum - I would call it a hex - that propels this country to a contradiction of creating unemployable college educated men and women, while becoming a police state, which demands only obedience and fear.
Extraordinary renditions. Secret prisons. Show trials. Laws curbing free expression. The dismantle of public education and the construction of penal institutions.
President Obama, as CEO of the decaying empire rather than a revolutionary community organizer, is as forced and complicit as any fortune 500 company leader to send 30,000 military troops, trained to kill and destroy rather than 30,000 teachers, technicians, social workers.
Cuba, by the way, has more doctors per capita than any other developing country and exceeds the US. It also exports school teachers and technicians to poor countries to aid in social and economic development.
Compare and contrast. The well indoctrinated and disciplined will retort: "We are free," which the Western experiment has devalued exponentially.
Why haven't our rulers made such frank assessments? Why have our public schools continued to channel the young through poor education and into the "honor" of a debt for which there are no jobs?
The answer? In Warren Beatty's monumental film, "Reds," Jack Reed answers a similar question cryptically: "Profit."
The answer is also in Pres. Barack Obama's strange television escalation. The US - true to the words of the president - is still in denial that it is a terrorist nation and will dress its foreign policy up in the sheep's clothing of "Values." I am discouraged that it will ever admit that it is a warring nation.
Not only is profit the easy answer but also that momentum - I would call it a hex - that propels this country to a contradiction of creating unemployable college educated men and women, while becoming a police state, which demands only obedience and fear.
Extraordinary renditions. Secret prisons. Show trials. Laws curbing free expression. The dismantle of public education and the construction of penal institutions.
President Obama, as CEO of the decaying empire rather than a revolutionary community organizer, is as forced and complicit as any fortune 500 company leader to send 30,000 military troops, trained to kill and destroy rather than 30,000 teachers, technicians, social workers.
Cuba, by the way, has more doctors per capita than any other developing country and exceeds the US. It also exports school teachers and technicians to poor countries to aid in social and economic development.
Compare and contrast. The well indoctrinated and disciplined will retort: "We are free," which the Western experiment has devalued exponentially.
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