To be an African in North America

To be a Black man in a white country is to be presumed not a member of that country.

A former Del Taco supervisor during a job I had in high school liked to speak of "all-American types" being at the front counter. I had no consciousness then except the consciousness that passes through us psychically, so the phrase always rubbed me the wrong way, made me uncomfortable, even though I could not put my finger on it. And I did not notice until much, much later that while I occupied that front counter, I was alone as a POC. My unconsciousness, in part, made me safe. The grill and cook areas were mostly Latinos. The phrase was to come up again later when I heard about certain temp agencies using that code to indicate white people.

To be Black in a white country meant when the restaurant chain, Houlihan's, had NO Black waiters, this included me, even though my white college peers were readily hired as such, and I allowed to be a busboy and clean up after them, and after the patrons, for whatever spare change they delighted to give me. After many attempts to move up in spite of this, that Okie cracker manager woman, Kris Tinger, said to me "Lowell, if you insist on being a waiter I can make you a waiter, but I can't guarantee you any hours."

To be African in the United States is still to be defined by that US Supreme Court which said we were not now nor ever meant to be Americans, citizens, of this infamous country.

To be of African descent in this white-settler country is to be a tool for exploiters, even so-called liberal ones: so those gay bars, like the Midnight Sun in San Francisco's Castro District, were found by a District Attorney sting to in fact be routinely denying Blacks employment, charging cover charges where there was none, and selling cocktails at a higher price. When I went as a freelance reporter for the local gay newspaper, The Sentinel, to cover the story, the white patrons greeted me as if I had walked into a Klan gathering, heckling me and throwing ancient racist epithets my way.

To be descended from that stock of stolen African labor made surplus, therefore dangerous, after the United States Experiment utterly blew up in 1865 means you cannot be rented an apartment by many a large property owners in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Orange County, California, because you are still surplus labor; nor given an office temp assignment because - again - you are not "front-office type," except to go assemble tents for a Beverly Hills Arts Expo, then finally get a job at barely minimum wage while your white "friends", bless their clueless puzzled hearts, ask you "why are you working there?"

To be Black in a a lily-white land is to be a vagrant, and you belong nowhere, so every police and justice institution in this country is intent on prodding you, questioning your presence, frisking you, moving you along, until you're dead, in jail, or you go mad so they can put you in jail.

In fact, to be Black in this racist country is to be one false accusation or corrupt district attorney away from incarceration.

To be Black in this white supremacist patriarchy means, then, your gay, meth-addicted, weed-smoking compatriot, tweaking throughout the whole night without sleep, barely passed his adolescence, is presumed fit for an executive manager position at a five-star hotel, while your Black ass cannot get a minor promotion.

Where is this white fool who says he lost a job to a minority?!

To be African in a land founded by hate groups and Nazis, who've bred more hate groups and more Nazis, is to be a walking provocation, always presumed to be shouting and threatening. But don't be angry. We are not allowed anger.

This all means we may be troubled Black people, but we are troublesome Africans.

To be an African in North America for more than one, or many, generations, is to be at your core a revolutionary, a table-turner, one who upends the smallest to the grandest symbol of oppression, to constantly but at varying pace pull the thread with the intent on destroying the fabric. Whether we deconstruct, destruct, burn down, blow up, blow out, we do it dangerously: this much the white institutions of this ass-backward country know and fear. And I want them to shit their pants.

Why the Campaign to Raise the Minimum Wage is an Awful Idea

Let me be clear. I'm opposed to the raising of the minimum wage to $15. I'm opposed to a campaign to raise it at all. I am opposed to making it a point of discussion.

Yes, not only will raising the minimum wage hurt local business owners by imposing greater overhead costs on them, possibly incur layoffs, which means a heavier workload for remaining employees, but raising the minimum wage will increase prices of goods and services.

But that is not why I am opposed to raising the minimum wage or the campaigns to do so. I couldn't care less about local business owners or larger corporations' bottom line and their overhead costs. I couldn't care less about their profit motive.

It shows the bankruptcy of our discussion about labor and wages that a so-called civilized country could tolerate a business that can only exist on laborers who cannot feed and house themselves. Why is it important we preserve a business that can only exist on virtual slavery?

It's important because the US has never been a civilized country.

The United States started unapologetically as a slave state, where vast fortunes were built literally on the backs of African free labor and the extermination of existing indigenous nations whose land was stolen. If my radical activist friends cannot begin there, they cannot go anywhere.

In other words, for the West to win, human rights crimes have to be committed and enshrined in the laws of this settler nation-state.

So using those not-so-long-ago times as an example - and I say this because my grandparents grew up in this so-called civilized country knowing people who had been born into slavery, so that is not that long ago - let's pretend a movement arose in the 1800's to give African free labor an allowance. Call it a wage, if you like. Now, I can see some slave owners rising up on their hind legs opposing this, how it will raise their costs, etc., etc., but given enough public pressure, such an allowance might be instituted as a compromise to preserving the country's "peculiar institution."

Mind you, the slave system would otherwise endure, the African laborer still the property of the white master.

Similarly, my first of two reasons for opposing making higher wages an issue is that it preserves a wage-slavery system fully in place. The capitalist superstructure is unaffected. Wall Street continues as it began, darkly, as a site of slave auctions.

At a time after the abolition of chattel slavery in the US, as industry was on the rise, it was widely campaigned among trades-union activists that factory laborers not only set a maximum work day and abolish child labor but also abolish capitalism and private ownership. The people who run the factories, it was assumed, should own the factories. This democratic idea implies that work rules would be implemented fairly and that wages would be distributed equitably if not equally.

These trades-union campaigns weren't about becoming rich as laborers but rather empowering workplace and community democratic control. Industrial feudalism was incompatible with democracy.

These campaigns, their rhetoric, its activism was pretty well erased by the end of the 1930's after a combination of US government retaliation against trades-unionists - assassinations and deportations - and finally an entente cordiale between certain elements of the labor movement, Wall Street, and the US government, whereby unions would be recognized, afforded some collective bargaining rights, limited or restricted in other bargaining rights, prohibited from internationalizing their movement - that is, taking it abroad to combat capitalism at all fronts - and, most damaging of all, the purge of all communists and anarchists from the trades-unions, which had formed the backbone of what the trades-union movement meant.

The result became instant. For, while union labor won lucrative contracts and high salaries, the militants were gone. The critique that capitalism was the problem was gone. The collaboration with our brother and sister laborers abroad was gone. So when Wall Street predictably found even unions undesirable, they had only to move to right-to-work, anti-union states or to Mexico or anywhere they pleased. As union power began to decline, along with membership, precipitously, there was no one within the union to militantly oppose and give voice to this massive assault on laboring people.

I want the conversation returned to capitalism being the problem, Wall Street being the problem, and if the solution cannot come legislatively - and I doubt it ever can or will - then a revolution must happen. By hook or crook, by any means on the table, the so-called means of production must be taken. I am not holding my breath for Progressive Caucuses or Congressional Black Caucuses or one political party over another to make a radical move: they are all slaves themselves to a Wall Street, capitalist system.

My second reason for opposing this campaign to raise the minimum wage involves a bit of conjecture.

When I moved to San Francisco in the late 80's, Chevron and Bank of America were headquartered in that city. Because of rising taxes, they left. Bank of America moved to a Southern state. Chevron simply went across the San Francisco bay into the suburbs.

Recently, a fast-food corporation has made headlines by effectively transferring its headquarters to Canada where business taxes are less.

This is what capitalists do because they are driven to show productivity every quarter whether they are producing anything or not - and I would argue that few are really producing anything at all but showing some margin of profit by fraud and by starving their labor force with poverty wages.

At any rate, I foresee the result of this Campaign for $15 resulting in some urban areas being emptied of much of its low-wage work into the suburbs where wages will be kept low. For a city like San Francisco or Seattle, a $15 minimum means nothing in a high-technology boom economy. These high-tech workers are not making $15/hour, but many times that.

I envision these oases of high pay being populated with a largely highly skilled, white, male workforce, and the surrounding suburbs and unincorporated areas, where there will be no high wage by design populated with the warehouses, fast-food, and bargain businesses employing largely women and people of color.

So let's not delude ourselves further with this silly campaign. It will succeed. We see signs of it already, where big cities - who happen to be eager to gentrify, which already presupposes their hatred of poor people and nonwhite people - are giving a nod to raising wages. The end result will be worse for labor, but more important, it will not advance the democratic movement that had always been the labor movement.

Capitalism, whether peacefully or militantly, must be ended. That is the campaign. Capitalism is incompatible with democracy, because democracy means democratic control of your community, which includes yours schools and your workplaces and how the productivity is shared among the people; and capitalism means the antithesis of this. Human beings cannot become honest partners with Wall Street, because Wall Street - as has been shown and is being shown - will kill you to turn a profit.

How the Public Funds its Own Extermination

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) news site ran a lead story headlined "Ebola-Infected Americans Released from Hospital, Thanks to Experimental Drug U.S. Government Helps Develop".

The story reads "The National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Defense's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), have provided support for the development of ZMapp, the experimental drug used to treat the two Americans who had contracted Ebola while helping patients infected with the disease in Liberia."

The story highlights a particular contradiction in the US capitalist system, whose proponents like to speak about ingenuity and independence while they bash the function of government: that nothing was built by these tycoons alone. In fact, they could not have built anything alone.

Most of our major corporations have benefited from essentially a government handover of patents and technologies.

From pharmaceuticals to the high-tech industry, private corporations have been the recipients of highly subsidized ventures paid for by tax dollars. Any losses are borne by the consumer, by empty city coffers, schools and public universities with less funding, public transportation subsidies decreased so bus and transit fares continue to increase.

The gains are passed on to for-profit corporations to maximize on our backs.

Microsoft, Hewlitt-Packard, Dell, Apple, and all of the expanding Silicon Valley could not have happened without the huge transfers of government [including military] research from the public to the private sector.

The worst of the victims must lately include 1400 African deaths from the Ebola virus who were denied access to a treatment publicly paid for.

But Africa and the global South have long been denied access to the treatments of curable diseases because for-profit corporations do not find it profitable to produce the treatments, the recipient country will not pay the demanded price of the treatment, or, in the case of Cuba and other US "enemies," it is simply barred from purchasing the life-saving treatment or technology.

The victims don't stop there: the people of the US who witness the transfer of billions of dollars from their pockets for the enrichment of a few. The beneficiaries grow richer; their incomes continue to inflate out of proportion to the common workers, if the common workers can find work at all.

The technology drive seeks to maximize profit and minimize costs, and this includes labor costs. This is why the maqueoladoras on the US-Mexican border, the move to South Asia, the coups in Haiti and Honduras against leftist, pro-public, democratically elected presidents.

The technology drive means fewer jobs, and what jobs there are will be lower-waged ones.

Publicly funding our own extermination is not only class warfare but it is also a microcosm of how the West has Won for the last few centuries. The real wealth is not in London, Paris, or New York, it is in the lands of the global South - first made colonies or private fiefdoms, later guarded by Western-installed military juntas and eternal presidents - who secure the transfer of the foreign wealth to the global North in order to benefit the empire.

Once in the empire, we have seen it will always benefit a select few.

There is no reform under the sun that will right this crime, no picket line, no tweeting campaign. As things have gotten only worse they will continue to do so.

The unique path to right this crime is a revolution. If we cannot begin there, we will not begin anywhere.

The whole system must be dismantled by any and all available means.

What the Left won't tell you about Africans in North America and why they are not our friends

Will the Left ever redeem itself and truly become conspirators with the African diaspora and the holocausts against indigenous nations all over the global South? I have my doubts. Be it in the anti-war organizing, LGBTQ rights, and even the current focus on Gaza and the Israeli slaughter of over 1,000 souls, the European Left has framed the dialogue in the narrowest fashion and always to its advantage and to the exclusion of Africans, Natives, and occupied peoples it pretends to befriend.

White settlers and the regimes they live under must come to an different end-game if they are going to be worth hearing and allying with. So far, they get to pull the strings, design the blueprints, and set strategy for the darkies to follow, to do the heavy lifting. and of course to give the movements that faux democratic, multicultural feel-goodedness.

The result of this unbalanced alliance can be seen everywhere, not only in the persistent racism and cultural genocide in our respective countries' institutions but specifically in things like the mass incarceration of men of African descent - widely disproportionate to our numbers; to persistent spread of HIV/AIDS among young men of African descent and higher mortality rates generally - also, disproportionate to our numbers; our greater vulnerability as wage slaves - lower wages and higher unemployment - again, also disproportionate to our numbers.

Within the context of the US settler nation-state, dated from 1776, the central defining document of the role of Africans in the United States is not the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution. It is still the US Supreme Court Dred Scott vs Sanford decision, written by the Chief Justice Roger Taney - a racist and a slave owner - which decided that Africans in North America were not then and had never been considered part of this country, were not citizens, and therefore had no rights, that their only purpose was as livestock.

The indigenous nations on North America have it much, much worse. Their indices show this, are actually worse than people of African descent, but are never discussed. We are at best allowed exoticizing American Indians because to do otherwise challenges the very existence of the white settler plantation formed when those lowly Pilgrims came over from Europe to do what the European Jews did in Palestine: land theft, concentration camps, genocide.

The real foundation of this settler nation-state continues to make our role precarious at best. When the farmer has too many rabbits, he culls them - meaning he slaughters them for their meat and pelts lest they overtake the farm and become nuisance pests. The white settler regime when faced with a surplus population of people of African descent - that is, numbers the capitalist system has no use for - it similarly culls us by shooting us in the streets and locking us up in prisons.

The capitalist system's current phase as a post-industrial, technological one will prove to have less use for us, as it strives to grow richer and is proportionately more threatened by our presence.

Since our importation from Africa, people of African descent have been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we forcibly provided free labor to literally build the empire on the land stolen from indigenous nations; but on the other, our numbers have represented a constant threat.

The second amendment to the US Constitution was put there to ensure that a time when standing armies of any kind were a provocation against [white] liberty, the individual states - particularly in the South - could maintain standing armies to keep the Africans in check. There is no other reason why that amendment is in the Bill of Rights; owning a gun - even a cache of guns was not controversial in 1776 or 1876.

The white settler state knows the threat the Africans and indigenous nations pose to it, so it has strategized to keep us in our places. We may not know it today, may not be intimately conscious of it, but we are a revolutionary cadre always on the verge of waking up and striking back.

What does this have to do with the Left, our supposed friends, and their Programs we are supposed to sign up for?

The Left has never really acknowledged our beginnings. It will rhetorically support us, but invariably direct us to the very institutions which are both racist and illegitimate - as illegitimate as an Israeli settler institution on Palestinian land. In other words, the Left wants us to work within a framework - the system. The Left implicitly believes in the "Promise of the Founding Fathers." This Left lacks revolutionary zeal to overturn the system altogether because it benefits from this system.

And I do not mean to suggest the so-called Right is any better. It is just another wing of the same bird.

People of African descent are disproportionately filling US jails and prisons for the same reason the Second Amendment was embedded into the US Constitution. The white Left is not. Our numbers represent a provocation to the white settler when the white settler has no use for us in his fields. Not to lock us up would threaten rebellion and revolution. The white Left does not menace the settler state because it always acts within in.

People of African descent indoctrinated in government [public] schools may not know this. The settler does.

I've had enough of this dog-and-pony fiasco. With the current slaughter in Gaza, the Left will refer to a few months back, or maybe a few years; they may allow that Israel has a right to defend itself; they invariably return to the magical year 1967; or even 1948.

But implicit in everything they say is Israel's legitimacy as a settler state and theft of land. The Establishment of these countries are settlers, the Left being no better and not of the caliber to end one epoch for a better one.

When Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney [author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa] had a dream fulfilled to go to London to continue his education as young student, he was looking forward to meeting this European Left, the Labour Party, and other radicals he had read so much about. He talks about what he found is more comparable to Dorothy arriving at OZ and finding a little weasel behind a curtain.

White people - especially white settlers - love to talk. Admittedly, so do many of their indoctrinated pupils of color. But we don't have the luxury to sit behind a curtain pulling strings. The gun is at our head, knives at our throats, and we must act. If you're not down with our revolution, you're just in the way.

Eleven unknown facts about Katharine Hepburn and what they say about us

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born May 12, 1907, and died June 29, 2003, eleven years ago. Up until shortly before her death. she acknowledged that she had been using her late brother's birthdate - November 8 - as her own for all of her career (see #3).

So, for the 11 years Hepburn has been asleep - as she deliciously described death: "No more leaves to rake," she once relished to a reporter - I have listed eleven not-widely-known factoids about the famous actress.

Basically, en total, the reason these are not talked about is that we live in a fantasy world constructed by Hollywood and a PR machine under the watchful eye of the Christian church. Hepburn herself took part in this charade and, like many celebrities, is guilty of sometimes confusing fact with fiction. Our heroes cannot have be villains, so anything that is in the record is simply ignored - viz., Churchill using chemical warfare against Arab tribes in the early 1900's, a rather Hitlerian response before Hitler was even thought of.

For example, number 11 I read myself from a New York Times news story on microfiche - who remembers microfiche and the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature!? - of Kit Hepburn's testimony to Congress in the 1930's. It has changed forever my view of Planned Parenthood but not about women's rights.

So here's my eleven facts you may not have known:

11. Hepburn's mother, Kit*, cofounded Planned Parenthood with Margaret Sanger. She testified in a congressional hearing that [poor] Blacks and Asians needed to be sterilized as a remedy to poverty.

10. Hepburn's younger sister, Marion**, was a cofounder of the URBAN LEAGUE in Hartford, CT, and earlier a labor organizer for the radical union federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO].

9. Hepburn's mother, Kit, was a Marxist and when she predeceased her husband in 1951, he burned all of her papers and letters and remarried a few months later while Hepburn was in Africa filming "The African Queen". When she began as a suffragette, she abandoned one women's party for a Marxist, radical one.

8. Hepburn wrote an article for the Univ of Virginia law review journal on the Right of Privacy in 1965 on the occasion of the US Supreme Court's Griswold decision.

7. The first political candidate Hepburn openly supported was author Upton Sinclair, a socialist, who ran for governor of California with an EPIC [End Poverty in California] Program. The last presidential candidate Hepburn openly supported and campaigned for was Henry Wallace, who was also backed by the Communist Party USA. Wallace ran against Truman.

6. Hepburn's secret spot to go read scripts, books, and take naps was a gay cruising area of Central Park in NYC [see photo]. She once took a film writer friend for a picnic there, and he says she seemed either oblivious or indifferent to these gay men coming out and going in bushes around her.

5. One author writes that Hepburn not only liked Nixon but defended him saying he was "misunderstood." No context if this was said before or after Watergate, but no matter since Nixon had to have been known to her as a Red baiter since the 1950's.

4. During the "communist" witch hunts, Hepburn was subpoenaed to testify by the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused. Attempts to hold her in contempt were stopped by someone yet to be named.

3. When she was 14, Hepburn's oldest brother, Tom, 16, committed suicide by hanging himself, and Kate found the body and held it aloft until help arrived. In later years she speculated that he might have been gay. Until the 1980's, she used Tom's birthdate as her own.

2. Hepburn put herself in self-imposed exile from the US in the 1950's and lived mainly in the UK and Australia. The man reported to be her "lover" Spencer Tracy was not there. The woman reported to be her lover, Laura Harding, was. Harding came to Hollywood with Hepburn in 1932, where press rumors swelled in print; and when the morality police started tightening down on the whole film colony, Harding was sent back to the East Coast, and Hepburn started to be "paired" in the press with different men.***

1. In today's parlance, Hepburn would be considered a lesbian, though in her day this was not only unacceptable but considered a slur even to upper class same-gender loving women. Hepburn's godparents, Bryn Mawr friends of her mother's, were lesbians. Biographer Anne Edwards wanted to document this in her book, but the publishers nixed it. Not until Michael Mann and Scott Bowers (who procured women for her) was the extent of her relationships with women revealed.

__________________________________________________________________

* Kit was Katharine Martha Houghton-Hepburn. I only use Kit here as it was what she went by and to distinguish her from her actress daughter.

** Marion Houghton Hepburn-Grant was also the mother of Katharine Houghton, the actress who played Joey in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

*** Anyone who hasn't read a history of the Hay's Office, predecessor to the movie rating system, ought to. The Hay's Office asserted itself in the 1930's guided by the Christian Church and dictated what could and could not be in movies, even how they had to end. This spilled over into the film colony itself where actors, like Hepburn, were made to seem to lead exemplary STRAIGHT Christian lives.

Brief Obit on Ruby Dee and a Lot about our Real Missing Militants

Ruby Dee (October 27, 1922 – June 11, 2014) was an actress. She was a GREAT actress, stage and screen. That she was a supporter of various civil rights activities of her time and has had her name associated with some of the icons we have come now to revere - but we did not always, mind you[!] - should not revise her biography. To now mourn her as if she had been some kind of Black Panther or Communist Party activist is false. Worse, to inflate her role also underplays Dee's peers, African, Indigenous, and European, who committed their lives to radical, revolutionary work. Women we do not talk much about: instead we talk about actors who say interesting things ... when sometimes saying interesting things is quite powerful.

If after Katharine Hepburn's death, someone like me - who adores her and has read every biography - had cast her as a civil rights activist I'd be looked at with a lot of justified skepticism: and yet, one can glean from the Hepburn biography a continuum of far leftist politics, causes she herself supported, and her name was associated with a few militants. But Hepburn was an actress. Like Dee, she was a GREAT actress of stage and screen. Like Dee, Hepburn paid a price sometimes for her politics.

But to call Hepburn an activist because she supported and campaigned for a Communist Party-backed presidential candidate does not, in the totality, make her a political activist. This grade inflation revisionism of calling either Dee or Hepburn "activists" really undercuts the people who do put their necks out for radical change. They rarely come from Hollywood, though you wouldn't know this if the center of your universe is in Hollywood. The political associations of each woman say a lot about who they were but that they chose the road they'd hoe - film, theater - says a lot about them too.

Recently a low-income elder home for the veterans of the Stonewall riots was opened in Philadelphia. We don't think about these fighters, but they paid a great deal as out lesbians and gays and drag queens in their employment. Now that they enter the senior years they lack hefty 401K's to sustain them. They chose a path, often a militant path, and we must honor their path as we queers stand on their shoulders. Because they aren't fixtures of Hollywood, they and their plight is ignored.

I honor Ruby Dee as a great actress, and that much greater that she succeeded in a racist, post-Dred Scott United States She was a working and prolific actress, performing Shakespeare and O'Neill, Hansberry and Tennessee Williams. I would love to have seen her perform Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession."

But she's not Assata or Angela or Winnie Mandela. Let's not get it twisted. If we are hungry for militants - and we should be if we had any sense - they're here, and they were here.

The Abdication of another Spanish King

The First and Second Spanish Republics were born out of insurgent radicals who forced the king to either abdicate or flee for his life and limb. In the view we are not supposed to take, Spain has been trying since the 1870's to build a vibrant civil society, democratically run, and imbued with egalitarian principles. This, thanks to those radicals, anarchists, and republican anti-monarchists who've never gone away in more than 100 years and are reappearing and reimposing themselves in the streets of Madrid and Barcelona right now demanding a Third Republic.

On the other hand, the view of history we are supposed to digest is a fluke of history forced one 19th century king to abdicate only to have the military install "order and stability" a short time after. Then, in April 1931, another fluke caused the Bourbon king to flee until Franco emerged to set things right by 1939.

There is fact, and there is fiction.

The fluke, if you will, is the radicals; and here they come again stubbornly sprouting through the concrete.

We are supposed to believe - because we are told as much - that Juan Carlos is abdicating because of ill health. Granted, like the end of the First Republic, this king was carried back in not on the shoulders of revolutionaries but rather the French- and UK-backed military of Franco. Just like, not far from Spain, we are told to believe Egyptians want the "order and stability" of a new dictatorship over democratic free elections.

But there is fact, and there is fiction.

If four out of five dentists surveyed recommend saccarine-laced, cancer-causing chewing gum for their patients who chew gum, what are we to make of those dentists?!

Tyrants and constitutional monarchs have always suffered ill health, and we are never told much about it, and they go on and on useless in their own faculties but not useless to the state which needs them. Mental illness and inbreeding plagued many a European monarch but interestingly as long as the elites got their wealth, "order and stability" was declared. No one cared much about these genetic defects that were constantly replenished with marriages to first and second cousins.

And this is the point. As the late Tony Benn observed about the abdication of Edward VIII in the UK, 1936, it was less about a marriage to a divorced woman and more about the possible erosion of the office of the monarch and, therefore, the powers exercised by a handful of bureaucrats. Especially a prime minister. Without the king and the powers invested in that office, the raison d'etre of a prime minister "exercising" these powers disappears.

Benn noted that any president with the powers of the prime minister under a "constitutional" monarch - such a president would be considered a dictator.

This is probably why not 24 hours after the Spanish abdication the UK Buckingham Palace Press Office released a photo of their 88-year old queen carefully astride a pony on what we are told is among her daily rides. Vigor? "Continuity," is the word barked at us over and over again by the royalists. "The 'A-word' is not in her vocabulary."

Juan Carlos's health is as relevant to this story as his estranged wife Sofia's avowed homo-hatred, her espousal against gays and gay rights, or the state of their marriage.

What is relevant?

Spain is in a toilet, like many other Mediterranean nations. The banks tell us the European economies are turning around, but this is belied by the truth of widespread unemployment and misery, especially among young Spaniards. European workers are becoming refugees. Austerity continues to slash at the gains of the last 50 years. "Turn around" must be understood here to indicate that the financial world has found new ways to make profits, and nothing more.

So, thankfully, the insurgents of the 1870's have never died. They were brilliant in 1931, and they are ever-present today. In the recent European Union elections, more green sprouts emerged. Not believing the hype that things have turned around, pro-Republic, anti-monarchy parties, like PODEMOS, gained seats in Brussels.

Now, PODEMOS, United Left, Equo, and Republican Catalan Left Parties are all demanding a referendum on what Spain is to become, a republic or a monarchy. Elites are worried, and they seemed to ask Juan Carlos "Por que no te callas?".

Nixon advises the old Bourbon from his grave. Let the Republic inspire the masses.

No pasaran. Pasaremos! Campesinos, la tierra es vuestra.

Calling Things By Their Right Names: A brief word on the retirement of Barbara Walters

This media icon came into my life just after my parents' divorce in the early 70's. In the mornings I would go into my father's room, where he was sleeping on a bean bag, turn on the TV and watch Barbara Walters on the NBC Today Show. Something about her captivated me. Then one morning, she was gone. I remember the anxiety I felt as I went back every morning, and Walters was never there again. I scrolled through the TV channels looking for her, and she was no where to be found. I was baffled and bewildered. I must have been three or four years old.

While Freud and the psychoanalysts may have some field research to do on me, what's more interesting is how Walters got in front of the camera in the first place. In earlier interviews long ago, she noted the beginnings, but I notice in the last month as she has announced her impending retirement, leaving her TV show, and a building named in her honor at ABC-TV, she is silent about the history of how she came to be a respected TV journalist.

More than a generation ago, women in the news business was an oxymoron. Walters, like a lot of women of her generation, was kept behind the scenes in the research departments writing copy for the male reporters. In high schools and colleges, they had no chance of perfecting themselves as athletes.

Then class-action lawsuits, feminist activism, Title IX, and affirmative action programs changed all that and forced the athletic departments, news rooms, newspapers, and TV stations to bring [white] women into the forefront.

It was force. It was pressure. It was organized chutzpah. It was a form of class war. It was not some Darwinian evolution to naturally occurring higher state of being that enlightened men and patriarchy to eek out a sliver of its privilege to women anymore than our slave owners or factory owners were naturally enlightened to see the error of their ways: they did not, they will not, and they have not, to this hour.

There would be no Barbara Walters [or Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, or the late Jessica Savitch] were it not for feminist activists being "pushy". Granted, these white feminists come with problems. As the major beneficiaries of 1970's affirmative action, they have not shown much solidarity with the Black or Brown recipients, brothers or sisters, who faired far worse under affirmative action programs.

This white feminism is a lot like that of the elites in the LGBT community of the last generation in that the demand to sit at the controls of white supremacist capitalism, be "married," or fight its imperialist wars is ultimately not a very radical demand. These victories cost the system nothing, just widen the cage of rats competing for the spoils. Liberation and revolution with real demands cost a lot but come with greater benefits, like ending patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.

Still, even with that sordid history, those white feminists of the 60's and 70's offer a valuable lesson about activism and organizing worth repeating. The working class and poor have always been in the cross-hairs of the slave state, but we are losing precipitously more ground now.

If Walters wants a building named in her honor, it should be one that honors this militant history and its class warriors, not her. I'm sorry she is not repeating the real story now while she is being given so much attention but has allowed the Creation Myth to take over. The Creation Myth says that she worked hard and kept her head up, and this is all it takes to succeed in a white settler state, like the the United States of America.

This Creation Myth has no truth to it, and Walters knows this unless she's become senile and brittle-minded. Listening to her over the last few days, she seems perfectly lucid. And this risks leaving generations of men and women waiting for the sun to rise into the dark hearts of the empire and jubilee to come.

Extremism in Africa

More than 200 Nigerian girls kidnapped by "extremists" has the world's attention, and it should. But the tens of thousands of African children who die of curable diseases is of interest to no one in the West. No Western media reports the tears and anguish of these mothers. No one in the global North - the so-called "developed" world - calls this extremism.

For the last 10 years or so, another Scramble for Africa has occurred by the global North - US, France, China and its militaries, its economic policies, its Christians[!] - for land and resources of the continent. Note that this is not extremism but framed in the language of business interests, defense, or "humanitarian intervention."

AFRICOM, for example, is the US Defense Department's solidification of military and business power on the African continent. It was founded around 2006 probably because China was already making advances into the continent for treasures.

Like the Berlin Conference of the late 1800's, which solidified Western Europe's interests in the continent, AFRICOM is not called colonialism or extremism either. It claims it is providing protection and "defending our interests." White civilization has always framed these interventions in terms of defense or protection.

Britain, for example, wanted us to believe its 19th century intervention into Africa was about defending one ethnic group from another. And interestingly - please note this - it used this supposed conflict to justify its imperial ambitions.

The latest scramble for Africa is exactly related to the extremists we are warned about in the Western press. Make no doubt about it: kidnapping anyone - especially children - is criminal, and an extreme tactic. Interesting you never, ever hear the European-driven slave trade, which kidnapped millions of Africans and set its development back several generations - indicted as extremism. It is not discussed how the West went to extreme measures to steal free labor on which to build its civilization, etc. But criminals usually find justification for their crimes; all the better if intellectuals and the media support this delusion in dissertations, journal articles, and above the fold of newspapers.

What should interest the West if it had any collective conscience is where these so-called extremists of today - kidnappers, pirates, and jihadists - come from.

By Western standards, it is a near moral travesty to ponder the reasons these kidnappers might actually go to extreme measures. I think this is a tactic to keep us from looking behind curtains and asking intelligent questions.

But I make it my business to ask questions and connect dots.

For example, the group alleged to have kidnapped these 200 school girls in Nigeria is reportedly against Western education. To the indoctrinated classes, it is mystical that anyone would resort to a crime because of what is supposedly the best education in the world.

If I were living on the continent at this moment, and I saw Western militaries and Western business interests coming in with cheap talk of humanitarianism and bold action of theft, taking the land beneath my feet, making my already vulnerable position from centuries of colonialism, that much worse: I might think a Western school would save my children ... and I might not.

If I saw whole populations made into refugees in the name of Western intervention and foreign corporations who wanted to mine what is under the ground and displace me to do it, I might want a piece of the pie ... Or I might want to kill the people making the pie and destroy its institutions.

If I listened to sermons from Christian missionaries, NGO's, and foreign government bureaucrats about how much they cared while simple development solutions and cheap medical treatments remained elusive to my people, I might just as easily hold out hope for these carpetbaggers as I might want to see them removed forcibly and permanently from my lands.

But I could not hold out hope or believe in their sermons or feed my people on US arms for long before I got very distressed. And from this distress, I could imagine doing all sorts of creative and terrible things.

And this, the West must wake up to realize.

Every day in the West, human rights crimes against it own populations - denying a living wage, access to social services, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and health care - are committed because Wall Street and the financial centers want to maximize their profit margins. The indoctrinated classes tolerate - even if they do not support by poll numbers - our social, political, and economic policies being dictated by pirates.

Just as movements large and small have organized in the West against capitalism and employed all kinds of tactics - pickets, petitions, kidnapping, assassination, sabotage - to combat this home-grown extremism, they will organize anywhere.

Just because our intellectuals and the media are never far labeling these activists as "extremists" while they have forgiven Wall Street its excesses doesn't mean the activists are extremists and Wall Street deserves forgiveness.

Our own distress and complacency have a breaking point, and I'm afraid we see it in this recent mass kidnapping.

The solution is simple but elusive. If we don't want extremism in the world, simply stop participating in it. Unfortunately, white civilization is extremism, its foundation and infrastructure is extremism; theft and slavery is its life's blood. White civilization will always find short-term ways to nuance Naziism, and the most gullible will be the first to be exterminated. The least will have to get creative: so more distress and breaking points are to come. Gird your loins.

My First and Last Word on Cisgenderism

The only thing I know for sure about this term "cis" is it's fucking confusing and deeply contentious. It came to my attention in the context of Deep Green Resistance's (DGR) alleged "transphobia" - and before you throw a brick at me, I only say "alleged" because I do not even understand the totality of the controversy, and what I do understand I have mixed feelings about: more on that below.

So as I understand this term, it suggests the connection between your assigned gender at birth - "It's a boy!!" - with your identity: I am a MAN; versus a transgender person - "it's a boy!!" - and your identity: "My name is Chelsea Elizabeth Manning."

Academics don't impress me. I love Gore Vidal's term for them: "scholar squirrels" because they are careerists perpetually gathering their nuts for the next paper to be peer-reviewed by other scholar squirrels. Enough favorable citations means tenure.

So an academic, and a Western one at that (German), inventing a term like "cisgender" means absolutely nothing to me. That it's trickled over into some austere, uber-educated activist circles is as impressive to me as the infamy of Eugenics in a not-to-distant generation.

We've been handed - and do ourselves reinforce - two gender roles by a patriarchal Western capitalist system. Blue for boys; pink for girls. And rather blow this open by taking a page from older, more sustainable, more psychically developed indigenous societies in the Americas and the global South, where - broadly speaking - there were two biological genders but many sexes, our ever-irrelevant academics have decided to create yet another duality - cisgender vs transgender.

Error, Mary Baker Eddy lectured us, cannot expel error. More binaries are not the solution to our current binaries. They may make for tenure-track professorships and publication in journals no one reads, but I already know who they serve so why pay any attention?

Since academics have almost always served the state and its power - if this is news to you I suggest you spend and afternoon reading Noam Chomsky's "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship [1969]" - it makes sense they would not draw from indigenous experiences across - god forbid! - the global South for their dissertations and aspirations for journal publications, endowed professorships, and tenure.

Now, my qualms about DGR's alleged transphobia. I read it stems from not allowing [trans-] women into women-only circles. I'm sure if I've got that wrong one of my sympathetic readers will let me know. This is where I have mixed feelings:

Can a person born white decide because of a cultural affinity or genetic test or whatever that he is actually African (Black) and in turn speak for the experience of Africans in the Americas?

My own suspicion is that he cannot. My own suspicion is that this African-identified person will bring his white privilege into the discussion, when Africans have no experience of this privilege.

Is this chauvinist? Maybe. But I can't help, in as much I understand the DGR debate, that women would not want [trans-] women to be a voice in their private spaces.

And yet, I accept that I'd rather have radical abolitionist John Brown speaking on my behalf than the surly and remote US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but this only opens the question whether to have spaces set aside for the Other is a value at all.

So aside from what continues to make sense to me from indigenous perspectives, I took like a fish to water to the term QUEER when introduced to its usage in the late 80's. I am queer. I know some straight people who are queer and some lesbians and gays who are not. I cringed when for a brief period in the middle 90's academics tried to employ this term but it was happily and epic failure (all those tomes from Routledge must be floating on a landfill in the Pacific now).

Is queer another binary? I hope not. To me it's just a broad canvass onto which anyone can explore the boundaries of themselves without the roles assigned to us by a dominant and domineering culture.

This is all I have to say on this cockeyed subject.

The Color Line will keep the US a slave state not a worker democracy

It boggles the mind that 50,000 Chinese workers can go on strike, while their counterparts in the US keep toiling at their machines [promised rewards in heaven!]

This demands wide analyses.

For my part, the color line - as WEB DuBois called it - holds the answer. He eventually moved [back] to Africa, and maybe this is OUR answer. In the meantime, white civilization loathes the African and must keep the American Indian Movement and its Indians in concentration camps, worse off than the poorest Africans in the US.

White civilization is dependent, fundamentally, on a system of racism. This is our caste system in the US.

But what does this have to do with 50,000 Chinese workers withholding their labor [strike] while their counterparts in the US remain toiling at their machines?

White civilization and its aspirants cannot tolerate to see the system unhinged in any way that would undo the caste system. Southern DEMOCRATIC PARTY Senators during FDR's New Deal only consented to support the emergency measures if Africans were kept out of it. These same white settler elites refused to support measures like the GI Bill unless funds were distributed locally and not the federal government - this enabled southern institutions to deny money to African GI's for home loans and college, keeping them out of the much lauded emerging middle class.

I'll keep assuring you that Chief Justice Roger Taney's majority decision in the Dredd Scott case is the cornerstone of African life in the United States. If you want to understand our legal place in US society, read it.

The progeny of these early white settlers are themselves white settlers and beneficiaries of this caste system of race, theft, and economic privilege, and they mean to maintain it. They'll allow a reform here and there. They'll let an African in here and there, but under very strict conditions, and the moment the "n*gger gets out of place" he/she is sent back into the fields.

These white settler descendents are just like their forebears. Minor adjustments are tolerated, but these adjustments cannot undo the status quo.

An Injury to One is an Injury to All confronts this color line in a white racist settler colony like the USA. The narrative goes that Africans either deserve their plight because they are "lazy" or must be seen to be kept there, in their place. The effect is the same.

A General Strike that would even rhetorically embrace all workers, across many fields, and many colors, threatens the settler state and its caste system.

Years ago when I lived in St. Louis, MO, a modest health care reform measure was put before the voters to expand services regardless of income. The measure failed. I tired of hearing white nativists, which pollute that strange city, say in open spaces they opposed the measure because to support it meant "those people from East St. Louis [Illinois: read AFRICANS] would come across the river and steal our services."

The whites stole the land then robbed Africa of enough of its population to set it back several generations, and yet: Africans in the Americas are the ones singled out as taking things they do not earn. White-settler logic says Africans in the Americas are suspect where jobs or services are concerned because we would abuse the system, as if this were our genetic disposition.

So, white-settler logic says controls must be kept on workers since the Africans might pilfer the system. Ergo, no worker solidarity. No strike. And like those piss-ignorant St. Louisans, we all lose.

The Right to Withhold your Labor

Germany, Argentina, Greece, Libya, Guandong Province [China], Haiti, Kashmir Province [India] ... these are just some of the places where massive strikes or general strikes are taking place.

In the US: zero.

In Panama, organizers sent out the message: "We are producers of your wealth and we are stronger than you when we unite and strike."

The 24-hour general strike in Buenos Aires involved 1,000,000 people and shut down public transportation and air traffic.

In the US: we keep showing up for our crappy jobs where we're treated worse than farm animals and prodded and tested like any prized pig.

In the US we keep saying how lucky we are to have a job.

In Haiti, workers are staging a two-day general strike to force the government to address lowering quality of life, rising costs of living, and worsening services.

In the US we face the same elements by getting second jobs where we are abused by two employers and have less leisure and recreation time.

In the US, we allow our Patrones [Fucking Bosses] to check our finances, look into our backgrounds - "have you met with anyone from a foreign government?" - test our blood for drugs and alcohol, administer "qualifying" and "certification" exams on a regular and harassing basis - exams, by the way, which often began as a means to keep Africans, various American Indians, and women out of employ.

These Patrones do this while paying us little, never adjusting it to ebbs and flows of the Wall Street bankers (inflation), and demanding things like: we be more professional [i.e., kiss more asses and don't answer back] or do-more-with-less [i.e., doing the job of the three other workers who've been laid off].

This doesn't look promising, and it's not meant to.

When I read what is flaring up and going ablaze in other countries, some economically on par with the US and many not, I wonder how did we here get so docile and dull.

The government and the 1% it really works for will not bend to our will and our interests based on letter-writing campaigns or online petitions asking for donations. These things are interesting for some of the issues they bring up, but they bring about as much social change/revolution as a Dear Abby column.

The intrusions into our lives [credit checks, what I smoke or drink, etc], the "high standards" met with low wages and zero benefits, the arbitrary firing won't begin to come to an end until workers in the US digest the principle that we have a right to withhold our labor from our employers.

In other words: STRIKE.

We do it small; we can do it big, but it's got to be done. Like a Radical Faerie solstice party, the more the sexier.

The United States is not only unique in the Western world for its abysmal health care system but also the steps it has taken in law to keep workers from really organizing effectively.

Strikes are prohibited for all federal workers and most state and city workers.

Almost half of our states have laws which prohibit a union from organizing a workplace. These are so-called right-to-work states.

Unions are restricted from sympathetic strikes - that is, solidarity with other workers.

Since the 1940's federal laws have curbed unions, when it should have been unions that curbed the United States government.

Faced with a weakened labor movement, may local unions, like for school teachers, have been forced to accept No-Strike clauses to their contracts. These clauses further restrict employees from discussing any kind of work stoppage or slowdown.

In the US, the Patron is a king, and the government arms and supports them just as it arms and supports other two-bit global South thug dictators against the masses of workers who want to organize their societies better.

And this is what we have to gain and what the Patron and the US government have to lose: a better society.

George Bernard Shaw wrote "You see things and say 'Why?' But I dream of things that never were, and I say 'Why not?"

So it's time we put the ownership of our labor back on the table. It's ours. It belongs to us. It is not lent with a blank check to the thugs of management and Wall Street to do whatever they want for their quarterly profit while more of us have to stand in food lines.

Remember what the organizers in Panama declared: "We are producers of your wealth and we are stronger than you when we unite and strike."

It's time for a GENERAL STRIKE.

Why the Ottomans do not matter to us

By Ottoman I do not mean a piece of furniture. The Ottoman Turks gave us far more than the name of a piece of furniture, which is an interior-design question best relegated to an IQ test where class and privilege matter.

The Ottoman Empire lasted far longer and became far more powerful than, say, the British, and yet the average adult and above average school student know nothing about them.

From the 15th century up until the 20th, up until the the births of of my grandparents, the Ottomans ruled that part of the world which included many of our cradles of civilization: Egypt and parts of northern Africa, southern Europe and what we now call the Balkans, and onward into what we now call - thanks to the British - the Middle East.

They made numerous contributions, all of which we think - like our civil and human liberties - fall from on high, graciously: deus ex machina or el rex le veult.

But I don't want to write a history of the Ottoman Empire. Many sources exist already, never classified, easily excavated at your local public library; and the best education is self directed.

I do want to make a note on why the Ottomans have been wiped from our historical lexicon, why we can name the Romans and the Greeks; then the French and its Sun King, Marie and her cake; the British and its majestic white kings and queens, which we are still very fond of, which is really creepy given their incessant inbreeding and bloodshed.

A fringe of us can even add the US empire to this random list, exterminating natives, stealing foreign territory, wars of foreign conquest.

But nearly 500 years of the Ottoman Empire, and a whole lot of real estate along with literary and scientific achievement, is nowhere to be found among our historical mishmash of propaganda.

Why?

Without the Ottomans the various occupations in the Middle East become humanitarian interventions. Without the Ottomans, a certain rogue apartheid racist state can be invented and an all-out land grab ensue. Without the Ottomans, the political boundaries drawn up by the British take on an ancient, timeless flavor and so are beyond scrutiny.

Without the Ottomans, the House of Saud is an ancient dynasty when it is nothing more than a West Asian Kardashian drama, and the kingdom of Jordan an episode of "Keeping Up Appearances."

The Ottomans do not matter to us because they cannot. The narrative the West needs us to believe breaks down if the Ottomans are allowed to intrude, then questions are asked, fresh options explored - like, if Humpty Dumpty Germany can be put back together, why not the Ottomans? This question cannot be asked because of "our enduring friendship with Israel" and, basically, oil, which, like the slave trade of recent times is a necessary evil the West is thoroughly willing to suffer upon others for its conglomeration called civilization.

Removing the Ottomans from our thoughts is like removing the indigenous civilizations from our history books. We are left with an untamed wilderness ripe for exploit by the Europeans and their bankers.

And before you offer a Survival of the Fittest argument for the Allies victory over the Axis Powers [Germany and the Ottomans], know that it was not British might that brought the Turks to defeat. It was monogamy.

In another blow against traditional marriage, a certain sultan broke with longstanding Ottoman custom and became a one-woman kind of guy - we are told this was "true love" - thus messing up the pool of heirs and causing discord. Before this, the sultan in charge had had several wives who bore many children, and the sultan could chose which male[sic] child was best to succeed. This provided a steady pool of qualified aspirants.

With monogamy, the one wife had to produce the one male heir, and he could have been brilliant as easily as have had no temperament for colossal rule. He might have preferred painting. He might have been an imbecile. Just look at the British.

Narratives are important, hence Bible citations and morality tales rammed down our throats. Narratives are important not only to teach lessons but as in this instance to avoid learning any altogether. Once upon a time, the West tried to fix the Middle East - not, how it was intentionally broken in the first place. And, the gods help us, the West will kill them trying.

A Shavian Pope?

First, a disclaimer: while I somewhat embarrassingly call myself an anarchist, I don't put much stock in the label or those who wear it. It is an emblem like any other in a swamp of emblems, like DKNY or Gucci, that say something, but not enough, about a person. Also, I have fierce awe and respect for those anarchists who got their hands dirty and broke things - as opposed to those who climb academic ladders for PhD degrees and marginal think-tanks or those who busy themselves telling us why others are not real anarchists while they build nothing at all. Or those who plod out blog entries!! My thoughts on Pope Francis, like my already published [and scorned] thoughts on Charles Windsor, aka, Prince Charles of the UK, are not written as a thesis defense for that panel of self-appointed, self-righteous radicals who pretend among themselves they care. I simply do not give a damn about them.

No, Francis is not a bomb thrower, but he is causing quite the stir. He is doing the unexpected and the undesired, and this always impresses me. He said, "How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?"

I did not start as a blogger but as a fiction writer. Short stories read after lunch to Mrs Herbert's third grade class - stories I had written in the library during lunch rather than play on the play ground. So character interests me. Many writers do character better than others, like people, who hide their bad character worse than others. I suppose how you respond to character is like how you like your steak cooked.

Anyway, Agatha Christie's characters and Poirot's judgement of them started as my favorite. That was high school.

Then there's Shaw. George Bernard Shaw. Anyone who claims to know me well has heard me quote Shaw. He was a character in himself. When I encounter Prince Charles or Pope Francis I think of Shaw's king in The Apple Cart or the doctor in A Doctor's Dilemma. I think of Candida in the play of that name. I think of St. Joan: "Oh, Lord, when will the world be ready for thy saints?"

I think of the Black girl in his novelette A Black Girl in Search of Her God.

Shavian? I can best define this adjective with a description of the referred-to novelette: the Black girl isn't really in search of God as she is in exposing the lies and hypocrisies in all of them. My Tennessee grandmother might call a Shavian character "contrary" - meaning contentious, irreverent, curmudgeon.

That is Shavian; that is George Bernard Shaw.

Pope Francis is a character ripe for Shaw's hand. He's leaving no false idol unhinged from its base. He's doing the unexpected and not playing to that choir of do-gooders who pretend to care about the poor but want absolutely nothing done.

And he doesn't give a damn about detractors.

To give a little contrast, I've made no secret of my respect for Fidel Castro. But he's not a Shavian character. Maybe he's a Cervantesian Don Quixote. But not Shaw. Fidel did what was expected of him, even if it shocked the sensible people of the US, even if it shocked many Cubans. He meant to do what he said he was going to do, so maybe - just maybe - it's a cautionary tale of be careful what you wish for.

If there were a sequel to The Apple Cart, Charles Windsor would be the central character. In this play, Magnus threatens to abdicate his throne rather than being hog-tied by his prime minister by constitutional niceties, then run as a private citizen in an election against said prime minister. Magnus wants to do something meaningful with his life, not just be a symbol - or a cudgel - used by political parties. Prince Charles wants to do something, and I don't believe a minute in the retraction made recently that he compared becoming king to a prison sentence.

The pope's role in a Shaw play remains to be seen after some more careful simmering. He could be Ceasar in Shaw's Ceasar and Cleopatra, or the vast theme behind Back to Methuselah, where Shaw indicts modern society its pretensions and its technological prowess in the face of such poverty and brutality as was witnessed after World War I.

But Pope Francis is Shaw, that famous writer and social activist who refused the Nobel Prize, declined a knighthood from the king and declined twice induction into the king's Order of Merit, stating that merit was a thing bestowed by history, not kings. The no-nonsense Shaw who wrote in a tiny shack and had his ashes spread as fertilizer in his garden. That is Shaw: taking a little and giving as much back as possible.

"I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security," he wrote.


I will argue to the death those who say you can change institutions from within - institutions, especially government types, are insular and conservative and can if so empowered resort to violence to prove their purity. This not only explains governments of the present and past but also those self-appointed committees I am so bored with. But when I see someone on the inside, as it were, breaking up some of the foundation stones I cannot help but admire the handiwork.

The AIDS Ponzie Scheme Carnival Continues another Year

If HIV AIDS is not a ponzie scheme, aren't we justified in thinking it might be?

Right now, a killer fungus threatens to destroy our stock of [Cavendish] bananas, that most common brand of banana in our local stores. An earlier fungus outbreak spread in the 50's. Scientists are more confident than the farmers, reports indicate. Scientists assure us some-such-something will be developed to kill once again this fungal pandemic; they say we've learned a lot since the 50's.

Farming practices, to put it carefully and cautiously, have evolved. Yields have increased. Various pestilences have been mitigated. Now, the ways these things have been done should sometimes make you sick, and they do. The Monsantos of this world have engineered resistant seeds that can withstand all kinds of onslaught, but the effect on the body is besides the point to our business morality. But organic and commercial farmers have also learned new techniques to deal with encroachments onto their crops that have nothing to do with Monsanto.

Medical science has continued to make - again, to put it cautiously - strides. Antibiotics and vaccines have done much to mitigate the side effects of civilization. When curable diseases became least profitable, yuppie drugs, like for hair growth or restlessness or to supplement your ineffective anti-depressants, were developed.

The point is not to laud these achievements as such. Aside from the clear controversies in these so-called advances, science cannot be said to have stopped and stood still over the last 50 or 100 years.

And yet, in the so-called HIV-AIDS field, we have gone from potent poisons like AZT, which killed people in the 80's and 90's, maimed others by destroying their livers and other vital organs, to less potent poisons which have a slower corrosive effect on the body is purported to save. People are still dying, moneys are still being spent on a variety of activities - from the pharmaceuticals inventing another brand of Coca-Cola to the HIV bureaucracy of "counselors" and research "assistants."

But where has this budget produced an advancement except in pharmaceutical companies? Why hasn't anyone convened a congressional inquiry into the fraud of billions spent and very little to show for it? Why are World AIDS Day festivities and "Get Tested" promotionals become our obsession rather than good, old fashioned scientific discovery and cures?

Why 30 years of bullshit?

The disturbing writing on the wall is while HIV drugs are profitable for the drug companies, these drugs are also prohibitively expensive: without insurance not even a middle income person could afford them, let alone the growing numbers of working-class and poor: and I am referring to the working class and poor in the global North, the so-called First World.

As our middle income and mid professional jobs disappear in favor of low-wage service industry and underemployment, who will pay for these drug companies to continue to reap profits with these expensive medications? Will ObamaCare pay for HIV meds for an underpaid WalMart or fast-food worker?

Since we have no functioning civil society in our opulent countries, the nexus of this debate will happen not in a public square but on Wall Street, and, as always, they will construct the message and the morality which will not want to address this mystery virus at all, will blame its victims - the gays, Africans, you know - and no inquiry will be made into the heart of this so-called epidemic - viz, who caused it, why it fails so many established scientific theories, why the Reagan administration unilaterally chose one HIV theory over any others while the scientific community was busy with several hypotheses, etc.

It's Imperialism, stupid

I hear a lot of talk about the environmental movement, about green jobs, opposing fracking, recycling, sustainable energy, renewable energy, clean coal, peak oil.

Some Greenpeace activists may spend seven years in a Russian prison for opposing Russia's oil thirst.

Amy Goodman spent a whole week in Poland at a global environmental conference which seemed to end like all the others: in despair.

But the only ones despairing were the ones who went thinking "this time, this time ..." Structurally, I suspect these conferences are designed to fail, designed to wear away at our hopes and to feed a skepticism. And actually, Russia's iron hand is a sign of things to come - East and West - as more activism tries to surround this unquenchable thirst for oil, gas, and other resources.

It's passed time to change the conversation. The environmental movement needs to stop being the acceptable alternative to what is really plaguing the planet.

The other day, a Facebook ally posed this question: what do you think about the term "social justice"? It was an interesting question, because I can almost remember when this facile term came to be used too widely for its own good: I think in the mid 90's.

I don't like the term now and didn't like it then because it was used to put some distance between its aims and that of socialism. Good cop/Bad cop. Martin vs Malcolm.

The environmental movement needs to get the point. It's imperialism, stupid.

The heart of the issue is development. How is development to be accomplished, whom it will benefit, and who controls its direction.

Imperialism, which no one wants to talk about, did not want to develop the colonies at all, only rape and pillage them. Its aims are no different today. It cannot develop the global South while it continues to support a "global" system which needs to rob, steal, or take for cheap, those things which the global South possesses.

Imperialism is a rapacious, ravenous organism. If it has to foul the waters of some poor country, it will invent a morality to rationalize this pollution; it will also make the people of that poor country seem needy of civilization and at the same time the cause of the misery the West imposes on it.

Or, as Fidel Castro once put it, "They hang us by our necks then criticize us for not breathing."

If it has to foul the water of a poor region within its own territory - a slum, an Indian reservation, an "industrial" area, or a whole state, imperialism will not hesitate to do the exact same crime.

This is the heart of the matter of environmental degradation that continues to plague us right to the present.

Why are they still counting bodies after the hurricane in the Philippines? The environmentalists speak about global warming. The earth is warming. Human civilization may or may not have an effect. But global warming did not make the Philippines a poor country with a wide class stratification and no early warning or evacuation plan.

For about 400 years imperialism promoted itself upon the Philippines - the Spanish crown then the US plutocracy: they were going to raise them up, civilize them, develop them. Some of us have known for a long time this is a lie. The havoc of this hurricane is just another piece of evidence of this lie.

Four hundred years, and nothing to show from it.

The US is still an imperial power. The United Kingdom is still an imperial power. France is still an imperial power. The West is still dependent on extracting the wealth and treasure of the global South for it to be what it is, the monster that it is, cultivating the atrocities it does and making human values out of it.

It is fascinating to hear the current pope speak truths to the lies of these so-called human values.

Nature may or may not be under our influence. But how the wealth and resources are distributed is a task for anti-imperialists. It is a task for people who will call things by their proper names.

Chelsea Manning and the dungeon of our despair

Just moments after being sentenced to a 35-year prison sentence for leaking government crimes and malfeasance to Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pvt 1st Class Bradley Manning, announced she would commence to live her life as a woman.

Maybe it is the chip on my shoulder but I felt the air being sucked out of the room. The Right, of course, has never liked Manning, so their support is not expected. The Left has always shown its dysfunctions more publicly. Witness how the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Pride Committee withdrew considering Manning as Grand Marshall for the Parade earlier this year (but as I have said too many times of that reputed city, all that glistens has never been gold).

Now that Manning has just as publicly declared her gender and that she will begin taking hormones, I imagine much of the Left will simply drop her from their thoughts while she languishes in prison.

How many "I AM CHELSEA MANNING" placards will be see? Time will tell, but history is a guide. We've only just come to liking lesbians and gays, as long as they are devoid of militancy and long deeply to be hetero-normative ... Or is that the chip on my shoulder?

History, at any rate, is also a guide for this conundrum we find ourselves in regarding such topics as sex, gender, and race identities.

We in the Western world - and this includes the non-West where our tentacles have reached - live in a madhouse. I do not mean this metaphorically. Our madhouse is around color and gender identities, and we are crazed about it. This means that our perception of these things are immediately warped, always suspect, and potently volatile. We kill over the stupidest things.

To the strict Western duality, there is Black and there is White. There is Male and there is Female. There is also the Man and there is the Woman. Each must know his [and her] place. Just as there were once mulattoes and quadroons and octoroons, and they had to know their place too.

You are this, or you are that, but if you try some other course you may be lynched.

This duality is about power and maintaining it.

A Patriarchal arrangement with an Old Man God in the sky to whom we must submit as we submit to our husbands and to our kings, and even to our vanguard, must make these distinctions between human drones sharp and few.

As true to a system which affords us Coke or Pepsi, and fewer choices of how to rent and sell ourselves in wage-slavery, it would be stretching hope to think we'd be given broad options in the expression of our so-called identity.

Options would be a threat. Options, simply put, is a means to abolishing the West and its prisons and its morality and its labor system.

I have, for example, read that among many native American groups, the "Two-Spirit" existed while in West African societies, the "Gate-Keeper" thrived.

Modern gay/straight duality thought have placed these phenomena on the LGBTQ team, but this misses the point. The Two-Spirits and the Gate-Keepers weren't fringe subcultures brought out like pets. And it seems while these indigenous cultures had two sexes, they embraced many genders.

They existed as a norm before the West was Won: not as an alternative, not as a "gay lifestyle" but as one of many norms within complex civilizations which had a better relationship with the natural and supernatural world.

Those true civilizations knew what we have lost: we are ourselves expressions of this natural and supernatural world, and this fact confronts the Western claustrophobic one every day. This is why governments and monotheists have waged wars against any expression of difference.

If we had escaped what anthropologist Margaret Mead called, simply, "an accident of history" - that is, us, here and now, enslaved, brutalizing each other, exterminating the ecosystem, fouling the planet, and seeking to spread our plague to galaxies far, far away [and calling it Progress!] - we might still have our civilization and not live in a dungeon of barbarism, guilt, and man/woman duality.

Yes, we got history backwards. Our official texts tell us we are modern and civilized, advanced and developed while our ancestors were primitives. That is a lie. What we really have done is what the Hon George Galloway lectured the US Senate in a not dissimilar context: we have defied evolution and gone from a butterfly and become worms.

In our real civilization, the ones we aren't supposed to know about, people like Manning would not be imprisoned in the binary male-female world: is she a man, or is she a woman, and what do I call ... him? .

I say these things about our false gender choices at some risk of angering my more sympathetic friends and allies on the Left. Because I am skirting dangerously close to criticizing Manning's announcement. Maybe that old chip on my shoulder wonders how civilized cultures, like who embraced the Two-Spirit and the Gate-Keepers, among others, would have nurtured Manning in his youth and allowed that human being to grow and become, period. It was not a Coke and Pepsi world back then. It would have offered the child more ways of being, as normal and as natural as another. It would not have told him, in so many violent ways, "if you are not this you are that."

Are Unions Obsolete (or, If they are not, should they be)?

The relevance of trades-unions is not really a subject to be addressed to the Democratic and Republican Parties. Their hands are not clean. Both the political parties represent first and foremost the interests of the business class - Wall Street and international capital.

These elites have shown their intentions: the class war in the US against unions began in blood shed and continues right to this hour against workers who may work full-time work and be starving.

In fact, that we keep talking in terms of just these two parties, with all the problems we have and the problems building up in front of us on the horizon, would alert an elementary school child.

This toy is broken; and that toy is broken; so I want a new toy. Why are we wondering if Hilary is running in 2016?

But we have become too sophisticated to think with such elementary logic, so we keep turning to these two political parties and a very broken system while our workers and our communities, not by accident but by design, are made less and less viable.

But back to unions. I address this question of their obsolescence to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), International Workers Association (IWA-AIT), Solidarity Federation, Workers Solidarity Alliance, and their "types" and supporters. These unions maintain, at least rhetorically, a militancy and a vibrant pro-worker history. All of them, except the IWW openly embrace anarcho-syndicalism.

For this militancy these unions have - again right to this hour - faced repression and harassment. Note Spain's conservative government and its hounding of CNT organizers.

If you're not familiar with any of these unions you should be. They are not the business unions you are familiar with. Business unions, like the Teamsters, AFL-CIO, etc., cuddle up to the two pro-business political parties.

In an of themselves these business unions are a motivation to put unions in the dustbin of history and end this essay.

Because to whatever extent trades unions ally themselves with elites, with the nation-state, with kings and presidents and corporations, they should be obsolete. They have no use to workers: this is not dogma, but something borne out in fact. Wall Street rallies, workers gets screwed.

The AFL-CIO is not a trades-union of tradition. It and its kind are booster clubs for the Democratic Party, rallying the downtrodden to add legitimacy to corporate elections which make us more downtrodden.

But whether it is a militant trades-union or a business union, they share a similar problem.

The conundrum with trades-unions generally is they organize themselves around workplaces - factories or stores in most cases; or broadly by trades. Historic reasons exist for this.

But our workplaces and our trades are not today what they were in earlier times when trades-unions were organizing. An average worker may change careers - to use that word loosely - four or five times in his or her lifetime.

Added to this conundrum is that throughout modern history elites have so degraded what it means to work that it means nothing at all.

Work today is a task done for a paycheck. That task is rarely open to scrutiny by even militant trades-unions, who are interested in wages and health and safety issues. This is best seen in urban areas, where the chambers of commerce designate as work anything which supports the bottom line - viz, office support staff for the importation of produce from outside areas, other states, or foreign countries.

Not validated are the tasks which would make notoriously unproductive cities less unproductive, more self-sufficient and aligned with the natural world - like reclaiming land to grow food, water reclamation, and meaningful tasks the indigenous populations did for thousands of years without harming the landbase.

But opening up for question an urban metropolis challenges the validity if not viability of our cities. Can our trades-unions do this?

Meaningful work does exist, but it rarely gets done. Can a trades-union, actively organizing a workforce, at the same time open for question the very work that is being done?

Our trades-unions, even our militant ones, seem stuck in an old paradigm where: a worker in a factory is automatically deemed a social benefit; and it is assumed that this worker is employed with some longevity so he or she would have a sustained interest in making improvements.

Both presumptions are false.

Can a movement centered on debauched tasks and unsteady employment, where we move from job to job and care less and less what we do but will it make ends meet, ever be an effective movement?

Or do we need now a broader, social movement, a militant, avowedly anarchist [-syndicalist, -primitivist, -communist, etc] organizing, above and below ground,  of whole communities and across communities?

This is where our work needs to be focused.