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.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
If you are wondering where your child's teachers, counselors, and arts programs are look no further than the US federal police apparatus
Thursday, January 14, 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.
Sunday, January 10, 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.
Friday, January 08, 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.
Tuesday, January 05, 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.
Tuesday, December 29, 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.
Monday, December 07, 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.
Thursday, November 12, 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.
Friday, November 06, 2009
1989 Twenty years of triumphalism and nothing to celebrate
Twenty years ago in November 1989 I had been six months a new graduate from Washington University, moved to San Francisco (on a coin toss, New York City being tails), and landed my first professional job at an international publishing company as a production editor.
Then the Wall came tumbling down and much shifted under my feet, but George Herbert Walker Bush was president, a stammering act one of the Reagan Administration. So while air flowed between the two sides of Berlin and the Bolshevik dream came to a sad end, the US was burdened not only with more of the same, but also a wretched triumphalism as if our sheer will and some green God's grace, we had crushed the red menace.
I owned a TV in 1989, which I watched if I wasn't listening to npr or Pacifica radio. I vividly remember watching one of those sober round table chat shows on public television where one of the white-haired economist cautioned US declaring victory over a Cold War we didn't see ending. He warned that the same things that brought down the USSR and the Warsaw Pact would bring down the US.
Then came the great sucking sounds: Bye bye Peace Dividend! Bye bye union jobs and military bases! Bye bye industrial base and the rationale for subsidizing the middle class as a bulwark against communist ideology. The middle class was never sustainable anyway, something many of them did not know - so they prattle about the poor having children they can not afford as if the state weren't subsidizing theirs - public hospitals, public schools, social services.
The middle class could only be sustained with socialism in policy but never in name.
Then: Bye bye international publishing company!
My graduating class of 1989 was the last that could earn a degree in anything [that publishing company didn't care] and get a decent, white-collar job. While there is still a momentum for the young to go to college or be damned, nothing awaits them except disappointment and debt. Our rulers do nothing about this scandal, and since we are the Masters of the World - the mafia crime-boss of the planet - with no USSR to compete against the poor have been left to their own devices.
Our walls are still firmly up, and Sen. Joe Lieberman one of its most prominent, ruthless, unsavory masons.
I lamented in a previous column how my present employer, the US Dept of Homeland Security, is a growth industry of managers and deputies with high salaries to police - I mean "protect"- us, while teachers are being fired and class sizes are increasing while student services are going the way of Cuba's ethical ration system: history!
That white-haired economist only said more soberly what Fidel Castro was to say in the same months of those earth-moving times, when another eminent historian informed us that history had ended. The leader of Cuba's socialist revolution asked what the US was being so triumphant about, given the sorry state of capitalism not only within the US but every place it had stepped its bloody footprint. Name one place, Fidel challenged, where capitalism had done well.
Twenty years later to the day, we must remember Fidel's admonishment as the US not only exceeds 10% unemployment nationally but also whole regions double that. What have we to celebrate about?
We must also remember that economist, whose words and tone I shall never forget.
The Godfathers of neoliberalism have sufficiently tamed and frightened the poor who are very worried. So our masters give us slogans and give the wealthy billions.
There is no option but a public option and that means a worker's party and socialism.
Then the Wall came tumbling down and much shifted under my feet, but George Herbert Walker Bush was president, a stammering act one of the Reagan Administration. So while air flowed between the two sides of Berlin and the Bolshevik dream came to a sad end, the US was burdened not only with more of the same, but also a wretched triumphalism as if our sheer will and some green God's grace, we had crushed the red menace.
I owned a TV in 1989, which I watched if I wasn't listening to npr or Pacifica radio. I vividly remember watching one of those sober round table chat shows on public television where one of the white-haired economist cautioned US declaring victory over a Cold War we didn't see ending. He warned that the same things that brought down the USSR and the Warsaw Pact would bring down the US.
Then came the great sucking sounds: Bye bye Peace Dividend! Bye bye union jobs and military bases! Bye bye industrial base and the rationale for subsidizing the middle class as a bulwark against communist ideology. The middle class was never sustainable anyway, something many of them did not know - so they prattle about the poor having children they can not afford as if the state weren't subsidizing theirs - public hospitals, public schools, social services.
The middle class could only be sustained with socialism in policy but never in name.
Then: Bye bye international publishing company!
My graduating class of 1989 was the last that could earn a degree in anything [that publishing company didn't care] and get a decent, white-collar job. While there is still a momentum for the young to go to college or be damned, nothing awaits them except disappointment and debt. Our rulers do nothing about this scandal, and since we are the Masters of the World - the mafia crime-boss of the planet - with no USSR to compete against the poor have been left to their own devices.
Our walls are still firmly up, and Sen. Joe Lieberman one of its most prominent, ruthless, unsavory masons.
I lamented in a previous column how my present employer, the US Dept of Homeland Security, is a growth industry of managers and deputies with high salaries to police - I mean "protect"- us, while teachers are being fired and class sizes are increasing while student services are going the way of Cuba's ethical ration system: history!
That white-haired economist only said more soberly what Fidel Castro was to say in the same months of those earth-moving times, when another eminent historian informed us that history had ended. The leader of Cuba's socialist revolution asked what the US was being so triumphant about, given the sorry state of capitalism not only within the US but every place it had stepped its bloody footprint. Name one place, Fidel challenged, where capitalism had done well.
Twenty years later to the day, we must remember Fidel's admonishment as the US not only exceeds 10% unemployment nationally but also whole regions double that. What have we to celebrate about?
We must also remember that economist, whose words and tone I shall never forget.
The Godfathers of neoliberalism have sufficiently tamed and frightened the poor who are very worried. So our masters give us slogans and give the wealthy billions.
There is no option but a public option and that means a worker's party and socialism.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Reflections on a year of living with Obama's change has been a police state
I have been away for awhile, feeling as many Barack Obama supporters must: a bit disappointed to say the least. While I was admittedly not an Obama supporter but voted rather for Ralph Nader, I am equally grim about where this newest Augustus has driven this sorry, dilapidated empire.
Some promises are fulfilled, some broken, some just hot air.
When the Russian Revolution triumphed against the Czarist regime, against feudal power structures against the poor and worker, the Revolution was true to its word in re-organizing the economy and taking the new state firmly out of World War I. The USSR was the most industrializing country in the world while the West was mired in an economic 1930's Depression.
It was punished for keeping this promise to the people. Western countries invaded to re-establish not so much the quaint Czarism but feudalism and its profits. Thankfully, the West's decline had already begun and it couldn't bring down the first socialist revolt.
When the Cuban Revolution triumphed against the US-backed puppet regime, against a similarly feudal power where the best lands and wealth were taken out of the country to prop up the Metropolis, the US sustained a brutal war against it.
Cuba has been punished for 50 years for this insolence in keeping its promise to address the people's needs.
Keeping promises or showing it is a dangerous game.
Of course, many revolutions and dramatic elections passed the 20th century, and many of them deteriorated for myriad reasons into brutalizing the people on behalf of the Western Accountant, the behemoth, the Great Satan (what else would a rational person call such a parasite?). This deterioration was not unassisted by Western machinations - a sanitized way of saying assassinations, upheavals, sowing discord and watching the blood of brothers flow like rivers.
Obama, in as much as his election and Promise might be called Revolutionary, is such a traitor. History does not nuance these things. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was called a traitor ... to his class. Obama is a traitor to his - that is, the working class of his mother and father.
It's a rather dispiriting thing to see a pathetic country that can't produce anything, including decent graduates further lower the bar by saving the banks and screwing the people. It is very dispiriting to peruse job listings and forecast the state of the country.
My current employer, an aviation security arm of the federal government, is bloated with too many managers and hierarchies with inflated salaries. Meanwhile, public education has gone the way of a crackpot invention by your crazy uncle: teachers and staff are being laid off, class sizes increased, services downsized.
Like good Germans, all our managers are being obedient for a perceived, short-term benefit of a paycheck, while in the long term we send what hope we have on a night train headed for a death camp.
Could this be a civilization on the make, ready for a 21st century future or a police-slave state being solidified? Unbeknown the public at large, the federal government is growing the security field with managers and inspectors whose ultimate purpose is to tell us the sky is falling.
The state will need these teams of federal police when the only work available is part-time language tutors for autistic children, and the worker cannot pay rent.
I have heard some predictably discouraging comments from our "managers" - who are really overseers disciplining a plantation of workers, but it drives one to hopelessness to hear how deeply or wage-slaves have internalized these lessons.
And why not? They have had no teachers. They have had no history. They are secured in their foreclosed homes and unemployment with growing lists of jobs in the federal security sector, while the teachers of our young and young-adult can't get a teacher, counselor, school psychologist.
President Obama has done absolutely nothing to turn this ship away from the precipice. Not only has history shown a tough road for promise keepers, but also Obama is the Lehman Brothers Man. This would make him more a scoundrel than a coward. The failing mid-term score I gave him must be a demotion now. Send this man back to the Illinois legislature where he can do no harm.
For more info: My Socialism: Our present poverty crisis (2006) * Examiner Homepage
Some promises are fulfilled, some broken, some just hot air.
When the Russian Revolution triumphed against the Czarist regime, against feudal power structures against the poor and worker, the Revolution was true to its word in re-organizing the economy and taking the new state firmly out of World War I. The USSR was the most industrializing country in the world while the West was mired in an economic 1930's Depression.
It was punished for keeping this promise to the people. Western countries invaded to re-establish not so much the quaint Czarism but feudalism and its profits. Thankfully, the West's decline had already begun and it couldn't bring down the first socialist revolt.
When the Cuban Revolution triumphed against the US-backed puppet regime, against a similarly feudal power where the best lands and wealth were taken out of the country to prop up the Metropolis, the US sustained a brutal war against it.
Cuba has been punished for 50 years for this insolence in keeping its promise to address the people's needs.
Keeping promises or showing it is a dangerous game.
Of course, many revolutions and dramatic elections passed the 20th century, and many of them deteriorated for myriad reasons into brutalizing the people on behalf of the Western Accountant, the behemoth, the Great Satan (what else would a rational person call such a parasite?). This deterioration was not unassisted by Western machinations - a sanitized way of saying assassinations, upheavals, sowing discord and watching the blood of brothers flow like rivers.
Obama, in as much as his election and Promise might be called Revolutionary, is such a traitor. History does not nuance these things. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was called a traitor ... to his class. Obama is a traitor to his - that is, the working class of his mother and father.
It's a rather dispiriting thing to see a pathetic country that can't produce anything, including decent graduates further lower the bar by saving the banks and screwing the people. It is very dispiriting to peruse job listings and forecast the state of the country.
My current employer, an aviation security arm of the federal government, is bloated with too many managers and hierarchies with inflated salaries. Meanwhile, public education has gone the way of a crackpot invention by your crazy uncle: teachers and staff are being laid off, class sizes increased, services downsized.
Like good Germans, all our managers are being obedient for a perceived, short-term benefit of a paycheck, while in the long term we send what hope we have on a night train headed for a death camp.
Could this be a civilization on the make, ready for a 21st century future or a police-slave state being solidified? Unbeknown the public at large, the federal government is growing the security field with managers and inspectors whose ultimate purpose is to tell us the sky is falling.
The state will need these teams of federal police when the only work available is part-time language tutors for autistic children, and the worker cannot pay rent.
I have heard some predictably discouraging comments from our "managers" - who are really overseers disciplining a plantation of workers, but it drives one to hopelessness to hear how deeply or wage-slaves have internalized these lessons.
And why not? They have had no teachers. They have had no history. They are secured in their foreclosed homes and unemployment with growing lists of jobs in the federal security sector, while the teachers of our young and young-adult can't get a teacher, counselor, school psychologist.
President Obama has done absolutely nothing to turn this ship away from the precipice. Not only has history shown a tough road for promise keepers, but also Obama is the Lehman Brothers Man. This would make him more a scoundrel than a coward. The failing mid-term score I gave him must be a demotion now. Send this man back to the Illinois legislature where he can do no harm.
For more info: My Socialism: Our present poverty crisis (2006) * Examiner Homepage
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Westminster Ca school dstrict official leads the charge to keep US in the Dark Ages
While the Pope conspires to "poach" good Anglicans back into the Roman Catholic Church, leaving both the head of the Anglican communion, Rowan Williams, and the head of the Church of England, Queen Elizabeth II, speechless, another religious, Dark-Ages era battle looms on this side of the pond.
Westminster, Ca., is not only proving to be a small enclave of Orange County but full of small minds. Or, at least one: Judy Ahrens, a school official, has started a campaign, in 2009, to ban a Maya Angelou classic, "I Know Why the caged Bird Sings." Why? Because Angelou's autobiographical book details the rape that left her from speaking for a few years.
Bernard Shaw wrote that while the soldier says war is hell, we yet say it is a sin. And not even the good, small people of Westminster have started this campaign against the sin of war, particularly as started from lie upon lie [another sin, n'est-ce que pas?]
But we are talking, again, about Orange County, honorary member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [aka, The Inquisition] in the tarnishing state of California.
Gratuitous carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan of the nation's young in desert tombs is implicitly OK. That it be continued by the Conundrum in Chief, Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Laureate, should tell us who did what in the parlor and with which weapon.
But this continues to be besdies the point. Only off-the-grid weirdos, like San Francisco, makes stands against war crimes and give LGBTs rights.
A tiny mind in tiny Westminster takes the rostrum on behalf of our children's "innocence" to ban a book.
That such claptrap is still suffered, that this loony isn't responded to like the Black man who appeared at the LA City Council dressed in Klansman regalia, says something about the peculiar ghosts of this young nation.
The Dark Ages were hearkened precisely by such acts as the burning of libraries by the nominally "Christian" warriors.
Westminster, Ca., is not only proving to be a small enclave of Orange County but full of small minds. Or, at least one: Judy Ahrens, a school official, has started a campaign, in 2009, to ban a Maya Angelou classic, "I Know Why the caged Bird Sings." Why? Because Angelou's autobiographical book details the rape that left her from speaking for a few years.
Bernard Shaw wrote that while the soldier says war is hell, we yet say it is a sin. And not even the good, small people of Westminster have started this campaign against the sin of war, particularly as started from lie upon lie [another sin, n'est-ce que pas?]
But we are talking, again, about Orange County, honorary member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [aka, The Inquisition] in the tarnishing state of California.
Gratuitous carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan of the nation's young in desert tombs is implicitly OK. That it be continued by the Conundrum in Chief, Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Laureate, should tell us who did what in the parlor and with which weapon.
But this continues to be besdies the point. Only off-the-grid weirdos, like San Francisco, makes stands against war crimes and give LGBTs rights.
A tiny mind in tiny Westminster takes the rostrum on behalf of our children's "innocence" to ban a book.
That such claptrap is still suffered, that this loony isn't responded to like the Black man who appeared at the LA City Council dressed in Klansman regalia, says something about the peculiar ghosts of this young nation.
The Dark Ages were hearkened precisely by such acts as the burning of libraries by the nominally "Christian" warriors.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
National Equality Farce on Washington Oct 10
Equality or liberation? This weekend LGBT activists will stage a National Equality March and continue their demand to be equal to those heterosexuals so unimaginative as to continue to feudal wedding rites.
Of course, Martin's March on Washington comes to mind, an event much celebrated in our national discourse today but critiqued by leftists of the day and maligned by then-Nation of Islam spokesman, Malcolm X, as the "Farce on Washington" for its very careful stage management so not to upset the power structure. Further, Bayard Rustin was dis-invited and James Baldwin kept from view.
In seriousness, any people demanding rights of their government is not a laughing matter or a thing to be mocked. I do not. Neither should the love and partnership decisions between two people.
But anywhere else in the Dark Corners of the world such a march would be proof positive of a foreign government's worthiness of US sanctions and brow-beating. Secy of State Hillary Clinton assures us she will press the cause of human rights with her upcoming meeting with the Chinese: if only she's turn that mouthpiece of hers toward her homeland. It might have more effect since the Chinese are about ready to excavate us sorry selves and pair us with Lucy the missing link in a museum.
By our government continuing to brow-beat the dark world, which finds us fairly irrelevant, while neglecting rights issues at home puts them on the same pedestal as Bull Connor, chief law enforcer of the Old Ways. No problem here: just some outsiders stirring up trouble!
The LGBTQ community does suffer discrimination. Better than take their case to Washington, the seat of our national problems, let them take their march and a petition to the UN and World Court for a hearing. The World Court, after all, found against the US in what it ruled its terrorist attacks against Nicaragua.
But only oppressed people of those aforementioned Dark Corners do such insolent things because their own governments are unresponsive at best; lethal at worst, and for which these activists are given prizes by the former imperial powers. More jokes.
I write as a queer socialist, a former Queer Nation member, not a baroque suburban "Gay American" whose goal is to be just like the Joneses. They aren't normal, and equating myself to that wretched state would be a step down into mental illness. Demanding the Congress of Go-Slows and Do-Nothings to extend me an equal status to the Joneses is ... peculiar. But so are the poor who think that hard work and thriftiness will raise them into the 1% wealth owners.
So, why? Americans it has been said are a people without a history. This is rather cliche at this point. But the serious consequence of this is their firm belief that rights come from government - that every liberty they enjoy, from freedom from chattel slavery to the eight-hour work day to votes for women, end to child labor, have come from government waking up one frosty morning and melting the ice off the cherry blossoms with its warm heart.
LGBTQ liberation is social and economic liberation, and it demands simply universal health care, guaranteed housing, guaranteed income, publicly funded education, from kindergarten through college. Some LGBTQ activists speak about the many rights extended to married couples, and unimaginatively think the route to these rights is to extend an exclusive system to middle-class LGBTQ's. So not only do they want to emulate straight marriage but also the class stratification of capitalist society.
Of course, Martin's March on Washington comes to mind, an event much celebrated in our national discourse today but critiqued by leftists of the day and maligned by then-Nation of Islam spokesman, Malcolm X, as the "Farce on Washington" for its very careful stage management so not to upset the power structure. Further, Bayard Rustin was dis-invited and James Baldwin kept from view.
In seriousness, any people demanding rights of their government is not a laughing matter or a thing to be mocked. I do not. Neither should the love and partnership decisions between two people.
But anywhere else in the Dark Corners of the world such a march would be proof positive of a foreign government's worthiness of US sanctions and brow-beating. Secy of State Hillary Clinton assures us she will press the cause of human rights with her upcoming meeting with the Chinese: if only she's turn that mouthpiece of hers toward her homeland. It might have more effect since the Chinese are about ready to excavate us sorry selves and pair us with Lucy the missing link in a museum.
By our government continuing to brow-beat the dark world, which finds us fairly irrelevant, while neglecting rights issues at home puts them on the same pedestal as Bull Connor, chief law enforcer of the Old Ways. No problem here: just some outsiders stirring up trouble!
The LGBTQ community does suffer discrimination. Better than take their case to Washington, the seat of our national problems, let them take their march and a petition to the UN and World Court for a hearing. The World Court, after all, found against the US in what it ruled its terrorist attacks against Nicaragua.
But only oppressed people of those aforementioned Dark Corners do such insolent things because their own governments are unresponsive at best; lethal at worst, and for which these activists are given prizes by the former imperial powers. More jokes.
I write as a queer socialist, a former Queer Nation member, not a baroque suburban "Gay American" whose goal is to be just like the Joneses. They aren't normal, and equating myself to that wretched state would be a step down into mental illness. Demanding the Congress of Go-Slows and Do-Nothings to extend me an equal status to the Joneses is ... peculiar. But so are the poor who think that hard work and thriftiness will raise them into the 1% wealth owners.
So, why? Americans it has been said are a people without a history. This is rather cliche at this point. But the serious consequence of this is their firm belief that rights come from government - that every liberty they enjoy, from freedom from chattel slavery to the eight-hour work day to votes for women, end to child labor, have come from government waking up one frosty morning and melting the ice off the cherry blossoms with its warm heart.
LGBTQ liberation is social and economic liberation, and it demands simply universal health care, guaranteed housing, guaranteed income, publicly funded education, from kindergarten through college. Some LGBTQ activists speak about the many rights extended to married couples, and unimaginatively think the route to these rights is to extend an exclusive system to middle-class LGBTQ's. So not only do they want to emulate straight marriage but also the class stratification of capitalist society.
Friday, October 02, 2009
Is a socially just civilization possible?
Despite the real elation behind the Barack Obama presidential victory, the US has installed the Goldman-Sachs candidate to run the country: old wine in new bottles. Progressive historians will look back at this and hopefully note the real elation should be placed at the huge, diverse coalition that worked to elect this man, and not the man himself, who presently ponders how to follow the errors of the British and Russians by digging deeper in the Afghan desert. Or, the US's own error in Southeast Asia.
OK, I'm feeling pessimistic. So I've been submerging myself in my bottle-of-choice: the Pacific Ocean and my penchant for rough-water swimming. It's during these swims I can exercise my body and exorcise a few demons. Obama is not a demon. He first deeply impressed me in the LOGO channel debates in 2008, where he alone struck me as someone who spoke the LGBT language, even more than my personal favorite, Rep. Dennis Kucinich. I thought someone so versed, so exposed to the complexities of the US community was better than the parochial men of our past.
But in the several months of the Obama Administration, fair and balanced is grossly skewed to the ruling, corporate elite and not the workers, the poor, the disabled, LGBTQ community, and what Prof. Ogbe called "involuntary immigrants" - Black and Brown communities. Commentators enchant about a second Camelot, straining comparisons with John Kennedy, but this man is more comparable to Lyndon B Johnson, whose Great Society architecture was seriously undermined by our evil war against Vietnam and a federal police run by J. Edgar Hoover.
I am not a Christian but the cards dealt me were that I was born in a Christian country, and it behooves anyone so unfortunate to know the lingua franca of its master class. Yes, Christianity is essentially a rationale, a poor excuse for the Dark Age, the Inquisition, and massive ethnic cleansings. Still, it's better to know your enemy and his "good news." So on a recent swim some words from the Old Testament came to mind, from Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities."
It would be the height of arrogance to think I am the first to present a certain angle on, say, capitalism or the public option or the insidious ruling class. Like flesh, all is recycled. Marx inspired Henry George, and it was this American author of POVERTY & PROGRESS who convinced a young George Bernard Shaw to become a socialist.
At my current job, I have gotten my fill at seeing coworkers sitting on the morning shuttle deep in the pages of their Holy Bible. In private conversations, I hear them quoting passages to one another. I hear them citing with academic precision those men supposed to be the followers of the Jewish teacher who has been appropriated as a Christian prophet.
No one quotes Karl Marx. Marx being either a Hollywood comedian or an Unknown, I may see him cited only in my online life, in discussion groups of the left, progressive, and socialist/communist persuasion. Our prophets: Lenin, Stalin, the Fabian Society, CLR James, or Walter Rodney, George Bernard Shaw or Annie Besant, Emma Goldman or Rosa Luxemburg. Fidel and Che. Poor Angela Davis is not even reduced to being an iconic Afro; just another unknown.
Nearly 2,000 years of Christian doctrine and maybe 200 of communism, and where has it got us except feeling a deep, false sense of satisfaction? Where's the progress?
Is knowledge really power? History proves that in brittle minds knowledge is equal to the ashes of the burned libraries of the Dark Ages, blowin' in the wind.
What have these opposing doctrines, thoroughly studied, committed to memory, inspiring murder and revolution, brought to the final analysis of human psychology? Yes, the Christian doctrine, as it is so construed, stands opposed to communism, as it so constructed. This is not to say Jesus is at issue: I have said again and again that Jesus was not a Christian but a rabbinical social justice, communist hero.
Are human beings, Shaw queried, hopelessly depraved? He said we are certainly lazy, as we have not dared attempt to implement the Jesus Program, which would more likely be found in those ancient synagogues of East Africa, which predate Jesus, than in the palace at the Vatican. But why bother with history?!
And Marx or Marxist-Leninism or Stalinism or the Fabian Society's parliamentary socialism? The first successful socialist revolution was invaded by the Western powers and arguably not allowed to succeed or fail on its own merits. Today, Cuba is held up as further proof of the failure of communism, but to me it only proves the stubborn lengths to which the West will go to starve a whole aspiring people who want to re-order the economic order. Tropical Communism has not failed; it has never been allowed to flourish.
So communism as written by its Framers and the admonishments as spoken by Jesus, while they seem to be rigorously studied - you may see me with my worn copy of Fidel's speeches sitting next to a coworker with his worn Bible - neither civilization has been achieved.
If the US weren't on its deathbed - and it is - we could go another 200 years in this Dark Age. I do not presume its disintegration will hearken a Golden Age any more than the demise of the USSR ... for, as the Book says, there is nothing new under the sun.
OK, I'm feeling pessimistic. So I've been submerging myself in my bottle-of-choice: the Pacific Ocean and my penchant for rough-water swimming. It's during these swims I can exercise my body and exorcise a few demons. Obama is not a demon. He first deeply impressed me in the LOGO channel debates in 2008, where he alone struck me as someone who spoke the LGBT language, even more than my personal favorite, Rep. Dennis Kucinich. I thought someone so versed, so exposed to the complexities of the US community was better than the parochial men of our past.
But in the several months of the Obama Administration, fair and balanced is grossly skewed to the ruling, corporate elite and not the workers, the poor, the disabled, LGBTQ community, and what Prof. Ogbe called "involuntary immigrants" - Black and Brown communities. Commentators enchant about a second Camelot, straining comparisons with John Kennedy, but this man is more comparable to Lyndon B Johnson, whose Great Society architecture was seriously undermined by our evil war against Vietnam and a federal police run by J. Edgar Hoover.
I am not a Christian but the cards dealt me were that I was born in a Christian country, and it behooves anyone so unfortunate to know the lingua franca of its master class. Yes, Christianity is essentially a rationale, a poor excuse for the Dark Age, the Inquisition, and massive ethnic cleansings. Still, it's better to know your enemy and his "good news." So on a recent swim some words from the Old Testament came to mind, from Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities."
It would be the height of arrogance to think I am the first to present a certain angle on, say, capitalism or the public option or the insidious ruling class. Like flesh, all is recycled. Marx inspired Henry George, and it was this American author of POVERTY & PROGRESS who convinced a young George Bernard Shaw to become a socialist.
At my current job, I have gotten my fill at seeing coworkers sitting on the morning shuttle deep in the pages of their Holy Bible. In private conversations, I hear them quoting passages to one another. I hear them citing with academic precision those men supposed to be the followers of the Jewish teacher who has been appropriated as a Christian prophet.
No one quotes Karl Marx. Marx being either a Hollywood comedian or an Unknown, I may see him cited only in my online life, in discussion groups of the left, progressive, and socialist/communist persuasion. Our prophets: Lenin, Stalin, the Fabian Society, CLR James, or Walter Rodney, George Bernard Shaw or Annie Besant, Emma Goldman or Rosa Luxemburg. Fidel and Che. Poor Angela Davis is not even reduced to being an iconic Afro; just another unknown.
Nearly 2,000 years of Christian doctrine and maybe 200 of communism, and where has it got us except feeling a deep, false sense of satisfaction? Where's the progress?
Is knowledge really power? History proves that in brittle minds knowledge is equal to the ashes of the burned libraries of the Dark Ages, blowin' in the wind.
What have these opposing doctrines, thoroughly studied, committed to memory, inspiring murder and revolution, brought to the final analysis of human psychology? Yes, the Christian doctrine, as it is so construed, stands opposed to communism, as it so constructed. This is not to say Jesus is at issue: I have said again and again that Jesus was not a Christian but a rabbinical social justice, communist hero.
Are human beings, Shaw queried, hopelessly depraved? He said we are certainly lazy, as we have not dared attempt to implement the Jesus Program, which would more likely be found in those ancient synagogues of East Africa, which predate Jesus, than in the palace at the Vatican. But why bother with history?!
And Marx or Marxist-Leninism or Stalinism or the Fabian Society's parliamentary socialism? The first successful socialist revolution was invaded by the Western powers and arguably not allowed to succeed or fail on its own merits. Today, Cuba is held up as further proof of the failure of communism, but to me it only proves the stubborn lengths to which the West will go to starve a whole aspiring people who want to re-order the economic order. Tropical Communism has not failed; it has never been allowed to flourish.
So communism as written by its Framers and the admonishments as spoken by Jesus, while they seem to be rigorously studied - you may see me with my worn copy of Fidel's speeches sitting next to a coworker with his worn Bible - neither civilization has been achieved.
If the US weren't on its deathbed - and it is - we could go another 200 years in this Dark Age. I do not presume its disintegration will hearken a Golden Age any more than the demise of the USSR ... for, as the Book says, there is nothing new under the sun.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
An HIV vaccine raises more questions than it answers
I admit for more of my adult life I was a hardcore HIV dissident than not. Only in the last few years have I "fair and balanced" my views to complement them with Western Medicine. I have not thrown the dissident baby out with the bathwater. Western Medicine is still part and parcel to our corporate establishment, which is why - shamefully - poor communities within the West and poor countries of the Third World see deaths by easily preventable means were they able to access medicines.
So I do not rejoice too quickly at the prospect of a vaccine.
Adding to this skepticism, news reports point to the uniqueness of Thai HIV. I remember on one of my many HIV tests in the 90's, the pamphleteer [since a pamphlet was the extent of their HIV education] asked me if I had had sex with any Brazilians in the prior 6 months. I scoffed, and the pamphleteer told me to my surprise Brazil has its own special HIV.
Again, should this so-called vaccine be produced, I fear the poor communities and poor countries, like Brazil and Thailand, will be left, business as usual, to die from lack of access to the modern technology of available medicines because they are poor and structurally kept poor. We see this in Africa every day while the West wrings its hands with operatic majesty.
Second, something many dissidents queried to deaf ears a generation ago was: if such a vaccine for HIV is ever successfully created and administered, the recipient will then test POSITIVE for HIV. Since, until the coming of the human immunodeficiency virus, the presence of antibodies in the body was thought to be a good sign, a sign the body had mounted a counter attack on an imbalance.
I say again: imbalance. Our bodies are full of microbes, and despite the Western fetish for sanitizing and killing 99.9% germs, we won't live and live well if such a dream came true. Thank the gods we are fundamentally backwards.
With HIV, a positive antibody was a scourge, rightly or wrongly. Will a positive result from a purported vaccine be different?
Third, as Commerce is the West's True Religion, US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher changed the rules for private capital to access medical research and profit from it. These rules were changed at the exact time HIV was "discovered." A toxic, poisonous medicine called AZT brought back from its lethal failures in the 1960's to kill - err, I mean treat - thousands of gay men, killing many. More medicines followed: arguably life-saving medicines, less toxic but not without consequences.
Today, AZT in its pure form is once again shelved until a future generation with no sense of witch doctoring will take it for baldness and/or chronic unease about a job whose wage is low and provides no health benefit.
Since, the Reagan-Thatcher reform, there is no end to the invention of Yuppie conditions for which there is a pill, if only you talk to your doctor!
I would hope that universal, single-payer health care - the public option - would wipe the grins off pharmaceutical executives, since saving lives and treating the masses will be a priority over Big Pharm's only mandate: its fealty to the True Religion, commerce. Big Pharm is not empaneled to save the poor, reach the needy, but rather to make quarterly profits for its shareholders.
You want to see a Death Panel, look to the boardrooms of the pharmaceutical industry.
HIV is a scourge, affecting hundreds of millions. I have lost dear friends and comrades from it and from our official adherence to Commerce that denied them health care and housing. HIV is also a psychological scourge, implanted by Pres. Reagan's deafening silence while hundreds died, and pinning a truly scarlet letter on the breast of many warriors, adult and child (Ryan White's name flows like a song from our lips today, but who remembers when that child was hounded from his school?!)
A vaccine for HIV? I sincerely hope we can treat all preventable illness and launch investigations to prevent the mysterious ones, like Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer's, ALS, ... and breast cancer in women. But I believe as a socialist the first step to this is a vaccine for modern capitalism.
- This essay is dedicated to Martin Llambelis (Baba Funke), who would have celebrated a birthday today.
For more information:
Dr. Peter Duesberg's site and his book INVENTING THE AIDS VIRUS
Celia Farber's SERIOUS ADVERSE EVENTS
Celia Farber's article in Harper's magazine.
HIV vaccine reduces infection [BBC] * Researchers reports AIDS vaccine success [LA Times]
So I do not rejoice too quickly at the prospect of a vaccine.
Adding to this skepticism, news reports point to the uniqueness of Thai HIV. I remember on one of my many HIV tests in the 90's, the pamphleteer [since a pamphlet was the extent of their HIV education] asked me if I had had sex with any Brazilians in the prior 6 months. I scoffed, and the pamphleteer told me to my surprise Brazil has its own special HIV.
Again, should this so-called vaccine be produced, I fear the poor communities and poor countries, like Brazil and Thailand, will be left, business as usual, to die from lack of access to the modern technology of available medicines because they are poor and structurally kept poor. We see this in Africa every day while the West wrings its hands with operatic majesty.
Second, something many dissidents queried to deaf ears a generation ago was: if such a vaccine for HIV is ever successfully created and administered, the recipient will then test POSITIVE for HIV. Since, until the coming of the human immunodeficiency virus, the presence of antibodies in the body was thought to be a good sign, a sign the body had mounted a counter attack on an imbalance.
I say again: imbalance. Our bodies are full of microbes, and despite the Western fetish for sanitizing and killing 99.9% germs, we won't live and live well if such a dream came true. Thank the gods we are fundamentally backwards.
With HIV, a positive antibody was a scourge, rightly or wrongly. Will a positive result from a purported vaccine be different?
Third, as Commerce is the West's True Religion, US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher changed the rules for private capital to access medical research and profit from it. These rules were changed at the exact time HIV was "discovered." A toxic, poisonous medicine called AZT brought back from its lethal failures in the 1960's to kill - err, I mean treat - thousands of gay men, killing many. More medicines followed: arguably life-saving medicines, less toxic but not without consequences.
Today, AZT in its pure form is once again shelved until a future generation with no sense of witch doctoring will take it for baldness and/or chronic unease about a job whose wage is low and provides no health benefit.
Since, the Reagan-Thatcher reform, there is no end to the invention of Yuppie conditions for which there is a pill, if only you talk to your doctor!
I would hope that universal, single-payer health care - the public option - would wipe the grins off pharmaceutical executives, since saving lives and treating the masses will be a priority over Big Pharm's only mandate: its fealty to the True Religion, commerce. Big Pharm is not empaneled to save the poor, reach the needy, but rather to make quarterly profits for its shareholders.
You want to see a Death Panel, look to the boardrooms of the pharmaceutical industry.
HIV is a scourge, affecting hundreds of millions. I have lost dear friends and comrades from it and from our official adherence to Commerce that denied them health care and housing. HIV is also a psychological scourge, implanted by Pres. Reagan's deafening silence while hundreds died, and pinning a truly scarlet letter on the breast of many warriors, adult and child (Ryan White's name flows like a song from our lips today, but who remembers when that child was hounded from his school?!)
A vaccine for HIV? I sincerely hope we can treat all preventable illness and launch investigations to prevent the mysterious ones, like Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer's, ALS, ... and breast cancer in women. But I believe as a socialist the first step to this is a vaccine for modern capitalism.
- This essay is dedicated to Martin Llambelis (Baba Funke), who would have celebrated a birthday today.
For more information:
Dr. Peter Duesberg's site and his book INVENTING THE AIDS VIRUS
Celia Farber's SERIOUS ADVERSE EVENTS
Celia Farber's article in Harper's magazine.
HIV vaccine reduces infection [BBC] * Researchers reports AIDS vaccine success [LA Times]
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
It is time to break up the Democratic Party
While the DiVinci Code's Dan Brown is on the task to uncover national secrets, he might expose the one that has kept the Democratic Party together. It is not so much a big tent as it is a sprawling concentration camp of all sorts of candidates for a eugenicist's social purification campaign: yes, of course, Jews; yes, of course, LGBTQs; yes, of course, Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, Asians ... the poor, single mothers, single fathers, grandparent/guardians, the elderly, the disabled, felons.
But the inmates don't run this camp. We are mistreated. The camp is run by Lehman Brothers and its surviving money-changers. They have most cynically gathered us together, like an arranged marriage made in the Dark Ages.
I am truly curious what drug has been put in the water supply to keep these inmates under the throes of these madmen of Commerce - white, blue eyed ones, according to a rather frank president of Brasil.
In 1984, the federal government dismantled the iconic Ma Bell - aka, AT&T, in an anti-trust assault on bringing free enterprise, commerce, and profit opportunities to the nation. These three are the hidden holy trinity of the United States of America. I await Brown's made-for-TV narrative of the nation's true religion.
But more: I hope the federal government will do to the Democratic Party what it did over a generation ago to Ma Bell: break it up.
Pres. Obama's recent rations to the camp inmates was his continuation of the antiquated blockade against Cuba. There has been plenty other poison: slapping the LGBT community in the face by defending the Defense of Marriage Act. He cleverly employed the term "universal health care," but did not mean universal health care but rather more reforms, more mandates, then the public option, which he is rather quickly taking off the table. He began his first week in the White House by bombing soft targets in the Mideast war.
He is, in short, an effective and competent head of a capitalist party.
Thinking of Pres da Silva's white, blue eyeds who caused the financial crisis, Obama seems bent on channeling those of his white ancestors in his treaty-making skills. Of the 300-odd treaties made with the various AmerIndian nations, the white man broke them all. All. Obama continues this infamous record.
Rather than suffer the irritation of watching Obama continue to break promises, as recent democrats have been wont to do, let him break away and lead a party of wanna-be progressives who make touchy-feely commercials, and steel your money, water rights, land rights, and bomb your soft-targeted neighborhoods. Much of the agony suffered by the working class right now was neatly set up not by Richard M Nixon but by William "Welfare Reform" Clinton, a presidency which literally drove me from this country in an unsuccessful and sloppy attempt to live exotically abroad.
Obama can have his own party, with Bill and Hillary. Ralph Nader perhaps another. Dennis Kucinich another. Cynthia McKinney her constituents. US Senator Olympia Snow might find better lodgings than the present Republican Party. US Senator Bernard Sanders can finally admit to being a socialist, because along with the Democratic Party there will be a Socialist Party, a Socialist Workers Party, a Socialist Labor Party, a Democratic Socialist Party, led by Cornell West and Barbara Ehrenreich.
One would hope this break up would not follow the course of the scattered AT&T, which has been reunited, or those disparate political parties go the course of the UK's New Labour in making a deep and gracious bow to the Iron Lady and taking public ownership off its platform.
The US needs a socialist, worker party, and it will never have one in this internment camp.
For more info: Socialist Party USA * Socialist Labor Party * Peace & Freedom Party * Party for Socialism & Liberation * Revolutionary Communist Party * Democratic Socialists of America
But the inmates don't run this camp. We are mistreated. The camp is run by Lehman Brothers and its surviving money-changers. They have most cynically gathered us together, like an arranged marriage made in the Dark Ages.
I am truly curious what drug has been put in the water supply to keep these inmates under the throes of these madmen of Commerce - white, blue eyed ones, according to a rather frank president of Brasil.
In 1984, the federal government dismantled the iconic Ma Bell - aka, AT&T, in an anti-trust assault on bringing free enterprise, commerce, and profit opportunities to the nation. These three are the hidden holy trinity of the United States of America. I await Brown's made-for-TV narrative of the nation's true religion.
But more: I hope the federal government will do to the Democratic Party what it did over a generation ago to Ma Bell: break it up.
Pres. Obama's recent rations to the camp inmates was his continuation of the antiquated blockade against Cuba. There has been plenty other poison: slapping the LGBT community in the face by defending the Defense of Marriage Act. He cleverly employed the term "universal health care," but did not mean universal health care but rather more reforms, more mandates, then the public option, which he is rather quickly taking off the table. He began his first week in the White House by bombing soft targets in the Mideast war.
He is, in short, an effective and competent head of a capitalist party.
Thinking of Pres da Silva's white, blue eyeds who caused the financial crisis, Obama seems bent on channeling those of his white ancestors in his treaty-making skills. Of the 300-odd treaties made with the various AmerIndian nations, the white man broke them all. All. Obama continues this infamous record.
Rather than suffer the irritation of watching Obama continue to break promises, as recent democrats have been wont to do, let him break away and lead a party of wanna-be progressives who make touchy-feely commercials, and steel your money, water rights, land rights, and bomb your soft-targeted neighborhoods. Much of the agony suffered by the working class right now was neatly set up not by Richard M Nixon but by William "Welfare Reform" Clinton, a presidency which literally drove me from this country in an unsuccessful and sloppy attempt to live exotically abroad.
Obama can have his own party, with Bill and Hillary. Ralph Nader perhaps another. Dennis Kucinich another. Cynthia McKinney her constituents. US Senator Olympia Snow might find better lodgings than the present Republican Party. US Senator Bernard Sanders can finally admit to being a socialist, because along with the Democratic Party there will be a Socialist Party, a Socialist Workers Party, a Socialist Labor Party, a Democratic Socialist Party, led by Cornell West and Barbara Ehrenreich.
One would hope this break up would not follow the course of the scattered AT&T, which has been reunited, or those disparate political parties go the course of the UK's New Labour in making a deep and gracious bow to the Iron Lady and taking public ownership off its platform.
The US needs a socialist, worker party, and it will never have one in this internment camp.
For more info: Socialist Party USA * Socialist Labor Party * Peace & Freedom Party * Party for Socialism & Liberation * Revolutionary Communist Party * Democratic Socialists of America
Monday, September 14, 2009
Obama sticks the middle finger to his base and keeps US blockade against Cuba
Barack Obama defied the odds and with a pertinent message to a broad, liberal and progressive base, was elected president. But what's in a message? One must be as good as any other: or so it would seem this increasingly mediocre creature, President Obama.
Liar? Maybe. Fraud? Hmmm. Yes.
I may be far to the left of Obama, embrace socialism while he embraces the Lehman Brothers. But that broad, liberal and progressive base that cast their vote for him, staunch Democrats, Independents, and Undecideds, are bewildered.
While as candiiate Obama he made such decent overtures and employed rational rhetoric when it comes to US relations with Revolution Cuba, stated he would be willing to sit down with the Cuban government, as president he has answered the left's curiosity by ... keeping the blockade firmly in place. And he has done so sounding eerily like George W Bush, another mediocre creature.
Does the country deserve this? Given the excessive self-fascination one sees ad nauseum on the social networking sites, yes: we do deserve this swamp. One message is as good as any other; no bland daily deed deserves to go unposted.
Obama has already earned an F-grade on his progress report: the war/occupation, health care, the economy, LGBT rights (audaciously he supported Defense of Marriage Act). Like a lazy student he has turned his F-grade into an academic probation, numbering the days we will further watch one of his staged theatrical pieces. His first several months are are as disturbing and unremarkable as the first months of his predecessor: remember, oldies? Those dark, impotent months before 9/11?
With Cuba, he has thrown bloody red meat to the Miami Mafia of Cubans, wretchedly anti-Castro to the point they would starve the island's 11 million workers to take pot-shots at Fidel and Raul. This should not surprise us, since this same Mafia didn't care about the workers before the Revolution - backed death squads and torture and disappearances, and did so with the vital help of the US empire.
Gloria Estefan, a prominent anticastrista who refuses to sing in Cuba until there is democracy in her Cuban homeland, is the daughter of a bad gene pool which served the dictator/murderer/thug, Fulgencio Batista, who staged a coups d'etat in 1952 and locked up the Castro brothers. Yet she has the nerve to speak on behalf of democracy!
With that broad base of liberal and progressives, Obama has thrown what? LGBT government employees may share benefits. This is such a pedestrian, shallow, cynical use of his clout.
This man hasn't an idea in his head: that's becoming clear. He deeply impressed me on LGBT issues, struck me as a man with a grasp of the advanced education he has had. But this is very different from having a Mission, a Vision.
At this writing, Obama is shelving the Public Option and keeping the corporate health pirates in place: who's going to kill Granny now? That 70% who want serious reform doesn't phase this man's political timbre, which means he has none.
With persisting the US attack on Cuba, he has pleased a base of old, backward Cubans and US elites who won't vote for him since he's a Marxist Muslim born in the Axis of Evil, while he adds more insult to the injury felt by his broad, liberal and progressive base.
You fraud.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Let all workers have tenure
The education reform debate has inadvertently pointed to a solution for all workers while it has a the same time attacked them. As Queen Marie Antoinette might say: LET THEM HAVE TENURE.
Tenure commonly refers to a secured job for life, usually applied to senior academics since their academic freedom needed to be protected. Wage security would benefit all workers, not just academics.
The education reform debate is cloaked and daggared specifically in an attack on public school teachers, their competence, their unions, and especially tenure. The Los Angeles Times, that Swine Flu of US journalism has led this charge.
Yet we do not hear these reformers storming our federal courts to end life-term appointments for judges. That is also tenure. Wealth in the US is still kept with a small gaggle of ruling families. If you think about it, this is a form of perpetual tenure, generation after generation.
But it is no mistake why our Establishment goes after the social service sector.
The LA Times, with a record at heaping vitriol on pro-public, left-of-center, populist causes as far back as the 1930's near-victory of a socialist governor in California, is probably helping produce the farce that is cleverly couched as Helping Our Kids.
Their aim is to dismantle public schools, but you can't openly attack kids. So our Establishment has implemented "Testing" to covertly punish schools with little resources by using these student assessments to take paltry resources from schools.
Schools fail and are defeathered. Teachers punished and are defrocked. Capitalism's social darwinism is victorious.
"They hang us by the neck," Fidel Castro said in a not dissimilar context, "and criticize us for not breathing." This is the dilemma the public school finds itself in.
Ironically, the Establishment. itself so opposed to labor rights anywhere, has given us the logic for giving all workers tenure.
We get a lot of this do-well-in-school lip service, and how college graduates earning power is greater than a high school graduate. But this misses the dinosaur in the room of the swathes of unemployment in all sectors, in all walks of life, but most especially among the working classes.
If the Establishment believes so much in its education, let the country stand behind it by guaranteeing all workers a wage:
* Anyone who has successfully completed an education, GED, degree, or training certificate program is guaranteed a wage by the state. The more credentials, the greater your earning potential.
* If a job is made obsolete, the worker will continue to earn his/her wage and be re-trained or re-assigned to another job. This will disincentivize throwing workers to the streets.
If this exposes the phony degree mills and financial aid scams - such as what this author suffered at an over-rated San Francisco Jesuit university, all the better. Shut them down. The state would have a greater interest in the quality and longevity of these degree programs and certifications to produce employable people.
Let the Establishment stand behind its programs, the education system it touts and funds with tax dollars (often in student loans), and guarantee tenure for all by giving all workers a living wage regardless whether the system has a plough for them to push or a paper to shred.
For more info: George Bernard Shaw makes a compelling argument for Guaranteed Wage in his The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism & Capitalism
Tenure commonly refers to a secured job for life, usually applied to senior academics since their academic freedom needed to be protected. Wage security would benefit all workers, not just academics.
The education reform debate is cloaked and daggared specifically in an attack on public school teachers, their competence, their unions, and especially tenure. The Los Angeles Times, that Swine Flu of US journalism has led this charge.
Yet we do not hear these reformers storming our federal courts to end life-term appointments for judges. That is also tenure. Wealth in the US is still kept with a small gaggle of ruling families. If you think about it, this is a form of perpetual tenure, generation after generation.
But it is no mistake why our Establishment goes after the social service sector.
The LA Times, with a record at heaping vitriol on pro-public, left-of-center, populist causes as far back as the 1930's near-victory of a socialist governor in California, is probably helping produce the farce that is cleverly couched as Helping Our Kids.
Their aim is to dismantle public schools, but you can't openly attack kids. So our Establishment has implemented "Testing" to covertly punish schools with little resources by using these student assessments to take paltry resources from schools.
Schools fail and are defeathered. Teachers punished and are defrocked. Capitalism's social darwinism is victorious.
"They hang us by the neck," Fidel Castro said in a not dissimilar context, "and criticize us for not breathing." This is the dilemma the public school finds itself in.
Ironically, the Establishment. itself so opposed to labor rights anywhere, has given us the logic for giving all workers tenure.
We get a lot of this do-well-in-school lip service, and how college graduates earning power is greater than a high school graduate. But this misses the dinosaur in the room of the swathes of unemployment in all sectors, in all walks of life, but most especially among the working classes.
If the Establishment believes so much in its education, let the country stand behind it by guaranteeing all workers a wage:
* Anyone who has successfully completed an education, GED, degree, or training certificate program is guaranteed a wage by the state. The more credentials, the greater your earning potential.
* If a job is made obsolete, the worker will continue to earn his/her wage and be re-trained or re-assigned to another job. This will disincentivize throwing workers to the streets.
If this exposes the phony degree mills and financial aid scams - such as what this author suffered at an over-rated San Francisco Jesuit university, all the better. Shut them down. The state would have a greater interest in the quality and longevity of these degree programs and certifications to produce employable people.
Let the Establishment stand behind its programs, the education system it touts and funds with tax dollars (often in student loans), and guarantee tenure for all by giving all workers a living wage regardless whether the system has a plough for them to push or a paper to shred.
For more info: George Bernard Shaw makes a compelling argument for Guaranteed Wage in his The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism & Capitalism
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
What's wrong with our public education?
Pres. Barack Obama's Secy of Education, Arne Duncan, was formerly head of the Chicago public schools, but he persists in the cause du jour of "teacher accountabililty" for student performance. Dangerously, he now has a Hero-President and a big budget to coerce the nation's school districts, short of cash and needing federal moneys, into implementing teacher-bashing policies.
For those sincerely interested in reforming education - specifically: public education - we have replaced one Thug's No Child Left Behind with the Sheeply Clothed Throw Teachers Under the Bus.
The problem with this accountability nonsense is it is seductive to the many who long ago lost touch with our public institutions and believe in the magic of the marketplace. That is a serious problem, because when some World Bank type comes along demanding market models as the route to the Promised Land, the public - to throw in yet another metaphor - drink the Kool-Aid.
Has Pres. Obama become the Jim Jones of Public School Teachers? When he seeks to apply the magic of the marketplace to public institutions, he is a social terrorist.
The teacher accountability fix is rather like mammograms. They monitor, but they do nothing to address the problem. As gender-parity medical activists have pointed out mammograms do not cure cancer. The public may feel like something is being done, but cancer in women still remains on the rise, mysteriously.
My late grandfather, Lowell B Denny I, once defended the United States Postal Service (USPS) to me when I proposed its privatization. This man who had risen in the ranks of the USPS and raised four children schooled me on its social necessity. For one small fee, anyone in the country could send a USPS letter to anyone else, and that everyone had access to mail service.
My grandfather instructed me that were it a private enterprise, made to conform to market voodoo, the population in rural areas may or may not continue to get mail since it would be expensive to do so; and sending a letter to a grandparent in the middle of such remote areas would be equally expensive.
Imagine Grandma in the woods spending FEDEX prices to send you that holiday card!
Public schools - the mission of educating the many, the poor, is as costly but worthy an investment as the investment we put in small babies, 99.9% of whom earn nothing in return. All public institutions are public investments, for the public.
I don't know where the magic of the market is magic, but it's not in the rearing of children.
We must first expect the expense of public schools if we are to guarantee free public, k-12 schooling (insufficient in a post-industrial society) to all children.
Then we must reconcile what place it is to serve in our society. This will define curriculae and inform teachers as to their role. Remember: soldiers who don't know what they're fighting for are a pretty unreliable lot.
The larger question, the elephant in the room that our rulers do not want discussed is this: what are public schools for? What do we as a society want produced from 12 years of publicly funded education?
Our rulers do not want this discussed because their answers would diverge widely from ours. We would want well trained, literate, engaged citizens. This was always the Dream of public schooling which fled headlong into an ideologically narrow society, which wants conformity, obedience, legions of poor boys to be sent into deserts and jungles to fight and die and not question and certainly not display the cynicism toward the nation-state that our rulers do every day when they send jobs "overseas."
Don't think. Just toil. Just die. Bleed.
What is wrong with our public education is the latent class war waged within it. Only, one side doesn't know its fighting and by complicity are backing this teacher accountability attack.
Of course we should have good teachers. Of course Johnny and Susan must know how to read. But why?
Our rulers have maliciously convinced the public that the woes of our society be traced back to Johnny and Susan and their teachers, not to their poor, corrupt leadership of our society. The rulers get bailed out. Public school teachers extraordinarily rendered.
For those sincerely interested in reforming education - specifically: public education - we have replaced one Thug's No Child Left Behind with the Sheeply Clothed Throw Teachers Under the Bus.
The problem with this accountability nonsense is it is seductive to the many who long ago lost touch with our public institutions and believe in the magic of the marketplace. That is a serious problem, because when some World Bank type comes along demanding market models as the route to the Promised Land, the public - to throw in yet another metaphor - drink the Kool-Aid.
Has Pres. Obama become the Jim Jones of Public School Teachers? When he seeks to apply the magic of the marketplace to public institutions, he is a social terrorist.
The teacher accountability fix is rather like mammograms. They monitor, but they do nothing to address the problem. As gender-parity medical activists have pointed out mammograms do not cure cancer. The public may feel like something is being done, but cancer in women still remains on the rise, mysteriously.
My late grandfather, Lowell B Denny I, once defended the United States Postal Service (USPS) to me when I proposed its privatization. This man who had risen in the ranks of the USPS and raised four children schooled me on its social necessity. For one small fee, anyone in the country could send a USPS letter to anyone else, and that everyone had access to mail service.
My grandfather instructed me that were it a private enterprise, made to conform to market voodoo, the population in rural areas may or may not continue to get mail since it would be expensive to do so; and sending a letter to a grandparent in the middle of such remote areas would be equally expensive.
Imagine Grandma in the woods spending FEDEX prices to send you that holiday card!
Public schools - the mission of educating the many, the poor, is as costly but worthy an investment as the investment we put in small babies, 99.9% of whom earn nothing in return. All public institutions are public investments, for the public.
I don't know where the magic of the market is magic, but it's not in the rearing of children.
We must first expect the expense of public schools if we are to guarantee free public, k-12 schooling (insufficient in a post-industrial society) to all children.
Then we must reconcile what place it is to serve in our society. This will define curriculae and inform teachers as to their role. Remember: soldiers who don't know what they're fighting for are a pretty unreliable lot.
The larger question, the elephant in the room that our rulers do not want discussed is this: what are public schools for? What do we as a society want produced from 12 years of publicly funded education?
Our rulers do not want this discussed because their answers would diverge widely from ours. We would want well trained, literate, engaged citizens. This was always the Dream of public schooling which fled headlong into an ideologically narrow society, which wants conformity, obedience, legions of poor boys to be sent into deserts and jungles to fight and die and not question and certainly not display the cynicism toward the nation-state that our rulers do every day when they send jobs "overseas."
Don't think. Just toil. Just die. Bleed.
What is wrong with our public education is the latent class war waged within it. Only, one side doesn't know its fighting and by complicity are backing this teacher accountability attack.
Of course we should have good teachers. Of course Johnny and Susan must know how to read. But why?
Our rulers have maliciously convinced the public that the woes of our society be traced back to Johnny and Susan and their teachers, not to their poor, corrupt leadership of our society. The rulers get bailed out. Public school teachers extraordinarily rendered.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Death of a Liberal Lion but when will a worker-led party be born in the US?
The tributes have been coming from all corners of the conquering world for the late Edward M. Kennedy. The oft-noted moniker is Liberal Lion, Champion for the working class, Health Care Reformer. Defender of Children. I do not know what this must mean when I look at my country and an institution like The Kennedys.
The political structure aside for a moment, the slashing of social services of every kind, education cuts (ironic in the face of rising teacher expectations), single-payer health system (hotly debated), rising war funding (no debate there) have to speak to our national morality, or lack thereof.
Because a parent who was shown to treat his/her family like this would be locked away by the police and an intervention by Child Protective Services. This should be enough, but I know it is not, to understand why that demonized concoction called Al Quaeda does not want the West in the Middle East and why it refuses to honor our "Way of Life."
In structural terms, the United States of America is the only Western democracy [sic] without a viable political party for the working class. Instead, we have the Democrats, and we have the Republicans, two parties, as the Obama campaign showed, are largely funded by the ruling elite of this country.
Oh, yes, and we have The Kennedys.
Democrat or Republican, what we are left with in the country is to wait for our ruling elite to decide to act before action is taken. If the ruling elite want the "Internationale" to replace our national anthem, we will see flurries of news stories and features on this leading up to a seamless "democratic" process of their flunkies voting for it.
I am afraid to say that is what the two-party machine is in the US: a computer program controlled by the ruling elite. Top-down structure. The downs carry the placards printed by the tops.
Kennedy was, of course, a Democrat. His family was as close to ruling class as the average American is allowed to know. More over, he came from a family the popular culture has bestowed by divine right political ability: so at 30 he becomes a US senator. This is really funny since more than a few of that generation admonished a civil justice system for affirmatively promoting women and racial minorities, and securing their access to higher education, but who were suspected of being "unqualified."
Not The Kennedys!
In this moral swamp, I found myself asking had we a broader political class - like Europe with its working class political parties, some in power, some not, some having identity crises - where would this Liberal Lion's allegiance lay. This is not a meaningless exercise: we must know, soberly, who our allies are and what our agenda as progressives is.
Kennedy is a mystery. I noted looking over photo spreads of his "life" how easily we can make someone like Kennedy appear on the "right" side of anything.
His late brother, Robert, for example, is the darling of the liberal left, but how does his rabid anticommunism, early and key support of Vietnam invasions, and his campaigns to assassinate Fidel Castro and sabotage the Cuban Revolution by coordinating subversion play? We hear nothing about that, do we?
The Kennedy glow is too bright.
Making Kennedy a Champion of the Working Class, a Liberal Lion has set our national bar very, very low. So even to get a bit above it still puts the US in a pretty pathetic place in regards to its Western neighbors. Yes, FOX news gets its dander up when we seem to inch toward that low-hanging fruit.
For more info: LA Times coverage * BBC coverage
The political structure aside for a moment, the slashing of social services of every kind, education cuts (ironic in the face of rising teacher expectations), single-payer health system (hotly debated), rising war funding (no debate there) have to speak to our national morality, or lack thereof.
Because a parent who was shown to treat his/her family like this would be locked away by the police and an intervention by Child Protective Services. This should be enough, but I know it is not, to understand why that demonized concoction called Al Quaeda does not want the West in the Middle East and why it refuses to honor our "Way of Life."
In structural terms, the United States of America is the only Western democracy [sic] without a viable political party for the working class. Instead, we have the Democrats, and we have the Republicans, two parties, as the Obama campaign showed, are largely funded by the ruling elite of this country.
Oh, yes, and we have The Kennedys.
Democrat or Republican, what we are left with in the country is to wait for our ruling elite to decide to act before action is taken. If the ruling elite want the "Internationale" to replace our national anthem, we will see flurries of news stories and features on this leading up to a seamless "democratic" process of their flunkies voting for it.
I am afraid to say that is what the two-party machine is in the US: a computer program controlled by the ruling elite. Top-down structure. The downs carry the placards printed by the tops.
Kennedy was, of course, a Democrat. His family was as close to ruling class as the average American is allowed to know. More over, he came from a family the popular culture has bestowed by divine right political ability: so at 30 he becomes a US senator. This is really funny since more than a few of that generation admonished a civil justice system for affirmatively promoting women and racial minorities, and securing their access to higher education, but who were suspected of being "unqualified."
Not The Kennedys!
In this moral swamp, I found myself asking had we a broader political class - like Europe with its working class political parties, some in power, some not, some having identity crises - where would this Liberal Lion's allegiance lay. This is not a meaningless exercise: we must know, soberly, who our allies are and what our agenda as progressives is.
Kennedy is a mystery. I noted looking over photo spreads of his "life" how easily we can make someone like Kennedy appear on the "right" side of anything.
His late brother, Robert, for example, is the darling of the liberal left, but how does his rabid anticommunism, early and key support of Vietnam invasions, and his campaigns to assassinate Fidel Castro and sabotage the Cuban Revolution by coordinating subversion play? We hear nothing about that, do we?
The Kennedy glow is too bright.
Making Kennedy a Champion of the Working Class, a Liberal Lion has set our national bar very, very low. So even to get a bit above it still puts the US in a pretty pathetic place in regards to its Western neighbors. Yes, FOX news gets its dander up when we seem to inch toward that low-hanging fruit.
For more info: LA Times coverage * BBC coverage
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Republic UK campaign highlights what we all miss in populist politics
The Republic UK group may be unknown to most in the United States. This country achieved this organization's aims over 200 years ago. Republic UK wants to end the British monarchy and replace it with a democratically elected head of state, no more lords and inherited titles, no more unearned privilege. This US did most of that already. Most, not all.
Most in the United States may be fascinated with the British monarchy, a long history which pales in comparison to this country's youthful 200 years (vs. the 10th century ancestor of the present queen, King Alfred) is bound to get respect.
Lately, Republic UK has aimed its rhetorical guns on Prince Charles, who fascinates me. Republic UK knows which way the wind blows and understands the relative popularity of Queen Elizabeth II; no gun will be aimed at her. At most, they suggest she be allowed to retire.
Charles Windsor, prince of Wales, heir to that ancient throne, duke of This and earl of That, has decided to be useful and use his leverage for Charities - arguably what the Rich do as opposed to advocating an overthrow of the very system that allowed the Rich - architecture, education reform, organic, sustainable farming, the environment, and modern medicine.
At every turn he has royally pissed the Experts and some in the Establishment. Admittedly I would be less fascinated with this man were he advocating white supremacy or the sort of national socialism [Nazism] that his great uncle, King Edward VIII, liked.
I introduce this very British activist group for what is shows lacking in our conventional democratic movements.
Prince Charles and the Queen very much aside, where do these naive groups school themselves by suggesting electing a head of state ends the sort of meddling they accuse of the prince? Interestingly, they admire the queen for keeping her mouth shut, performing her ritual duties, and staying out of politics.
In the United States, a minimum of 70% of those polled want a public health care option. But this is from the start outweighed by the mighty voice of the unelected, unvetted health care industry. Our own conventional democratic movements are mute to the hands behind the clock; those who may speak of this class warfare are themselves muted by our newspapers of record.
Why have our conventional democratic movements set their guns on phantoms, like government take-over of health care bogeymen, the prince of Wales ... and not, say, Blue Cross, that crime against Nature, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, or the duke of Westminster, the wealthiest man and biggest landowner in the UK?
They fundamentally believe in capitalism with all its manifold contradictions.
Our best high school textbooks do not detail an Establishment in the US. Myth would have it that class system ended in 1776, when some white landowners prefacing Howard Jarvis, threw regulations out and the king with them.
But there is an Establishment. There is a ruling class. Their enemy since the beginning is the threat - I do not use this word lightly - of the public overtaking them in sheer numbers. So, the masses must be kept in their place. One tactic to achieve this is, again to cross the pond, launch specious attacks on a very forward-thinking prince of Wales, who launches no illegal wars, directs no dropping of carpet bombs on innocent children, does not with "votes" shred civil liberties by rendering untried prisoners to their torture.
If we want a public, social democracy, we must know who our enemies are.
For more info: Prince Charles in the Guardian UK * Preface to Shaw's THE APPLE CART * "How the Ruling Class thwarts Democracy" (Commondreams.org)
Most in the United States may be fascinated with the British monarchy, a long history which pales in comparison to this country's youthful 200 years (vs. the 10th century ancestor of the present queen, King Alfred) is bound to get respect.
Lately, Republic UK has aimed its rhetorical guns on Prince Charles, who fascinates me. Republic UK knows which way the wind blows and understands the relative popularity of Queen Elizabeth II; no gun will be aimed at her. At most, they suggest she be allowed to retire.
Charles Windsor, prince of Wales, heir to that ancient throne, duke of This and earl of That, has decided to be useful and use his leverage for Charities - arguably what the Rich do as opposed to advocating an overthrow of the very system that allowed the Rich - architecture, education reform, organic, sustainable farming, the environment, and modern medicine.
At every turn he has royally pissed the Experts and some in the Establishment. Admittedly I would be less fascinated with this man were he advocating white supremacy or the sort of national socialism [Nazism] that his great uncle, King Edward VIII, liked.
I introduce this very British activist group for what is shows lacking in our conventional democratic movements.
Prince Charles and the Queen very much aside, where do these naive groups school themselves by suggesting electing a head of state ends the sort of meddling they accuse of the prince? Interestingly, they admire the queen for keeping her mouth shut, performing her ritual duties, and staying out of politics.
In the United States, a minimum of 70% of those polled want a public health care option. But this is from the start outweighed by the mighty voice of the unelected, unvetted health care industry. Our own conventional democratic movements are mute to the hands behind the clock; those who may speak of this class warfare are themselves muted by our newspapers of record.
Why have our conventional democratic movements set their guns on phantoms, like government take-over of health care bogeymen, the prince of Wales ... and not, say, Blue Cross, that crime against Nature, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, or the duke of Westminster, the wealthiest man and biggest landowner in the UK?
They fundamentally believe in capitalism with all its manifold contradictions.
Our best high school textbooks do not detail an Establishment in the US. Myth would have it that class system ended in 1776, when some white landowners prefacing Howard Jarvis, threw regulations out and the king with them.
But there is an Establishment. There is a ruling class. Their enemy since the beginning is the threat - I do not use this word lightly - of the public overtaking them in sheer numbers. So, the masses must be kept in their place. One tactic to achieve this is, again to cross the pond, launch specious attacks on a very forward-thinking prince of Wales, who launches no illegal wars, directs no dropping of carpet bombs on innocent children, does not with "votes" shred civil liberties by rendering untried prisoners to their torture.
If we want a public, social democracy, we must know who our enemies are.
For more info: Prince Charles in the Guardian UK * Preface to Shaw's THE APPLE CART * "How the Ruling Class thwarts Democracy" (Commondreams.org)
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