The Fielding Mellish Party for Self-Defense

papers

2010-05-19T12:13:00.000-07:00

the students are writing papers. they don't want to, but then, who does? 14 year olds sit in world history, "learning" of cracker conquerors from days past. they peer edit, make note cards, now done on the computer and referred to as noodle bibs, or some such nonsense. the teacher speaks of pizarro, de soto, columbus. they were free spirits, adventurers, explorers. there is no indignation, no passion, no sense that injustices were done. clean, smooth...progress.

ah yes, the papers. you see, the students have no choice. they've just got to go along. the student as tom. deadlines, guidelines, 12 font, doubled spaced, title page, footnotes, bibliography, at least 6 pages, at least 5 sources. wikipedia not acceptable.

just what the world needs...more 14 year olds writing about julius ceasar and the protestant reformation. this will surely save all of us. of course, their options were limited. they couldn't write about massacres, genocide, holocausts. such words are not used in freshman world history. no, that would be political. that would mean someone risking their teaching job. that would mean...something. but then, what they are taught means something too. sadly.

and me? i just sit there, pretending to help a student who cares even less about this bullshit than i do. hey, i've found a job, and short of being sexually hairy-assed, i plan on keeping it.

so, the papers will be written. what other choice do the students have? they will obey, or else. for, if they don't, they will "fail for the quarter." i would rather fail for the dime myself. and, if they fail for the quarter, they may fail for the year, or at the very least, hurt their gpa, which in turn may hurt their chances of getting into a "good" college. never mind that they are 14. it's never too soon to break them in, to teach them what really matters, which is the ability to do things that make no sense.

and one day in the future, these flustered, frustrated children can become the lording adults of tomorrow. they too will be able to realize the dream of forcing bullshit on others.

you know, the students don't have to write these papers. the sun will rise and set either way. they could say fuck it. what if they did? what would the teacher do? would he fail all of them? could he?

we'll never know, because the papers will be written.

and the bombs will be dropped.

the same children may do both.

they are certainly being trained well for the murders of tomorrow.

it's been a minute

2010-05-14T08:01:00.000-07:00

in fact, it's been several months. i've grown since then. either that, or it's these platform shoes i'm wearing. there have been a plethora of terrorist scares since i last wrote. luckily, no one has arrested me yet for being an armchair radical. i court arrest. once, i took it all the way to the supreme court arrest, where they arrested my development, but let me go free. sadly, all my neighbors in the development had to serve long sentences. i got off with a few paragraphs, though they did insist on a 12 font. at least they allowed recycled paper.

so, i've returned. millions have waited, wondering. sadly, they haven't been waiting for me. truthfully, one person did confess to missing my blog, but was shortly after seen muttering anarchist slogans in the nude. what has compelled me to write again, you ask? simply, a gun to my head. no matter that it is a water pistol. frankly, i became bored with the status quo. i needed moore in my life. unfortunately, archie moore has been dead for many years.

so, where do i go from here? well, i go back to what i do best. once i figure out what that is, i'll let you know. of course, it's not like i haven't been working on anything. over the last few months, i've been laying down the vocal parts for my debut album, "pissing on the ceiling." i expect it will take six years to complete, what with the guitar overdubs and the interweaving of 46 different bass lines. i'd like people to think that this is a great album. so, each album will come with 100 dollars worth of food stamps. hopefully, it will meet with their food stamp of approval. mark hasn't eaton a while, so i'll maybe send him the first copy.

as for me, it's been much of the same...work, ball, jazz, somber thoughts of the destruction of the universe, not necessarily in that order. perhaps all is lost. if so, couldn't the pop music be a little better? at least when they were telling us to duck and cover, sinatra was swinging his ass off.

speaking of music, it seems bill evans refused to play in the soviet union as an act of protest against the soviet invasion of afghanistan. funny, but i seem to recall that he was plenty busy while the u.s. destroyed vietnam. selective compassion doesn't impress me. though, i must say, evans was a great piano player. well, those of us on the left want our artists to be political. sadly, this often backfires!

think i might take the summer off again. or, i might work. one or the other. you know, there really aren't a lot of choices.

but, it would be nice to sleep in, move slow, catch some free jazz, play with my penis, not necessarily in that order.

crouching tiger, hidden penis

2010-02-04T18:35:00.000-08:00

when the tiger crouched from us, we couldn't see what he, and his hammond b-3 "organ" was up to. sadly, he chose to stand erect, and the situation came to a head. tiger woods has become tiger's wood, and we have been forced to hear enough "hole in one" gags to make us gag. if you are thinking something dirty because i used the word gag, perhaps your name is steve swallow, which would be off bass, but on point. so, be on guard, on point, and play point guard, or pass on the entire game. and remember to hate the game and not the player. or the playa, for that matter. and yet, shoot is still just shit with two o's. peter gunn could shoot. he once shot someone in his shelly manne hole. what if shelly's last name was ass? then, his club would have been called shelly's asshole, which would be ok, but you can't put it on the sign. tits and ass, yeah, but you can't say it.

i'd be lion if i said that the tiger story is over. sadly, we are not out of the woods yet. so, keep your head up for the next break in the story. until it reaches it's climax, this story may fuck with our lives for sometime.

if only dick johnson had been caught having an affair.

2010

2009-12-31T15:47:00.000-08:00

26 years later, and war is still peace. well, all is well that's orwell.

besides kool and the gang, who exactly wants to celebrate, and what is worth celebrating? well, many of us are still alive. i suppose that's good.

the mavs are 22 and 9. kidd, nearing his 37th birthday, has yet to win a title. now, if someone could kidnap the celtics and lakers, we might be on to something.

2010...how about 2020? we could make eye jokes. i can see that this will be a perfect year...shit like that. and i think it's by 2040 that whites will no longer be a majority in the states. i hope i feel like celebrating at 60. but then, blacks were 90 percent of south africa during apartheid. you can have your population percentages, it seems that the power percentages are the thing. if we can get non-whites to have a majority of the power, things may swing a little, though the big o doesn't give us much to be hopeful about in that regard. maybe if its class based, or feminist, or something. hey, we got to hope, right?

there is evo and hugo and fidel still writes an article now and then. there are movements from the grass roots, though i have always preferred an ass roots movement. come to think of it, an ass roots bowel movement is really where it's at.

so, today, many will travel from miles around to hit up old beantown. they will wear silly hats and blow horns. they will listen to mediocre singers and wear the red white and blue. they will forget their troubles and blindly hope for a better tomorrow. they will lie to themselves, but what the fuck else is there?

i am getting slightly wasted before i hit the local bar. cheaper that way. funny thing is, i prefer the taste of chocolate milk and apple cider.

happy jew year.

two rights don't make a left

2009-12-28T18:30:00.000-08:00

yeah man, now we are bombing yemen. but, you see, it's to save lives. you know, bombs for peace. will that help the dozens of dead? only if they think positive thoughts!

saturday, we killed eight school children in afghanistan. i think we were after some taliban, or terrorist, or something. but it was children who took the bomb. i suppose this is the price we pay for fighting a "just war," but it isn't we who pay the price, is it? it's not obama's kids who get killed when one of these bombs are dropped. but, what makes these children any less valuable than his own? didn't they too have parents who loved them? will they cry less, knowing the man calling the shots in the country that killed them is more liberal than the man he replaced? perhaps they will not shrug their shoulders and say, "hey, at least he's a lot better than bush." just as the vietnamese didn't give thanks that they weren't being murdered by the nazis.

we have a funny sense of progress in this country. progress means a guy can speak in complete sentences, have a half way decent looking wife, know his jazz and blues. it's a progress of style, of form, a shadow progress, a superficial progress, a surface progress. for, you see, we can all make it now. what if the odds are a million to one? what if making it means having to be as big an asshole as the cats you will replace? people of different shades have always made it, and still millions starve, countries are bombed, the earth is polluted. a token is only good for a ride on a subway, and now, they want tickets, so tokens don't even work for that anymore.

what is going on in pakistan, afghanistan, yemen, and iraq is not progress. the dismantling of democracy in honduras is not progress. a watered down gift to the insurance industry, euphemistically referred to as health care reform, is not progress. yes we can has quickly turned to no we can't.

america, land of surface and superficiality.

and murder.

a tale of two crazies

2009-12-02T06:28:00.001-08:00

two crazy things happened yesterday. well, more than two crazy things, but these are two that i am at least partially aware of. one, hit close to home, or rather, work. the other was on tv. one group of crazies were an ostracized number of fascist zealots, standing directly across from the high school that i work at. members of the phelps family, founders of the godhatesfags website, decided to protest outside of my workplace because our school has a gay straight alliance, and because the town i work in has a liberal reputation, whatever that means. and so they came. they were guarded by police officers stealing money from the town, making at least 30 bucks an hour to stand by and defend fascists. of course, as bad as these fascists are, they have not killed as many people as the various police agencies of this great nation. and speaking of white supremacists, it was not some kansas crazies who shouted "white power" after the massacre at attica in 1971. it was not those who tell us that aids is god's gift to gays who murdered fred hampton in his bed, bashed heads in the american south, or brutalized rodney king. something to think about.

in any case, there they were. they had children with them. one looked about 5 years old. a woman with them would occasionally burst into song. i yelled "you have good pipes. i would like to bust them!" then, i started making requests. hey, if they are gonna sing, why can't i ask for a few favorites? i asked for over the rainbow, but sadly, the tune was not in the real books they had brought with them, fully aware that such a request may well be made. a male member wanted to do it in c, but the back up singers balked. i then asked for skylark. i was met with silence. meanwhile, hundreds of students stood gazing at them, as if they were animals at the zoo. if only they were. i would have preferred a mass beat down, but cops and teachers kept that out of the realm of possibility. earlier in the day, i had casually stated in the teacher's lounge that i would personally like to see them get the crap kicked out of them. i was met with silence. "then, what is to stop them from beating up some gay guy?" well, what is to stop them from doing that anyway? why is it only the assholes that get to kick ass? nonviolence as an excuse for non action doesn't impress me.

eventually, they were led away. now, as bad as they were, they operated exclusively in the realm of words and ideas, twisted though they are. they flew no b-52's over our school, dropped no napalm on us, raided no one's houses. they were acknowledged as the fools they are, for they make the mistake of being honest. they put their bigotry out there, and therefore, their lunacy is apparent. and we rightly reject them.

later in the day, a well spoken man appeared on the television. the fascists hate this man, though he has killed many more muslims than they have. he is the physical embodiment of multiculturalism. he has succeeeded. millions respect him. no one mocks him. he doesn't speak from a pen, and is not made to feel that he is a pitiful fool. and yet, this same men, surrounded by young men who will likely kill many more people than the wackos i had protested earlier in the day, told us that he is sending 30,000 more soldiers to afghanistan. his words were not hateful, at least not personally so. he didn't once say that "god hates fags," though the bombs that will be dropped as a direct result of his decision will likely kill a number of gay people. he spoke in the liberal, sophisticated, wordly manner that excuses all manner of brutal acts. he wore a suit, was clean shaven, he looked calm. it is the facade of decency that makes it work. the appropriate language soothes us, as we proceed to destroy.

the first group of crazies command no army. they have no bombs, no marines. they have invaded no countries, stolen no resources. and yet, it is they that we fear. meanwhile, under the superficial cover of freedom and democracy, well dressed men mouthing pious platitudes, are destroying the earth and its people. one of those well dressed men spoke to us last night. he is supposedly a liberal.

and it is this liberal, and others of his ilk, operating within the american power structure, that will continue to kill with deeds far more abhorrent than even the most hateful signs held by the outcasts among us.

and we will watch the respectable ones, and vote for them. we will celebrate their victories, and fight their wars.

as we protest the crazies for their words, we will do our terrible deeds.

at least we will have nice suits and fine vocabularies.

giving observations, not thanks

2009-11-26T16:16:00.000-08:00

took an evening walk through the empty streets this thanksgiving. saw a sign outside the fire department building, showing a child with a toy. the poster read "toys for tots." toys for tots is a toy give away done by the marines. hopefully, it will be better than their original production, "bombs for babies." the facade of compassion and decency in this culture is almost as hateful as the brutality of our actions. almost. when you think of all the children our military has harmed, something like toys for tots becomes a sickening thing. it is not enough for us to kill. we must also pretend to be peaceful.

the hypocrisy is ongoing. we celebrate family on this day as we destroy families throughout the world. it would shock if it wasn't so mundane. we are such hypocrites that our hypocrisy has taken on a normality. honesty is a foreign trait. it would blind us if we came face to face with it. if someone asked the firemen, many of whom ride their trucks with a plethora of american flags, what do they make of an institution which kills children sponsoring a toy drive, they would look at this person as if he had three heads. or, they would tell him off. for, truth is no where to be found. it is buried deep, hidden within our degraded culture, but we are too busy digging for oil to notice. for, there are stars to be danced with, and songs to be sung, so simon says. it is bleak. we have pushed out the sun with lightbulbs, gigi gryce with lady gaga, home cooked meals with burger king. the bombs are dropped, as we debate the merits of adam lambert. yes, he kissed a man on stage. that's neither here nor there. but, what was he doing on tv in the first place? and, while children starve, what does it say about us that we spend precious time speaking of such matters?

surely, they will talk of us years from now. and oh, how vulgar the conversation will be.

just a walk down quiet streets. as the alcoholic once said, you can rum but you can't hide, so you might as well gin and bear it. it's better than singing the scotch blues.

toys for tots, sponsored by the marines. the walk for hunger, sponsored by raytheon.

war is peace

ignorance is strength

obama is bush

2009 is 1984

well, i give thanks that i am 5 again.

but there is noise in my head.

first slaughter turkeys, then people.

2009-11-23T06:35:00.000-08:00

word is that the obama administration will not make the decision to send more troops to afghanistan until after the thanksgiving holiday. isn't that nice? but, what if it were october? would he wait until after halloween, or columbus day?

of course, a holiday which glorifies the slaughtering of past people is more important than the slaughtering of present people. indeed, whether to fight a war is not nearly as important as who gets the turkey leg, or first crack at the banana pudding. and you can't expect obama to make such a decision before he has the opportunity to pardon a turkey.

war is something that is done after the holidays. let it not ruin our joy, or cramp our styles. yes, there are impoverished children to kill. surely, we will get to that. but, let us entertain our annoying relatives first. all things in time. i suppose the afghans can give thanks that those 40,000 additional troops won't arrive for a while longer. aren't they the lucky ones.

you know, i wonder what the liberals would say if bush determined policies around his holiday schedule? in fact, i know what they would say..."he's an idiot." "his turkey comes first." shit like that. but, when their guy acts like a fool, it passes without comment. and there has been a lot of foolishness that has passed without comment within liberal circles during the last year. of course, the far right has been hard at work, painting obama as a radical socialist that wants to destroy our cracker civilization. but, does their insanity excuse their intellectual dishonesty? i think not. for, the liberals have always been this way. when clinton bombed serbia, they put their hands in their pants and jerked off, while thousands died. it's ok, as long as they are doing the killing.

saul alinsky once said that the conservative laughs as he stabs you in the back, while the liberal cries. well, that would be bad enough, but i'm not even seeing tears anymore. the liberal no longer apologizes. rather, he arrogantly struts on the big stage, killing easily. he always did, but he no longer hides his ferocity.

except at thanksgiving.

well, the turkey may feel differently.

especially, knowing that a jive turkey in the white house will be eating him.

just a piece in a puzzle

2009-11-18T17:11:00.000-08:00

they changed my schedule today. there was no notice. dude claimed he had been trying to reach me, but i'm always in the same place.

it really doesn't matter, but the kids wondered where i was. it matters to them. they haven't learned yet that we are all just parts on a giant chess board. when they decide to move us, we move. every once in a while, we refuse to move, but those times are exceedingly rare. in this case, it all seemed a bit silly. the teachers who were introduced to me where unaware that i would be joining them. friendly fascism, if you will. i felt as if i were a bit player in a marx brothers routine. it couldn't be taken seriously. where i am doesn't seem to much matter. that i have to be anywhere is the real crime. that i have to get up in the morning, put on my clothes, catch the bus, and take direction from men and women who aren't worthy of scratching my ass, is the problem of all problems.

and yet, the kids don't know yet. and it's sweet. they like you. they don't care that you are only a para. to them, all that counts is that you are a good guy. and we teach them.

so, i will be in some different classes from now on. mellish the gypsy. if only i could play blues for ike. as oppression goes, it ain't much. but, it would be nice to determine my own movements.

as it was, i was sitting in the teacher's lounge, listening to gene ammons, when a bearded man with a voice higher than little anthony, approached, claiming he wanted to talk to me. in actuality, he didn't want to talk to me, but to the position i hold. very few people want to talk to me, but that may be for the best. the bearded wonder laid out his plan, seemingly improvised on the spot. zoot sims he wasn't.

and so it goes. i'm just another piece of the puzzle. i can be moved whenever "they" decide i should be moved. there is sadness to it, and humor as well. it's meaningless and profound, simple and complex. like everything else.

they own me from 8:20 to 2:45, as long as they don't personally insult me.

they can impersonally insult me all they want.

sad, but true.

by the way, i told the kids that they would see me around. that i would drop by, still bring my basketball, sing in the hallway, all of that.

i'm still here, folks.

kind of.

2009-11-11T12:16:00.000-08:00

today is veteran's day. our nation will always make sure that there are plenty of veterans to honor. obama has just approved 40,000 more troops to afghanistan. 40,000. surely, those 40,000 troops will end up killing more than 13 people, the amount of people killed at fort hood, an event which has temporarily made us compassionate again. surely, obama, by continuing to prosecute wars in afghanistan, pakistan, and iraq, has been responsible for thousands of deaths. but, no one in the media has tried to figure out his state of mind. no one seems to think that the pressure has gotten to him, that he is suffering from ptsd, that religion is forcing him to kill. obama remains a liberal to both liberals and conservatives alike, the mounting death toll notwithstanding. in truth, truth doesn't matter. to the liberals, he wants peace. it doesn't matter that he makes war, for they know what he "wants." he has to move slowly, they tell us. why he has to add troops, they neglect to mention. supposedly, obama wants to do good, but it is tough. but, why is it easier to add troops than to subtract them? and to the conservatives, he is not sending enough troops. whatever he does, it doesn't matter, for he is a muslim socialist that wants to hand everything to black america. with two sides such as this, there is nothing to discuss. there is nowhere to turn.

we are left with the results of many more veteran's days to come. and come they will, courtesy of democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives. whoever drops them, the bombs feel the same.

we worry about the madmen, as the sane ones continue to kill in far greater numbers. erich fromm called us "the sane society," meaning that we are all nuts. in such a world, sanity is relative, as is madness.

it is mad to shoot 13 people, sane to send 40,000 troops to kill and be killed into afghanistan. what is the connection between sanity and madness? if it is sane to fight wars, why is it madness for individuals to pick up the gun and decide for themselves who they will kill? if we are willing to condemn the latter, why do we insist on condoning the former? we malign safe victims, knock the approved villian, as we salute killers of far greater magnitude. the big killers go to ivy league schools, lead countries. some even have african fathers. not many, but a few of them do.

just trying to judge men by the content of their characters. don't beat up on me too much.

i suppose tilberg won't post this one on facebook. too many would be offended.

well, that's when you know you're doing your job.

happy veteran's day.

here's to many more.

violence in the hood

2009-11-09T15:17:00.000-08:00

fort hood. not the hood, but a violent place indeed. always so, but usually, violent in a way that we are comfortable with. we don't mind killers, as long as we get to train them. as long as they kill the right people. you know, the ones with "funny" names and small bank accounts.

but, once in a while, violence comes back to bite those seemingly expert at only giving and not receiving. sometimes, they are victimized by "one of their own," who, in a blaze of crazed heroism, decides it is better to use his skills against the home team.

and, it is at that point, where we all suddenly become non-violent. a plethora of pacifists is born. now, we care about each life that has been taken, for the ones killed were american, and had names that may have been our own. this compassion was not in evidence before, and will soon go back into its hiding place, waiting for the right victims to present themselves. iraqis, afghanis, surely they will not do, for they are being killed by us, so therefore, our compassion can only go toward the murderers.

13 killed at a military base. the biggest military base in the country. the shooter? an army man of 9 years. a muslim. deeply disturbed by u.s. foreign policy. worried that he would soon be deployed to afghanistan. a madman? perhaps, but if he was mad, what drove him to madness? could it be the destruction of iraq and afghanistan? surely, more than 13 people have been killed by our troops in these two nations. who among us is willing to speak of the madness of the u.s war machine, a madness that dwarfs any response to its horrors.

what are troops doing at a military base? surely, they are learning to be better killers, are they not? well, it seems that at least one of them learned his lessons fairly well.

now, i would like you to imagine a scenario. it's the early 1940's, and the place is a german military base. a soldier at the base is deeply disturbed by germany's invasions of russia and poland. he loses it, can't take it anymore. he has to act. he picks up the gun and kills 13 people at the base. today, how would this man be judged? my guess is that many would judge him to be a hero. and yet, we have no more right to be in iraq than germany had to be in russia.

madmen are the violent ones who act against the wishes of the powerful.

and, so it goes. if a chilean soldier at a chilean military base, during the terror of the early pinochet years, turned his gun on his fellow soldiers, how would he be judged today by those of us on the "left?"

speaking of which, where is the left? where is the modern emma goldman, where is that someone who will humanize him whom the society will portray as a craven madman? who is it that will acknowledge the profound ugliness which led this man to act. the ugliness which is war, occupation, and religious bigotry.

as always, the real crimes will go unmentioned. our compassion will be selective. we won't learn anything, for to learn would mean that we have to change, and change we won't. we can not acknowledge the extent of our evil.

and therefore, we can not understand.

and we never will.

low impact day

2009-10-23T18:20:00.001-07:00

we at bhs care about the environment. today, some of our teachers elected to turn the lights off. i'm sure the earth felt the profound power of our action. speakers came and said many good things. they can't really be faulted for anything. for, you see, we are all doing our part. of course, no one mentioned how bad war is for the environment, or civilization, or big public schools, for that matter. no one really did anything. yes, some students "got involved." yes, some cards were signed. i suppose some people "learned." but, in the end, it felt fake, unreal, happily superficial. for, how can we care about the environment and bomb afghanistan? surely, there were many fascists who cared about the "earth," but today, we don't remember these heroes of yesteryear. will anyone remember us? and, if they do, what will they think of us?

today was low impact day, but what about monday? activism isn't a holiday, despite what our well fed "progressives" may think.

so, the speakers make speeches. young, well off white kids get to care. they will learn what we choose to teach them, which is quite little. a few of them will get it, eventually, but the rest will go merrily along, thinking that while we may have our problems, if we just sign enough cards and call enough congressmen, things will swing back our way. they will tinker at the edges. i recall a guy i knew who considered himself a radical leftist, and he proved it to me by saying that he had worked on the john kerry campaign. these "committed" kids will bemoan corporate abuses, but will never learn to question the legitimacy of the corporate state. they will sing the praises of obama and other democratic duds, either not knowing or not caring about the actual policies of the politicians they admire. of course, these same students and their mediocre mentors will rail against the republicans for instituting the same policies. a teacher i work with, quite intelligent, and certainly, not a bad person, will soon show the class "an inconvenient truth." meanwhile, "as the world burns" will go unread, as will gore's actual environmental record when he had a chance to do something. just ask the indigenous people of columbia just what al gore thinks about "our mother." but, of course, our determined, dedicated environmentalist, who bikes to work, wears new balance, is a vegan, and probably wipes her ass with old college textbooks, will not mention the indigenous of columbia. for, we need good guys. we need to believe that change is possible.

yes, change may be possible, but not without a fight. and change is not possible if it is to come from the very same men who helped to create the problems.

turning the lights off won't do it.

it's as if your house was flooding, and your main concern was to make sure that your kitchen sink isn't dripping water.

we are fucked.

simple as that.

but, there ain't a high school in america that will swing with that message.

there's no money in it. no grants. no articles in the local paper. it doesn't make us feel good.

in the end, that's all we really care about...ourselves.

and, that's why we are fucked.

america, turn off the lights.

2009-10-23T08:20:00.001-07:00

The Super Rich are Laughing
The US as Failed State

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The US has every characteristic of a failed state.

The US government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.

Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on terrorism and military aggression.

Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war’s financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.

“It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome,” said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the subcommittee.

According to reports, the US Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way.

While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor third world peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America’s cities, towns, and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy’s decline. Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country half way around the world that is not a threat to America.

It costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who are at risk of life and limb, are paid a pittance, but all of the privatized services to the military are rolling in excess profits. One of the great frauds perpetuated on the American people was the privatization of services that the US military traditionally performed for itself. “Our” elected leaders could not resist any opportunity to create at taxpayers’ expense private wealth that could be recycled to politicians in campaign contributions.

Republicans and Democrats on the take from the private insurance companies maintain that the US cannot afford to provide Americans with health care and that cuts must be made even in Social Security and Medicare. So how can the US afford bankrupting wars, much less totally pointless wars that serve no American interest?

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington’s wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar’s value reduces the purchasing power of Americans’ already declining incomes.

Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the US housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.

Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.

The enormous bank reserves created by the Federal Reserve are not finding their way into the economy. Instead, the banks are hoarding the reserves as insurance against the fraudulent derivatives that they purchased from the gangster Wall Street investment banks.

The regulatory agencies have been corrupted by private interests. Frontline reports that Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers blocked Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating derivatives. President Obama rewarded Larry Summers for his idiocy by appointing him Director of the National Economic Council. What this means is that profits for Wall Street will continue to be leeched from the diminishing blood supply of the American economy.

An unmistakable sign of third world despotism is a police force that sees the pubic as the enemy. Thanks to the federal government, our local police forces are now militarized and imbued with hostile attitudes toward the public. SWAT teams have proliferated, and even small towns now have police forces with the firepower of US Special Forces. Summons are increasingly delivered by SWAT teams that tyrannize citizens with broken down doors, a $400 or $500 repair born by the tyrannized resident. Recently a mayor and his family were the recipients of incompetence by the town’s local SWAT team, which mistakenly wrecked the mayor’s home, terrorized his family, and killed the family’s two friendly Labrador dogs.

If a town’s mayor can be treated in this way, what do you think is the fate of the poor white or black? Or the idealistic student who protests his government’s inhumanity?

In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the USA. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.

The one percent that comprise the superrich are laughing as they say, “let them eat cake.”

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

moore lies

2009-10-22T05:44:00.001-07:00

double m, michael moore, has done it again. the big man plays fast and loose with the truth. that we know. but, the details demand repeating.

moore recently appeared on the jimmy kimmel show. on the show, he was asked about a meeting he had recently had with chavez at the un. it seems that chavez and moore had met for three hours, but moore asked that no photos be taken, as the meeting "would make him look bad." (contrast this with oliver stone, who just filmed a movie on chavez.) however, a few shots were snapped, so the meeting became public. in the photos, the two men are dressed in suits, and are sitting at a dinner table. but, facts have never meant a great deal to moore, so he went on to tell a tall tale. in his words, he heard a racket in a hotel room a floor below him. this "racket" was taking place at 2 in the morning, so us clever viewers of kimmel were sure to get the drift of what chavez was supposedly doing. incredulously, moore then proceeds to go down to inspect. he knocks on the door, and a hulking man answers. the man then lets him in! my, it's getting quite easy to intrude on presidents in the middle of the night. perhaps, i'll drop by on the big o in the wee small hours, for a little late night snack. in any case, moore then noticed a couple of bottles of tequila. likely this was the only latino liquor that moore could think of. supposedly, chavez then invited moore to sit by his bed, and the two began to chat. amazingly, chavez then asked moore to help him with his upcoming un speech! chavez, mind you, is a noted public speaker who often doesn't even read written speeches. rather, he improvises, going where his heart and head tell him to. it is beyond belief that chavez would have been unprepared for such a speech, or that he would have turned to moore for help, especially considering he had no clue in this tale that he was going to be meeting moore.

the next day, moore was watching tv, when he caught a glimpse of chavez speaking at the un. incredibly, chavez was using the very same words moore had supposedly written for him the night before!

wow...in this story, moore riffs on common latino stereotypes. here, chavez is a party animal. here, chavez is a heavy drinker. here, chavez is sex crazed. here, chavez is a believer in the "manana is good enough for me philosophy," in that he has not prepared for a vital talk just hours away, preferring to get his groove on instead.

also, moore has once again managed to stroke his own ego. this time, he is writing speeches for leaders. also, in this tale, moore gets to flex his patriotic credentials, for supposedly, moore told chavez to apologize for calling bush the devil. apparently, it's ok for moore to mercilessly mock bush in film, as moore is a blue eyed, white skinned north american. i guess chavez doesn't have the same freedom to speak the truth, at least in moore's eyes.

so, moore is doing many things at once here...demonizing and mocking an "enemy" of the u.s., overrating his own importance, and stereotyping latinos.

sounds like a true progressive.

white american style.

and to think that chavez is actually attacking capitalism, as opposed to talking about attacking capitalism.

for, you see, there is no money in the actual attacking. and the other side has guns and tanks and bombs they aren't afraid to use. so, better to appear on late night tv, and make movies, and grow fat, literally and figuratively, from the profits, and most importantly, to mock the men who are actually challenging american capitalism.

that will ensure more moore on late night tv, and mainstream theater screenings, and favorable reviews.

if moore is a progressive, it may be time to regress.

and the saddest thing of all was that we cared about the wrong things

2009-10-13T06:39:00.000-07:00

a student shows up 20 minutes late. you would think the class was being bombed. what will the future generations say, if there are future generations? they will say that while the bombs were falling, while the food was being poisoned, while poverty was rampant, while various bigotries battered our brutalized earth, we cared about people being on time.

and on time for what? if they were on time, what would they learn? it brings to mind the line in sleeper..."prepare subject for a thorough brainwash." just what is our educational establishment in place for? if there was real learning going on, perhaps one could justify caring about students being on time. but, of course, true learning is done by choice. when you want to learn something, you take time to learn it. this truth explains why things are learned in the first place.

if i may reach for a comparison, it is like comparing rape with consensual sex. one is forced upon you, the other is a choice freely made. that is why 1984 reads better when you read it on your own, as opposed to it being on your school's summer reading list.

forced learning is an oxymoron. and, just what is it that this culture has to teach us? in five years at "one of the best public schools in the country," i have yet to see a student with a william blum book, or a barry harris cd. there is much to learn, and one will never learn it in the educational establishments created by the culture that is killing truth.

so, the student was 20 minutes late? perhaps he got some extra sleep, an activity much more important than sitting in a banal classroom. maybe the young man was eating, another activity more essential than taking notes on a plethora of information that will be forgotten as soon as the next quiz is completed.

eating, sleeping, sitting in a classroom.

the animals, which we once were, and still are, suicidal tendencies aside, can all figure out which choices to make.

sadly, our society can't.

and the future generations?

they will surely say that the saddest thing was, they cared about the wrong things.

gays in the military?

2009-10-12T19:31:00.000-07:00

will obama end "don't ask, don't tell?" well, maybe he will, and maybe he won't. but, if you want gay people in the military, that means you want people in the military, and people in the military is the problem. will it help bombed villagers in afghanistan to know that those who killed them are gay? "hey, i don't mind being blown up, as long as i'm being murdered by a homosexual!"

it brings to mind my old gag about a tribute at umass given years ago to black korean war veterans. supposedly, these guys were forgotten heroes. i joked at the time that the tribute could have been titled "we kill people too."

the problem isn't who is in the military, the problem is the military itself. so, if "don't ask, don't tell" is ended someday, then what? what of the wars themselves? when will they be ended? a true progressive movement would be doing what it could to end the wars, and to expose the military as a violent, sexist, racist, homophobic institution. in short, it is the last place a decent gay person, or straight person, should be in.

a progressive moment challenges power. it doesn't try to find its place within existing power structures. the military is the dominant mode of power in american life. to ask for equality within it is to accept its power. it legitimizes it, acknowledges it as decent, as something worthy of belonging to.

but, as groucho once said "i don't want to be a part of any group that would have me as a member."

not all things are worth joining. sometimes, there are things that trump equal rights. do we want equal rights to commit evil acts? is there a movement that says both men and women should have an equal right to abuse their children, rape their servants, beat their dogs? the problem is the abuse, not the gender of who is doing the abusing. similarly, the problem with the military is that it is used to kill people, not whether the person bombing brown people is allowed to openly express their sexuality as they do so.

some may want gays in the military. i want all people out of the military. i want equal rights for gay civilians, but as far as i'm concerned, once you join the service, i'm rooting for the road team.

have these avid would be abolishers of "don't ask, don't tell" stopped to think of how many gay people have been killed in war? if more gays serve in combat, they will surely kill thousands of fellow gays around the world.

well, i suppose they won't ask them their sexual preferences before they bomb the shit out of them.

2009-10-10T17:22:00.001-07:00

War and Peace
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

I suppose we should not begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, though it represents a radical break in tradition, since he's only had slightly less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering people across the world for years.

Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The peace laureate president who preceded him was Teddy Roosevelt, who got the prize in 1906 as reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines. Senator George Hoar’s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt’s eligibility for the Peace Prize:

“You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. ”

TR was given the peace prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama’s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindukush and portions of Pakistan.

People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, albeit Norwegian. It’s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That’s the audacity of hope at full stretch.

It’s dawning even on those predisposed to like the guy that when it comes to burning issues the first black president of the United States truly hates to come down on one side or the other. He dreads making powerful people mad. He won’t stand up for his own people when they’re being savaged by the nutball right, edges them out, then has his press secretary claim that they jumped of their own accord. This may impress the peaceniks of Oslo, but from the American perspective he's looking like a wimp.

Obama’s Afghan policy evolved on the campaign trail last year as a one-liner designed to deflect charges that he was a peacenik on Iraq. Not so, he cried. The Global War on Terror was being fought in the wrong place. His pledge was to hunt down and “kill” Osama bin Laden.

Once ensconced in the Oval Office Obama, invoking “bipartiship”, instantly nailed a white flag to the mast by keeping on Robert Gates, Bush’s secretary of defense.

He formed a foreign policy team mostly composed of Clinton-era neo-liberal hawks, headed by Hilary Clinton and Richard Holbrook. His next step was to eject the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, and install Gen. Stanley McChrystal, best known for running the assassination wing of the military's joint special-operations command. (JSOC). Then he ordered 17,000 new US troops to be deployed to Afghanistan.

It was a fine exhibition of Obama’s eerie skill - also demonstrated in the politicking over health reform - in foreclosing his own range of choices and allowing opponents to coalesce and seize the initiative. If, on his second day in office he’d announced a full and complete review of US aims in Afghanistan, with no option left off the table he’d have had some purchase on the situation. But the months drifted by and finally the worsening situation forced a review of Afghan policy, precisely when Obama’s poll numbers were dropping, the war lobby heartened and the liberals already dejected by Obama’s surrender to Goldman Sachs and Wall Street and disastrous efforts in the health fight.

At this point fate handed Obama a golden opportunity. With astounding insolence Gen. McChrystal began to conduct a public lobbying campaign for his appeal for 40,000 more troops. His rationale for new troops ended up in the hands of Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.

Harry Truman was an indifferent president who needlessly dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, designed to intimidate Stalin. He launched the cold war arms race in 1948. Yet Americans venerate him for two things: the sign on his desk saying the buck stops here, and his dramatic firing of war hero Gen. Douglas MacArthur, for insubordination in challenging Truman’s overall direction of the war in Korea (not to mention Truman's fears of likely MacArthur excess in administering plans being carefully evolved in Truman’s high command to deploy and use nuclear weapons on the Koran peninsula.)

Truman didn’t allow MacArthur time to stage a grandiose resignation. In April, 1951, he fired him on late night radio, announcing that "With deep regret I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the U.S. Government and of the U.N. in matters pertaining to his official duties. In view of the specific responsibilities imposed upon me by the Constitution of the U.S. …I have decided that I must make a change in command in the Far East. I have, therefore, relieved General MacArthur of his command.”

It’s clear that McChrystal stepped over the line conclusively in his speech in London at the Institute for Strategic Studies where he contemptuously dismissed the “small footprint” counter-terrorism strategy proposed by Vice President Joe Biden and Senator John Kerry, saying that it would lead to Afghanistan becoming Chaos-istan. Obama’s National Security Advisor, Gen Jim Jones declared that it would have been better that McChrystal’s criticisms had come up through the Army’s chain of command. That was the moment Obama could have fired McChrystal for MacArthur’s offense – insubordination and defiance of civilian control of military policy.

McChrystal is no war hero, like McArthur. People crave some evidence that Obama has steel in his soul. High risk, maybe, but potentially a huge coup for Obama at a fraught political moment, also a brisk exit from the humiliation of the failed booster trip to Copenhagen to win the 2016 Olympics for Chicago. Obama did nothing, except further irk his liberal base by saying withdrawal isn’t an option. Pundits solemnly explained that given Democrats’ distaste for the war in Afghanistan – backed by strong popular hostility, Obama might have to go to Republicans to get the votes for the necessary appropriations of money.

It’s all much too late for any sensible policy review. There have been two moments in the last 40 years when life might have improved for ordinary Afghans, particularly women. The first came with the the reforming left regime of the late 1970s, destroyed by the warlords with US backing. The second arrived with the US eviction of the Taliban in 2001-2, which was welcomed by many Afghans. But at this stage in the game, simply by definition, no American intervention overseas can be anything other than a ghastly disaster, usually bloodstained. Allready the US had too many chits out to the warlords of the Northern Alliance. The US “nation building” apparat is irreversibly corrupt – with a network of $250,000 a year consultancies, insider contracts, and beyond that a de facto stake in the drug industry now supply most of the West’s heroin and opium.

There’s no possible light at the end of any tunnel. The robot war via Predator missiles and other instruments in the arsenal infuriates all Afghans, as wedding parties are blown to bits every weekend. With more troops and mercenaries now in Afghanistan than during the Russian military presence at its peak, there’s zero chance for America playing a long-term constructive role in Afghanistan. The US presence is just a recruiting poster for the Taliban.

But Obama has now surrounded himself with just the same breed of intellectuals who persuaded Lyndon Johnson to destroy his presidency by escalating the war. They’re easily as mad as the bible thumper I heard last week on my truck radio as I drove over the Tehachapi pass on route 58, between Barstow and Bakersfield. Harold Camping, president of Family Stations Ministry, was patiently explaining that God’s plan was to end the world by flooding on May 21, 2011, thus trumping the end of the Mayan calendar, December 21, 2012. In the Biblical perspective 5/21/2011 is the end of the world. The elect will be saved, the rest will perish, not even given brief probation like the inhabitants of Nineveh. Camping's voice was calm and seemingly rational , no doubt like those of the men and women briefing Obama. A doubter called in, emphasizing that he was a 100 per cent believer in the veracity of each line in the Bible, but how to explain verse 4 of the ninetieth psalm? “For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night”? Why had the divine author permitted himself the ambiguity of simile? Camping plunged confidently into biblical numerology: God revealed to Noah in the year 4990 BC that there would be yet 7 days until the flood of waters would be upon the earth. Substitute 1000 years for each one of those 7 days, and we get 7000 years. And when we project 7000 years into the future from 4990 BC, we find that it falls on the year 2011 AD. 4990 + 2011 = 7001. He counseled us to remember, when counting from an Old Testament date to a New Testament date, always to subtract one year because there is no year zero, resulting in: 4990 + 2011 – 1 = 7000 years exactly.

But May 21? On May 21, 1988, God finished using the churches and congregations of the world. The Spirit of God left all churches and Satan entered into the churches to rule at that point in time. The Bible decrees that this period of judgment upon the churches wil last for 23 years. A full 23 years (8400 days exactly) would be from May 21, 1988 until May 21, 2011. Camping took pains to remind his vast world audience that this information was discovered in the Bible completely apart from the information regarding the 7000 years from the flood.

At this point the geological contours of the Tehachapi pass interrupted the radio signal and soon I was descending into the inferno of sunset over Bakersfield. Is Campoing madder than the augurers who have been counseling Obama on his Afghan policy? Is his devoted audience more gullible than the President?

Last week Obama invited Republicans as well as Democrats to the White House for further review of the options. Obama has let events overtake him, exactly as he allowed the health policy debate to spin out of his control in the summer and early fall. He'll shoot for some sort of lethal semi-compromise on reinforcements, thus feeding the right and angering his liberal supporters. A year from now he’ll be paying the penalty in the mid-term elections, just as Clinton did.

Anthropology at War

Don’t miss the marvelous new edition of our Subscriber-Only Newsletter. David Price, an anthropologist and season contributor to CounterPunch excavates a story of particular relevance right now: the way the Pentagon is recruiting PhDs to fight its counter-insurgency campaigns: today Afghanistan, tomorrow the world. Price writes:

“While political science was the academic discipline, which the wars of the twentieth century drew upon, the asymmetrical wars of the twenty-first century now look toward anthropology with hopes of finding models of culture, or data on specific cultures, to be conquered or to be used in counterinsurgency operations. ..

“The counterinsurgency program generating the greatest friction among anthropologists is the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) – a program with over 400 employees, originally operating through private contractors and now in the process of being taken over by the U.S. Army. Human Terrain embeds anthropologists with military units to ease the occupation and conquest of Iraqi and Afghanis – with plans to extend these operations in Africa through expanding units with AFRICOM. Some HTS social scientists are armed, others choose not to. In the last two years, three HTS social scientists have been killed in the course of their work, and HTS member Don Ayala recently pled guilty in U.S. District Court to killing the Afghan (whom Ayala shot in the head-execution style while the victim was detained with his hands cuffed behind him) who had attacked THS social scientist Paula Loyd…

“Supporters of HTS claim the program uses embedded social scientists to help reduce “kinetic engagements,” or unnecessary violent contacts with the populations they encounter. The idea is to use these social scientists to interact with members of the community, creating liaison relationships between occupiers and occupied, as well as using HTS’s social scientists’ cultural knowledge to reduce misunderstandings that can lead to unnecessarily violent interactions.”

HTS has been selling itself to the public through remarkably well-organized domestic propaganda campaigns that have seen dozens of uncritical articles on HTS , with personality profiles on HTS’s personnel appearing in American newspapers, The New Yorker, Harpers, Elle, More, etc.) In his essay, exclusive to the newsletter, Price lays out the full, ugly story of these recipes for “better killing”.

Also in the newsletter: Mark Grueter reports from Sulaimani, Iraqi Kurdistan, on a multi-million dollar campus designed to sell the American way of life. Welcome to the American University of Iraq. “Move your ass and your brains will follow”: Joe Paff remembers an astounding mobilization in San Francisco, 1967-1973 and the lessons it holds for left organizers today.

Subscribe today!

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

peace prize?

2009-10-10T16:42:00.000-07:00

while the bombs fall on afghanistan? while the drones fly over pakistan? while billions in military aid is given to israel? while iran is threatened? while a 600 billion dollar military budget is passed in the democratically controlled senate? while obama ponders a 40,000 troop increase in afghanistan? while the destruction of iraq continues?

of course, there should be no surprise. the nobel committee almost gave the 1938 prize to hitler. according to tariq ali, it was between hitler and gandhi, and since they couldn't choose between those too, they gave it to a group that helped refugees. but, other war criminals have won the reward, including the fellow i like to refer to as the "jewish nazi," henry kissinger. if you think that a strong nickname, ask the millions buried in the lands of vietnam, laos, cambodia, chile, indonesia, argentina, and elsewhere.

teddy roosevelt once won a nobel as well. he who took cuba from spain so he could keep it for himself. it would take 60 years, and a cat named castro, to change that ugly piece of peace. it was teddy the bear who devastated the philippines, killing hundreds of thousands of filipinos, who were guilty of wanting to be in charge of their own country. they say it was vietnam before vietnam. in short, teddy was a brutal bastard. and, the winner of a peace prize.

good old woodrow wilson also won a peace prize. of course, he also invaded haiti and the dominican republic, bombed mexico, got the u.s. involved in the mass slaughter known as ww1, and was a rabid white supremacist. our involvement in the first world war got around 300,000 u.s. soldiers killed. who knows how many people our soldiers killed. it seems this bloody resume was a perfect record for a prize. for, you see, woody was a key player in the creation of the league of nations. which begs the question, did the league of nations save a single life? a young ho chi minh once tried to talk to woody at the league. needless to say, he never was granted any time.

so, we have soaring rhetoric on one hand, and bloody deeds on the other. the nobel people seem to prize the rhetoric, as they ignore the butal deeds of those they honor.

so, congrats, mr o'bomber.

but as they say, consider the source.

awarding of peace prize to obama a piece of shit

2009-10-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

War and Peace Prizes
by Howard Zinn

I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace.

Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations – that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he had bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War, surely among stupid and deadly wars at the top of the list.

Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains on that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The Committee did not give the Nobel prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticised the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league.

Oh yes, the committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final peace agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war, with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, is given a peace prize!

People should be given a peace prize not on the basis of promises they have made – as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises – but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war, and Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Nobel peace committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.

© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited

2009-10-07T06:49:00.001-07:00

The Hidden Side of Mexico's Drug War
An interview with ERPI guerrilla leader Comandante Ramiro
October 2009 By John Gibler
printer friendly version Gibler's ZSpace page

Ramiro of the ERPI—photo by John Gibler

They came shooting. Three military Humvees raced up the sole dirt road that leads to Puerto Las Ollas with soldiers firing mounted machine guns into the dirt paths and lean-to houses. Helicopters crested the mountain ridge that borders the tiny village. Soldiers leaned out of the side, firing. It was mid-morning June 9 and no one expected it. "I was fixing a tin roof when they arrived shooting," says a 19-year-old who was there that day. The young man watched from a rooftop as soldiers ran through the village, apprehending women and children. He managed to escape into the steep mountainside. "You see soldiers beating 13-year-olds and it makes you rage," he said.

One of the boys, Omar, tells how he was beaten, tortured, and interrogated for hours that day, with the soldiers asking about the guerrillas. "They asked for Ramiro, but I didn't say anything. It went on for about five hours. They stepped on my bare feet with their boots and boxed my ears with their open palms. They said that if I told anyone about it they would kill me," says Omar. He was able to escape later that night.

Most of the men in the village had been working in the cornfields when they heard the gunfire. They ran for cover in the forest. One man, César Acosta Ávila, who suffers from the aftereffects of a severe head injury, could not run. When the soldiers grabbed him, they beat him, threatened to rape and kill him before jabbing sewing needles under his fingernails and demanding information about the guerrillas.

Alejandro, in his late 20s, also ran into the mountains that first day where he hid with other villagers for four days without eating. "How can one trust such a government," he asks. "Here you live in fear. You see a soldier and run to the hills." He tells how he returned to his house to find his few possessions and clothes all on the floor, dirty and broken. "Imagine if the government arrived to support agricultural production instead of repressing," he says. "But...the criminals are part of the government itself. What is happening is that the government is forcing the poor to take other measures, even though they don't want to."

The soldiers camped out in the village and the following day between 500 and 600 more arrived, setting up camps in Puerto Las Ollas and two nearby villages, Las Palancas and El Jilguero. There they continued to harass, beat, and interrogate those who had been unable to escape, mainly women and children. The soldiers entered their homes—made of wood walls, dirt floors, and tin roofs—breaking and stealing their possessions. They set fire to the only modes of transportation: two dirt bikes and an all-terrain four-wheeler.

The army remained in the villages until June 13, when a "civilian observation mission" composed of various human rights organizations arrived to document abuses. Amnesty International released an "urgent action" on June 25 based on the mission's findings documenting cases of torture.

Drug War or Counterinsurgency?

Puerto Las Ollas is a tiny village of some 50 subsistence farmers poised on the dense green mountain ridges of the Sierra Madre in Guerrero State. Much of the region, known as the Tierra Caliente, provides cover for marijuana and poppy fields for Mexico's powerful drug trafficking cartels. The region is also home to some of Mexico's most marginalized rural communities, among whom rag-and-bone guerrilla fighters have lived and organized uninterrupted for over 40 years. Guerrilla groups were a part of the Mexican political scene throughout the 20th century. More than 20 distinct groups rose up in cities and rural areas during the 1960s and 1970s, targeting the military and police, kidnapping wealthy Mexicans to fund their cause, and in some cases setting bombs off in empty buildings. The government responded with "white brigades" (paramilitary death squads) tasked with executing guerrillas outside the law. During this time more than 400 people were "disappeared," most of them in the state of Guerrero.

The most well-known guerrilla army, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN-Zapatista Army of National Liberation), grabbed world attention when they rose up in arms on January 1, 1994. The Zapatistas have since launched several national political initiatives while continuing to build autonomy in their recuperated territory in Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas.

Most of the recent headlines have focused on the intense bloodshed between warring drug cartels, the army, and various state and federal police forces, in which over 13,000 people have been slain since President Felipe Calderón ordered the army into the streets in December 2006. The Washington Post's July 9, 2009 headline "Mexico Accused of Torture in Drug War" prompted an immediate call for inquiries from the U.S. government. Rights groups also called on the United States to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to Mexico, funds that form part of the $1.4 billion aid package known as the Merida Initiative.

The Post story only mentions in passing, however, the existence of an armed guerrilla group in the region, the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo Insurgente (ERPI-Insurgent People's Revolutionary Army). The ERPI traces its roots back to the teacher-turned-guerrilla-leader Lucio Cabañas and is perhaps the armed movement that publicly elaborates a political position most closely resembling that of the Zapatistas. The ERPI's core concept, poder popular (popular power or peoples' power), is very similar to the Zapatistas' struggle to build autonomy and their core concepts like mandar obedeciendo (lead by obeying).

"The Mountainside Is Different"

After some 18 hours of driving from Mexico City and another few hours walking through the forest in the Guerrero mountains, I came to the hillside where the ERPI column was fanned out with machetes cutting weeds and brush away from knee-high corn stalks.

ERPI in Guerrero—photo by John Gibler

Dressed in camouflage fatigues, jeans, and T-shirts, they wear military caps and ski masks or bandannas to cover their faces. They use sticks and machetes to clear away the brush, their shiny made-in-China AK-47s slung over their backs, handheld radios, canteens, and hunting knives affixed to their belts or backpack straps. There are no women present in the column, though one of the ERPI's co-founders is a woman, Gloria Arenas Agis.

Comandante Ramiro, a 34-year-old, steps away from the column to give an interview on the open hillside. When addressed as "comandante" he says quietly, "Just Ramiro is fine." He begins by telling his version of what happened when the soldiers stormed the village of Puerto Las Ollas on June 9.

"Once again we have seen the attitude of this bad government. Instead of bringing public works, they come shooting, they come with bullets," Ramiro says. "Only this time the people didn't just take it. Many ran to the mountainside and were pursued. The villagers did not shoot; their children were all there. But the mountainside is different. The soldiers pursued people out into the mountainside and this time we had it out. It was no big deal," he says of the ERPI's shootout with soldiers.

The Mexican Army acknowledged that one soldier was wounded during the operations, but Ramiro thinks that several were killed."We responded in a firm, appropriate manner," he says, "just enough so that they would stop pursuing people out into the mountainside. It was self-defense. It was the first day. They were trying to surround the mountainside. There was another clash and we contained them. Another column of soldiers tried to come up from the other side and we also stopped them. They didn't follow those fleeing anymore or anyone else."

"I Wasn't Born A Guerrilla"

Ramiro joined the guerrillas 20 years ago when the survivors of Lucio Cabañas's Partido de los Pobres (PDLP-Party of the Poor) still clung to the edges of remote villages. In 1974, the Mexican Army dispatched over 70,000 soldiers who killed Cabañas and many of his fighters—but many more escaped and fled to Mexico City to hide. In the 1980s, these survivors returned to Guerrero to rebuild their troops.

At the age of 14, Ramiro began participating in protests and marches and formed a part of the PDLP's social support network, often carrying tortillas into the mountains to the guerrilla column. A military spy observed Ramiro's movements and tipped off the army, leading soldiers to his village where they detained and tortured him. "I was going on 15 when the soldiers grabbed me and tortured me," he says. "They interrogated me about the armed groups, about who were the local leaders. They accused me of being a member of the command structure—despite my young age—saying that I was training the compañeros."

After being tortured by the army, Ramiro decided to join the PDLP guerrilla column full time. It was around 1989. The PDLP subsequently joined forces with the urban guerrilla Unión del Pueblo (Peoples Union) and later became the Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR-Popular Revolutionary Army), which appeared during the first anniversary of the massacre at Aguas Blancas on June 28, 1996. The EPR would later split, with the Guerrero columns forming the ERPI. The pattern is well established in deep, rural Mexico. For decades, state repression of social activism has led Mexicans to take up arms and go underground. Lucio Cabañas, an elementary school teacher, took to the mountains and formed the PDLP after state police attempted to shoot him while he spoke at a teachers rally in Atoyac de Alvarez in 1967. Cabañas escaped, whisked away by fellow teachers and his student's parents, but the police killed five teachers and bystanders that day.

Gloria Arenas went underground and began the clandestine organizing that would lead her to co-found the ERPI (along with her husband Jacobo Silva Nogales) after the Veracruz state police kidnapped her, held her incommunicado, and threatened to kill her for her nonviolent activism with the indigenous land rights organization TINAM.

"I was not born a guerrilla fighter," Ramiro says. "I was not born with a gun in my hand. It was repression, injustice, and poverty that forced us to this. It is not just to have a good time that I am going to grab a gun and head into the bush. Here one sleeps on the ground in the rain, without eating, weary, but always with the idea that one day things will be better for everyone."He was present when the army surrounded the tiny schoolhouse in El Charco, near Ayutla de los Libres, Guerrero in the pre-dawn hours of June 7, 1998.Ramiro and other guerrillas were able to shoot their way through the army siege, but soldiers killed 11 combatants and local villagers, executing several after they had surrendered and lay face down on the basketball court, giving each a shot in the back of the head. Ramiro was one of the organizers and leaders of the ERPI's September 22, 1999 ambush of an army convoy in response to the massacre. Mexico's Department of Defense said that two soldiers were injured, though witnesses said several were killed.

In October 1999, Mexican authorities captured and tortured Silva and Arenas. They were then charged with both fabricated crimes and with rebellion. Over the past ten years Silva and Arenas have taken their case to the courts and won several appeals, getting most of the charges dropped—except rebellion, to which they pled guilty. When, on the first day of their trial, the presiding judge asked Jacobo Silva his profession, he responded: "Guerrillero."

In 2001, Ramiro was captured at a military roadblock in Riva Palacios, Michoacán. He says that both soldiers and civilians linked to drug trafficking participated in his capture and the subsequent torture sessions, during which he repeatedly lost consciousness. "When I was caught, I was cruelly tortured. But once I was taken to jail in Coyuca de Catalán, besides the bad aspects, there was a nice upside," he says. "Nice because we started organizing among the prisoners." Prison life in Guerrero, he says, is one of constant torture, beatings, and drugs sold by prison guards. "With all that I saw there in prison, I asked myself: This is the reformation of which the government speaks? Drugs in the jails. Beatings. Humiliations. That is not how to reform someone, that is how to make him or her more rebellious.... We told the prisoners that they need work, they need recreation as well, without that you'll go crazy, which is what the government wants. The government brings drugs into the prisons because that is what they want. Leave all that, we have to demand work, demand nutritious food. And that is how we began to organize."

Despite his experiences organizing, however, early on he decided to break out of prison or die trying. When he was transferred to a state prison in Acapulco, he was beaten and tortured while in transit. In Acapulco, he continued organizing not only for work and better conditions, but also to dig a tunnel under the prison walls into a nearby neighborhood. He and 14 other prisoners escaped on November 28, 2002 in broad daylight. The Guerrero state government accused them of being drug traffickers and said that among the 14 other escapees were several Colombian capos. Ramiro, however, says that the Colombians were not capos, but borregos ("goats")—slang for those charged with traveling with the drugs on boats. "They were poor people," he says. "I saw how they lived, what they ate, how they dressed. We were together after all, and not because we wanted to be."

Ramiro accuses the government of protecting and even collaborating with paramilitary drug gangs and traffickers in the region. "When I was captured, several civilians were there: Abel Montúfar, a well-known hired killer in the Tierra Caliente and the brother of Erik Montúfar [a Guerrero state police official] was there and apparently in charge. That family [the Montúfars] has been both feared and hated in Tierra Caliente because they have the support of the state," Ramiro says. "Erik Montúfar is deeply embedded in state power and thus they let them go."

Ramiro says that "Chapo" Guzman's Sinaloa Cartel and the government work together to both eliminate the competition (such as the dreaded Zetas of the Gulf Cartel) and carry out counterinsurgency operations against the guerrillas. "Here El Chapo Guzman's cartel is working for the state and vice versa."

The ERPI, according to Ramiro, is trying to fight drugs at the grassroots. "We have been helping to combat alcoholism and drug addiction," he says. "Before we came to this region, there was a lot of alcoholism and drug use. We have been talking with people, holding assemblies and explaining the damaging effects. Often internal conflicts in communities are due to alcohol and drugs. So we have been helping to reduce drug and alcohol use. But we do not impose this. It is something agreed upon and arrived at via consensus in assemblies. People vote in favor of this. We let the dealers know, first in a very calm way, that from then on they cannot sell drugs in those communities because that was the people's decision. If they continue, they will be sanctioned by the column."

In this sense, the ERPI has taken a similar path as the EZLN. The Zapatistas successfully banned all forms of alcohol and drugs from their communities. Indeed, during the recent years of spectacular drug violence plaguing the country perhaps the only corner of Mexican territory to be completely immune—the only place where not a single drug execution has occurred—is Zapatista rebel territory in Chiapas.

What does Ramiro say to the critics of armed movements today, those who accuse them of glorifying violence or even of being murderers? "How are we going to confront the army, with flowers? No," he says. "In clashes some soldiers fell. If they accuse me of that, I accept. But if an armed movement exists, it is because the conditions for it also exist: poverty, injustice, and repression. That is why guerrillas arise. It is not something we do for fun."

Z

John Gibler is a Global Exchange human rights fellow in Mexico. His writing and photographs has appeared in Z, In These Times, Left Turn, the Indypendent, and New Politics. His 2009 book is Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt.

2009-10-07T06:47:00.001-07:00

Nuclear Hypocrisy
U.S. Plan to Develop New Nuclear Weapons is Censored by the American Press

October 07, 2009 By Anthony DiMaggio

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It was one of the New York Times' shining examples of investigative journalism, as it reported last week that the "U.S. is moving forward with reconstituting nuclear weapons, while concurrently attacking Iran for similar behavior." The story raised serious questions about U.S. double standards in dealing with an alleged nuclear threat, while at the same time violating its own obligations - under the Non-Proliferation Treaty - requiring it to dismantle its nuclear stockpile.

We can dream can't we? Although one of the hottest stories of the year was reported by the Inter Press Service last week, the U.S. plan for new nuclear weapons production was completely ignored in the mainstream media. That Obama allocated $55 million for nuclear weapons production runs directly contrary to the myth that the U.S. fulfills its international legal obligations, while punishing "rogue regimes" for violating international law. This story, however, was dead on arrival when it was first reported by the Inter Press Service (IPS) on Wednesday, September 30th.

The IPS report states that "despite the statements by Barack Obama that he wants to see the world reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons, the U.S. Department of Energy continues to push forward on a program called Complex Modernization, which would expand two existing nuclear plants to allow them to produce new plutonium pits and new bomb parts out of enriched uranium for use in a possible new generation of nuclear bombs." The story's timing is particularly ironic considering that the U.S. is openly admitting to reconstituting nuclear weapons, while there is currently no physical evidence that Iran is running a nuclear weapons program.

The combined stories of Iran's "weapons program" and U.S. nuclear reconstitution are one of the most explosive news developments of the year, although one wouldn't know by following the news. The IPS story was picked up by progressive, non-mainstream news sources such as Truthout, CommonDreams, and ZNet, but received no coverage in mainstream sources. The Obama administration's calling out of Iran was covered in 66 news stories, op-eds, and/or editorials from September 30th to October 6th. The New York Times ran 19 pieces, the Washington Post 18, the Houston Chronicle 7, the Washington Times 6, the Boston Globe 6, the Los Angeles Times 5, the Chicago Sun Times 4, and the San Francisco Chronicle one. In contrast, no headlines, op-eds, or editorials in these papers featured the U.S. decision to reconstitute nuclear weapons. There is not a single reference to the Complex Modernization program anywhere in the reporting of these papers, nor is the program mentioned in any of the news programs from ABC News, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, or Fox News over the last week. References to Iranian "nuclear weapons" appear, in contrast, in nearly four dozen stories in these television outlets.

A brief review of newspaper stories on Iran from the last week demonstrates the extraordinarily propagandistic nature of reporting and commentary on Iran, to the exclusion of criticisms of the U.S.:

- From the Washington Times: "The Coming War with Iran; Real Question is not if, but when," "Righteous Indignation: Countdown to War and Armageddon," and "Big, Ominous Win for Iran; Buying Time for Continue Clandestine Work."

- From the Washington Post: "U.N. Chief Says Iran Must Prove its Sincerity on Nuclear Issue," and "Nuclear Disarmament is an Issue of Morality."

- From the New York Times: "Iran Agrees to Key Concessions on Uranium, but Doubts Linger," "Iran May Have All it Needs for Bomb U.N. Agency Says Functioning Nuke is in Reach," "Challenge for Obama: Holding Iran to its Word," "The Possibility of a Nuclear-Armed Iran Alarms Arabs," and "Answering Iran's Nuclear Challenge."

- From the Los Angeles Times: "Access Delay May Give Iran Time to Obscure Data."

- From the Houston Chronicle: "Iran Will Send its Enriched Uranium to Russia Concession a Win for West - if it's Not Hollow."

It is disturbing that the U.S. plan for nuclear weapons production is completely censored from our discourse. Obama promised to "seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." The Department of Energy's plans clearly violate this promise, and run counter to U.S. obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue U.S. nuclear disarmament, rather than rearmament.

It is no surprise that the U.S. media and political establishment ignored this story. U.S. political and media elites expect Americans to be ignorant regarding official double standards, but this is only possible if media outlets refuse to talk about these double standards. Most Americans, for example, probably don't know much about U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the 1980s, when he was committing the worst of his atrocities against the Iraqi and Iranian people. This ignorance is not surprising, since most media outlets refused to discuss U.S. support for Saddam in the 1980s, or during the run up to the 2003 invasion. Most Americans probably don't know much about how the U.S. increased its support for Saddam during the worst of his atrocities, and how U.S. corporations and government officials provided Hussein with the necessary precursors for developing his infamous weapons of mass destruction. U.S. hypocrisy in regards to Iraqi WMD played out over a period of a few decades, however, so it was easier for officials and journalists to omit discussion of this inconvenient history. In the case of Iran, however, Obama's verbal attacks took place just five days before reporting on the United States' nuclear weapons reconstitution (Obama made his speech criticizing Iran on Friday, September 25th, while the IPS story on U.S. nukes was released on Wednesday, September 30th). Americans may be ignorant of their history, but it's unlikely that they're so ignorant that they'd fail to notice blatant nuclear hypocrisy over the period of a single week. It is not surprising, then, that journalists refuse to publicly embarrass Obama for his militaristic approach to Iran.

Anthony DiMaggio teaches U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University. He is the author of Mass Media, Mass Propaganda: Examining American News in the "War on Terror" and the forthcoming: When Media Goes to War: Hegemonic Discourse, Public Opinion, and the Limits of Dissent (February 2010). He can be reached at: adimagg@ilstu.edu

mellish strikes

2009-10-05T16:06:00.000-07:00

just listened to lucky thompson's lucky strikes album, a classic prestige album from 1964. the man plays beautifully, as he always did. and it got me to thinking...what kind of a society lets a brilliant artist like lucky become homeless? and then i thought, what kind of a society lets anyone become homeless? lucky spent many years a street person in seattle. very few people knew who he was, or what he had been. they had never heard the trio recordings with oscar pettiford, the walkin solo with miles, the sides with milt jackson, the great recordings from paris, the three beauties on prestige.

let it be known that america doesn't care about its great people. it rewards regressives, and punishes progressives. masters are ignored, often even mistreated. many of our musical masters have been black. this has surely increased their chances of remaining obscure and oppressed. their brilliance is largely forgotten, and people are either indifferent or ignorant of their accomplishments.

earlier today, i saw a young guy riding down the street in an suv, blasting the new jay-z song that has obnoxious vocals by alicia "off" keys. the volume was the usual way too loud, and instead of looking at the road, the fuckhead's head was turned to the side, to see what reaction his stupidity was garnering. who has introduced this man to bird and dolphy and trane? if he was introduced to them, would it matter? is it already too late? for it seems the musical and cultural brainwashing is complete, and we are left with the disgusting results. as it is, a cultural heritage has been obliterated. the silence is shocking, but it screams to those of us who have experienced the serenity that only real music can bring.

so, lucky was unlucky. in our nation, in the year of your lord, how could it be any different?

but, perhaps it isn't too late. i still believe, somewhere deep within me, that if people heard that sensual soprano blow such sweet sounds on in a sentimental mood, they would be moved.

it will never happen. i work in a school, and i've seen too many teachers, administrators, parents. most of them know next to nothing, and the few that are hip remain silent, always remembering to do their job and little else. of course, the nazis in the camps did their jobs too.

and now, we are left with the results of a devolved species, unaware of its brilliance and proud of its ignorance and brutality.

there is veterans day, but no lucky thompson day.

and knowing what i know about this pathetic excuse of a nation, i can assure you that there will be many more veterans, but there will never be another lucky thompson.

amerikka, home to the army and the berklee school of music, but never home to eli "lucky" thompson.

2009-10-04T16:46:00.000-07:00

so, the olympics are not coming to chicago. as the title of my last blog stated, less is more, michael. in order to house the games, the city of chicago would likely have bulldozed a number of houses, functioned as a mini police state, and placed a pretty tax on the people of chicago. they tell us there is no money for impoverished inner city residents. they tell us there is no money for crumbling schools. they tell us there is no money for parks, libraries, recreation centers. they tell us there is no money for adult education, literacy programs. and yet, there was billions available for the olympics. private investors had already pledged over 5 billion dollars to the city of chicago. will they now pledge that money to the hungry and poor people of chicago? the obamas strongly advocated for the games to come to chicago. will they now advocate for the people of chicago? why was it more important to oprah and the obamas to have games played in their city than for houses, libraries, and parks to be built for masses of needy chicago residents? this is a question that can only be answered when one understands the class question. the powerful care for prestige. they want "their city" to be considered world class. they want to show off the city they so love. the masses, on the other hand, want to eat. the masses want a decent place to live. they want safe schools for their children. they want health care.

it would have been a crime for chicago to host the games of 2016. instead, rio will get the games. to no one's surprise that has been paying just a wee bit of attention, the big o's were on the wrong side here. the side of wealth. but hey, they are wealthy. we can't expect them to be against themselves, can we?

but what's our excuse for not being on the right side?

now, let us turn our eyes from these so called leaders, and let us lead ourselves.

as for me, i think a game is coming on.

see you around.

less is moore

2009-10-02T19:40:00.000-07:00

just saw moore's new flick "capitalism: a love story." of course, there were plenty of laughs and alot of truth in it. his general argument was pretty good, and all in all, it's worth seeing. but. but. but.

how can somebody make a two hour film on american capitalism and not once mention war? why is it that we send our army all over the world? and why is it that our corporations have gone all over the world? no mention of sweatshops, mineshafts, child slavery. our economic system is reliant on the world's resources. therefore, it is reliant on our ability to dominate other nations militarily. to make a film about our economy and not even mention this is criminal. it is an insult to the millions that have been killed all over the world due to american foreign policy.

in fact, american militarism needs to be mentioned on a number of levels. as i just stated, war allows us to steal resources. furthermore, much of our domestic economy is based on war production. no mention of this.

no mention was made of how environmentally destructive american capitalism is. nothing about air pollution, the obesity epidemic (would that have hit too close to home?) the food industry, skyrocketing cancer rates, and a depraved popular culture. the film narrowly focuses on the decline of america's industrial economy. but, what if an industrial economy works? is that sustainable? is building a weapon or car any better if the guy building the weapon or car makes a decent wage? yes, it is sad when people get the shaft, and yes, we want to see people make a living wage, have health insurance, and a decent place to live. but, isn't there more than that? what of the deeper questions?

again, moore displays his usual intellectual dishonesty. he tells us how bad the guys running the economic regulatory agencies are, but he doesn't mention that obama hired all of them. he rants against the 700 billion dollar bailout, but fails to directly mention that obama strongly supported the bailout. this is incredible, as anyone without advanced dementia will surely remember this. but, the facts on obama would fly in the good vs evil, great/bad man theories of history that moore, self proclaimed socialist or not, seems to live by. so, obama was a key figure in the bailout goes unmentioned, but a few words obama spoke in favor of striking factory workers in chicago becomes a central part of the film. it was bank of america that was refusing to pay those workers, the same bank of america that gained 25 billion from the bailout obama supported. if obama was such an advocate of workers, why didn't he go after corporate power before they got the 700 billion? moore does nothing to inform us on this issue. in fact, he presents obama as a messiah like figure, shows women weeping after his victory, and people carrying on as if their favorite football team had just won the superbowl. of course, they were allowed to party, but what a joyful celebration over a capitalist politician ascending to the presidency has to do with socialism is beyond me.

earlier in the film, moore had blamed the reagan era for the beginning of the decline of american capitalism. has moore heard of something known as the great depression? now, i'm no fan of reagan, and he did help to make this country worse, but let's remember that he was the president of the 1980's, not the 1780's. slavery, the mexican american war, the slaughter of the indigenous, the persecution of the wobblies, socialists, anarchists, and the labor movement in general, corporate collusion with nazi germany, the use of strike breakers, pinkerton goons on strikers, none of this was mentioned. moore mentions socialism, but never tells us of our wonderful history of great radicals, and of a once proud american labor movement, crushed by governemt repression. not once did he reference eugene debs, emma goldman, mother jones, malcolm x, or a plethora of others who spoke and acted eloquently and bravely against american capitalism.

so much was left unmentioned. no mention of racism, war, sexism, nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment. yes, there were plenty of laughs. yes, it was well made. yes, it beats the new tyler perry film.

but, what it could have been.

he has a heart.

if he only had a brain.

then, perhaps he would get over the rainbow.

as it is, michael moore's feet remain firmly on the ground.

debate?

2009-10-02T05:53:00.000-07:00

there is a "battle" going on in obama's cabinet over the war in afghanistan. for purposes of brevity, we shall refer to these fuckheads as "warmongers a" and "warmongers b" , or "wa" and "wb" for short.

wa want a troop increase. apparently, not enough people are dying in afghanistan to suit their taste. these cabinet members don't seem to realize that many of our soldiers are only in it for the college benefits. for these fellows, a policy that doesn't work must be extended, so it can not work even more. if only the soviets had sent more troops into the afghan trap, perhaps their people would still have free health care today.

wb don't want to send more troops. rather, they want to send more drones. they too, don't believe enough people are dying in afghanistan. wb would prefer to kill from thousands of feet in the air, leading to massive civilian casualties but little in the way of american deaths.

the "debate," it seems, is between killing from the ground or killing from the air. there is not one cabinet member in this so called debate who is opposed to the senseless destruction of a nation already destroyed. what kind of debate is it when both sides are pro-war? this is not a debate, but a difference of opinion in regards to tactics. it is continuation of a bipartisan foreign policy, which means death to untold numbers from either democratic or republican administrations.

so, who will obama listen to? will he send more troops or more drones? perhaps he will agree with both sides and send both. wouldn't that be fine? for, we don't want to fight this war with one hand tied behind our backs. we don't want to leave our boys out to dry, especially after leaving them out to dry.

oh, i love a good debate.

sadly, they happen so rarely.

save the children. if we mean that, what should we do with the parents and teachers???

2009-09-30T20:18:00.000-07:00

"For the Children...."
[col. writ. 9/19/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

The next time I hear a politician promise to do something 'for the children', I may heave.

If one thing is clear in this nation, it is that children are hated. Oh -- we don't use that word to describe our relationships with them, but if we honestly examine those interactions we find that it would be difficult to describe in ways other than 'hate.'

For the last several months, I've been reading, studying and thinking about the nation's public school system. I've read classics in the field, like Jonathan Kozol's 1967 work, Death At An Early Age, a stunning account on his years as a permanent sub [!] in Boston's Black populated schools in Roxbury, where kids were taken down into dark, dank cellars and beaten with rattan sticks.

But what happened in the dark basements of the buildings, while certainly dramatic and deplorable, could hardly be worse than the systematic slaughter of the minds of tens of thousands of children, who were, in Kozol's words, "intellectually decapitated" daily by a racist, segregated school system.

Truth is, any major U.S. city could've been used with similar results - Harlem, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, for nationally, the drop-out rate is 50%.

Public schools are places where kids go to get their minds and souls killed.

And what is war but old men sacrificing young men in often meaningless battles? What is the so-called 'War on Terror' but a mindless slogan used to sell lies like 'Weapons of Mass Destruction?'

And what are soldiers but mostly children, molded into madmen, who fight and die, so that old rich men can get richer?

Daily, we drug millions of schoolchildren, some as young as 4 years old with Ritalin, because we describe them as hyperactive or deficient in attention --which means they don't sit still, while we bore them out of their brains, with what we laughingly call an education.

'For the children' we leave a diseased and poisoned planet, an economy on crutches, and a world boiling with hatred for their fathers.

Isn't it about time we really stopped doing more damage to the children?

(c) '09 maj

2009-09-30T19:48:00.000-07:00

the situation in honduras is really something. i've got to give zelaya a lot of credit. here's a guy who gets overthrown, but comes back without having been reinstalled as president. essentially, he is living at the brazilian embassy, so i've also got to give the brazilian government their props. however, i will soon need my props back, as i am staging a musical version of macbeth starting in a couple of weeks. zelaya is one brave dude. when arbenz got the boot, he never returned. overthrown leaders never return, unless they have regained power, as chavez did in 02. also, zelaya's term was ending in november, so it is incredible that he is laying it on the line to stand up to the coup makers and the reactionary society they hope to recreate in honduras.

and we in the states? well, we have ignored the matter, since zelaya is not a starting quarterback and has yet to appear in a popular reality show. our change candidate has hung zelaya out to dry, and with the expensive cost of the modern dryer, who can blame him? as always, america stands on the side of reaction in latin america, and the party out of power is even worse on the issue, so there is no improvement in view.

as always, decency and fairness are words and ideas meant for school children, not for nations. and yet, there is a new breeze blowing, as my hat just flew off my head. the modern leaders of the left are not allowing themselves to be silently slaughtered. they are fighting back, as are the millions of common men and women who stand to benefit from the changes they hope to implement. let us not forgot what got zelaya in trouble...he raised the minimum wage!! he didn't confiscate land, or raise taxes on the rich, or nationalize industry (hey, what's wrong with this guy?) rather, he merely wanted to improve the lives of the most humble and poor of his nation. and that, to the corporatists and neo-fascists, is inexcusable. to even begin to redistribute wealth is to be a monster in the eyes of those who feast while the masses starve. the enemy is the rich, and the armies that fight their battles. that doesn't change. but, in latin america, the opponent is stronger. his tactics are diverse. chavez swings for the fences, while zelaya hits singles. still others boo the umpires who are doing their best to fix the game. everyone will need to do their thing, and more.

if i was honduran, i would be proud of my president. as a resident of the united states of north america, i can only envy them his decency and courage.

there is a battle to be waged. we need change we can believe in, and so does honduras.

all of us are waiting.

let's hope the larouche people don't come out on top.

the words of a man worthy of the presidency

2009-09-29T16:37:00.000-07:00

Once we stop growing up corporate and grow up civic, we will be much more focused on nutritious food, rather than junk food; we will be much more inquiring about different kinds of products; we will look at pollution as a form of violence, not just something that is nasty and dirty; we will demand the mechanism so we can control what we own and use these great resources for an enlightened, just, prosperous, happy society where the pursuit of justice is filled with such joy it itself becomes the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of justice.

Ralph Nader

2009-09-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

if the government gets involved in health care, some tell us, that would be fascism. it would also be socialism. i didn't realize that social security and medicare were fascist. i'm surprised that we have stood for such fascist policies for so long.

my sense of fascism is much different. since fascists are also rabid militarists that start wars to control resources and pacify populations, I tend to think of our wars as much closer to fascism than, let's say, a national health insurance plan. that just goes to show you how depraved my mental workings happen to be.

furthermore, since fascism tends to imprison and persecute large numbers of people, often racial or ethnic minorities, i ususlly think of our large prison population of over 2 million and the horrendous conditions they face as approximating fascism much more than say, public libraries.

also, since fascism usually means oppression of the "other" along nationalist, racist lines, i often see racism, sexism, homophobia, anti immigrant sentiment, and anti-arab and muslim bigotry as resembling fascism alot more than, shall we say, medicare.

but, of course, i know little. i barely make more than 20,000 a year, and that's with two jobs. therefore, what can i know? surely, i am just wasting my time complaining, when i could be out, trying to get people to join the sierra club. alas, the only sierra i ever liked was the sierra madre. what a treasure that was. well, i certainly bogarted that line.

fascism has come to america, so say the fascists. to them, fascism means the wrong guy being in power. it has nothing to do with actual policies. so, when obama does nothing to support an ousted democratically elected leader in honduras, or when he drops bombs on afghanistan, or when he advocates for the city of chicago to waste millions of dollars by hosting the olympics when the city could use that money to create jobs or build housing, none of this is fascism, though it is such facts as these that at least show a strong connection between american capitalism and militarism and fascism. but, such real connections are not helpful to the fascists that are yelling fascism at their "opponents." in fact, such facts, may help people understand how this sickening nation of ours actually operates, and that's exactly what they don't want.

so, white supremacists call obama a fascist, as they scream the n word in his direction.

welcome to the circus.

admission is free, but sadly, there is no exit.

2009-09-28T17:04:00.000-07:00

recently saw obama on tv. he seemed loose, and was speaking the truth. i leaned closer. his voice was a little louder, it had more soul than normal. it hit me. he's talking to a black audience. indeed, he was speaking at a meeting of the black congressional caucus. i don't know what to make of this, and i do.

saw curtis fuller. he was on blue train. wrote a la mode. was on the mode for joe album. played with blakey. played on so many great records. there he was last saturday, a little hunched over, frail, wearing a patriots hat.

saw plas johnson. this man played the tenor solo on sinatra's version of that old feeling and blue moon. he is the horn on the pink panther theme. he was the session man. made some jazz classics that are almost impossible to find, including the 1959 album entitled "this must be the plas." there he was with what looked like a conked wig! white blazer, bad ass collar, smooth. he had a silver tenor. played beuatifully at 78.

the next day saw a local cat named nick goumas. wasn't expecting much. the man played his ass off. joe henderson and cedar walton tunes. the blue note sound, the 60's sound. the trane-joe thing. he had chops. he gets about a gig a month. at this gig, there was no one in attendance. i sat there, veggie burger in mouth, rum and coke in hand, stunned that i was hearing serenity played so well. i've added goumas to my list of bad local tenors (tim mayer, bill pierce, rick dimuzzio)

it's cool to hear live music. yes, the air is being poisoned, the bombs are being dropped, but, it's still cool to hear live music. especially an older dude that still has it. i love seeing the joy an older player has in making music. their instrument is usually old and has a warm sound. they know all the tunes. it's just good shit.

good shit.

now, if i could only take one.

2009-09-21T17:55:00.000-07:00

notice how a white guy is under no pressure to refer to himself as a european american? when's the last time you even heard that expression?

you know what i'm getting at. it's black vs. african american again. it seems that a number of people, particularly in the academic community, but also wide numbers of "mor's" (middle of the road whites) think that african american is the more respectful term. somehow, this phrase pays proper homage to the roots of the person being spoken of.

well, i suppose these people are triggered by the idea that there is something negative, something disrespectful, about the phrase black. but, in fact, it is amongst these middle class, academic sectors, that a lack of historical knowledge of the civil rights and black power struggles are exhibited. do they not recall the saying "black is beautiful?" or, what of "say it loud, i'm black and i'm proud?" when a person exclaimed they were black in the 60's, it was an affirmation of self, an example of self love.

what, i ask, has happened to change this? if something has changed, isn't that the problem, and not the word black itself? and what has come along to replace it? why, of course, african american! but, who says it? have you ever heard a group of black people refer to themselves as african americans? certainly not in casual conversation. perhaps in a classroom, particularly in a room that is predominantly white.

and what of this term? is it factual? does it have any power? is it a prideful, strong term? are africans who come to america african american? what about hatians, jamaicans? what of black spanish speaking people? is david ortiz african american? well, he is from the americas, and he is clearly of african descent, so why wouldn't he be? does one have to be born in the u.s to be an african american? but, if you are born in a country, isn't that your nationality? david ortiz doesn't say he is an african dominican, he says he's dominican.

the term black does away with all this. as does the term white. these other terms are inventions of academic masterbators, who have nothing better to do than make the rest of us think that we are disrespecting ourselves, when we are in fact being truer to who we are than they will ever be.

to those who insist on the term african american, i suggest they read their malcolm, in which he says the word black with love. i suggest they revisit the struggles of the 60's. if they feel that the term black ignores their heritage, than they are the ones who know nothing about the epic racial battles of yesterday, in which the term black was claimed as a word of power, strength, joy, and beauty.

to you users of aa (yes, you need help) i suggest you meet some real black people who don't have five advanced degrees. i suggest you journey to places where black people live, work, talk, pray, eat, and shop.

leave the rarified air of the classroom, my friends, and live.

get in touch with yourself, before you claim to speak for others.

until then, my european and african american brethren, i wish you a fond farewell.

thoughts on the gig

2009-09-11T17:53:00.000-07:00

here at bhs, the students recycle their lunch trays and plates. bhs, our leaders say, cares about the environment. they babble about global warming, doing our part, being responsible citizens. bhs, like the town that houses it, is an example of corporate liberalism, which after corporate conservatism, is about as bad as it gets. maybe worse, because of its fundamental hypocrisy. for while the students recycyle their trays, not once, in five years, have i heard anyone at bhs mention the environmental destruction and human suffering caused by the u.s. military. not one speech has been made by a liberal bureaucrat at the school imploring the students to care about our earth by doing everything in their power to halt the u.s. war machine. even writing this seems silly, as if it were possible that a fine, liberal public school could actually educate its students.

here at bhs, while trays are recycled, i and my peers purchase sodas from the plethora of coke machines that line the hallways and lounges. the corporate liberals and arm chair radicals at bhs ignore what coke has done to the environment in india and elsewhere, all the while imploring the student body to care. speaking of the student body, how good can it be with soda and candy on the premises?

and the hypocrisy goes on. today, there was a moment of silence for the victims of 9/11. well, there has been nearly 8 years of silence at bhs for the victims of our bombing of afghanistan. no one acknowledges the carnage. likewise with iraq. no one gets on the intercom and humanizes their suffering. no one speaks of war crimes, depleted uranium, cluster bombs, burned babies, orphans, refugees. the moments of silence go on and on and on.

we here at bhs claim to value life and the planet. but it seems that only some life is valued, and it appears fine to kill the earth, as long as we get a good deal on the vending machines. we teach our children to recycle, as we drive in to school in our suv's. here at good old liberal bhs, i have heard teachers speak of "red china" and "the great jefferson davis." they too, surely have recycling bins in their classes.

so, we here at bhs recycle.

as the bombs fall. as the cars fill the streets. as the pesticides are sprayed.

we here at bhs recycle, as marines roam the hallways. in the new rome, they roam, looking for virgin bodies to drop their bombs. liberal bhs allows them entry, lets them table during lunch. they strike up conversations with working class and black kids. their accents shift, as they go street and slang to impress the students. once i yelled "don't listen to a word these fascists tell you!"

but, the rent was due in two weeks, so i didn't push it any further.

rather, i kept moving.

but, not before recycling my tray.

as i finished my orange soda, and prepared myself to withstand another day at the slaughter house.

this is fielding mellish, reporting live from the belly of corporate liberalism.

che vive

2009-09-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

watched part one on monday. haven't had the strength to watch part 2, yet.

what a man he was. dedicated, moral, brave, charismatic. the words themselves fail from over use. one needs to see him, to think about him, to get it. the risks he took. man. like few before him or since, he combined ideas and action. many of us think good thoughts. few of us act out the best within us. we are not brave enough. we stop, rationalize, remember that saving one's skin has its merits. but che, he was a different beast. he risked it all. by example, he attempted to raise others who would become like him. and yet, he was always different. while others congregated and socialized, che studied and observed, a man alone. it was as if he was a million years ahead of the mortals. and yet, he was of his time too. he was macho, manly, much too much, and jut too very very, to ever wind up in the dictionary.

it is rare that a man gives everything so that others may live a better life. che was such a man. he was not perfect, but he could not have been better if he were so.

che vive!

the gloom of blum

2009-09-10T07:27:00.000-07:00

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It's as if the Wright brothers' first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.

william blum, right on, as always.

h@#$% a@#%^&$*()&

2009-09-10T06:59:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2008

September 11, 2008 By Mickey Z.

Mickey Z.'s ZSpace Page

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Edited version of a talk I gave in NYC on September 11, 2008, with preface, prologue, preamble, and postscript:

Preface: In 1853, several pairs of the previously unknown European house sparrow were set free inside Brooklyn's Green-wood Cemetery. By picking the hayseeds out of horse droppings from the carts used for funerals, these tiny birds flourished and are today one of the continent's most ubiquitous creatures. In other words: When all they feed you is horseshit, it's up to you to pick out the hayseeds that enable you to not only survive, but to thrive.

Prologue: In the 1999 film Run, Lola, Run, the female protagonist is magically given three chances to cope with a tricky situation. Like having a reset button on a video game or computer, if Lola screws up, she gets to go back and start from the beginning.

Many people imply that unless a critic expounds a specific strategy for change, his/her assessment is worthless or, at the very least, too negative. This somewhat understandable reaction misses the essential role critical analysis plays in a society where problems—and their causes—are so cleverly disguised. When discussing the future, the first step is often an identification and demystification of the past and present.

In order for us to hit the reset button, we must collectively agree that we got it wrong the first time.

Preamble: "How many other countries give you the right to write what you just wrote?" This was one of the many responses I got to a recent article of mine. Let's put aside the unintentional tongue twister and the question's obvious answer: plenty of other countries would give me the right to write what I just wrote.

The larger issue, as I see it, is how we each choose to evaluate our freedom. Is freedom just a matter of bigger cages and longer chains? Is it merely a commodity sold to the highest bidder? Must the majority of us sit by and drool while freedom fries on the grill of capitalist greed?

Freedom, according to Rosa Luxemburg, is "always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently." To merely have more freedom than, say, a woman living under Taliban repression is not the same as being free. But it is the same as settling for less subjugation instead of demanding more liberty. The "it could always be worse" excuse is no way to judge the quality or quantity of anything.

Begin: It was September 14, 2001. The F-16s were no longer circling overhead. But there were people on my block holding candles, waving flags, and singing the National Anthem as an SUV cruised by with the words "Nuke 'em" soaped onto its rear window. These people were all craving normalcy. Even with the severity of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the ultimate goal at the end of the day was always normalcy.

Despite the lingering fear, sorrow, doubt, and anger, we waited breathlessly for the authorities to pronounce: "Don't worry. Things were bad but now, we've gotten everything back to normal."

What is normal in our country and on our planet? What type of society have we humans cultivated as we sit arrogantly atop the intellectual food chain?

The New York Stock Exchange was shut down by the attacks, but once things returned to normal, Wall Street went back to making decisions that impacted horrendously upon the large majority of the globe while the top one percent of Americans carried on owning wealth equal to the bottom 95 percent. That's normal.

The SUV owner I just mentioned might have wiped the soap off his window and driven onto the island of Manhattan where, once again, cars had free reign. The toxic haze caused by the two towers collapsing was now replaced by the normal toxic haze induced by America's automobile culture.

Those I heard singing songs of patriotism could return to stepping over homeless people to go buy products made in sweatshops. That's normal.

Contemplating normal reminds me of something Charles Bukowski wrote: "As we go on with our lives, we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed."

Normal means each month, 100,000 Americans lose their health insurance...while, each minute, one million of our tax dollars is spent on war.

Normal means 15 million animals are slaughtered each day although up to 14 times as many people could be fed by using the same land currently reserved for livestock grazing.

Normal means one billion earthlings live on the equivalent of one US dollar a day while my neighborhood is teeming with 99 cents stores. But these establishments aren't offering Third Worlders subsistence for 24 hours. No, they're where folks like me can purchase cheap goods—probably assembled in China by pre-teen girls. If you need an earpiece for your coltan-containing cell phone, it's all yours for one dollar and eight cents...after tax.

Normal means taking off your shoes at the airport, being shot at by overzealous cops, and getting priced out of the neighborhoods you grew up in...but never having to walk more than two blocks to find your nearest Starbuck's. Wait, did I say "walk"? I meant "drive," of course. Walking: how Third World of me.

Whether we realize it or not, thanks to corporate scientists, normal also means that when a human gene is introduced to a sheep's mammary glands to produce a protein called alpha-1-antitrypsin, that sheep is no longer a mere sheep...but rather, it's a legally patented commodity known as a "mammalian cell bioreactor." Not a sheep, not a lamb, but a mammalian cell bioreactor. Try it out: Mary had a little mammalian cell bioreactor. Sound normal to you?

Normal means two indistinguishable political parties, corporations that never pay taxes, and yellow ribbons as far as the eye can see.

On a normal day, more than 100 plant or animal species go extinct. On a normal day, 45,000 human beings die of starvation.

Normal means slavery—on so many levels—like this:

In the most remote regions of Brazil, slave labor is employed to cut down grand swaths of the precious rain forest to make room to grow eucalyptus which is then burned by male slaves (who exploit the body, mind, and spirit of female slaves forced into prostitution) to make charcoal for the steel mills of Brazil where the poorest of the poor toil for wages that do not sustain them so that steel can be shipped to a General Motors plant in Mexico (GM is the second largest employer south of the border) where the poorest of the poor suffer maquiladora conditions so these automobile parts can then be shipped to a GM plant in the U.S. (roughly 50 percent of what we call "trade" consists of business transactions between branches of the same transnational corporation) where even the poorest of the poor proudly take on imposing debt to possess a car "made in the U.S.A." so they can clog the highways that were paved over countless eco-systems, filling the air with noxious pollution as they make their way to the drive-through window of an anti-union fast food restaurant that purchased the beef of slaughtered cattle that once grazed on land cleared by male slaves who exploited the body, mind, and spirit of female slaves in the most remote regions of Brazil. That is some of what we accept as normal...

Normal means land mines, factory farming, and the death penalty

It means racial profiling and the shooting of abortion doctors

Normal means gay bashing and it means "illegal" is a noun

It means pesticide, homicide, suicide, genocide

Normal means the WTO, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and KKK

GMO, HMO, Guantanamo.

It means banned books, the war on drugs, and the PATRIOT Act

Normal means: "have it your way" and "just do it"

Global warming, water boarding, People magazine

It means no cod in Cape Cod and soon: no ice at the North Pole

Normal means strip malls; normal means strip mining

It means pre-emptive strikes and humanitarian bombing

It means shock and awe

Normal means if you kill someone while wearing a uniform, you get a parade. Do it in gang colors and you get the electric chair.

Normal means we live in a society programmed and conditioned to lust for revenge instead of unite for peace and justice

After 9/11, normal also came to mean a perpetual war on terror. You know what? Maybe a war on terror is precisely what we need.

No, I'm not declaring public allegiance to the current jihad against a tactic (which is in actuality a war against terrorist attacks not perpetrated by the US or its allies). Instead, I'm thinking of another meaning entirely for our new favorite, post-9/11 word: "terror."

Author Don Lutz has written that terror is "what one feels when being kidnapped or raped."

He goes on to list other terrifying examples:

"Terror is what poor people worldwide feel when approached by uniformed, armed men; what animals feel in research laboratories; what people feel when their families are faced with starvation; what a child feels when an adult starts to hit; what millions of families feel when they hear planes overhead; what fish feel when hooked in the mouth; what people feel under threat of having loved ones tortured or killed; what forest dwellers feel when the loggers come in to clear-cut; what people feel when they are threatened with invasion; and what animals feel at slaughterhouses."

You wanna wage war against terror, why not find a worthy adversary? No shady FBI stings, unconstitutional wire tapping, or panic-inducing color-coded warnings that conveniently pop up at the most politically expedient intervals. The variety of terror I just described is genuine and endemic and it is the real problem.

Many Americans automatically defend their country's rampant illegalities because they perceive these actions as falling under the seductive justification of "defending our way of life."

The U.S. constitutes roughly 5% of the earth's population but consumes more than 25% of the earth's resources. Maybe "our way of life" makes us the real terrorists.

Besides, if our way of life is so sacred, so ideal, so worthy of being defended by any means necessary, why do we need so many homeless shelters, alcohol and drug rehab centers, rape crisis hotlines, battered women's shelters, and suicide hotlines?

Why does a sexual assault occur every 2 1/2 minutes?

If America is the world's shining light, why are its citizens left with no choice but to organize in a desperate attempt to protect human, environmental, civil, and animal rights?

Why can't we drink the water or breathe the air without the risk of becoming ill from corporate-produced toxins?

If America is the zenith of human social order, why does our vaunted way of life provoke terror as a tactic and an emotion?

I know what some of you are thinking: Surely, Mickey Z., humans aren't as bad as you make them sound. They can't possibly be the most dangerous species of all time. Humans aren't more dangerous than a T. Rex, right? To you, I ask: In all the millions of years dinosaurs roamed this planet, did a single stegosaurus ever feel the need to invent nuclear weapons?

Even today's "monsters" are far less harmful than we "intelligent" humans. No great white shark created DDT, napalm, or the internal combustion engine; you can't blame cigarettes, greenhouse gases, hydroelectric dams, or mercury-laced vaccinations on a pit bull; and rest assured no non-human conjured up zoos, animal experimentation, or the circus.

With the point of no return fading in the rearview mirror (or at least obscured by a Hummer), the time is long overdue for all of us to recognize the real enemy is that which inspires terror. The real enemy just might be what we see as normal.

And what can be more normal than the American Dream? You all know the American Dream myth, the fable of individualized success. If we're tough enough and willing to fight our way past the competition, this is the land of opportunity: anything is possible. If you succeed, it's because you worked harder and better and deserved it more. If you fail, the blame is all on you.

William Burroughs sez: "Thanks for the American Dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through."

Vulgarization. Falsification. Compromise. Conformity. Assimilation. Submission. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Brutality. The elite. All of which, as Rage Against the Machine reminds us, are American dreams.

All of which are American dreams...

So, how about cultivating some new American Dreams?

Dreams not for sale

Dreams not based on celebrity

Dreams not based on material consumption
Dreams not based on physical beauty

Dreams not based on military conquest

Dreams that promote unity and collective action while maintaining individuality and independence

Dreams that challenge us to think for ourselves and about others

Dreams that help us pick out the hayseeds amidst the horseshit

Postscript: In his 1941 classic, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller contemplated what it might be like to bring an American Indian back to life and show him the steel mills of Pennsylvania. Miller imagined the Indian thinking: "So it was for this that you deprived us of our birthright?"

Miller pondered, "Do you think it would be easy to get him to change places with one of our steady workers? What sort of persuasion would you use? What now could you promise him that would be truly seductive?"

I think I know what might win over that resurrected soul. A reset button, just like the one Lola had. For if this is the best humanity could produce with the gifts we've been given; if this is what is accepted as normal by the majority of Homo sapiens on the planet, what we really need is to hit the reset button...before it's too late.

But then again, what do I know? I've always been the black mammalian cell bioreactor in my family.

Mickey Z. is the author of CPR for Dummies (http://www.rawdogscreaming.com/cpr.html) and can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

van rode out of town

2009-09-07T14:14:00.000-07:00

obama had a guy named van jones working for him. by all accounts, he sounded like a cool dude. his thing was trying to create green gigs. in short, a progressive. so, the dirt was dug. once, he referred to republicans as assholes. once, he stated that black students wouldn't have created the carnage at columbine. once, he signed a statement requesting a look into governmental collusion in the crime of 9/11
the right wing hacks started blogging. these supposed lovers of freedom never seem to love freedom of speech, when that speech runs counter to their regressive ideology. what is to keep obama from pointing this out? if these protestors can draw hitler mustaches on obama's face, call his health care plan socialist, and refer to him with the n word, why can't van jones speak controversial thoughts out loud? what would the reactionaries do if obama gave a press conference and said "if my opponents value freedom so much, why are they condemning others for practicing the very same freedom they claim to love so much?" what would their response be?

well, i suppose you know how this went down. van was shown the highway. yep, a one way ticket to ride far, far out of town. obama didn't speak up for him. not one word. and the thing is, he's in power now. remember when the big o hung his pastor out to dry? there were those who said he needed to win the presidency. well, he's got the gig now! what's his excuse? why can't obama stand up to power when he is in power?

my hunch is, if obama went on tv and made the kind of challenge to his crtics that i propose, a lot of people would like it. but, the game is not played that way. in the u.s., right wingers can say the most bizarre things, and no one forces them to resign. in fact, they get tv shows! but if you make radical statements from the left, your job will run away faster than a criminal from a cop.

and the cat who represents change won't do a damn thing to stop it.

so, here we stand, with two right wing parties, one more reactionary than the other. of course, the dead pile up under both of them. those afghanis killed as they tried to gather fuel likely felt no better that they died from bombs dropped with the okay of democrats. as this is the case, one could argue with good cause that van jones had no business doing business with criminals of this caliber.

but, just this once, now that the dude is in charge, wouldn't it have been nice if he told his fascist critics to fuck off?

that ain't gonna happen.

not with an election in 2012, and even a few fascist votes helpful to the cause.

and, let's remember that obama is not a fighter. he can't fight fascism, for one needs to recognize a problem before one can fight it.

and if you are too busy creating problems, you will never be able to solve them.

2009-09-07T14:10:00.001-07:00

US Hypocrisy Astonishes the World
Indefensible Nation
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Americans have lost their ability for introspection, thereby revealing their astounding hypocrisy to the world.

US War Secretary Robert Gates has condemned the Associated Press and a reporter, Julie Jacobson, embedded with US troops in Afghanistan, for taking and releasing a photo of a US Marine who was wounded in action and died from his injury.

The photographer was on patrol with the Marines when they came under fire. She found the courage and presence of mind to do her job. Her reward is to be condemned by the warmonger Gates as “insensitive.” Gates says her employer, the Associated Press, lacks “judgment and common decency.”

The American Legion jumped in and denounced the Associated Press for a “stunning lack of compassion and common decency.”

To stem opposition to its wars, the War Department hides signs of American casualties from the public. Angry that evidence escaped the censor, the War Secretary and the American Legion attacked with politically correct jargon: “insensitive,” “offended,” and the “anguish,” “pain and suffering” inflicted upon the Marine’s family. The War Department sounds like it is preparing a harassment tort.

Isn’t this passing the buck? The Marine lost his life not because of the Associated Press and a photographer, but because of the war criminals--Gates, Bush, Cheney, Obama, and the US Congress that supports wars of naked aggression that serve no American purpose, but which keeps campaign coffers filled with contributions from the armaments companies.

Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard is dead because the US government and a significant percentage of the US population believe that the US has the right to invade, bomb, and occupy other peoples who have raised no hand against us but are demonized with lies and propaganda.

For the American War Secretary it is a photo that is insensitive, not America’s assertion of the right to determine the fate of Afghanistan with bombs and soldiers.

The exceptional “virtuous nation” does not think it is insensitive for America’s bombs to blow innocent villagers to pieces. On September 4, the day before Gates’ outburst over the “insensitive” photo, Agence France Presse reported from Afghanistan that a US/Nato air strike had killed large numbers of villagers who had come to get fuel from two tankers that had been hijacked from negligent and inattentive occupation forces:

“‘Nobody was in one piece. Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere. Those who were away from the fuel tanker were badly burnt,’ said 32-year-old Mohammad Daud, depicting a scene from hell. The burned-out shells of the tankers, still smoking in marooned wrecks on the riverbank, were surrounded by the charred-meat remains of villagers from Chahar Dara district in Kunduz province, near the Tajik border. Dr. Farid Rahid, a spokesperson in Kabul for the ministry of health, said up to 250 villagers had been near the tankers when the air strike was called in.”

What does the world think of the United States? The American War Secretary and a US military veterans association think a photo of an injured and dying American soldier is insensitive, but not the wipeout of an Afghan village that came to get needed fuel.

The US government is like a criminal who accuses the police of his crime when he is arrested or a sociopathic abuser who blames the victim. It is a known fact that the CIA has violated US law and international law with its assassinations, kidnappings and torture. But it is not this criminal agency that will be held accountable. Instead, those who will be punished will be those moral beings who, appalled at the illegality and inhumanity of the CIA, leaked the evidence of the agency’s crimes. The CIA has asked the US Justice (sic) Department to investigate what the CIA alleges is the “criminal disclosure” of its secret program to murder suspected foreign terrorist leaders abroad. As we learned from Gitmo, those suspected by America are overwhelmingly innocent.

The CIA program is so indefensible that when CIA director Leon Panetta found out about it six months after being in office, he cancelled the program (assuming those running the program obeyed) and informed Congress.

Yet, the CIA wants the person who revealed its crime to be punished for revealing secret information. A secret agency this unmoored from moral and legal standards is a greater threat to our country than are terrorists. Who knows what false flag operation it will pull off in order to provide justification and support for its agenda. An agency that is more liability than benefit should be abolished.

The agency’s program of assassinating terrorist leaders is itself fraught with contradictions and dangers. The hatred created by the US and Israel is independent of any leader. If one is killed, others take his place. The most likely outcome of the CIA assassination program is that the agency will be manipulated by rivals, just as the FBI was used by one mafia family to eliminate another. In order to establish credibility with groups that they are attempting to penetrate, CIA agents will be drawn into participating in violent acts against the US and its allies.

Accusing the truth-teller instead of the evil-doer is the position that the neoconservatives took against the New York Times when after one year’s delay, which gave George W. Bush time to get reelected, the Times published the NSA leak that revealed that the Bush administration was committing felonies by violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The neocons, especially those associated with Commentary magazine, wanted the New York Times indicted for treason. To the evil neocon mind, anything that interferes with their diabolical agenda is treason.

This is the way many Americans think. America uber alles! No one counts but us (and Israel). The deaths we inflict and the pain and suffering we bring to others are merely collateral damage on the bloody path to American hegemony.

The attitude of the “freedom and democracy” US government is that anyone who complains of illegality or immorality or inhumanity is a traitor. The Republican Senator Christopher S. Bond is a recent example. Bond got on his high horse about “irreparable damage” to the CIA from the disclosures of its criminal activities. Bond wants those “back stabbers” who revealed the CIA’s wrongdoings to be held accountable. Bond is unable to grasp that it is the criminal activities, not their disclosure, that is the source of the problem. Obviously, the whistleblower protection act has no support from Senator Bond, who sees it as just another law to plough under.

This is where the US government stands today: Ignoring and covering up government crimes is the patriotic thing to do. To reveal the government’s crimes is an act of treason. Many Americans on both sides of the aisle agree.

Yet, they still think that they are The Virtuous Nation, the exceptional nation, the salt of the earth.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

2009-09-05T21:08:00.001-07:00

a dude who runs a school, i guess they call these cats headmasters or principals or deans. i tend to call them assholes or fuckheads. in any case, one of these intellectual midgets was just featured in the local paper. it seems he doesn't feel that the library at his school should contain books. 20,000 of them being donated, disregarded. he said that the computer is to the book as the book was to the scroll. someone should tell this nimrod that analogies are no longer used on sat's.

wow. a library without books. books, they want us to believe, are a thing of the past. even the term library, they intone, is obsolete. speaking of obsolete, remember meredith on the zone? he was a librarian, a lover of books, and, so said his society, obsolete. but yes, library ain't the word anymore. learning center is in. computers. computers. and more computers.

but, can you get a high from touching a computer screen? can you lie down, book beside you, as you bundle yourself under the covers on a cold night? can you take a computer with you to the toilet, as you order up a number 2? (supersize those fries for me please!) the book is your one friend as you sit on the bus. you can walk down the street with it, sit in a cafe with it, read it while you are doing the laundry, as you wait for your pizza.

a book has a smell, a soul, a charm, that a screen will never have. yes, you can put the words of a book on a screen, but the experience of the book itself can not be duplicated. yes, we should get what we can out of computers, but not at the expense of the book, a wonderful creation, perhaps the greatest creation of modern man.

to anyone who has ever touched a book and felt its warmth, this man's plan is a fucking crime.

but, i'll say this. when this shithead is dead and gone, some kid will pick up a book and discover neruda or trumbo or heller or zinn or hughes or emma goldman for the first time. they will sit and lie and cry and laugh and smile as they discover their words.

and they will not have heard of this man.

come to think of it, i've forgotten his name already.

in fact, i never even knew it.

2009-09-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

we continue to kill in afghanistan. and now, they are starting to kill us too. 44 american soldiers in july, 47 in august. almost eight years now since the insane carnage began. and for what? they tell us that more troops need to be sent. for, you see, the situation ain't fucked up enough. if we just fuck it up a little bit more, victory will be ours. but victory for whom, and what kind of victory? a country that was all ready ruined is being more ruined. we did it to get osama, al qaeda, the taliban, and we did it for democracy, women's rights, the free market, fair elections. or so we said. at different times, different stories were told. now, nothing is being told. now, it's just being done. the big o has it under control, while others are under the bombs. democracy in afghanistan is a cruel joke. they had it better under the soviets, but no one will ever tell you that, not anyone with an audience anyway. but, in truth, none of these european or north american countries have any business in afghanistan. haven't we murdered enough of their multitudes?

no u.s. president wants to lose a war. no u.s. president wants to admit to being a criminal. no u.s. president wants to stand up to the u.s. military, and the corporations that sustain it. of course, any person who wanted to do these things would not be president. there's the old catch 22 again.

so, afghanis must die. and u.s. troops. crimes must be undertaken. for to stop would be to admit our criminality, or at least, our defeat. so, we must freeze spending on social security and give the military more money. the army will not need to conduct bake sales this year, or the next. there will be no war crimes trials, but there are plenty of war criminals to try. many of them claim to be liberals, and are derided as socialists by their opponents. they insist on playing along with the bipartisan game of war, and are equally embedded in the militaristic structure as the crazed contrarians who attack them.

but, it seems the courts are only for the small time crooks. the big criminals need to run the world.

and you can't run the world from behind prison walls. the game wasn't set up to be played that way. so, we continue with our destruction of afghanistan. should we send more troops, or are there enough there now? do we need to switch to more of a counter insurgency model? perhaps if we only show the troops "battle of algiers" again, all we be well.

but, don't forget how that played out.

the french had to leave. the french lost. and so did a ravaged algeria. left behind were thousands of tortured and dead.

we too will one day have to leave. we will surely leave behind a ravaged nation with no winners. much bravery and courage will be displayed, but for what? it was brave to invade the soviet union in the dead of winter, but no one recalls the nazi invasion of russia warmly. so it is with us.

as petty crooks and pot smokers are criminalized, we condemn countries to a condition of utter carnage.

all the while, getting ready for the next rocky movie.

fuck you freedom!

2009-09-01T11:34:00.000-07:00

Gross Violations of Human Rights
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

In Israel, a country stolen from the Palestinians, fanatics control the government. One of the fanatics is the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Last week Netanyahu called for “crippling sanctions” against Iran.

The kind of blockade that Netanyahu wants qualifies as an act of war. Israel has long threatened to attack Iran on its own but prefers to draw in the US and NATO.

Why does Israel want to initiate a war between the United States and Iran?

Is Iran attacking other countries, bombing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure?

No. These are crimes committed by Israel and the US.

Is Iran evicting peoples from lands they have occupied for centuries and herding them into ghettoes?

No, that’s what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for 60 years.

What is Iran doing?

Iran is developing nuclear energy, which is its right as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran’s nuclear energy program is subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which consistently reports that its inspections find no diversion of enriched uranium to a weapons program.

The position taken by Israel, and by Israel’s puppet in Washington, is that Iran must not be allowed to have the rights as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty that every other signatory has, because Iran might divert enriched uranium to a weapons program.

In other words, Israel and the US claim the right to abrogate Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy. The Israeli/US position has no basis in international law or in anything other than the arrogance of Israel and the United States.

The hypocrisy is extreme. Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and developed its nuclear weapons illegally on the sly, with, as far as we know, US help.

As Israel is an illegal possessor of nuclear weapons and has a fanatical government that is capable of using them, crippling sanctions should be applied to Israel to force it to disarm.

Israel qualifies for crippling sanctions for another reason. It is an apartheid state, as former US President Jimmy Carter demonstrated in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

The US led the imposition of sanctions against South Africa because of South Africa’s apartheid practices. The sanctions forced the white government to hand over political power to the black population. Israel practices a worse form of apartheid than did the white South African government. Yet, Israel maintains that it is “anti-semitic” to criticize Israel for a practice that the world regards as abhorrent.

What remains of the Palestinian West Bank that has not been stolen by Israel consists of isolated ghettoes. Palestinians are cut off from hospitals, schools, their farms, and from one another. They cannot travel from one ghetto to another without Israeli permission enforced at checkpoints.

The Israeli government’s explanation for its gross violation of human rights comprises one of the greatest collection of lies in world history. No one, with the exception of American “christian zionists,” believes one word of it.

The United States also qualifies for crippling sanctions. Indeed, the US is over-qualified. On the basis of lies and intentional deception of the US Congress, the US public, the UN and NATO, the US government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and used the “war on terror” that Washington orchestrated to overturn US civil liberties enshrined in the US Constitution. One million Iraqis have paid with their lives for America’s crimes and four million are displaced. Iraq and its infrastructure are in ruins, and Iraq’s professional elites, necessary to a modern organized society, are dead or dispersed. The US government has committed a war crime on a grand scale. If Iran qualifies for sanctions, the US qualifies a thousand times over.

No one knows how many women, children, and village elders have been murdered by the US in Afghanistan. However, the American war of aggression against the Afghan people is now in its ninth year. According to the US military, an American victory is still a long ways away. Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in August that the military situation in Afghanistan is “serious and deteriorating.”

Older Americans can look forward to the continuation of this war for the rest of their lives, while their Social Security and Medicare rights are reduced in order to free up funds for the US armaments industry. Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden have made munitions the only safe stock investment in the United States.

What is the purpose of the war of aggression against Afghanistan? Soon after his inauguration, President Obama promised to provide an answer but did not. Instead, Obama quickly escalated the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan that has already displaced 2 million Pakistanis. Obama has sent 21,000 more US troops into Afghanistan and already the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is requesting 20,000 more.

Obama is escalating America’s war of aggression against the Afghanistan people despite three high profile opinion polls that show that the American public is firmly opposed to the continuation of the war against Afghanistan.

Sadly, the ironclad agreement between Israel and Washington to war against Muslim peoples is far stronger than the connection between the American public and the American government. At a farewell dinner party last Thursday for Israel’s military attache in Washington, who is returning to Israel to become deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, and and Dan Shapiro, who is in charge of Middle East affairs on the National Security Council, were present to pay their respects. Admiral Mullen declared that the US will always stand with Israel. No matter how many war crimes Israel commits. No matter how many women and children Israel murders. No many how many Palestinians Israel drives from their homes, villages, and lands. If truth could be told, the true axis-of-evil is the United States and Israel.

Millions of Americans are now homeless because of foreclosures. Millions more have lost their jobs, and even more millions have no access to health care. Yet, the US government continues to squander hundreds of billions of dollars on wars that serve no US purpose. President Obama and General McChrystal have taken the position that they know best, the American public be damned.

It could not be made any clearer that the President of the United States and the US military have no regard whatsoever for democracy, human rights, and international law. This is yet another reason to apply crippling sanctions against Washington, a government that has emerged under Bush/Obama as a brownshirt state that deals in lies, torture, murder, war crimes, and deception.

Many governments are complicit in America’s war crimes. With Obama’s budget deep in the red, Washington’s wars of naked aggression are dependent on financing by the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Saudis, South Koreans, Indians, Canadians and Europeans. The second this foreign financing of American war crimes stops, America’s wars of aggression against Muslims stop.

The US is not a forever “superpower” that can indefinitely ignore its own laws and international law. The US will eventually fall as a result of its hubris, arrogance, and imperial overreach. When the American Empire collapses, will its enablers also be held accountable in the war crimes court?

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

for diego and frida, and yosemite sam

2009-08-30T21:40:00.000-07:00

8 Reasons Why Cars Suck, Plus 12 Ways Cyclists Can Stay Safer in an Automobile Culture
There are all sorts of safe and easy methods for choosing two wheels over four.
By Mickey Z.
Astoria, NY, USA | Wed Aug 26 16:30:00 GMT 2009

David Buffington/Getty Images

READ MORE ABOUT:
Bicycles | Biking | Cars | Gas Mileage | Public Transportation | Transportation

(In memory of James Langergaard)

We all know cars suck and bicycles rock but with 254,403,082 cars clogging up this planet, cyclists have no choice—for now—except to co-exist with cars. And that can be easier said than done.

In 2005, there were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the U.S. This resulted in 2.9 million injured people and 42,636 deaths. Roughly 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in America—that's one death every 13 minutes. About one in 40 of those deaths is a cyclist.

So, let's recap: cars suck and bicycles rock and it takes some planning to stay safe.

8 Reasons Why Cars Suck

1. Traffic: From 1950 to 1970, the U.S. automobile population grew four times faster than the human population. As a result, we Americans spent nearly 500,000 years stuck in traffic in 2007—nearly 4.2 billion hours.

2. Cars kill children: The leading cause of death for children aged 5 to 14 in New York City is pedestrian automobile accidents.

3. Cars kill animals: Automobiles, SUVs, trucks, and other fossil field-burning vehicles kill a million wild animals per week in the U.S.—not counting tens of thousands of family pets.

4. Sprawl: During the last century, an area equal to all the arable land in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania was paved in the U.S.

Kristina Williamson/Getty Images

5. Waste: Cars create 7 billion pounds of un-recycled scrap and waste annually and approximately one billion discarded tires are littering our increasingly paved landscape.

6. Global warming: More than 333 million tons of carbon dioxide are emitted by U.S. cars each year,—that's more than one-fifth of the nation's total carbon dioxide emissions.

7. Oil consumption: The U.S consumes about 21 million barrels of oil per day. 10,000 gallons of gasoline are burned in the U.S. every second.

8. Car Wars: During the 40 days of the (first) Gulf War, 146 Americans died keeping the world safe for petroleum while at home, 4900 Americans died in motor vehicle accidents.

12 Basic Ways to Practice Safe Cycling

1. Avoid unsafe situations: Never assume motorists can see you.

2. Ride in the street and with the traffic: Think like a motorist.

3. Put lights and reflectors on your bike: Be seen at night.

iStockphoto.com/AntiMartina

4. Use your horn: Let 'em know you're on the road.

5. Avoid busy streets: You know, the path of least resistance and all.

6. Maintain a safe speed: Slower is better.

7. Know the traffic laws: A little knowledge can go a long way.

8. Take good care of your bike: A well-maintained bicycle is a safer bicycle.

9. Always wear a helmet: Helmets are 85% effective in preventing head injury.

10. Use your voice: A simple "Hey" or "Watch it" will do.

11. There's safety in numbers: United we stand...

12. Be an activist for two wheels, not four: Less cars = safer roads and a cleaner planet.

2009-08-30T21:17:00.000-07:00

lately, i've been noticing that there are no pay phones in the phone booths. you know, i liked the pay phone. you had to come to it. it didn't run your life. if you needed to make a call, you looked for one. eventually, the local calls became limitless. i thought that was cool. just stand there and talk, without the machine telling you to hang up. all for 50 cents. i remember the different rates...25, 35, 50. how about that old expression "drop a dime?" what good slang has the cell given us? perhaps romanticizing the pay phone is a reach, but isn't there something soulful about it, at least in relation to that disgraceful invention, the cell phone? i continue to hold out on the cell. the laughter and confused looks have grown over the years. i respond that if someone wants to buy me one and pay the monthly bill, i just might consider owning one. strangely, no one has taken me up on this offer. you see, people want to give you stuff, but then they expect you to pay the bills. it's like the dude on the corner giving out free kittens. when you go looking for him to buy the cat food and kitty litter, the dude is long gone. hence, cats give you a computer, but expect you to pay for the internet. they throw an old tv your way, but don't return your calls when you ask them to cover your cable bill. oh, the indignity of it all.

seriously, don't we have enough phones in this country? i'm not even talking about the cobalt, and the millions in the congo who are being fucked because of our insane addiction to gadgets, inspector. rather, i am speaking merely to our own banal, craven fascination with mindless technology. and, are there really that many people to talk to? if so, why is my phone not ringing? do more people call you if you have a cell? who is it, deep down, that you really want to talk to, more than once or twice a week? but dudes cop out, say they are good for an emergency. bullshit. i have never seen a cell phone used for this purpose. it's always the same dickheads ruining my bus ride, talking about how they are laying some tracks down, or some loud girl yelling at her man. can't this shit wait until i'm far gone, and the people talking have vacated public property?

but no, once the flood hits, the water doesn't recede. and so it is. cell phones, iphones, ipods, texting.

and we laugh and mock the 50's.

in the 50's of the 21st century, we may well be the butt of the joke.

if there is anybody around to laugh.

giving bush the boot

2009-08-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

Iraqi Who Threw Shoes at Bush to Be Released Early
by Kim Gamel

An Iraqi journalist imprisoned for hurling his shoes at former President George W. Bush will be released next month after his sentence was reduced for good behavior, his lawyer said Saturday.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi's act of protest during Bush's last visit to Iraq as president turned the 30-year-old reporter into a folk hero across the Arab world, as his case became a rallying point for critics who resented the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation.

"Al-Zeidi's shoes were a suitable farewell for Bush's deeds in Iraq," Sunni lawmaker Dhafir al-Ani said in welcoming the early release. "Al-Zeidi's act expressed the real will and feelings of the Iraqi people. His anger against Bush was the result of the suffering of his countrymen."

The journalist has been in custody since the Dec. 14 outburst, which occurred as Bush was holding a news conference with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Al-Maliki, who was standing next to Bush at the time, was said to have been deeply offended by the act.

Al-Zeidi was initially sentenced to three years in prison after pleading not guilty to assaulting a foreign leader. The court reduced it to one year because the journalist had no prior criminal history.

Defense attorney Karim al-Shujairi said al-Zeidi will now be released on Sept. 14, three months early.

"We have been informed officially about the court decision," al-Shujairi told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "His release will be a victory for the free and honorable Iraqi media."

Judicial spokesman Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar said he had no immediate information about the release because it was a weekend.

Followers of anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who were among the leaders of many of the demonstrations demanding al-Zeidi's release, welcomed the decision to free him early.

"We believe that al-Zeidi did not commit any crime but only expressed the will of the Iraqi people in rejecting the U.S. occupation," Sadrist lawmaker Falah Shanshal said. "Al-Zeidi's image will always be a heroic one."

The bizarre act of defiance transformed the obscure reporter from a minor TV station into a national hero to many Iraqis fed up with the U.S. presence.

Thousands demonstrated for al-Zeidi's release and hailed his gesture. A sofa-sized sculpture of a shoe was erected in his honor in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, but the Iraqi government later ordered it removed.

Neither leader was injured, but Bush was forced to duck for cover as the journalist shouted in Arabic: "This is your farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

The case's investigating judge has said the journalist was struck about the face and eyes, apparently by security agents who wrestled him to the ground and dragged him away.

Al-Zeidi's family has said he was also mistreated while in custody, although the government has denied the allegation.

"We thank God that he will be released, although we still fear for his safety since he is still in the prison," his brother Dargham said. "He will be released full of pride and strength from all the love he has received from the Iraqi people and international organizations and figures who advocate freedom."

meetings on health care, but not on war

2009-08-29T10:21:00.000-07:00

obama and his backers have been barnstorming the nation, offering themselves as human punching bags for fuckhead fascists. an interesting way to get a law passed. kind of funny, but when a u.s. president wants to do something, doesn't he usually just do it? all of a sudden, the town hall format is making a comeback? and how is it that the incoherent rumblings of right wingers have gone unanswered at these events? surely, obama and his men could answer back if they really wanted to. it seems that the forums are an easy way to kill any health plan. "hey america, i tried, but it seems most of you don't want my efforts to succeed." democracy in action, all of a sudden.

but, wait a minute. when obama decided to send more troops to afghanistan, did he first go around the country, asking the heartlanders whether he should do so? of course not. presidents don't need a license to kill, only to heal. when the u.s. government, wants to do something, it does it, and when it doesn't, it pretends that it does by going through motions like these health care forums. so, when nothing ends up getting done, the leaders can say that they tried.

if obama went around the nation trying to sell americans on war with afghanistan, or drones for pakistan, or weapons for israel, there would have been thousands of people who would have shouted him down, held signs, expressed frustration. but, because obama, and more to the point, the american war machine, is set on pursuing those policies, no such forums were held. the decisions had already been made. therefore, there was no reason to play at democracy. that would only confuse the issue.

but now, we are all democrats again. we didn't have forums on the 700 billion dollar bailout, or pollution of the oceans, or home foreclosures, but now, we have rediscovered the joys of the town hall meeting.

just in time to kill any progressive changes in health care.

sounds like the fix is in, doesn't it?

2009-08-28T09:09:00.000-07:00

Published on Friday, August 28, 2009 by Facing South
Katrina, Four Years Later: Expert Fired Who Warned Levees Would Burst
by Greg Palast

There's another floater. Four years on, there's another victim face down in the waters of Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Ivor van Heerden.

I don't get to use the word "heroic" very often. Van Heerden is heroic. The Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, it was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, if it weren't for his international stature, it would have been hard to believe:

"By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody."

On the night of August 29, 2005, van Heerden was shut in at the state emergency center in Baton Rouge, providing technical advice to the rescue effort. As Hurricane Katrina came ashore, van Heerden and the state police there were high-fiving it: Katrina missed the city of New Orleans, turning east.

What they did not know was that the levees had cracked. For crucial hours, the White House knew, but withheld the information that the levees of New Orleans had broken and that the city was about to drown. Bush's boys did not notify the State of the flood to come which would have allowed police to launch an emergency hunt for the thousands that remained stranded.

"Fifteen hundred people drowned. That's the bottom line," said von Heerden. He shouldn't have told me that. The professor was already in trouble for saying, publicly, that the levees around New Orleans were no good, too short, by 18″. They couldn't stand up to a storm like Katrina. He said it months before Katrina hit -- in a call to the White House, and later in the press.

So, even before Katrina, even before our interview, the professor was in hot water. Van Heerden was told by University officials that his complaints jeopardized funding from the Bush Administration. They tried to gag him. He didn't care: he ripped off the gag and spoke out.

It didn't matter to Bush, to the State, to the University, that van Heerden was right -- devastatingly right. Exactly as van Heerden predicted, the levees could not stand up to the storm surge.

In 2006, I met van Heerden in his office at the University's hurricane center; a cubby filled with charts of the city under water. He's a soft-spoken, even-tempered man, given to understatement and academic reserve. But his words were hand grenades: the Bush White House did nothing about the levees, despite warning after warning.

Why? A hurricane is an Act of God. But a levee failure is an Act of Bush -- of the federal government. Under the Flood Control Act of 1928, once the levees break, it's Washington's responsibility to save lives -- and to compensate the victims for lost homes and lost loved ones.

By telling me this, the professor had to know he was putting his job on the line. This week marks the fourth anniversary of the drowning of New Orleans.

Shakoor Aljuwani of the Rebuilding Lives Coalition reminds me it is also the fourth year of exile for more than half of the low-income Black residents who once lived in the Crescent City. In the Lower Ninth Ward, 81% have yet to return.

And it marks the end of Dr. van Heerden's career at LSU. They got him. Once the network cameras were turned away from New Orleans, as America and Anderson Cooper shifted attention to Brad and Angelina and other news, the University put an end to Dr. van Heerden. "In 2006 they started the nonsense -- they stopped me from teaching. They tried last year to get faculty to vote me out."

His contract was not renewed; he was forced out too, dumped along with the chief of the Hurricane Center who led the academics who supported van Heerden's research. The Man Who Was Right was fired.

Cronies and Contracts

I did not seek out professor van Heerden about Bush's deadly silence. Rather, I'd come to LSU to ask him about a strange little company, "Innovative Emergency Management," a politically well-connected firm that, a year before the hurricane, had finagled a contract to plan the evacuation of New Orleans.

Innovative Emergency Management knew a lot about political contributions, but seemed to have zero experience in hurricane response planning. In fact, their "plan" for New Orleans called for evacuating the city by automobile. When Katrina hit, 127,000 wheel-less New Orleans folk were left to float out.

And van Heerden knew all about it. Well before the hurricane, I discovered, he'd pointed out flaws in the "Innovative" plan -- and was threatened for the revelation by a state official. The same official later joined the payroll of Innovative Emergency Management.

When I asked the company, at their office, for a copy of the plan, they body-blocked our Democracy Now! camerawoman and called the cops.

Not everyone shared the harsh fate of van Heerden. Just this month, Innovative Emergency Management, the firm with the drive-for-your-life plan, was handed a fat contract by the State of Alabama to draft -- you guessed it -- a hurricane evacuation plan for Mobile.

The City That Care Forgot

After the flood, I filmed the uplifting story of Common Ground, the commune of Katrina survivors who, under the leadership of the community organizer Malik Rahim, rebuilt a shattered hulk of a building with their own sweat and donated materials. They housed 350 displaced families.

Since I broadcast that film in 2006, Rahim and the tenants were evicted by speculators who bought the building. Just before Christmas, elderly residents were carried out and dumped in the street, literally, by marshals. The speculators paid the families who build their new edifice not one dime.

We also filmed the story of Patricia Thomas, a woman fighting to return to her home in the beautiful Lafitte public housing project. Speculators have long lusted for this property on the edge of the French Quarter.

And now the speculators have it. Patricia's home, unscathed by Katrina, was nevertheless bulldozed. As Rahim puts it, "They wanted them poor niggers out of there and they ain't had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers." Their plan succeeded. Patricia, homeless, died last year.

This Friday, take a moment to remember a courageous professor, an indefatigable activist and the refugee families who once lived in what was once called, "The City That Care Forgot." Now, in 2009, you could call it the city that everyone forgot.

© Copyright 2009 by the Institute for Southern Studies
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. For one week only, the International Humanities Center is offering, free of charge, a download of Greg Palast's investigative report for Democracy Now!, "Big Easy to Big Empty - the untold story of how the White House drowned New Orleans" at www.GregPalast.com. Download the film or make a donation to support these investigations and get a copy signed by Palast at www.gregpalast.com/bigeasy.

honduran women fighting the man

2009-08-26T10:42:00.001-07:00

Catalyzing a New Movement
The Coup and Honduran Women
By LAURA CARLSEN

On the morning of June 28, women's organizations throughout Honduras were preparing to promote a yes vote on the national survey to hold a Constitutional Assembly. Then the phone lines started buzzing.

In this poor Central American nation, feminists have been organizing for years in defense of women's rights, equality, and against violence. When the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya was forcibly exiled by the armed forces, women from all over the country spontaneously organized to protect themselves and their families and demand a return to democracy. They called the new umbrella organization "Feminists in Resistance."

On August 18, Feminists in Resistance sat down with women from the international delegation for Women's Human Rights Week, which they organized to monitor and analyze human rights violations and challenges for the organization. One after another they told their stories in a long session that combined group therapy and political analysis—a natural mix at this critical point in Honduran history and the history of their movement.

Miriam Suazo relates the events of the day of the coup. "On the 28th, women began calling each other, saying 'what's happening?'" At first no-one really understood the full extent of the coup, she says, but networks mobilized quickly and women began to gather to share information and plan actions. Independent feminists and feminists from different organizations immediately identified with each other and with the rising resistance to the coup. They began going out to rescue those who had been beaten and to trace individuals arrested by security forces.

For some, the shock of waking up to a coup d'etat wasn't new.

"This is my third coup," relates Marielena. "I was a girl when the coup in 1963 happened. Then I lived through the coup in 1972. We lived in front of a school and I saw how my mother faced the bullets, we thought they were going to kill her … Later in the university in the 80s I lived through the repression with many of the women here … So this has revived the story of my life."

There is a saying in Honduras about the Central American dirty war that "While the United States had its eye on Nicaragua and its hands in El Salvador, it had its boot on Honduras." For the older women who remember the terror of that time when over 200 people were disappeared and hundreds tortured and assassinated, the current coup stirs up deep fears. Gilda Rivera, director of the Center for Women's Rights in Tegucigalpa, says, "I've had a messed-up life. I knew the victims of Billy Joya in the 80s … Now I've been to the border twice, I've lived with a curfew over my head. I wake up alone, terrified."

The older women agree that they have grown and their movement has grown since the 80s.

Marielena notes, "Today's not the same as the 80s because there's a popular movement that the coup leaders never imagined … What Zelaya has done is symbolize the popular discontent accumulated over the years." She recounts the August 5 battle for the university where she works and the surprising participation of students. Her story is echoed in variations by many of the women present.

Although they battle nightmares and long-buried trauma, these women also see a new hope for the resistance this time around and for their own fight for women's rights. The repression and fear has strengthened their resolve. "Sure, I'm afraid of dying but I'm not losing hope," Gilda says. "I see hope in the faces of the people at the marches. And the solidarity from women, from all of you, keeps me going."

For Jessica, events this year brought to mind the contra war of the 80s. "I never imagined that my daughters would have to be in a situation like this," she says. As a mother who has lived through the period before Honduras began its incomplete transition to democracy, and the period when democracy was merely a word that belied a much cruder reality in the country, she worries. "I told my daughter not to go to the march. She said, 'Mom, what about my autonomy?'"

"My little girl—she's 18 now, but she's still my little girl—ended up going with me to the march. It was really gratifying for me that we went together." These women know in their bodies and their hearts the costs of resistance. They also know that the costs of not resisting are far greater.

For the new generation of feminists, the catalyst came with the confrontation in front of the National Institute of Women on July 15. The day the coup-appointed head of the Institute was installed, Feminists in Resistance gathered to protest the takeover of "their" institution. Lesly says, "The police used their billy clubs, they grabbed me by the neck. I was filled with so much rage—I was drowning in it." Many women in the organization experienced a turning point in their lives that day. Adelai explains, "(The Institute) was my turf, something that belonged to me, and they attacked us there. That was a direct assault on our condition as women … What they did there really affected me personally."

Despite a lot of suffering, the women in the Feminists in Resistance meeting agree that the exhausting dynamic of constant mobilizations and repression has deepened their commitment. Their movement has also come together and developed closer ties to the general movement. When word got out that the feminists were being attacked at the Women's Institute, demonstrators from the entire demonstration of the National Front against the Coup immediately marched to the Institute to defend the women and show their solidarity.

Although the Front leadership continues to be mostly male, men in the movement have publicly recognized the contributions of the feminist organizations and women in the resistance. From recovering the wounded, to marching day after day, to developing analysis and strategy papers, women's organizations have played a critical role in opposing the coup.

At a meeting between leaders of the Front and Feminists in Resistance earlier in the day, Salvador Zuniga, a leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organzations of Honduras (COPINH) and the Front, recognized that women have been among the most active and courageous in the resistance movement. He pointed out that the feminist movement is at the center of the rightwing reaction that led to the coup.

"One of the things that provoked the coup d'etat was that the president accepted a petition from the feminist movement regarding the day-after pill. Opus Dei mobilized, the fundamentalist evangelical churches mobilized, along with all the reactionary groups," he explained.

The unprecedented role of women in the nation's fight for democracy opens them up as a target for repression. Zuniga concluded in no uncertain terms, "What I can say is that the feminist compañeras are in greater danger than any other organization. This has to be made public."

Besides being at the receiving end of the billy clubs and pistols along with the rest of the movement, women suffer specific forms of repression and violence; their bodies have become part of the battleground. Human rights groups including the Women's Human Rights Week international delegation have documented rapes, beatings, sexual harassment, and discriminatory insults. Army and police units routinely shout out "whores!" and "Go find a husband!" at the more and more frequent confrontations between the women and the coup security forces.

It's precisely that step out of the private sphere that makes these dangerous times so exciting and energizes the women of the organization. Many report being driven by the adrenaline of knowing that this time they are the ones defining their history. They ride a roller coaster of emotions, often pitching from euphoria to despair in a single day. But one constant is the satisfaction of binding in a political project with other women who understand the full scope of what they demand and share the contradictory feelings storming inside.

The budding movement has come together in the heat of the coup as Feminists in Resistance faces some major challenges, the first to defeat the coup that now enters Day 54 on the resistance calendar. As the rightwing consolidates power and its own perverse brand of institutionalism, they feel like they're looking down the barrel of a gun as far as their rights and safety are concerned. Rumors circulate that the coup will dismantle the Institute for Women. Congress is about to initiate obligatory military service, meaning that mothers throughout the country will be compelled to protect their children from forced induction. Their freedom of expression, freedom of transit, freedom of assembly have all been curtailed under the coup, along with everyone else who opposes the regime, except for them the physical enforcement of reduced liberties is accompanied by acts of sexual violence and threats.

Big questions are on the table at the meeting of Honduran and international feminists. How to fight for a necessary return to institutional order at a time when the vulnerability and insufficient nature of those institutions has been exposed? How to avoid relegating women's demands to a lower plane in a period of acute political crisis? How to break through a media black-out that's even more impenetrable if you're against the coup and a woman? And how to simply hold your work and family together while spending hours a day in the streets and in meetings.

Bertha Cáceres is a leader of COPINH, a leader of the Front, and mother of four. In her political work she has integrated her specific demands as a woman and believes that organized women must be front-and-center in the resistance against the coup.

"First, because (our struggle as women) means confronting a dictatorship based on different forms of domination. We've said that it's not just destructive capitalism, not just the racism that has also been strengthened by this dictatorship, but also patriarchy. So we think our resistance as women means going a step further, toward a more strategic vision, a more long-term vision in fighting for our country."

She points to a national constitutional assembly as a fundamental goal for women. "For the first time we would be able to establish a precedent for the emancipation of women, to begin to break these forms of domination. The current constitution never mentions women, not once, so to establish our human rights, our reproductive, sexual, political, social, and economic rights as women would be to really confront this system of domination."

The women of Feminists in Resistance have no illusions that this will be an easy task. In addition to the challenges above, the movement is in transition to a new stage of nationwide local organization and long-term strategizing, at the same time as it faces increasing repression and human rights violations. The question of the elections slated for November has created another deadline for definitions of September 1, when candidates must be registered and President Zelaya has sworn to return to the country. Feminists in Resistance has a clear position to boycott any coup-sponsored elections, but some other parts of the movement and the international diplomatic community have been more ambiguous.

What's certain amid these rapidly changing national scenarios is that Honduran women have built a movement that, despite little media attention and the barriers of a male-dominated society, has garnered international support from women around the world and respect from the general resistance movement. Their organization will continue to play a central role in what happens next in Honduras—a key determinant of the course of democracy throughout the Hemisphere.

Laura Carlsen is director of the Americas Policy Program in Mexico City. She is currently in Tegucigalpa as a member of the international delegation of Women's Human Rights Week in Honduras. She can be reached at: (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org).

2009-08-24T17:25:00.001-07:00

a lot of people are saying they don't want the government involved in health care. well, what do they want government involved in? torture? war? environmental destruction? it's ok for the government to kill people in iraq, but not to save babies in detroit. what bullshit. and now, they want to tell us obama is a socialist and a fascist. well, which one is it? does anyone recall that the nazis invaded russia and killed millions of its people? sometimes, they put that little hitler mustache on obama. ok, fine, but where are these people when the bombs fall? they never make those rallies. where were these angry rednecks when bush was raiding the treasury and starting imperial wars? where were these angry heartlanders when hurricane katrina did its damage?

the truth is, obama's plan, or lack thereof, is nothing much, but this ugly hatred being directed at him strikes me as the stirrings of a 21st century american fascism. these people are worse the government, and that's saying a lot. their stupidity disguises the fact that obama is in fact moving very slowly on health care. his ideas are corporate friendly. he has never argued for a medicare for all, single payer approach, so anything he comes up with is liable to be bullshit. but still, do these angry protestors (some of them likely paid agents of the radical right) think the current set up is good? do they like 46 million people being uninsured? do they like the rising premiums, the uncaring insurance agencies, the rising health costs, the bills for those with health care and for those without it? just today, i went to get some blood work done. i was told that my health plan may not cover it. how can a health plan not cover blood work? i pay about 2 grand a year for this care. how could this even be a question? i wonder what those folks who want to take america back would think of this story. i would love to screen sicko for them, or better yet, salud, but they would just write them off as left wing propaganda.

yeah, everything is left wing propaganda.

until you get cancer.

2009-08-24T17:04:00.000-07:00

calley apologized for my lai, but not one of the dead came back to life.

saw food inc. a fine film, though depressing as all hell. i guess most of the good films are.

saw part 1 of the che film. it was quite good. it was similar to battle of algiers, for after a while, i was not conscious of the fact that i was watching a fiction film. the guy who played che was great, and the guy who played fidel was beyond great. i recommend the film, despite it's length. perhaps breaking it into halves is the way to watch it.

for some reason, a quote by c. wright mills is coming to mind. "i have tried to be objective. i do not claim to be detached."

che was an astounding man. moral, disciplined, a part of, and beyond his time.

god, do i hate summer weather.

was watching sportscenter last night, and when manny's face came on the screen, one of the studio guys said "cut the hair." wow. what fascism. the racist, fascist shit comes out in different ways now. these dudes wouldn't talk about someone's skin color, or they would be fired, but they can mock the way a guy chooses to look. but, of course, the way a guy chooses to look says at least as much about him as anything else, and if we get to mock that, what does that say about our culture? it speaks to its fascistic strain, an extreme conservatism that has embedded itself deep into our culture. it is as if the 60's never happened. it is the 50's all over again. conformity is ascendant, and anyone who strays from the dominant modes of dress, speech, etc, will pay with the disdain and insults of the mediocre multitudes. the system is watching, and looking to take down any cultural manifestation that calls into question the dominant structure. something as silly as manny's hair is on the chopping block.

hair today, gone tommorow.

why is there no steroid scandal in football? bodybuilding? pro wrestling? boxing?

more people drank ate at mcdomald's today than ever heard of hank mobley. in fact, more people probably ate at mcdonald's in 10 minutes than ever heard of hank mobley.

pardon my french, but my brain is fried.

till we meat again, some sunny day, i'm david silburger, wishing everyone in turkey, and elsewhere, a happy jew year.

shameful

2009-08-24T17:02:00.000-07:00

AMY GOODMAN: The imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier has been denied parole again. The US Parole Commission told the sixty-four-year-old Peltier Friday his release would, quote, “depreciate the seriousness of [his] offenses” and, quote, “promote disrespect for the law.” It was Peltier’s first full parole hearing in fifteen years. He will not be eligible again for parole until July 2024 at the age of seventy-nine.

Leonard Peltier has been in prison for thirty-three years, convicted of killing two police—two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. Peltier has long maintained his innocence and has been widely considered a political prisoner who was not granted a fair trial. He is now being held at the Lewisburg prison in Pennsylvania.

I’m joined on the phone by his attorney, Eric Seitz. He represented Peltier at his parole hearing, joining us on the phone from his home in Hawaii.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Thank you for waking up very early, Eric. Describe what happened, what you learned on Friday.

ERIC SEITZ: Well, what we learned was that the Parole Commission, which is a holdover group of people from the Bush administration and an agency of the Justice Department, is never going to parole Leonard Peltier. They adopted in full the position of the FBI that if you kill an FBI agent, you should spend the rest of your life in jail, even if there are serious questions about the conduct of the FBI itself and of the government in prosecuting him.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the questions in this case and the other men who were tried separately who were acquitted years ago.

ERIC SEITZ: There was a trial of two people who were indicted with Leonard. It was held in Cedar Rapids, Iowa before a jury that acquitted them on grounds of self-defense.

The FBI, after that case, decided they couldn’t risk a reoccurrence of the same outcome, so they came up with some ballistics evidence, which purported to link Leonard to the fatal shots by which the FBI agents were killed after this shootout had occurred for some period of time and the two agents had been fatally wounded. So they convicted Leonard of firing the fatal shots, according to the jury.

And afterwards, it turned out that the ballistics evidence was questionable, at best. But the courts have refused to set aside or disturb the outcome since then. So Leonard has actually been in prison now for more than thirty-three years for a crime of which the only other two people who were actually put on trial were acquitted, and that raises all kinds of questions about the fairness of the proceedings and of, in particular, the fairness of the judgment in his case.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, in Leonard Peltier’s case, he would have been tried with these men, but he, fearing he would not get a fair trial, had fled to Canada, so he was not tried and then tried separately.

ERIC SEITZ: That’s right. And then there were all kinds of questions about the proceedings by which he was returned to this country from Canada. It is an admitted fact that in the extradition proceedings, the FBI used a series of affidavits that they themselves wrote, purporting to be from a witness who was an eyewitness who wasn’t even there. So the affidavits were perjured, and yet the Canadian government readily agreed at some point to send Leonard back. And after that evidence about the perjury came out, the United States government refused to take any action to correct the situation.

So there have been all kinds of issues about this case which have percolated for more than thirty-four, thirty-five years. And we were hoping at this point in time that we could get a fair consideration from the Parole Commission. We had a very good six-hour hearing before an examiner, not the commission itself, but on their review of the examiner’s recommendations, which we still have never even seen, the Parole Commission basically adopted the position of the FBI. And in some sense, that’s actually helpful to us, because it makes it clear that they are violating the law and the guidelines, and they are basically succumbing to this whole theory that if you kill an FBI agent, you should never be paroled, and that’s not what the law requires.

AMY GOODMAN: The documents that have not been released in Leonard Peltier’s case, how many are there?

ERIC SEITZ: Well, there are thousands of documents from the investigation itself going back to the mid-1970s and beyond that. And a lot of those documents have been shrouded in various levels of secrecy, and there have been Freedom of Information Act cases that have been filed. And many of them have been flushed out, and at various times that’s how we learned about the ballistics evidence that was fraudulent, and that’s how we also learned about the nature of the FBI’s investigation and the fact that they focused on Leonard and the way in which they did after losing the first trial.

Now we’re going to try to get some more of those documents and, in particular, the documents at the Parole Commission, and we’re contemplating the possibility of further litigation, although I think probably much more fruitful at this point is going to be an effort to try to get clemency for Leonard, in terms of his advanced age, in consideration of his health, and because of the fact that this just simply is a case that needs to be brought to resolution properly.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you spoken to Leonard? And what is his response?

ERIC SEITZ: I have not been able to speak with him, because I can’t get calls in to him over the weekend. Other people have talked to him. And I have not yet really found out from them what the results of their visits were over the weekend. But I am hoping to speak with him either today or tomorrow.

AMY GOODMAN: And again, while we reported that he doesn’t have—he’s not eligible for parole again until July 2024, when he’s seventy-nine, his chances before then?

ERIC SEITZ: Well, as far as the parole board is concerned, there are no chances, because they’re not going to change their position unless the personnel of the parole board changes dramatically.

Basically they have taken a hard-line position. He qualifies for parole, which was the difference this time around. He’s served the minimum time that’s necessary. He’s done everything in prison that he needs to do to make himself qualified. He came up with a parole plan prospectively for where he’s going to live and work for the rest of his life, with people to take care of him. All of those things are requirements, which he met. The only requirement he didn’t meet, according to them, which he can’t change, is the fact that he committed a crime that they regard as so heinous that he should never be released from prison. So, as far as the parole board is concerned, we will file a mandatory appeal to exhaust the channels there, but we have virtually no sense that they are going to change their position ever.

AMY GOODMAN: Eric Seitz, we’re going to leave it there, because we have to move quickly on to our last segment. Again, commenting on Leonard Peltier, who was denied parole once again, Eric Seitz, his attorney.

viva fidel

2009-08-24T15:40:00.001-07:00

The Empire and the Robots
August 24, 2009 By Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro's ZSpace Page

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A little while ago, I wrote about U.S. plans to impose the absolute superiority of its air force as an instrument of domination over the rest of the world. I mentioned the project of that country possessing more than 1,000 state-of-the-art F-22 and F-35 bombers and fighter planes in its fleet of 2,500 military aircraft. By 20 years later, the totality of its warplanes will be robot-operated.

Military budgets always have the majority support of U.S. legislators. There are very few states where employment is not at least partially dependent on the defense industry.

On a global level and constant value, military costs have doubled in the last 10 years, as if no danger of crisis existed at all. At this juncture it is the most prosperous industry on the planet.

In 2008, approximately $1.5 trillion was invested in defense budgets. Forty-two percent of world spending on defense, or $607 billion, corresponded to the United States, not including war expenditures, while the number of hungry in the world reached the figure of one billion people.

A Western news agency reported two days ago that in mid-August the U.S. army exhibited a remote-controlled helicopter, as well as robots capable of doing the work of sappers, 2,500 of which have been sent to combat zones.

A robot marketing company maintained that new technologies are revolutionizing the ways of commanding war. It has been published that in 2003 the United States had next to no robots in its arsenal but "today it has — according to AFP — 10,000 ground vehicles and 7,000 aircraft, from the little Raven, which can be launched with one hand, to the giant Global Hawk, a spy plane of 13 meters in length and 35 in wingspan capable of flying at a great height for 35 hours." Other weapons are listed in that dispatch.

While that colossal expenditure on technologies for killing is taking place in the United States, the president of that country is sweating blood in order to bring health services to 50 million U.S. citizens who lack them. The confusion is so great that the new president affirmed that reform of the health system was closer than ever but "the battle is turning ugly."

"But now's the hard part," he added. "Because the history is clear - every time we come close to passing health insurance reform, the special interests with a stake in the status quo use their influence and political allies to scare and mislead the American people."

It is a true fact that in Los Angeles, 8,000 people - the majority of them unemployed, according to the press - gathered in a stadium to receive medical attention from a free traveling clinic that provides services in the Third World. Most of them had waited there overnight. Some of them had traveled from hundreds of kilometers away.

"‘What do I care if it's socialist or not? We are the only country in the world where the most vulnerable of us have nothing,' said a woman from a black neighborhood and with higher education."

It was noted that a "blood test could cost $500 and routine dental treatment more than $1,000."

What hope can that society offer the world?

Congressional lobbyists are spending their August working against a simple bill that is an attempt to provide medical care to tens of millions of poor people — the vast majority of them black or Latino — who lack that service. Even a blockaded country like Cuba has been able to do that and, moreover, cooperate with dozens of Third World countries.

If robots in the hands of the transnationals can replace the imperial soldiers in wars of conquest, who will detain the transnationals in the search for markets for their artifacts? Just as they have inundated the world with automobiles that are now competing with humans for the consumption of non-renewable energy and even for foodstuffs converted into fuel, they can also inundate it with robots that will displace millions of workers in their workplaces.

Better still, scientists can likewise design robots capable of governing; thus sparing the government and Congress of the United States that horrible, contradictory and confused labor.

No doubt they would do it better and more cheaply.

Fidel Castro Ruz
August 19, 2009
3:15 p.m.

legendary woman and lawyer, unknown to me until a second ago

2009-08-19T11:09:00.001-07:00

Legendary Lawyer Doris Brin Walker Dies; Represented Angela Davis, Smith Act Defendants
By MARJORIE COHN

Doris “Dobby” Brin Walker, the first woman president of the National Lawyers Guild, died on August 13 at the age of 90. Doris was a brilliant lawyer and a tenacious defender of human rights. The only woman in her University of California Berkeley law school class, Doris defied the odds throughout her life, achieving significant victories for labor, and political activists.

Doris’ legal and political activism spanned several decades and some of the most turbulent but significant periods in US history. She organized workers, fought against Jim Crow and McCarthyism, was active in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, and actively opposed the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At UCLA, Doris became a Marxist. After she was sworn in as a member of the California State Bar, Doris joined the Communist Party USA, remaining a member until her death. Upon graduation from law school, Doris began practicing labor law; but a few years later, she went to work in California canneries as a labor organizer. When Cutter Labs fired Doris in 1956, the case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Although the Court refused to hear the case, Justice Douglas, joined in dissent by Chief Justice Warren and Justice Black, wrote, “The blunt truth is that Doris Walker is not discharged for misconduct but either because of her legitimate labor union activities or because of her political ideology or belief. Belief cannot be penalized consistently with the First Amendment . . . The Court today allows belief, not conduct, to be regulated. We sanction a flagrant violation of the First Amendment when we allow California, acting through her highest court, to sustain Mrs. Walker's discharge because of her belief.”

Doris returned to the practice of law and represented people charged under the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act) in California. The Act required all resident aliens to register with the government, enacted procedures to facilitate deportation, and made it a crime for any person to knowingly or willfully advocate the overthrow of the government by force or violence. The work of Doris and other NLG lawyers led to Yates v. United States, in which the Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Smith Act defendants in 1957. After Yates, the government never filed another prosecution under the Smith Act.

During the McCarthy era, Doris was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and she also represented several HUAC witnesses. >From 1956 to 1961, Doris successfully defended William and Sylvia Powell, who faced the death penalty, against Korean War sedition charges. The US government charged that articles Powell had written reporting and criticizing US biological weapons use in Korea were false and written with intent to hinder the war effort. When a mistrial ended the sedition case, the government charged the Powells with treason. Attorney General Robert Kennedy dismissed the case in 1961.

A partner with the NLG firm of Treuhaft & Walker in Oakland, California from 1961 to 1977, Doris’ practice focused on civil rights, free speech and draft cases during the Vietnam War. She also defended death penalty cases. Perhaps best known for her defense of Angela Davis, Doris was part of a legal team that secured Angela’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. In that case, which Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree in 2005 called “clearly the trial of the 20th century, and one that exemplified the vast and diverse talents of the true Dream Team of the legal profession,” the defense pioneered the use of jury consultants.

Doris was elected president of the NLG in 1970 after a bruising battle during which one opponent labeled her “a man in a woman’s skirt.” She paved the way for the election of five women NLG presidents in the ensuing years.

Serving as Vice President of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers from 1970 to 1978, Doris supported the struggles of victims of U.S. imperialism throughout the world and was instrumental in the development of international human rights law. In 1996, Doris served as one of eight international observers at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings led by Desmond Tutu.

In 2004, Doris submitted a resolution on behalf of the NLG Bay Area Chapter to the Conference of Delegates of the California Bar Association asking for an investigation of representations the Bush administration used to justify the war in Iraq, for possible impeachment.

The writer Jessica Mitford and Doris were close friends for years; Jessica was married to Robert Truehaft, Doris’ law partner. When Doris invited Jessica to join the Communist Party, the latter replied, “We thought you’d never ask!” There is speculation that author J.K. Rowling, who cited Jessica as her main literary influence, named her Harry Potter house elf “Dobby” after seeing Dobby Walker’s name in Jessica’s books. On a recent visit to her home, Doris showed me the Dobby references in works by Decca on her bookshelf.

Doris frequently called me with her concerns and opinions about the issues of the day and in the NLG. She remained intensely engaged in politics until the day she died.

Doris “Dobby” Walker inspired generations of progressive lawyers, law students and legal workers to struggle unrelentingly for justice and equality. She was a friend, comrade and role model to scores of people in and out of the NLG. We will never see the likes of her again.

Marjorie Cohn is president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Deifed the Law and co-author of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. Her anthology, The United States of Torture: America’s Past and Present Policy of Interrogation and Abuse, will be published next year by NYU Press. See www.marjoriecohn.com.

uncle thomas outvoted...davis lives to fight another day.

2009-08-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

Troy Davis and the Meaning of ‘Actual Innocence’
by Amy Goodman

Sitting on death row in Georgia, Troy Davis has won a key victory against his own execution. On Aug. 17, the U.S. Supreme Court instructed a federal court in Georgia to consider, for the first time in a formal court proceeding, significant evidence of Davis' innocence that surfaced after his conviction. This is the first such order from the U.S. Supreme Court in almost 50 years. Remarkably, the Supreme Court has never ruled on whether it is unconstitutional to execute an innocent person.

The order read, in part, "The District Court should receive testimony and make findings of fact as to whether evidence that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes petitioner's innocence." Behind the order lay a stunning array of recantations from those who originally testified as eyewitnesses to the murder of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark Allen MacPhail on Aug. 19, 1989. Seven of the nine non-police witnesses who originally identified Davis as the murderer of MacPhail have since recanted, some alleging police coercion and intimidation in obtaining their testimony. Of the remaining two witnesses, one, Sylvester "Redd" Coles, is accused by others as the shooter and identified Davis as the perpetrator probably to save himself from arrest.

On the night of the murder, MacPhail was off duty, working as a security guard at a Burger King. A homeless man was being beaten in the parking lot. The altercation drew Davis and others to the scene, along with MacPhail. MacPhail intervened, and was shot fatally with a .38-caliber gun. Later, Coles arrived at the police station, accompanied by a lawyer, and identified Davis as the shooter. The police engaged in a high-profile manhunt, with Davis' picture splayed across the newspapers and television stations. Davis turned himself in. With no physical evidence linking him to the crime, Davis was convicted and sentenced to death.

Jeffrey Sapp is typical of those in the case who recanted their eyewitness testimony. He said in an affidavit:

"The police ... put a lot of pressure on me to say ‘Troy said this' or ‘Troy said that.' They wanted me to tell them that Troy confessed to me about killing that officer ... they made it clear that the only way they would leave me alone is if I told them what they wanted to hear."

Despite the seven recantations, Georgia's parole commission has refused to commute Davis' sentence. Courts have refused to hear the evidence, mostly on procedural grounds. Conservatives like former Georgia Congressman and prosecutor Bob Barr and former FBI Director William Sessions have called for justice in his case, along with Pope Benedict XVI, President Jimmy Carter, the NAACP and Amnesty International.

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority, "The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing." Yet conservative Justice Antonin Scalia dissented (with Justice Clarence Thomas), writing that Davis' case "is a sure loser," and "[t]his Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually' innocent."

Davis has had three execution dates, and in one instance was within two hours of lethal injection. Now he will finally have his day in court. With the courageous support of his sister, Martina Correia (who has been fighting for his life as well as her own--she has stage 4 breast cancer), and his nephew, Antone De'Jaun Correia, who at 15 is a budding human rights activist, Davis may yet defy death. That could lead to a long-overdue precedent in U.S. law: It is unconstitutional to execute an innocent person.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
© 2009 Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 700 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

sheet

2009-08-18T20:39:00.000-07:00

kids know that shoot is just shit with 2 o's. not one of carlin's more profound remarks, but i think it's cute. basically, the truth is better than euphemism, better than subterfuge. the thing is, we are so very far removed from truth in this country, that euphemism and subterfuge are our new realities. for us, the truth has ceased to exist. we wouldn't know what it was if it walked up to us and introduced itself. we have our substitutes. you know them well. work. bills. goals. church. sitcoms. the real house wives of orange county. at times, they all seem about equal. humor is where you can find it, but you can't find truth anywhere. they banished it. kicked it out of the country. removed it from the premises. fox news has multiplied. it's on all the channels now. it fills the streets, has our students ears in their classrooms. extremism is the new neutrality. we are a righ wing culture with two right wing parties, as the masses of whites fear a socialist takeover. hitler would be proud, as would the indian killers and slave catchers from our past. but, in so many ways, we have them licked. we are smoother, slicker. we have a superficial hipness. we have incorporated the victimized, co-opted the oppressed. even snuck a few of them into the elite. given them millions to entertain us. we have even stolen their slang and style. oh, the wonders of modernity. of course, the bombs still fall, usually on the poor and non-white, as they always did. we might love lebron, but we still need our oil. the big o might be in the white house, but nigeria still has resources we insist belong to us. having a token or two doesn't mean you own the train. all of us have a few tokens in our hands. we have "choice" beyond compare. never have there been so many choices. as long as the choices don't change anything. you know the kind of power us modern ametricans have...what kind of oreos to eat, what style of porn to watch, whether to read a moderate right wing or extreme right wing paper. we are overwhelmed by choice, as the wars are waged and the people are poisoned.

never before have we had so many options and so little power.

something to ponder, as i figure out what to listen to next on lala.

dedicated to the walkers and bikers among us

2009-08-17T17:14:00.000-07:00

10 Reasons Why Cars Suck
1. Bumper-to-bumper
From 1950 to 1970, the U.S. automobile population grew four times faster than the human population. Today, there are around 200 million cars in America. As a result, we Americans spend 8 billion hours per year stuck in traffic.

2. Cars kill people
During the twentieth century, 250 million Americans were maimed or injured in automobile accidents. Every single day in the U.S., an average of 121 people are killed in car accidents. The leading cause of death for children aged 5 to 14 in New York City is pedestrian automobile accidents.

3. Cars kill animals
Automobiles, SUVs, trucks, and other fossil field-burning vehicles kill a million wild animals per week in the U.S.-not counting tens of thousands of family pets.

4. Cars exploit dead animals
Substances like anti-freeze, bio-diesel fuel, hydraulic brake fluid, and asphalt binder are all made with ingredients culled from the carcasses of departed animals.

5. Sprawling for dollars
During the last century, an area equal to all the arable land in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania was paved in the U.S. This area requires maintenance costing over $200 million a day. (The surreptitious cost of the car culture totals nearly $464 billion a year in the U.S. alone, much of that going to the sustentation of a military presence in the Persian Gulf.)

6. Getting warmer?
Automobiles emit one-quarter of U.S. greenhouse gases.

7. Oil in our veins
The U.S. spends $60 billion per year on foreign oil. Eight million barrels of oil per day is combusted in U.S. cars. That’s 450 gallons per person per year.

8. They’re all wasted
Cars create 7 billion pounds of un-recycled scrap and waste annually.

9. Leaving rubber
With approximately one billion discarded tires littering our increasingly paved landscape, meditate upon this: Every tire loses one pound of rubber per year, spewing minute grains of rubber into the stratosphere and then back down to find a new home in our water and/or our lungs.

10. Cars are hell
During the 40 days of the (first) Gulf War, 146 Americans died keeping the world safe for petroleum while at home, 4900 Americans died in motor vehicle accidents.

2009-08-16T19:09:00.000-07:00

went on james moody's website a while back, and he had pictures of his trip to the white house, shaking hands with bush, the whole bit. i should have stuck to the albums.

there was really nothing that dizzy couldn't play. people tend to think of him as a bebop guy, which of course he was, but he did a lot of great playing after bebop too. just a great player, and a wonderful musical spirit.

it's tough to work with someone and know that he basically won't change. i mean, no one should change if they don't want to, but this is something else. you can put in the time with some of these students, day after day, and each day will replicate the day before it...the conversations, the patterns, everything. there are laughs (you are not a good idea, you be neal) but more than anything, there is sadness to it all. it will be nice to step away from it for a few weeks. and when i go back, the students i'll be working with will be more on the ball. they get the joke, that sort of thing. it's not that i didn't dig these guys. i did, it's just that it gets you down sometimes.

remember the excitement after obama's election? where did that go? where are all those people who wanted change? outside the white house, that is. or maybe it was all just a beauty contest, a superbowl, a world series. root, root for the home team, martha. well, it does seem that it's one, two, three strikes you're out at the old ballgame. but, then again, we always strike out. so, i guess it's better now. at least his old man was from kenya.

but, what about the beggars on the street? the kids in pakistan? what about this polluted earth of ours, on life support, thanks to our eternal molestation of it? can these realities be spoken of? are we allowed to voice these ugly truths, in this time of supposed optimism? just where is the hope that we are hearing so much about? my sense is there is less hope than ever, but i have no sense, so maybe i'm wrong.

i can only hope.

why do i care about manny ramirez so much? he is making over 20 million dollars a year for swinging a baseball bat. i should hate all these guys, including him. but, each day, i get on yahoo and track his numbers for the day. when he gets a couple of hits, my day receives a shot in the arm, but when he goes hitless, i feel as if someone has nailed me with a shot to the ribs. i have never met the man, and now that he is out in la, surely never will. why do i care? the question can not hide the fact that i do. and when basketball season starts, i will cheer with the same unthinking lunacy for the old and tired jason kidd, rooting without hope for that first championship for mr. assist.

hell, it's something to do.

2009-08-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

kind of blue just turned 50.

so what?

2009-08-15T21:02:00.000-07:00

there is a lot going on, but the bullshit stands out. there is so much of it. the people you have to deal with. the jobs you have to do. the bills you have to pay. the shows on tv, the music on the radio, the cars on the road, the false smiles, the chain stores, everything reduced to money. no one relates to you with empathy, with decency, with intelligence. in the end, it's all about getting ahead, feeling superior, pretending to be the shit. and what of us, the ones who just want to be left alone? what of the ones who just want to sleep and read and listen to jazz and take walks and do just enough work to survive? what of us? they will shit on us, that's what. they think nothing of us. they think we are demented, that there is something wrong with us, that we are failures, losers, sick. they can't understand us, so they lash out at us in anger. the landlords and employers and rednecks and store owners and drivers and cashiers and realtors and random passerby. all of them. they stare. they smirk. they do what they can in a 1001 ways to make our lives miserable. they put "these colors don't run" bumper stickers on the back of their cars. they make stupid jokes. they buy up all the property. they moan about the old days, when no child was molested and people respected each other's privacy. they leave out lynching and the burning of asian children with napalm. in their day, they had to walk to school. people worked back then, everyone spoke english, people knew how to spell, they wrote letters, blah blah blah.

everything becomes a morality play. good vs evil. root for the home team. oh, tom brady is back, and the celtics signed rasheed wallace. let's all sit around and bash unions, but never the rich. let's tell racist jokes, but never use the n word. it's all code now. let's give each other the wink before we act like assholes. i've seen whitey in action. i know what to look for. he holds back. thinks he's progressive. uses no slurs. wears his pants baggy. goes to a jay-z concert. watches basketball. fuck him. he ain't cool, and never will be. america co-opts. takes the life out of rebellion, and after the blood has been sucked, the redneck jumps in and nibbles at the crumbs of cool.

the whole thing is so redundant. repetitive. tiresome. is it worth the effort? the getting up in the morning? paying the taxes? is it worth it to make the marches? what changes? have we talked to our friends in the albanian community yet? has jim from cambridge switched to kentucky grilled chicken? does he still doubt that all the farms in cuba are organic? did jared israel really need all of that water?

throughout your entire life, the essentials will be constant. there will always be people trying to fuck with you. beware of the boss, the landlord, the spying neighbor, the corrupt politician, the waiter who refuses to serve you, the guy at the dinner party who asks you "what do you do?" the mainstream movie theater, the top 40 radio station, reality tv, nba and nfl refs, the prices at health food stores, rodents, u.s. foreign policy, the overrating of tom cruise, tom hanks, and denzel washington.

beware. it won't help none, but beware.

love and marriage in the "only democracy in the middle east."

2009-08-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

Israeli Rabbis Ban Marriage
For Jewish âUntouchables'
August 09, 2009 By Jonathan Cook

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Tel Aviv -- Two immigrants from the former Soviet Union staged a very public wedding in the streets of central Tel Aviv this week to highlight the plight of hundreds of thousands of Jews barred from lawfully marrying in Israel.

Nico Tarosyan and Olga Samosvatov chose to tie the knot in a special ceremony on Tuesday -- watched by family, friends and curious passers-by -- after Orthodox rabbis had denied them the right to wed.

The rabbinate says that Mr Tarosyan cannot prove he is Jewish according to its strict standards and therefore should not marry Ms Samosvatov, who is considered a proper Jew.

Mr Tarosyan, aged 34, who moved to Israel from Moscow in 1995, called his treatment by the rabbis "humiliating".

"In Russia we were hated because we were Jews and here in Israel we are discriminated against as Russians," he said.

An underclass of Jews has emerged in Israel since the early 1990s, when more than one million immigrants began pouring into Israel following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Many were entitled to emigrate to Israel under the Law of Return, which requires only that they have a single Jewish grandparent. But the authorities -- keen to bolster the number of Jews in Israel's demographic battle with the Palestinians -- also allowed some to arrive with little documentation or faked papers.

This set the new immigrants on a collision course with Israel's Orthodox rabbis, who regard themselves as guarding the Jewish people's ethnic and religious purity, said Ofer Kornfeld, the chairman of Havaya, an organisation that officiates at unrecognised weddings like the one conducted in Tel Aviv this week.

"Civil marriages are not possible in Israel," he said. "So the rabbis get to decide who can marry and who cannot."

Israel has passed control of all matters relating to personal status -- births, marriages and divorces, and deaths -- to rabbis belonging to the strictest stream of Judaism, Orthodoxy.

Havaya, said Mr Kornfeld, offered unrecognised, secular and non-Orthodox Jews the chance to marry in a ceremony that retained Jewish rituals while tailor-making the event to their own convictions.

Official figures show that as many as 350,000 Jews are classified by the rabbinate as having "no religion", and are therefore unable to marry in Israel. Their only option is to wed abroad -- the marriage is then recognised on their return.

These immigrants face major hurdles in seeking to prove their Jewishness to the rabbis' satisfaction. They must produce evidence that they have a Jewish mother or grandmother in a procedure that can be upsetting to those affected, said Mr Kornfeld.

"Many don't even try because they know it's a difficult and humiliating process that can take months or even years to complete and there is no guarantee of success."

For a man, the rabbis demand that he prove he is circumcised and produce a birth certificate stating that his mother was a Jew, a proof many immigrants from the former Soviet Union have difficulty providing.

"It may help if you can prove that your mother spoke Yiddish or, if she is dead, supply a photo of her gravestone with a Magen [Star of] David," said Mr Kornfeld.

Mr Tarosyan, a computer engineer, said that, although he failed to impress the rabbis, both his parents were considered Jews in Russia. In Moscow, he said, neighbours had daubed anti-Semitic graffiti on the family's door.

Ms Samosvatov, 29, who immigrated from Ukraine with her mother when she was 15, said although the couple considered this week's wedding in Tel Aviv to be the true ceremony, they were saving to travel to Prague later in the year to conduct a recognised wedding.

Mr Kornfeld said they would be following in the path of a growing number of Israelis. "About 6,000 couples wed abroad each year, often in eastern Europe. That's about a fifth of all marriages."

It is not only Jews classified as without a religion who are forced to leave the country, he said. Many recognised but secular Jews, who do not wish to submit to an Orthodox ceremony, tie the knot abroad, as do those marrying across religious divisions.

Israel's Muslim, Christian and Druze citizens -- comprising nearly a fifth of the population -- have their own separate religious authorities who are given exclusive oversight of weddings.

Demands to reform the law have been growing for more than a decade, but every parliamentary bill on civil marriage has been defeated, usually following stiff resistance from the religious parties.

However, a new bill, approved by a ministerial committee last month, seems more likely to become law. It allows for a limited form of civil marriage that applies only to couples where both lack a religious status. Mr Tarosyan and Ms Samosvatov would not qualify as the rabbis consider one of them a Jew.

The religious parties were forced to agree to the Civil Marriage Bill as a condition for entering the government of Benjamin Netanyahu in the spring. The compromise was needed because civil marriage was the key platform of another coalition partner, the far-right Yisreal Beiteinu party of Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, who is now facing corruption charges. The party draws heavy support from the Russian-speaking population.

The liberal Haaretz newspaper welcomed the bill as a "first crack in the religious monopoly" on marriage, but other observers have doubts.

Avirama Golan, writing in the same paper, warned that the law would apply only to a tiny number of couples and would in practice entrench the power of the rabbis, who before approving a wedding would still force couples to submit to lengthy and humiliating investigations to ensure that neither was a Jew.

She added that such couples would be forced into a ghetto, giving "birth to their shunned children who will marry among themselves and be registered separately in the communal records".

The rabbis' agreement to the reform, analysts point out, was possible because the bill maintains barriers preventing assimilation between the majority designated as real Jews and those the rabbis consider "without religion".

Mr Kornfeld said the rabbis' grip on marriage has continued even though nearly 70 per cent of Israeli Jews defined themselves as secular. Even among the religious, some regard themselves as belonging to the more moderate Reform and Conservative streams of Judaism.

Conversion to Orthodoxy is tightly restricted by the rabbinate, with only a few hundred people approved each year. Those converting are forced to adopt a strictly observant lifestyle for themselves and their children.

A general lack of sympathy for the problems of recent Russian immigrants was reflected in a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute this week. It found that half of all Israelis polled believed that only those born in Israel could be a "true Israeli". Conversely, only 28 per cent of Russian-speaking immigrants in their 30s saw their future in Israel.

2009-08-09T09:42:00.000-07:00

been out to the suburbs alot this summer, thanks to my camp gig. lincoln, acton, etc. you can't walk anywhere. good greenery though. but man, there's no diversity. it doesn't swing. i'm sure the air is better, and the houses are nice, but it feels like death to me. everywhere i have ever lived, i have been able to walk to a local library. a train or bus has been within a 10 minute walk. when i have ever walked down a street, i have seen people of every color, and have heard spanish, portugese, haitian creole, vietnamese, cantonese, italian, and other languages i couldn't place. the more people you observe, the more you become, if you are open to the observations. you begin to swing, to have a certain rhythm in your speech, in your walk, in your humor. you hear different kinds of music, eat different foods, attain different perspectives on politics, culture, religion. of course, a shitload of rednecks live in the heart of the city. contact does not progressivism make, but it can, if you are willing.

i have walked down the street, and seen david barsamian. i have jumped on a train for 10 minutes, and seen live jazz of the highest order. the ballgames are played in the same city in which i live. the record and bookstores are all here. of course, i was jumped once, but other than that, it's been smooth sailing. i have lived my life without a car. my feet and bus pass have been good enough. the market, library, train station, bakery, bank, ice cream parlor, videostore, diners, all within reach. no, i don't want to mow a lawn. i don't want to hang an american flag. i don't want "going to the city" to be an all day gig. i don't want to look at people whiter than me without end.

i am a city guy, and a city guy i'll stay. the overpriced, unsafe, pest infested, paranoid, angry, city has worked for me so far. the irish telling me i killed christ, the latinos yelling at me to drop my wallet, the black kids trying to punk me at the basketball courts, the chinese guys spying on me at their restaurants, the dogs unleashed, running up to me in dorchester, the woman being knocked down, refusing my help, the man lying in the street outside my old place, blood all over his hands, the inept schools with the bitter, ignorant teachers, the bigoted landlords, the vietnamese guy playing his guitar at the 3 in the morning, the jamaican guy who sold drugs on my old street.

and the old park me and my dad used to play stickball in. the brunch with live jazz, stereo jack's, dino's, lucy parson's, walks with pinko, meeting tilberg, running into walls and hitting high notes in the park, the pizza special at hi fi, the nestle quik at the local grocery store, pick up games in townfield, trips to the pond, castle island, the arboretum, the women who have walked pass, each with their own look and grace, the puerto rican parade, the west indian festival, the free movies at the library, the harvard film archive, the brattle, looney tunes, planet records, raven bookstore, newbury comics, wally's, the regatta bar, scullers, martin's coffee shop, the trotter, lewenberg, and o'bryant schools, umass boston.

the greats prefer the city. bogosian ran away from woburn as fast as he could. woody and tony bennett still have apartments in new york, fancy though they may be. the great musicians had their lofts.

the city has more life and more death, more happiness and sadness, more progressivism and reactionism, more beauty and ugliness.

the city swings.

for better or worse, i want in on the ride.

2009-08-08T20:36:00.000-07:00

there are times when anyone who does not lose his mind has no mind to lose.

nietzsche.

2009-08-08T20:01:00.000-07:00

sometimes, you want to tell them all off. all of them. of course, they probably feel that way about you. yeah, never really thought about that. you think they suck, but what if they think you suck?

wynton kelly...damn.

took the kids to the discovery museum, a small science museum in acton, a burb of boston. man, the burbs are a bore. bunch of bland whites. in any case, it was a kick to dig the kids. the place was hands on, interactive, all that shit. i jumped in by sticking my head in a long pipe and hitting high notes. i nailed "the record shows, my balls are froze, and did it my way!" (an original from papa mellish) banged on some stuff that made random noises. held my hand on a buzzer for a couple of minutes until concerned citizens took notice and shot me a look. in short, acted the fool, which i think is perhaps, my truest self, reading and music notwithstanding. (bullshit word, huh? does it even exist?) i find the kids like an adult who is crazier than they are, though they act like fuckheads either way. and why not? adults suck, why not children? the trip went well, at least as well as it could. but, i was still on the clock. i resent that condition. i resent it with every fiber of my being (who am i, wheat germ? that may well have been the first time i ever said "with every fiber of my being.") remember the guaranteed income? they used to talk alot about that. give me enough to survive on, and i would be sipping pina colada's at the local pond, book in hand. could even write that book that no one has asked for. "asses i have seen." sounds like a bestseller to me, but then, my taste is questionable.

until then, work it is. set the clock, grab the morning coffee, sit next to smelly stiffs on the bus. now that i shower twice a day, i notice bo. funny how it didn't bother me when i was the guy who stunk. to the all the bus riders who i may have offended in days of yore, i apologize. i am sure you are all following my blog, and will read this in within minutes.

even the weekends are starting to suck.

well, there is always next week.

for most of us.

the trip that went nowhere

2009-08-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

we were gonna take the kids to the aurboretum. we were getting them on the van, when one of them stormed away in anger. he was not able to get the seat of his choice. the next thing i knew, he was screaming such classics as "i don't give a shit" and "i'm fucking mad!" i offered to stay behind with the buffoon, but for issues of safety and security (who is he, tyson in his prime?) we called off the trip. only, we didn't. 10 minutes later, we were trying it again. the screaming student was not punished. instead, he was rewarded with getting to pick the seat he would stick his annoying anus in. but, not so fast. it seems that our shouter pointed at another student. this set the second student off. she started screaming "he pointed at me. i'm very angry!" and other such poetic tid bits. the trip was again called off, but not before a third student jumped into the mix. a male student, perhaps coming to the defense of the angry female student, turned around and said to the first student "you are not a good idea." yes, that was the exact phrase. then, we went back to the class, where student #3 again attacked student #1. "you're guilty" he yelled, sending #1 running, tears flowing from his suddenly sensitive eyes. (ironically, when this same kid threw a stick at me, he shed no tears at all) meanwhile, student #2 is still screaming, smashing her hands against the table, and verbalizing her hatred for #1. #3 has his color coded behavior chart put on red, an occurrence which causes him consternation. for some reason, #3 is the only student who is in anyway disciplined. supposedly, #1's disability explains why he often turns violent. yet, when we were playing basketball in the park with a 6 foot 5 kid a couple of weeks back, i noticed #1 was very polite, a real pacifist. how is acting like a brat a disability? in that case, most americans qualify.

that was the first hour of the day.

the townie keeps talking

2009-08-05T18:04:00.000-07:00

i don't want to see him, or any of them, for that matter. but one needs to eat. this one dude is on the gig. it's not that he does any one thing that is horrific. it's just his presence. it's his existence. he could be millions of others. his identity is secondary. he works in the town he was born in. he barely made it through high school. he is arrogant, i suppose due to his white skin and american birth. he is working class, but detests unions. he is always on the verge of saying something stupid. today, he said "unions are for people who don't like to work." funny, but i always thought you had to be working to be in a union. the terrible townie is surely a fan of the weekend, short hours, minimum wages, etc, and yet, he hates unions. he must think the lovable leaders of industry willingly granted every perk available to the modern worker. no, that's not quite right, for thinking would require thinking, and i don't think he does much of that.

each day, we have to share space with people we wish didn't exist. murder is out of the question. of course, no one really asks the hard questions anymore. so, we need to get by. in this case, it would probably help if i were a big, strong, black or latino guy. at least, the townies would know to shut up in my presence. unless there were 4 of them and 1 of me. then, they might have the "courage" to flaunt their fuckheadedness.

shit, all i'm trying to do is survive. why can't i be that guy guarding the empty atm? you know, these 350 pound fuckers reading a paper? of course, those guys have to wear a uniform, and are probably being spied on. but, at least they are alone.

to be alone on the job, away from the voices of ignorance, racism, and stupidity. to be far from the lunches with the coworkers, from coworkers who want to give you a lift, who ask you if you have any plans for the weekend, who insist on telling you that they are going back to school. to be apart from the plethora of putrid people.

ah, that would probably suck too.

2009-08-01T20:01:00.001-07:00

just saw a motown retrospective on pbs. not bad. of course, they left all the political stuff out...war, ball of confusion, what's going on. no surprise there. sadly, the show focused on only 5 acts...smokey and the miracles, marvin gaye, the four tops, the temptations, and the supremes.

smokey, a better writer than singer. too high pitched, a little flat at times. does some tough licks at times though.

gaye...soulful, good sound. as i said, they stayed away from what's going on, mercy mercy me, and inner city blues. too bad.

the four tops. levi had a fantastic voice, but the group sounds a little corny at times. baby i need your lovin remains one of the great motown tunes. not shown was the stubbs classic lead on "ask the lonely." i highly recommend this song. youtube has a version with no backing band which is quite interesting. levi recently died. for what it's worth, he was jackie wilson's cousin.

the temptations... great harmonies, but they can look a little silly on stage. david ruffin was a good singer. he could really nail his leads. they showed him to good effect on my girl and ain't too proud to beg, but didn't show him perform his classic "i'm losing you." similar to the marvin segment, there was nothing from their later period, where they touched on social issues with ball of confusion and papa was a rolling stone.

the supremes...ross has something, though i'm not a huge fan. you always get the sense that the background singers could have topped her, if they only got the chance. i like someday we'll be together.

well, the show went with perhaps the most famous acts of the label, though it did leave out stevie wonder and the jackson 5. hey, that don't bother me much, particularly in the latter case. stevie had a number of good things that it would have been nice to hear. but hey, what do i know?

but, there were other motown acts who were quite deserving of mention. edwin starr, in my view, may have had the best voice of anyone who ever recorded on the label. his war should be on any motown retrospective. the temps too cut a version of this tune. starr also did apolitical classics like 25 miles, sos, and double o soul.

martha and the vandellas have the supremes beat by a mile, in my view. heatwave, dancing in the street, nowhere to run, and jimmy mack, are classics of the era. martha reeves has more power than ross, and their songs drive harder.

jr walker and the all stars were a soulful group with an emphasis on instrumental performance. shotgun is a classic of the period, and features walker on vocals and sax. walker was a fine r and b tenor player, one of the few who could really play the horn in that context.

and there was eddie holland and kim weston and barrett strong and gladys knight and the spinners. but hey, whose counting?

please, if you are gonna show us something, educate us. give us a true sense of the body of work you claim to be demonstrating.

no wonder nobody knows what the hell is going on.

2009-08-01T17:56:00.000-07:00

"i wish someone would pick up on my art, before it lays down and dies where it is."

sinatra, 1965.

he knew he was slipping. he heard steve lawrence, and vic damone, and he knew that they weren't it. bennett was bad, but different, more of a show stopper. in any case, this quote means more to me than what sinatra is speaking about. where are the creative artists? aren't we better than the mariah/emimem feud, or the next spider man flick? who is there who can write a song or make a movie that will blow us away? once, i walked into a library with pinko, and saw a fellini film that i will never forget. masina walked, smiling, with sadness in her eyes, and to this day, it hasn't been equalled for me. that movie was made over 50 years ago.

it's laying down. it may not be dead, but it sure is hard to find the pulse sometimes, ain't it?

and the arts aren't the only thing dying. this world of ours is on life support. if we were disinterested, we would likely pull the plug, but when you are playing the game, one hates to concede defeat.

well, it's the 9th inning, folks.

and the pitcher is up next.

2009-08-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

shit is heating up in honduras again. it doesn't look like the big o is willing to move in the right direction, likely driven by his own centrism and the militant support for the coup by the right wing. therefore, it seems that latin america is going to have to take care of this one on its own. for one, the people of honduras will have to lay it on the line, while i do my part by blogging. sounds like a fair trade. also, the governments and people of other nations in latin america will have to up their opposition. i, for one, think a unified military response is justified. the coup regime should be warned that they have only a certain amount of time to get the fuck out of town, or else. between a strong movement within honduras and a unified response from neighboring countries, the coup regime will have to split. hopefully, not too many are killed in the process. but remember, unified responses from latin america halted the dirty tactics within bolivia, and also forced columbia to stop raids in equador.

one thing we know; it ain't gonna come from the states. we are too tied to big business and an imperial foreign policy. all we want are military bases and sweatshops. to hell with the poor. in fact, the more poor, the more people to work in the sweatshops, and to pick the fruit. that's the whole problem. zelaya raised the minimum wage. when you do that, you raise dignity. you say to people, you are worthy of respect. and, you cut into profits. the reason these big corporations are entrenched in these countries in the first place is to steal their resources and then to work the people for next to nothing. you start to question this process, and you run into opposition from the powerful. therefore, you need power of your own; a militant population, and allies willing to lay it on the line.

stay tuned.

2009-07-31T17:53:00.000-07:00

they talked of the acdc concert last week. they said they sounded better than ever. i just listened. they wouldn't have known who charles mcpherson is, nor would they care much about my discovery of "wayning moments." i honestly had never even heard of acdc, a feat for which even tilberg stood in awe over. kind of like when my dad auditioned for a group, and they asked him if he knew anything by the who. "the what?" he replied.

my humor and knowledge of sports gets me by. i think. i don't know if it really does, nor do i much care. it's just that we are forced to be around stiffs for much of our waking hours. they aren't that bad, i suppose. just ignorant and boring and shallow with poor tastes in music. other than that, they are a gas.

the guy on my gig mentioned miles. just what if he had said booker little, or louis smith? you know, just to shake things up. it doesn't happen that way, i guess. repetition rules, and mediocrity maintains its place in power. the gig gradually gets to us. man continues his search for meaning in a godless universe. he is alone in the cosmos, surrounded by over 6 billion others, each alone in his crowded corner. each day, its get up, and try again.

what would happen if we didn't set the alarm? if we just kept sleeping and walking and breathing and listening?

we would be homeless, that's what would happen.

2009-07-30T20:33:00.000-07:00

millions without health insurance

millions starving.

bombs falling.

iraq a mess.

gaza and new orleans waiting for help.

women being raped, and then murdered by their families as a result.

rivers polluted.

forests being clear cut.

animals being killed for profit.

work a boring act of repetitive madness.

but all is well, for a mixed group of men sat down to a beer today.

sleep well.

i know the murdered and starved and poisoned will.

but what about us?

2009-07-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

obama says the best things he has ever said on race. the result? his approval ratings go down. for america doesn't want truth on the subject. let me rephrase that: white america doesn't want truth on the subject. obama is walking a tight rope. if he had said the things i want to hear, he would not have been elected. no question about it. here, he says .0000001 of what i want to hear, and they knock him for it. obama, how dare you side with the black against the white, the civilian against the cop? how dare you stick your "elitist" nose where it doesn't belong? so the right cackles. he does a plethora of right wing things, expands the war in afghanistan, ignores the perils of pollution, fires drones over pakistan, lectures black men instead of creating jobs for them, continues regressive policies of spying and torture, but this is of no matter to those who will stop at nothing to get rid of him.

think of it; obama says racial profiling is a fact of life for black and latino men, and he loses popularity.

ugly folks don't like to be reminded of their looks. neither do ugly countries. the illusion must be maintained, the dominant group must be allowed a guilty free existence. if you shatter the illusion, they will come for you. you may think your offense was minor, but they will be the judge of its import.

so, today, a beer was shared at the white house. it was a kind of apology by obama, as he attempted to regain his role as uniter of disparate forces. "can't we all just get along?" the event seemed to shout. better to pretend at unity than to admit to injustice. the latter gains you few votes from the privileged, and there is an election in three years.

but, you know, the greats don't care who likes them. i wish all those who are riding around with obama bumper stickers would consider that. the greats tell the truth when it is unpopular. the greats risk their lives for a cause. they don't read opinion polls, they don't chase votes, they don't blow with the wind.

you don't become president with the truth, and you don't remain president with the truth. the big o has surely learned his lesson.

it was one he already knew, but just for a second, he remembered he was still a black man in america.

i doubt he will make the same mistake again.

.

2009-07-26T15:17:00.000-07:00

“Skip” Gates
A Curious Martyr in the Struggle Against Racism
July 26, 2009 By Paul Street

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The black-bourgeois Harvard professor and Cambridge, Massachusetts resident Henry Louis "Skip" Gates (who is certainly far into the six figure salary stratosphere at the nation's top university) is a curious martyr in the struggle against racism. He recently claimed that his now nationally sensationalized experience of being arrested in his own home - after being seen forcing his way (along with his cabdriver) into his residence upon returning from China (an action that elicited a neighbor's call to the police) and then launching into a tirade against the Cambridge police sent to investigate - has reminded him of the oppression that poor blacks face in the U.S. He is thinking, he says, of doing "a PBS special" about his confrontation with a "rogue racist police officer" in affluent, leafy Cambridge and how that experience connects him to the truly oppressed people down in Roxbury, Dorchester, Bedford Stuyvesant, South Central Los Angeles, Benton Harbor (Michigan), and the West Side of Chicago.

He's in the national spotlight thanks in no small part to President Barack Obama's politically ill-advised statement - made at the heavily distracting end of a prime-time press conference in which he was attempting to sell his watered-down, corporate-friendly "health care reform" - that Gates' arrest was a "stupid" action on the part of the Cambridge police. The president referred to Gates as a personal friend and admitted to not being particularly knowledgeable about the specifics involved in the Gates-Cambridge incident.

Blacks Have "No Excuse" for Not "Running MIT"

Another "PBS special" from Henry Louis Gates? White supremacists can be forgiven if they are not shaking in their boots. Five and a half years ago, the bourgeois professor fouled Black History Month by narrating an ambitious, four-part, and British-directed Public Broadcasting System television series titled "America Beyond the Color Line." Purportedly dedicated to providing a provocative new take on race, class, and black experience in the U.S., Gates' documentary spent an inordinate amount of time beating up on impoverished blacks for not having any, well, class. Accepting the dominant privilege-friendly and Euro-bourgeois notion that success, empowerment, and freedom are essentially available to all who exhibit proper individual initiative and "personal responsibility," Gates argued that poor African-Americans are largely to blame for the fact that blacks stand at the bottom of the nation's steep US socioeconomic pyramids. In "American Beyond the Color Line," Gates did not understand class in the radical way that the term has been used by leading black intellectuals and activists like W.E.B. DuBois, CLR James, Martin Luther King and Manning Marable: as an oppression structure that is intimately and inseparably (dare I say dialectically) bound up with race (today we must of course add gender) in the construction and preservation of American inequality. [1] He used "class" rather in the bourgeois and accommodationist Booker T. Washington [2] sense, arguing that lower-class blacks needed to work harder and smarter to acquire the middle- and upper-class skills, education, habits and values possessed in greater degree by black elites. One of those elites Gates held up as a role model in "America Beyond the Color" was the leading imperialist figurehead Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, featured as an example of what blacks could accomplish when they work hard, study, save, and behave decently.

"Unless there is a moral revolution and a revolution in attitude among our people," Gates told Chicago Tribune reporter Steve Johnson as "America Beyond the Color Line" hit the airwaves, "unless [poor blacks] decide to stay in school, learn the ABCs, not to get pregnant when you're 16, not to run drugs, not to sell drugs...we're doomed to have a relatively small black middle class and huge underclass and never the twain shall meet. The only way we can succeed in society," Gates said, "is mastering the ABCs, staying in school, working hard, deferred gratification. What's happened to these values?... My father always said, and it's true, if we studied calculus like we studied basketball, we'd be running MIT. It's true and there's no excuse." [3]

This was the key theme in a previous PBS special narrated by Gates. In that documentary, titled "Two Nations," Gates proclaimed that black poverty was pretty much about poor decisions: "deciding to get pregnant or not to have protected sex. Deciding to do drugs. Deciding not to study. Deciding, deciding, deciding..." [4]

"A Wake-Up Call...More Especially to Black America"

Gates told the Chicago Tribune that "America Beyond" was "meant to be a wake-up call to America, but more especially to black America, saying ‘are we crazy? What are we doing here? We can't just keep saying,'" Gates argues, "‘the white man made me do it.'"

The Tribune's Johnson reporter found that "America Beyond's" "most striking" aspect was "the degree to which it pushes the idea of personal responsibility as the best solution to the black community's problems," which, the reporter says, "is perhaps not something you expect to hear from a man who identifies himself as politically ‘center-left.'" While knowing full well that larger, interrelated forces of capitalism and racism play a role in the creation of deep and disproportionate black poverty, (he is not stupid), Gates decided (perhaps I should say "decided, decided, decided") in "America Beyond" and in "Two Nation" to skip past structural-racism and get to the meat of the matter: the personal responsibility of poor blacks.

It' was a comforting message, no doubt, for much of white America, most of which has embraced the convenient notion that racism (structural or otherwise) no longer poses serious problems for blacks and that the real barriers to black success and equality are located in the African-American community itself. "As white America sees it," noted Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown in their excellent study By The Color of Their Skin: the Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race (New York: Plume, 2000), "every effort has been to welcome blacks into the American mainstream and now they're on their own." Predominant white attitudes at the turn of the millennium are well summarized by the comments of a white respondent to a survey conducted by Essence magazine. "No place that I'm aware of," wrote the respondent, "makes [black] people ride on the back of the bus or use a different restroom in this day and age. We got the message; we made the corrections - get on with it."

The election of Gates' friend, Harvard graduate Barack Obama, to the White House, has of course pretty much closed the door on the chance that many American whites will understand that the "corrections" (an interesting word choice in a time when black prisoners account for nearly half of "freedom"-loving America's globally unmatched incarceration rate!) are only minimally underway if at all.

"Is it the System, the Man, Racism...Capitalism?"

Presented through the quintessentially Caucasian venue of the PBS documentary, much of "America Beyond" seemed like racially treasonous snitching. In one scene from Chicago's predominantly black South Side, Gates looked incredulous as a young woman offered him no rational reason for having a large number of children out of wedlock during her late teens and 20s. Another South Side scene in the special had Gates talking to a group of young black women who were enrolled in a program designed to help them escape ghetto life. Gates asked one young lady who or what she blamed for the desperate situation of so many of the city's African-Americans. "Is it the system, the man, racism," Gates asked her, "is it capitalism?" Failing to cite Marx, DuBois or Malcom X or the latest left-sociological research on the racially disparate impact of capitalist de-industrialization [5], the woman earned Gates' approval by emphasizing the poor choices made by ghetto residents she knew!

During one telling sequence in "America Beyond," Gates sat across from a black inmate at a notorious and giant racist holding pen - Chicago's Cook County Jail. After telling the inmate how much he himself loved attending school as a youth, Gates looked disturbed as his interview subject recalled alienation from the inadequate public school to which he was assigned by virtue of his boyhood address in a dangerous, poverty-ridden Chicago neighborhood. As the dialogue between the Harvard professor and the jail inmate concluded, both agreed on the basic wisdom of an uncontroversial conclusion: America's nearly one million black prison and jail inmates would be better off if they had hit the books and not joined gangs during their youth.

The point was shared in "America Beyond" by U.S. Secretary of State Powell, who told Gates that young blacks needed to...make better choices in life. (Gates did not ask Powell to elaborate on the moral character of the Secretary's choice to support the bloody, illegal, unjust, and thoroughly unnecessary invasion of Iraq by collaborating in the manufacture of spectacular high-state deceptions regarding the threat posed by the feeble regime of Saddam Hussein. There was no discussion of a younger Powell's role in the Pentagon's early attempts to cover-up the 1968My Lai massacres. )

Critical Omissions in the Call for Better Choices

There was nothing in "America Beyond the Color Line" about the need to make a "wake-up call" to the more structurally empowered and predominantly white business and government decision-makers who negatively affect black experience by "deciding, deciding, deciding" to, for example:

* deny blacks equal access to the nation's highest opportunity communities through a panoply of well-documented discriminatory real-estate, home-lending, and zoning practices and policies.

* target blacks for historically and globally unmatched mass incarceration and felony marking, thereby richly exacerbating the already deep socioeconomic and political disadvantage of lower-class African-Americans.

* maintain strict lines of racial segregation between predominantly black and under-funded inner city schools and predominantly white, affluent, and well-funded suburban school districts.

* divert hundreds of billions of dollars from social programs needed to assist the victims of domestic U.S. structural racism to pay for economically dysfunctional tax cuts that benefit the disproportionately white opulent few and to pay for an objectively racist foreign policy that pays its primary dividends to wealthy whites.

* disinvest in communities of color, helping create the barren material underpinning for neighborhoods where adult males with felony records and prison histories are more numerous than livable wage jobs.

* sponsor and protect various overseas drug lords who happen to serve America's imperial objectives while conducting a massive domestic anti-narcotics campaign that is significantly less effective and much more expensive than treatment when it comes to mitigating the ravages of substance abuse and generates the critical raw material (black bodies) for the nation's remarkable, globally unmatched and white-run prison industrial complex.

* permeate severely disadvantaged black neighborhoods with predatory financial institutions that exploit ghetto residents' limited economic choices.

* go easy with affluent white corporate and high-state criminals who devastate untold lives and communities with fraudulent practices and schemes while consigning hundreds of thousands of poor blacks to hard time in violent mass incarceration facilities for small-time narcotics transgressions that are deemed unworthy of imprisonment in every other nation in the democratic world.

* subvert the meaning and significance of American democracy by constructing a preposterously expensive, big-money and big-media-dominated "winner-take-all" election system that makes it absurdly difficult for racial, ethnic, and ideological minorities to translate their vital needs and perspectives into policy.

* attack "affirmative action" college admissions practices that try to marginally compensate a minority of blacks for centuries of structural racism while maintaining silence over "legacy" admissions practices that reward predominantly white applicants (i.e., Harvard and Yale graduate George W. Bush) for being born into a family that attended the same school in the past.

There was no call in "America Beyond" for a new "personal responsibility" on the part of the very predominantly white agents and beneficiaries of the above, bullet-pointed bad decisions (a small share of the poor and dangerous choices that can be observed in the corridors of Caucasian power and privilege). There was no demand that these perpetrators "wake up" to their need to make better decisions more consistent with the supposed noble American Values of hard work, honesty, saving, deferred gratification, and non-reliance on public assistance - critical omissions!

Booker T. Obama

Obama's initial, off-the-cuff defense of his Harvard friend Gates' position on what(ever) recently happened in Cambridge is also somewhat ironic and yet appropriate. "America Beyond" portrayed racial inequality and its causes in much the same Booker T. Washingtonian terms as those used by Barack Obama on the rare occasions when he feels compelled to explicitly address the problem of race. The capitalism- and Wall Street-friendly/-captive and "black but not like Jesse" president has made a career - a rather spectacularly successful one to date - out of militant race-neutralism. Taking his cue from the movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967), he has consistently respected majority-white race fears and denial by distancing himself from the supposedly obsolete and dysfunctional notion that racism still poses serious barriers to black advancement and racial equality in the U.S. He has spent a significant amount of time and energy lecturing lower- and working-class blacks - most recently at the 100th anniversary dinner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) - on their need to take personal and cultural responsibility for their own position in a supposedly opportunity-filled and "magical place called America." As Obama "explained" in his instantly famous Race Speech in Philadelphia in March of 2008, black rage at white racial oppression made sense in the post-Word War II America in which his former spiritual mentor Reverend Jeremiah Wright (thrown under the bus by the Obama campaign because of the pastor's nasty habit of telling basic truths about living U.S. racism and imperialism) came of age. Such rage does not make quite so much sense in contemporary America, however, the president-to-be felt - not in a nation where blacks had come (as Obama explained to Civil Rights Movement veterans in Selma, Alabama in March of 2007) "nine-tenths of the way" to equality (a rather curious statement in a country where black unemployment and poverty rates are double those of whites and where black median household net worth comes to seven cents on the white dollar!).[6]

Likes Gates, Obama is far from stupid. He knows full well (as is clear from his recent NACCP address [7]) that structural discrimination and racial bias continue to be major factors in black experience and racial inequality. He has decided (and "decided and decided"), however - for reasons that make political sense in a nation whose white-majority electorate is in deep "post-Civil Rights" denial about how powerfully white supremacy has (in historian David Roediger's phrase) "survived U.S. history" - to take the Booker T. Washingtonian road and to place primary emphasis on sending a "wake up call" to black America, not to white America. We can expect (I am writing on the morning of Friday, July 24th) him and his handlers to backtrack from his support for Gates [8], which was foolishly and somewhat uncharacteristically issued prior to a thorough review of the facts involved in the specific case. Those facts and, far more importantly for the Obama/Axelrod administration, the public opinion data (reflecting the incident's likely reinforcement of white racism-denial) simply do not recommend a pro-Gates position. Ironically enough, being seen as allied with Gates works against Obama's carefully constructed "post-racial" image in this particular case. In the meantime, consistent with the master class's longstanding use of race to divide and divert, the corporate media and the right have seized on the Gates-Cambridge-Obama story in ways that are helping distract attention from the health care issue. And we can do without yet another PBS Special from "Skip" Gates.

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com)is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated School: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).

climb every hillary

2009-07-25T10:06:00.000-07:00

hillary tells us it was reckless for zelaya to return to honduras! that's his country, and he's the president. the man was kidnapped in a coup, but he is the reckless one? how would hillary feel if she were forced out of her position by armed thugs? i'm not saying how i would feel, but rather, how she would feel! i would be celebrating, for what it's worth.

"reckless?" wow. all the man wants to do is return to his country, and continue his work. reckless things have occurred in honduras, like the coup that overthrew zelaya. surely, it was reckless of the u.s to train members of the honduran military. it was reckless of the u.s. to support and arm the contras on honduran soil. it was reckless of the honduran military, armed by the u.s., to kill and torture hundreds of progressives in the 80's. of these matters, hillary has had nothing to say.

i give you the democrats.

you asked for them, and now you've got them.

obama invites gates, cop, to dc, for a beer.

2009-07-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

sadly, he can't do this with sean bell and the cops who shot him, and he can't do this with oscar grant and the cop who who shot him. there are many poor black and latino men who can't be invited to the white house to share a beer with the police who murdered them. i find it interesting that obama was silent in the aftermath of the bell murder, silent in the face of jena 6, and silent after the murder of grant, but actually had something to say about the arrest of gates. now, i don't make light of what happened to gates. nobody should be arrested for trying to "break into their own home." it is clear to me that race and racism played a part in how the situation unfolded. but, no one was killed or beaten, circumstances that all too often occur against poor and unknown blacks at the hands of the cops.

so, why the words from the big o? well, gates is a peer. a harvard man, a respected scholar, a man of import. he is also a personal friend, and a member of the upper middle class. like obama, he is in that rarified "talented 10th." obama identified with gates. gates, you see, is not the sort of man who should be getting fucked with by the police. which means, by inference, that there are people who should be getting fucked with by the police. such men obviously include bell, grant, and the jena 6, since obama had nothing to say about their deaths and imprisonment. for, these men were poor, black, and unknown. they were not the big o's peers. they did not go to harvard, and they never appeared on oprah.

thousands and thousands of blacks have been killed in this country because of racism. of this history, which sadly, includes the present, obama has had little to say. but a friend being inconvenienced as a part of this racist history? no fair!

how else to explain obama's remarks in this case, and silence in the others? and even now, he retreats. as does gates. gates tells us it is time for both sides to move on. perhaps that can happen in this case, but sean bell can not move on. oscar grant can not move on. amadou diallo can not move on. those who hung from trees and were drowned in rivers can not move on. of course, none of them were biracial harvard professors, nor friends of obama and oprah.

so, now obama wants to share a beer with gates and crowley. he fears that he said too much, that perhaps his mentioning of racism may have angered those "moderate" whites he will need in 2012. thinking it over, it hits him that both sides may have been at fault. perhaps, it was all just a misunderstanding. yeah, a cold one should clear things up.

but not for bell and grant and diallo.

nor mumia, george jackson, and fred hampton.

nor malcolm, martin, and medger.

nor for thousands of others, too poor and unknown to reference.

obama will not speak for them.

he will be too busy drinking.

cronkite, rip.

2009-07-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

Walter Cronkite
The Vietnam “Stalemate,” and the Propaganda System
July 24, 2009 By Paul Street

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Walter Cronkite died one week ago at the age of 92. He was the nation's leading news anchor in the 1960s and 1970s. Like millions of other Americans who grew up in those decades, my earliest political memories carry the sound and image of "Uncle Walter." I can still hear his nightly sign-off: "And that's the way it is" [1].

Right wing media watchdogs have never forgiven Cronkite for daring to state on air one night (February 27, 1968) - at the end of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front's Tet Offensive during January and February of 1968 - that the Vietnam War had become "a bloody stalemate."

It was a jarring thing for many Americans to hear. For years prior to Tet, U.S. media (Cronkite included) had regularly created the impression that everything was going just fine with that little "police action" over in Southeast Asia. Delivered almost like football scores on the national television news in 1966 and 1967 (7 U.S. GIs dead vs. 21 for "the enemy" today), the body-count numbers from Vietnam were always in "our" favor. Back to your TV dinner and the next episode of "Gunsmoke," "My Three Sons," or "Hogan's Heroes."

Cronkite's "defeatist" and pessimistic statement has long held a special place in the American right's claim that U.S. media has a "liberal" and even "leftist" bias against U.S.military power. It is a centerpiece example in "conservative" media watchdogs' neo-McCarthyite argument that the "left-wing media" works to stab the noble American armed forces in the back.

Interestingly enough, as the watchdogs never noticed, much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment sensed a brutal impasse in Vietnam in the wake of Tet. This was the feeling of the "Wise Men" - the top military, corporate, and military elites President Lyndon Baines Johnson assembled to advise him on how to proceed with his increasingly unpopular "crucifixion of South East Asia" (as Noam Chomsky described the United States' assault on Indochina during the late 1960s) in early 1968. The recently deceased Kennedy-Johnson Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (the official "architect of the Vietnam War") developed his own pessimistic perspective on the colonial war early on. He determined that military victory was an unattainable U.S. goal well before the Tet offensive. After Tet, the "Wise Men" advised Johnson "to" - in Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's words - "abandon hope and to de-escalate the conflict," causing Johnson to complain bitterly that "the establishment bastards have bailed out." [2]

Before we get too crazy about the supposed "heroic" courage of Cronkite's 1968 "stalemate" statement (posted in full and in a positive light on Antiwar.com on the day of his death), we should recall that he never once publicly questioned the morality or legality of the criminal, mass-murderous Vietnam War. He and his CBS News crew never publicly criticized the false premises on which the U.S. assault on Vietnam was conducted. They advanced the Empire's sham pretexts. They stayed firmly within the framework of the U.S.propaganda system by advancing Washington's deceptive portrayal of the Vietnamese national independence and social revolutionary movement as part of the Soviet-Sino "communist" threat to Western "democracy." They disseminated the White House's ridiculous "domino theory" of "communist" advance. They helped spread the false notion of the war as a conflict between a "communist" North Vietnam and a "democratic" South Vietnam, ignoring the critical fact that the U.S. intervened in Vietnam to block independent national development and egalitarian, indigenously developed social and political revolution against a corrupt dictatorship in the second country. The real and biggest threat to U.S.foreign policy in Vietnam was that the Vietnamese revolution might succeed in showing others within and beyond Southeast Asia that impoverished Third World nations could defy Uncle Sam to develop their economies and societies without a grossly unequal distribution of wealth and without serving the needs of the imperial metropolis [3].

In March of 1966, Cronkite called the left political opposition to South Vietnam's corrupt, U.S.-sponsored dictatorship "forces of anarchy on the march." The year before, he congratulated Washington for "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia." [4] In the same 1968 broadcast in which he made his famous/infamous "bloody stalemate" comment (and called for a "negotiated solution" in Vietnam), he called Americans "an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could" in Vietnam. [5]

Cronkite never publicly described the war (accurately) as a U.S. invasion of Vietnam (South Vietnam mainly). He never noted (truthfully) that the Vietnamese were engaged in legitimate self-defense against that invasion. He never spoke about the monstrous atrocity that was the one-sided Vietnam War: history's most powerful military state killing, burning, and poisoning vast swaths of a poor and small peasant nation's human, animal, and plant life. He never acknowledged the deep racism that informed the U.S. assault. He never noted the telling death-count disparity between the two national sides of the "stalemate," which killed 58, 000 American soldiers but more than 2 million Vietnamese, mostly civilians. ("Operation Phoenix," the CIA's torture and assassination program in Vietnam, alone killed at least 20,000 civilians - more than a third of the total U.S. GI body count in Vietnam!) And, of course, Cronkite never dared to observe that Washington was in fact achieving the key bottom-line imperial objective in Vietnam - preventing Vietnam from becoming a viable model of social-revolutionary development and national independence outside U.S. supervision - by bombing the country (including especially much of the South) "back into the stone age."[6]

Such honest reporting would have gone far beyond the narrow parameters of "thinkable thoughts" (Chomsky's term) in America's leading cultural and ideological institutions. For Cronkite as for the rest of the United States' heavily indoctrinated political class, "controversy" over Vietnam was "limited," in Herman and Chomsky's words, "to tactical questions and the problem of costs, almost exclusively the cost to the United States."[7]

Listen to one of Cronkite's "pessimistic" comments during his "bloody stalemate" broadcast: "Khe Sanh [a leading South Vietnamese battle site] could well fall [to the Vietnamese, P.S.], with a terrible loss in American lives, prestige and morale, and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there." Following standard U.S. communications doctrine and procedure before, during, and since the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese themselves did not merit mention as victims of U.S. policy. What was at stake was U.S. power, status, and "morale," not the lives of people on the wrong side of America's supposedly virtuous, freedom-loving guns. His 1968 "stalemate" commentary referred to those fighting (heroically) to repel the foreign invader (from the other side of the Pacific Ocean) as "the enemy."

Cronkite's commentary stood well to the power-worshipping right of Dr. Martin Luther King's truly antiwar observations ten months before. The people of Indochina, King mused in 1967, "must find Americans to be strange liberators" as we "destroy their families, villages, land" and send them "wander[ing] into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one 'Vietcong'-inflicted injury. So far we have killed a million of them - mostly children." Further:

"They languish under our bombs and consider us - not their fellow Vietnamese - the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers and into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs...they watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their land. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees...They wander into the towns and see thousands of children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our solders as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our solders, soliciting for their mothers."

King noted the contradiction between (a) "our" claim to be advancing democracy in Vietnam and (b) "our" longstanding opposition to democratic national elections in Vietnam and "our" alliance with South Vietnam's vicious dictatorship and landlord class. Observing that the U.S. government had become the world's "leading purveyor of violence," King asked Americans to develop the maturity to "learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the [Vietnamese] brothers who are called the opposition." [8]

King's honest and genuinely antiwar sentiments remain beyond the boundaries of acceptable debate in "mainstream" media today. The Cronkitian limits continue intact in a time when a supposedly "antiwar" and "liberal" U.S. president sustains one illegal petro-imperial invasion (Iraq) and escalates another ("Af-Pak") in the name of "democracy." The invasion of Iraq, he has repeatedly said, was launched with the best (if an excess) of democratic intentions. Serious discussion of these wars' immoral, imperial, racist, and illegal natures - and their devastating consequences for civilians on the wrong ends of our inherently benevolent, "democracy"-promoting missile, bomb, and artillery systems - are (like single-payer health insurance in the "homeland") simply off the table of honest or serious discussion in the "mainstream" media.

In the official U.S. mainstream, from the White House through the corridors of corporate media's "reality"-shaping power, acceptable debate over America's colonial wars remains "limited to tactical questions and the problem of costs, almost exclusively the cost to the United States." The current president "opposed the war" (once and briefly) purely on tactical-imperial grounds, not on a principled moral or legal basis. [9] The millions of predominantly non-white others who die prematurely because of our "strange liberator" efforts of U.S. "global force projection" remain "unworthy victims" of "our" benevolent mission to do "good." It is considered a shame that our efforts to act as "an enormous force for good in the world" [10] are occasionally scarred by "strategic mistakes" (they can never be called imperial crimes) like the crucifixions of Vietnam and Iraq.

For media-focused right-wingers, of course, Cronkite's basic acceptance and dissemination of imperial ideology wasn't good enough. They think that a good anchor man's job is to sanitize American wars and to cheer-lead for them. It is to tell the masses that "Big Brother is doing great over there in Vietnam [or Iraq or Afghanistan or...fill in the blank]. No problem - Go Team!"

It would be nice to think that such chilling authoritarian sentiments have been relegated to the historical dustbin of crackpot neo-McCarthyism. But the "stab-in-the-back" thesis is still alive and in-play, ready for right-wing use to absurdly portray the imperial and centrist Obama and the dominant corporate war and entertainment media as "leftist" enemies of American greatness and power.

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com)is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).

mumia on mckinney

2009-07-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

Cynthia McKinney, the outspoken former congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, recently got out of jail.

Yeah. That's right. Jail.

It's possible that you had no idea she was in jail.

That's because she was in detention for almost a week in Israel.

Her offense? She accompanied a group from the Free Gaza Movement bringing medical supplies, olive trees, cement and children's toys to the beleaguered and occupied Palestinians in Gaza.

McKinney and 21 other people were blocked from landing on the Gazan coastline, and seized by the Israeli Navy, in what she called "an outrageous violation of international law."

McKinney was part of an international humanitarian mission to support an oppressed population -- not with weapons-- but with toys and medicines -- and was thrown into jail!

In a recent cal, when I was told about this, I was quite surprised, for I hadn't heard or read a thing about it.

A major U.S. ally, which receives more U.S. military aid than any other nation on earth, blithely tosses a former U.S. congressperson, a past presidential candidate, and a Back civil rights activist into a jail cell, and few major media sources deem it worthy of reportage!

Was the wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage too impenetrable?

According to a later published account (aired first on her MySpace page) McKinney wrote the following, shortly after her release:

We were in international waters on a boat delivering humanitarian aid to people in Gaza when the Israeli Navy ships surrounded us and illegally threatened us, dismantled our navigation equipment boarded and confiscated the ship.... . All of us on board were then taken off the ship and into custody, and brought into Israel and imprisoned {Source: Phila. Tribune, 7/7/09

Umph! Cynthia McKinney in jail -- in Israel -- for bringing medicine to the sick; for bringing toys to children; for bringing succor to the oppressed and occupied!

(Oh! By the way, the name of that ship? It was the "Spirit of Humanity.")

And it ain't news?

with that outward bound feeling

2009-07-24T18:32:00.000-07:00

it's been three weeks on the summer gig without getting paid. today, i emailed townhall and said i was going up there. when i got there, they were closed, despite it being 3:30. when i got home, my supervisor called, saying we should be getting our money next week. the thing is, this is a 6 week gig. we are half way through, without a buck. in fact, i have lost money, on stray vending machine and lunch purchases that i wouldn't have made if i were home. i'll give them next week, based on this semi promise from the boss man. what a deal. 5 hours a day with people who bite themselves, piss on themselves, stand around naked after swimming, and endlessly repeat themselves. and they're the best part of the job.

on the bright side, the weather has been cloudy, and strangely cool. perhaps this is not a good thing, but it does feel nice.

manny ramirez is back from his suspension, and is actually doing better than he did before. recently, he was hit on the hand by a pitch, and taken out of the game. the next day he wasn't in the lineup. no matter. with the game tied at 2 in the sixth inning, manager joe torre summoned manny to pinch hit. without having taken batting practice, he faced a 96 mph fastball from a pitcher he had never faced before. he drove that first pitch for a grand slam, the 21st of his career, two behind the all time record of 23, set by lou gehrig, who, honestly, was not the luckiest man on the face of the earth. manny, at 37, is still doing his thing. he is simply the best right handed hitter i have ever seen, and, in my opinion, with bonds, one of the two greatest hitters since 1970. let the racists and egghead experts try to bring them down. i'll trust my eyes, thank you.

oh yeah, some dick head i work with had on a shirt saying "manny being fired" followed by "fuck manny" but with a shamrock in place of the "u." i have been working with this shit brained nimrod for years, but never in such close proximity. manny, of course, was a fine fellow when he helped the sox to two rings. but, he left us, so he must be an evil man. for, he makes too much money, unlike jd drew, that upstanding cracker in right field, in the middle of a 5 year, 70 million dollar deal that the townies never seem to mention. today, we spoke of the old yankee teams of a decade ago. he mentioned several fine players, all pale. finally, for my own sanity, i said "jeter." "yeah," he said, "jeter." he stopped the name game after that. i had broken the unspoken agreement, that only caucasians merit conversation. what a traitor i turned out to be.

the dude next door is playing some mean soprano, which is weirdly going well with some out jazz i'm playing. usually this guy bugs me, as he often just runs scales. then again, he is practicing. what was i looking for, soul station, note for note? and if he did do that, i would nail him for being unoriginal. neighbor, you can't win.

couple a days ago, my boss asked me what music i liked. i hesitated, for i hate this question. "jazz" i muttered. he was driving at the time, taking us on a field trip half way across the state, despite the best trips being 10 minute t rides from brookline high. whatever. in any case, he paused for a second, and serenely, pretending profound understanding, simply said "miles davis." a david brent moment. i said, simply, "yeah." then he dropped a few more names. brubeck, of course, came next. i just nodded, not sure if my support of brubeck warranted a vocalization. sorry dave. i do dig desmond, but, what of it. he ripped off a few more...gerry mulligan, pat metheny, keith jarrett. i noticed that other than davis, a name automatically dropped, all the cats he mentioned were crackers. later, the same dude asked me if i had problems with gangs growing up in dorchester (note to self; stop telling charlie that i grew up in dorchester) and went on to say how bad it is in east somerville (note to self, 2; stop telling whitey that i moved to east somerville after leaving dorchester.) at this point, i thought he might throw me out the van for fear of what my white trash ass may do to him. we passed a trailer park, and i half expected him to ask me if i ever spent time in one. the ignorance of whitey, even "liberal," whitey, is often quite shocking to those who are attempting to think in anti-racist ways. but they are just making conversation. they assume i am in the club. if only i weren't. but, it seems that no matter how hard i try to get myself thrown of the cracker crew, my membership gets renewed, and i once again attain the privilege of hearing ignorant musings from my pale peers. and i repeat, these are the "liberal" ones, whatever that means.

hope is the thing with feathers.

if only i could fly away.

2009-07-21T20:19:00.000-07:00

To assist the corporate bottom line, the Obama Administration is peddling the worst sort of wares abroad.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just concluded a visit to India in which she acted as a shill for U.S. arms and nuclear companies. The United States and India signed an agreement that will pave the way for the possible sale of more than 100 fighter planes to India, the largest pending weapons deal globally (Lockheed Martin and Boeing are in the running for the contract). And India announced that two civilian nuclear reactors—most likely to be constructed by General Electric and Westinghouse—will be set up in the country as part of the U.S.-India nuclear deal signed a couple of years ago.

The Indian elite was nervous about the new Administration in Washington, uncertain whether India would receive the same warm embrace it had from Dubya’s people. It needn’t have worried (though differences did crop up during the Clinton trip on issues like climate change).

In a recent interview with me (available in the July issue), Rajmohan Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson, expressed apprehension about how the Indian political leadership has veered away from the ideals of his grandfather. He bemoaned its enthusiasm for nuclear weapons, its desire to cultivate a strategic relationship with the United States, and its muted tone as a moral authority on the global stage. The Bush Administration encouraged these tendencies, and the Obama folks seem to be heading down the same path.

The fighter jet deal has been in the works for years now, but that doesn’t make it any less repugnant. Presumably, it is meant as a counterbalance to the billions in military aid that the Bush Administration showered Pakistan with over the years, and to the Obama Administration’s announcement a few months ago of a $3 billion, five-year military aid package to Pakistan (much of which will be transferred back to the coffers of U.S. arms companies).

As a result, both nations are spending their scarce resources on shiny new military hardware. And if they still feel insecure, there's plenty more where that came from.

Like the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration is using Pakistan in the "war on terrorism," and flattering India as a junior global partner, a role India is willing to be employed in as long as the United States assuages its ego (as Clinton did by referring to it as “a global leader for the 21st century”). The United States fulfills its geostrategic aims, while U.S. arms manufacturers rake in the moolah. The losers in this scenario are the Indian and Pakistani people.

The nuclear deal is also very problematic. By agreeing to supply fuel, reactors and other technology to India’s civilian nuclear sector, the Bush Administration legitimized a nuclear weapons project that India conceived in dishonesty. India, in return, gave up any pretense of pressing for global nuclear disarmament, and signaled that it would open up its vast civilian nuclear sector to U.S. corporations. The pact “will present a major opportunity for U.S. and Indian companies,” Ron Somers, president of the U.S-India Business Council, said in 2007. He was so right.

But the really interesting thing here is what the United States is demanding: that the Indian Parliament pass a law releasing the U.S. companies from legal responsibility if there’s an accident. Since the worst industrial disaster in history, with a toll of tens of thousands of lives, was caused by a U.S. corporation in India, some Indians are not too happy and are promising a tough fight against any such measure.

“With what happened in Bhopal in view, we will oppose any move to bring in legislation to shield U.S. suppliers from liability in the event of a nuclear accident,” says S.P. Udayakumar, convenor of the National Alliance of Anti-nuclear Movements.

This is not the first time that a U.S. company has sought immunity from the consequences of a disaster in India. DuPont asked to be released from all such responsibility when it was negotiating with the Indian government in the 1990s to set up a nylon plant, but the people of the state of Goa, where the plant was slated to be located, mobilized to nix the venture.

The deals that the Obama Administration is pushing will be worth $20 billion to U.S. corporations if they go through. The damage that they cause could be incalculable, however.

2009-07-21T18:18:00.001-07:00

AMY GOODMAN: Nikolas Kozloff, you’ve been following the coup very closely right now. Talk about the latest developments and who you feel is behind it. And what exactly is the US role here? If the US cut off aid, economic and military aid, do you feel that would end the coup?

NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: I don’t think so. I think there’s this revolving door of Washington insiders that are supporting companies like Chiquita banana. I just wrote an article about Chiquita, formerly known as the United Fruit Company. And, you know, throughout history, Chiquita banana has had enormous sway and power over Central American nations.

And we know that prior to the coup d’état in Honduras, Chiquita was very unhappy about President Zelaya’s minimum wage decrees, because they said that this would cut into their profits and make it more expensive for them to export bananas and pineapple. And we know that they appealed to the Honduran Business Association, which was also opposed to Zelaya’s minimum wage provisions.

And we also—and what I find really interesting is that Chiquita is allied to a Washington law firm called Covington, which advises multinational corporations. And who is the vice chairman of Covington? None other than John Negroponte, who your previous guest mentioned in regards to the rampant human rights abuses that went on in Honduras throughout the 1980s. So I think that’s a really interesting connection.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the money and the support, Chiquita, then and now. It’s interesting, this is so reminiscent of the coup against the Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He wasn’t in office but a year, 1990, 1991, when he was ousted, and one of his first acts when he became president was to increase the minimum wage, as Zelaya has done.

NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: Well, right, and this is nothing new, as I point out in a recent article. Throughout the twentieth century, Chiquita, formerly known as United Fruit, was associated with some of the most backward, retrograde political and economic forces in Central America and indeed outside of Central America in such countries as Colombia. And we know that United Fruit Company played a very prominent role in the coup d’état against democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. And, you know, after that, that ushered in a very turbulent period in Guatemalan history, rampant human rights abuses, genocide against the indigenous people of Guatemala. And so, Guatemala is only now recovering from that.

But, you know, Chiquita has played a role in such countries as Guatemala and also Colombia, and now it maintains these ties to Covington, this law firm in Washington, to this day. And there is this revolving door, as I say before, of these Washington insiders. Covington, in turn, is tied to McLarty and Kissinger Associates, McLarty being President Clinton’s former Chief of Staff and envoy to Latin America, who was pushing the free trade agenda in Latin America, and Kissinger, who doesn’t even need an introduction. His ties to the coup in Chile in 1973 are well known. And so, it’s disturbing that there is this history of abuses in Central America throughout the twentieth century with Chiquita and the fruit companies, which continues to this day.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have—well, we played Lanny Davis’s testimony before Congress, Lanny Davis, who we were speaking to Ken Silverstein about last week, the superb investigative reporter, about his representing the Chamber of Commerce, which is very much on the side of the coup regime right now. Lanny Davis is the former White House counsel for President Clinton.

NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: Right, and there’s these—there’s the circle of Clintonites that are still around. And as I mentioned before, you have Mack McLarty, who’s now associated with a law firm which is defending Chiquita. Also, as I point out in my recent article, you have the current Attorney General, Eric Holder, who was also Deputy Attorney General under Clinton, who defended Chiquita and its actions in Colombia, when Chiquita was allied to right-wing paramilitary death squads in the 1990s, was found guilty of paying off paramilitaries. And Eric Holder, the current Attorney General, who was also in the Clinton administration, was the lead counsel for Chiquita.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain the significance of what he was representing Chiquita around. I mean, we know the story of the Cincinnati Enquirer that did this remarkable exposé of Chiquita, which they were forced to apologize for, not because they were wrong, but because the reporter had gotten access to voicemail system within Chiquita, and they said that it was illegal how he had gained access to that voicemail system. But what he exposed was quite astounding.

NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: Right. Well, Chiquita claimed that it was merely paying protection money to the paramilitaries in Colombia. But the victims of the paramilitary violence in Colombia claim otherwise. They say that Chiquita was engaged in this systematic campaign to control banana production in Colombia and terrorize the population. And Chiquita was the only company in US history to be found guilty of paying bribes to a terrorist organization, as defined by the United States.

Eric Holder was the lead counsel defending Chiquita. He’s the top justice official in the United States with ties to this fruit company that was complicit in right-wing paramilitary violence.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the latest right now—the developments of the EU dropping support for Honduras, the talks with Oscar Arias breaking down. Though the elected president, Zelaya, has fully accepted what he proposed, the coup regime has said no. What’s going to happen? Oscar Arias said there could be a civil war, the President of Costa Rica and the Nobel Prize winner.

NIKOLAS KOZLOFF: Well, I don’t really—I don’t see how this is going to be resolved, because he’s already tried to come back militarily—I mean, not militarily, but force his way back into the country.

And I think that the problem is that, you know, up until recently, Honduras was a very—had very traditional right-wing politics, was one of the most reliable countries, most compliant regimes in Central America towards the United States. And now you see the resurgence of these right-wing forces. And so, there is this vibrant—these vibrant social movements in Honduras—for example, the Garifuna people, the Afro-Honduran, the indigenous people, and labor. But I think perhaps this could be the resurgence of these right-wing forces that really haven’t gone away, that it seemed for a while that we had the pink tide from South America, the rise of the left spreading into Central America. This could be, perhaps, a disturbing sign that those old retrograde forces are now trying to prove that they can stage a comeback. And I think that’s disturbing for other countries that are, say, allied to Venezuela, you know, such as small nations in the Caribbean, and this could be a very disturbing message to other countries that are following and trying to cultivate ties to Venezuela.

AMY GOODMAN: Nikolas Kozloff, I want to thank you for being with us, author of the book Revolution!: South America and the Rise of the New Left. His latest piece, “From Arbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America.”

still racial tension?

2009-07-20T17:12:00.000-07:00

they tell us that despite the election of the big o, there is still racial tension in america. i never would have guessed. the proof, according to a local free paper? not housing discrimination. not police brutality. not prisons filled with young black men. not racial disparities in health care. not segregated schools. no, none of these things. rather, ongoing racial tension is proved by how whites and blacks responded to michael jackson's death. blacks were more likely to celebrate him, while whites were more likely to bemoan his weirdness. sadly, though i try my best to be a "blue eyed soul brother" (i have brown eyes, but whatever) i too tended to focus on the latter category. in fact, i do believe that race (and racism) played out in the responses to his death, but race and racism play out all the time in this society, often with life and death consequences. however, when it is a matter of life and death, we don't hear about it. that way, racism can be marginalized, and its victims can be portrayed as "too sensitive," or worse, as playing the "race card." (which, by the way, beats a full house, but loses to four of a kind) in fact, whites are often the real victims of racism, to hear whites tell it. reverse racism has whites in a bind, they say. strangely, they still have most of the money and power. funny thing, this reverse racism. in fact, it seems like the reverse of racism.

so yeah, racial tension continues. you can see it in how we respond to mj's death, but only in how we respond to his death. i thought we could see it in the shooting of oscar grant and the rebellion that shook oakland in its aftermath. i thought we could see it in the case of the jena 6. i thought we could see it in the indifference shown to the victims of katrina, and to the white vigilantes who murdered innocent blacks afterward, and who, by the way, have still not been charged with a crime, despite openly laughing and gloating over their deeds. i though we could see it in rampant immigrant bashing. i thought we could see it in the "english only movement." i though we could see it in those who speak of poor white neighborhoods as "working class," and "blue collar," but who speak of poor black and latino areas as "ghettoes."

i though we could see racial tension in a lot of places, places far removed from mj's rotting corpse. but, it seems i was wrong.

yet again, i was wrong.

2009-07-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

we will not apologize for our way of life, nor waiver in its defense.

obama said this in his inaugural speech. did it need to be said? would the right wing have pounced on him if he didn't say it? "hey, he didn't say that we will not apologize for our way of life! commie!!" it's like a tick, an automatic, generic rhetorical flourish that lets us know that all is well. for, why should a guy who has just become pres apologize? man, this country must rock. now, for the chaps under the cruise missiles? perhaps they are singing a different tune, maybe the gap band's "you dropped the bomb on me." i always say, build party trains, don't bomb them, but then again, i am a chubby loner. if only chubby checker were a chubby loner. that would have been a twist.

i remember wearing a shirt with a target on it as a form of protest. yeah man, bomb me, i'm a target too. sadly, no one killed me, meaning the rent is still due in 10 days. in any case, a bloke (sorry, been on a british office kick lately) asked if there were any targets in the area. i thought, yeah, him, but he meant the store. of course, there are now many targets in the area, but hopefully, he's not around to "enjoy" them.

i also remember protesting the war with yugoslavia at the boston marathon. the pink one was there to piss off the red ones, who were there by the thousands. i recall an old woman with the mind of a dead woman, and the body of one as well. it was insane. no one cared. except when we got in their way. how could it be any different, in this land of ours?

i hate it when the phone rings. not once, but all day. it's as if all the people who have nothing to say have all decided to say it at the same time. how about the ones who keep calling until you pick up? or the ones who switch from home phone, to cell phone, and back again, until you give up the fight, and answer? and then, when they do get through, it's your fault! "i've been trying to reach you, where were you? i even tried the cell!" and they never have anything to talk about. just wanted to kill time, bitch about the gig, complain about a partner. can a guy just relax after working all week? am i allowed a shell of sanity? of course, it's not that big a deal, but ain't it one?

they tell us we lost more troops in afghanistan over the last month than we have since the war began over a month's period. well, i got to tell you, i didn't lose a thing. those troops weren't mine to lose. as far as i'm concerned, they were lost the moment they enlisted. i suppose it's thoughts like these that have kept the really good jobs just out of my grasp.

obama tells us that he will move on health care. i may move on health care all the way to canada.

from the complete clifford brown on emarcy, dig the long jam cuts "coronado" and "you go to my head." besides crazy clifford, two mean west coast cats, herb geller and joe maini (both heroin chums of dirty lenny) blow their brains out. other than the double suicide, it's a fine record.

it seems that i have shot my load, which is quite a feat, considering i have been blogging the entire time.

stay thirsty my friends.

2009-07-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

i have been a rover,
i have walked alone.
hiked a thousand highways,
never found a home.
still and all i'm happy,
the reason is you see
once in a while along the way,
love's been good to me.

i remember these lines from a terrible thing that sinatra sang when he was over the hill, but still decent. "i have been a rover?" fuck you!

pinko, there were two albums that art farmer made with gigi gryce on prestige in the mid 50's. one is called "when farmer met gryce" and the other is called art farmer quintet featuring gigi gryce. they are both great, and capture both horn players at their best.

chiquita banana was pissed off when zelaya raised the honduran minimum wage. does anyone remember the central role played by the united fruit company in the arbenz/guatemalan coup of 54? today, the same company likely is pulling more strings. anyone with even a surface knowledge of how power works in the u.s. (about 40 people) understands that the economic, political, and military wings (the power elite) work so closely together as to be one and the same. it works that way here and in other countries, often thanks to our domination of their economies, and our training of their militaries.

i am told that a student i am working with this summer would get so horrified when it was time for him to go swimming that he would shit his pants. i would like to comment on this, but it's hard, ain't it? i will say this; after ordering the number 2, said student got to skip the swim every time.

today, this same student asked the only female member of our staff to "open her legs." yes, the lucky lady was wearing a skirt. she laughed it off, which i guess is easy to do when your admirer is 21 going on 4. the rest of us have to act appropriate.

darn.

they are calling it slam-gate

2009-07-11T17:22:00.000-07:00

word is, lebron james was dunked on by a college player at a summer league basketball clinic. to a sane human, it's no big deal, but lebron, and the folks from nike filming, are far from sane. word is, lebron had the tapes destroyed, or nike big wigs had it destroyed, or something. what a punk this lebron is turning out to be. what, he can't even be dunked on? what's the big deal? i remember in school, the guys used to go crazy when someone got dunked on. they would say that player a "shit on" player b. well, i was always more of an r. kelly guy myself. anyway, everybody would mock the guy that got dunked on. it was as if his entire life had been reduced, and now he was nothing more than a worthless shell of his former self. and lebron is 5 years younger than me, so his high school days must have been even more extreme in this regard, especially with him dunking on everyone, and i'm sure, letting them know about it. well, guess what lb, now it's your turn, and between me, it doesn't rank up there with world hunger. but, of course, this is the world of make believe, of untold profits made, but only when the illusion of perfection wins the day. getting dunked on? hey, that's something i could do, and i only make 5 figures! but, there are fortunes in fantasy. in the world, where one only dunks on, but is never dunked on, multitudes spend millions on mediocrities. for you see, we would all like to be perfect.

we don't want to get dunked on. for shame!

but only a few of us have the power to destroy the tapes. in fact, only a few of us have the power to be filmed getting dunked on in the first place.

poor lebron, he's only a mortal after all.

just like us, only taller, faster, and stronger.

and richer.

and dunked on, destroyed film or not.

good stuff

2009-07-10T16:58:00.001-07:00

AMY GOODMAN: The US contract with Ecuador over one of the largest US military bases in Latin America, Manta, expires later this year. You will not renew it. Why?

PRESIDENT RAFAEL CORREA: [translated] Why renew it? Now, if you'd like, I would renew it with one condition: that they allow me to set up an Ecuadorian military base here in New York. If there's no problem with foreign bases, then let's reach an agreement on that. I think that everybody listening is going to find that impossible. And for us Ecuadorians, it also seems impossible, based on our outlook informed by sovereignty, at least with the current government, to have a foreign military base on our soil.

2009-07-09T19:13:00.001-07:00

one of the sick, demented coup leaders (don't coup leaders tend to be sick and demented?) in honduras recently called obama the "little black man." perhaps that will piss the big biracial man off, and influence him to push for zelaya's return.

hey, i can hope, right?

2009-07-09T18:32:00.000-07:00

michael jackson's funeral cost los angeles 1.4 million dollars. there must not be any poor and hungry people there. of course, the war in iraq has cost more than a trillion dollars. there must not be any poor and hungry people there either. for surely, in a world of poor and hungry people, money would be spent to eliminate their poverty and hunger.

no one swings like zoot sims. for a taste, i recommend the first four tracks from "jazz in paris. zoot sims and henri renaud." also, dig the first part of charlie parker's album boston 1952. the first several tunes feature bird at the hi hat with a group that includes underrated monster joe gordon on trumpet, as well as mingus and roy haynes! yes, symphony sid does do his best to bother you, but there is no stopping this music. these lines are for the pink man specifically, but anyone reading can dig these albums. and if you haven't gotten hip to lala.com, get to it right now.

i wonder if there is someone out there who has heard of tommy potter, but not harry potter?

45 more dead in pakistan, thanks to us. bombs for peace made no sense when i yelled the phrase at alarmed passerby in the boston common more than a decade ago, and it makes no sense now. i've read my chomsky and blum and parenti, and i think i know a thing or two, but just what the fuck are we doing in pakistan? it's mad, which was short for nixon's "mutually assured distruction." not a word of criticism has been spoken by the obama ball sucks, who are so thrilled that "their team" is winning that they have lost whatever intellectual integrity they may have had. all i know is it ain't good folks.

went into the local cuban restaurant a couple of days ago. the food is good, it's a happening joint. i figured the politics were suspect, but they had never made an issue of it, so i gave them the benefit of the doubt. but, on this day, i found an obscure reference that i couldn't avoid. long ago, there was a film called "i am cuba." quite a classic, though a little dramatic at times. in any case, behind the counter, there was a banner which read "i was cuba." oh yeah? well, you ain't anymore! fuck you and your restaurant.

that is, until i get hungry.

for hunger, you see, makes fascists of us all.

we get to choose between time and newsweek

2009-07-09T09:49:00.000-07:00

A Normal, Minimal-Choice Election
Indonesia Gets to Pick Its Killer
By ALLAN NAIRN

The International Herald Tribune headlined it "A Proudly Normal Election" in Indonesia, and it was -- a minimal-choice election, as normally happens in most countries (Jacob Ramsay, "A Proudly Normal Election, " International Herald Tribune, July 8, 2009).

This election was a de facto choice among three mass-killing Suharto generals -- each of them old US proteges -- one of whom actually embodied the specter of something like fascist dictatorship, and people voted for the smoothest, least frightening general, the incumbent, Gen. Susilo.

But it was impossible on the ballot to vote for the poor or to vote against killing civilians, because none of the candidates, pre-screened by the establishment, stood for anything like that: these were candidates of the rich, and of murder.

Gen. Susilo had most of the army and most of the rich people behind him, so he had most of the media propaganda and also most of the campaign money.

In Indonesia a lot of poor people like the election season because they get direct cash bribes. Party messengers come to their homes and give each family several dollars, and this time everyone I met said Gen. Susilo's footmen gave the most money.

Beyond that, his two rivals were repulsive to many people. They selected as their running mates the two most hated generals in the country. One, Gen. Prabowo, has a neo-fascist style and made his name as a hands-on torturer and as Suharto's son-in-law, and the other, Gen. Wiranto, saved the army in 1998 when he threatened a Tienanmen-style massacre of demonstrators if they challenged the army after toppling Suharto.

So compared to those two, Gen. Susilo seemed less bloodthirsty, even though he's been high in the chain of command for some of the country's most famous massacres, including Jakarta '96, occupied East Timor '99, Aceh in the early 2000s, and as President he's backed nationwide police torture and army torture and murder in sealed-off Papua, and has a practice of arresting people who insult him or who hoist local independence flags. Economically, Gen. Susilo broke the law and canceled severance pay for workers, and hunger and diarrhea have been increasing nationwide, especially in Nusatenggara in eastern Indonesia.

But he's done all that smoothly. He's seen as smart, and he gets lots of foreign money. The US and investors like him because he does the necessary killing and holds down wages discreetly -- without bragging about it -- and he lets them take minerals and forests and labor while demanding smaller bribes than Suharto.

And at the same time he's made life better for city elites, lots of condos and spectacular malls. If you have money, life in Jakarta can be Valhalla. That gets him good press coverage.

But if you're poor, police thugs will come and bulldoze your home to put up those fancy condos, and your chances of working, eating, or putting your kid through primary school are the same or worse than before Susilo.

So the Herald Tribune is right, this was a normal election. There was voting but there wasn't much choice.

Allan Nairn writes the blog News and Comment at www.newsc.blogspot.com.

millions cried

2009-07-08T15:22:00.002-07:00

millions cried for the dead black man with white skin. the sharp one told mj's kids "there was nothing strange about their father." well, there was something strange about that comment. mariah carey sounded as if it was her funeral. they told us, by way of excuse, that she didn't rehearse, but i don't rehearse either before belting it out in the shower, and i even hit a correct note or two. jermaine jackson sang smile, which made me laugh. lionel ritchie again confirmed why i call him lionel bitchie. berry gordy once again demonstrated the biggest ego in the western world. at least he mentioned jackie wilson. queen latifah (hey, this isn't a monarchy!) read a poem by maya angelou, but i suspected it was written by a seven year old. brooke shields told us that michael is "undoubtedly smiling down on us from some crescent moon." perhaps, but i think there is some room for doubt about that.

and then, at the end, the daughter came to the mike. sadly, it wasn't mike jackson. she cried, and told us he was the greatest dad in the world, but at her age, it's hard to imagine that she has met every dad in the world. this display made us care and cry. it humanized mj. yes, a child losing her father is indeed a sad story. unless the child is afghani or iraqi or pakistani. if the child is made an orphan by our bombs, it is no concern. if a parent dies who didn't invent the moonwalk, then fuck their children. for you see, those tens of thousands of iraqi orphans had parents who wore two gloves, who never sold 26 million records, and weren't constantly grabbing their crotch. (at least not on stage.) these dead parents died the same color as they were born, and most were never charged with child molestation. and unlike mj, the u.s. government told them to beat it.

so, you see, this whole concern for cute children crap is rather selective. for, as we cry for blanket, many children go to bed without one, because they don't have the peanuts required to get one. selective compassion for the children of the famous doesn't impress me. and where will that compassion be next week? truth is, we don't give a shit about this child.

it just makes us feel good to think that we do. meanwhile, the orphans pile up, thanks to our wars and economic policies.

makes you think. at least until the ballgame comes on.

or until the next celebrity dies.

2009-07-08T15:22:00.001-07:00

AMY GOODMAN: Former Congress member McKinney, we only have ten seconds. But, you’ve just been deported. What are your plans right now?

CYNTHIA McKINNEY: Well, I would like to see the children of Gaza have the coloring books and crayons that we had on board with us. I would like to see the houses that have been destroyed rebuilt. I would like to see the lives rebuilt for the people of Gaza and I would like to see the people of Palestine have, and enjoy their human rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think president Obama is headed in that direction?

CYNTHIA McKINNEY: I think you can probably answer that as well as we can, because while we were in detention, the Foreign Ministry of Ireland made protests and asked the government of Israel to release its nationals, several Members of Parliament

AMY GOODMAN: …We have 5 seconds….

CYNTHIA McKINNEY: from the United Kingdom…

AMY GOODMAN: … 5 seconds….

CYNTHIA McKINNEY: …also wanted to censure Israel. Nothing from the United States.

long live long showers

2009-07-08T14:54:00.001-07:00

Published on Wednesday, July 8, 2009 by Orion Magazine
Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change
by Derrick Jensen

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”

Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.

So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.

The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

© 2009 Orion
Derrick Jensen is an activist and the author of many books, most recently What We Leave Behind and Songs of the Dead.

2009-07-07T15:09:00.001-07:00

The Honduras Coup: Is Obama Innocent?
July 07, 2009 By Michael Parenti
Source: www.michelcollon.info

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Is President Obama innocent of the events occurring in Honduras, specifically the coup launched by the Honduran military resulting in the abduction and forced deportation of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya? Obama has denounced the coup and demanded that the rules of democracy be honored. Still, several troubling questions remain.

First, almost all the senior Honduran military officers active in the coup are graduates of the Pentagon's School of the Americas (known to many of us as "School of the Assassins"). The Honduran military is trained, advised, equipped, indoctrinated, and financed by the United States national security state. The generals would never have dared to move without tacit consent from the White House or the Pentagon and CIA.

Second, if Obama was not directly involved, then he should be faulted for having no firm command over those US operatives who were. The US military must have known about the plot and US military intelligence must have known and must have reported it back to Washington. Why did Obama's people who had communicated with the coup leaders fail to blow the whistle on them? Why did they not expose and denounce the plot, thereby possibly foiling the entire venture? Instead the US kept quiet about it, a silence that in effect, even if not in intent, served as an act of complicity.

Third, immediately after the coup, Obama stated that he was against using violence to effect change and that it was up to the various parties in Honduras to resolve their differences. His remarks were a rather tepid and muted response to a gangster putsch.

Fourth, Obama never expected there would be an enormous uproar over the Honduras coup. He hastily joined the outcry against the perpetrators only when it became evident that opposition to the putschists was nearly universal throughout Latin America and elsewhere in the world.

Fifth, Obama still has had nothing to say about the many other acts of repression attendant with the coup perpetrated by Honduran military and police: kidnappings, beatings, disappearances, attacks on demonstrators, shutting down the internet and suppressing the few small critical media outlets that exist in Honduras.

Sixth, as James Petras reminded me, Obama has refused to meet with President Zelaya. He dislikes Zelaya mostly for his close and unexpected affiliation with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. And because of his egalitarian reformist efforts Zelaya is hated by the Honduran oligarchs, the same oligarchs who for many years have been close to and splendidly served by the US empire builders.

Seventh, under a law passed by the US Congress, any democratic government that is the victim of a military takeover is to be denied US military and economic aid. Obama still has not cut off the economic and military aid to Honduras as he is required to do under this law. This is perhaps the most telling datum regarding whose side he is on.

As president, Obama has considerable influence and immense resources that might well have thwarted the perpetrators and perhaps could still be applied against them with real effect. As of now his stance on Honduras is too little too late, as is the case with too many other things he does.

Michael Parenti's recent books include: Contrary Notions (City Lights); and God and His Demons (Prometheus, forthcoming). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.

2009-07-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

it's independence day, and yet, i don't feel free. the rent is due the first of each month, my summer gig starts on monday, and the humidity is kicking in after a month of rain. yeah, there is the mingus sextet of 1964, but what happens after the disc ends? i must say there is not a single american flag on my street, but the street only has three houses. it is 2:20 pm, and for now, all is quiet. the dickheads are gathered by the charles river, ready for the pseudo bombs to drop. and i, i still don't see a damn thing to cheer about. let kool and the gang celebrate. for me, this is a day to at best, ignore, and at worst, mourn.

we kicked the british out, but who is gonna kick us out? what does a tax on tea have on drones over pakistan? as carlin said, why don't you ask an indian about that great american spirit of freedom and generosity, if you can find one." we are all about celebrating 230 year old revolutions, as we do our best to put down the revolts of today. i would call it hypocrisy, but that would mean that the people were thinking enough to be hypocritical, and that they don't do. rather, they are after a good time, and they truly believe, the pale ones especially, that they live in the greatest country in the world. it is an honest stupidity, rather than a dishonest intelligence, that seems to be driving our society over the edge.

and those of us in the back seat can only cover our eyes, for we surely know that the landing will be anything but smooth.

happy 4th.

2009-07-04T11:07:00.000-07:00

Gray Panthers
July 2009 By Eric Laursen
printer friendly version Laursen's ZSpace page
By Roger Sanjek; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, 298 pp.

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The second Bush administration had just begun and the American war in the Middle East was grinding along in its deadly, directionless way when I was contacted by an organizer with a New York City group called Grandmothers Against the War. Eighteen of her comrades had been arrested at the Times Square Recruiting Center the previous fall when they tried to enlist to replace the young people serving in Bush's occupation of Iraq. They were about to go on trial for allegedly blocking pedestrian traffic.

Over the next year and a half, I helped write and circulate many press releases for the Grandmothers. I sometimes took part in antiwar actions with them and other groups they worked with. I also started to learn more about these elder activists. They had a shrewd way of going against people's stereotypes about older people, while using those preconceptions creatively to connect with the public. It was fun, it got attention, and it fostered a more decentralized, inclusive activist culture.

That approach had its roots—as did some of the Grandmothers—with the Gray Panthers, one of the more remarkable movements to emerge from the 1960s. Superficially, the Panthers were a pressure group for the rights and dignity of the aged. But like other emblematic 1960s movements, including Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party, they built their activism on a vision of a new society in which elderly people could achieve greater control of their lives by working through a model of community partly based on mutual aid. They challenged every social assumption about how and where the elderly should live, how they interact with younger people, and even how they should conduct their sex lives.

If that put them beyond the pale of much conventional politics, it also made them one of the most recognizable activist groups of the time. That's partly because the Gray Panthers wanted more than simply to secure more rights and resources for their "interest group." They sought to change the way the public viewed the elderly and, beyond that, the social role people were expected to play at every stage of life. They launched a nationwide Media Watch that spotted and called out stereotypical portrayals of the aged. Yet they also took full advantage in the early 1970s when the media became enchanted with the image of little old ladies and gentlemen forming picket lines and borrowing the name of a black revolutionary movement.

They returned the favor in 1973 when Bobby Seale was running for mayor of Oakland and the Black Panthers in that city were enduring intense pressure from police, FBI, and other agencies. As part of their Project SAFE (Seniors Against a Fearful Environment), the Oakland Gray Panthers arranged for Black Panther teams to escort seniors who lived in dangerous neighborhoods. An obvious and practical response to an everyday problem, it also emphasized the Gray Panthers' solidarity with the movements of other excluded and disadvantaged groups. It was part of an endlessly creative effort to muddle society's expectations and open up new possibilities for how groups like the elderly and inner-city African Americans could interact with each other.

The Gray Panthers have also persisted. Despite a period of decline and identity crisis, the organization survived and began to revitalize itself in the new century, meanwhile spreading its unique activist approach through groups like Grandmothers Against War. But the Panthers' social vision—which included intergenerational housing, community-run clinics emphasizing preventive care, and a linkage between social services and economic democracy—may be the most intriguing thing about them today. In the early years of the movement, that vision was built on the presumption that an affluent society should be able to perfect itself. But it also offers at least some partial answers to our current dilemma, namely, how to collectively define and fulfill our social needs at a time when government is retreating from the provision of social services and an increasingly rapacious economic elite fights to maintain its grip on power.

"Gray Panthers are out to make old a beautiful thing, not something to be hidden but something to be declared and affirmed," founder Maggie Kuhn said, explaining the Panthers' project. "The thing that we're up to is that life is a continuum and age is a period of fulfillment, of continued growth and creativity where the inputs, the experience of a lifetime can be related to the group of people who are coming into their creative productive years, and to our young people."

This conception of life has clear practical implications today, when more and more working families find themselves simultaneously raising children and caring for aging relatives. A fruitful place to start exploring such connections is the new book Gray Panthers, a long needed history of the movement, by Roger Sanjek, a sociologist who has also been an on-and-off participant for more than 30 years. His book is concise and slightly breathless as it crams a great deal of struggle, accomplishment, and personal drama into just under 300 pages.

The Gray Panthers conceived of themselves as a multigenerational movement and they worked on an astonishingly wide range of issues at once, including social justice and antiwar causes not directly related to aging. This is part of what continues to make them of interest to contemporary activists trying to forge connections between different but related struggles, and Sanjek was right to encompass as much of their story as possible in his book.

By far the highest-profile Gray Panther was Kuhn, a career activist, organizer, and program coordinator for the Young Women's Christian Association—and later the United Presbyterian Church—who began putting the idea together for a broad-based movement of socially conscious elderly when she herself faced mandatory retirement at 65. Sanjek does his best not to let Kuhn dominate his book, giving plenty of space to other important Gray Panthers, including Lillian Rabinowitz, who founded the Berkeley network, Frances Klafter, Elma Griesel, and New York organizers Lillian Sarno and Sylvia Wexler.

But the center of gravity keeps shifting back to Kuhn who emerges as a remarkable activist and visionary, as well as a media magnet who made the Panthers a pop cultural presence as well as an effective movement. Partly this was because she was an eloquent speaker and conversationalist and a deeply appealing presence. Her appearances with Phil Donahue and Johnny Carson were memorable and she was constantly in the news and in print media during the 1970s and 1980s. Another reason, however, was that she insisted, both within the Gray Panthers and in public, on centering elder activism around a broader social vision, not just the issue of the moment.

Kuhn lived in an intergenerational household in Philadelphia that served as a prefiguration of the kind of community she wanted the Panthers to help build. At a time when it was still considered unseemly, she insisted on talking about sex as an important part of life for the elderly, including her longtime relationship with a married man and later her involvement with a 21-year-old male Black Panther. Breaking taboos was her way of broadening the discussion of what life could be for the elderly and keeping the movement focused on possibility rather than on the next strategic compromise.

Elderly people were one of the last and, superficially, the least likely identity group to come to consciousness in the 1960s. But they had every reason. At the time, a far higher percentage of older Americans lived in poverty than the general population. Social Security was not yet fully indexed to inflation and Medicare was just getting started. Many of the elderly were warehoused in nursing homes, often in deplorable conditions. If they wanted to keep leading active lives, the cards were stacked against them. Big employers generally enforced mandatory retirement rules and nowhere were workplaces or public facilities required to accommodate their special needs.

The term "ageism" was coined in 1968, the year of uprisings, by gerontologist Robert Butler as a catch-all for the host of demeaning prejudices heaped on the old, ranging from the nasty (doddering, "senile," crotchety) to the patronizing (passive, old-fashioned, cute). Older people were starting to complain, get active, and form groups to fight for their rights. The American Association of Retired People (AARP) was launched in the late 1950s. The following decade other large advocacy organizations appeared, including the labor-backed National Council of Senior Citizens and the National Caucus on the Black Aged.

They quickly began to make progress. In 1965, Congress passed Medicare as well as the Older Americans Act, which funded a collection of new service and employment programs for the elderly. A year later came the first iteration of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which started the move to abolish compulsory retirement.

The Gray Panthers, who coalesced in 1972, were different, however. They didn't aim to be a mass organization directed by a Washington staff that mobilized its members from the top down. Instead, they organized through locals or "networks" loosely joined to a national office. At their peak in the early 1980s, the Panthers had only 5,000 to 6,000 members and 122 networks, whereas AARP's rolls topped 30 million. But the Panthers were hard-core, committed activists, many of them veterans of the old left and the radical wing of the labor movement, who joined because they wanted to give significant time and creativity to the cause.

As such, they helped push other elder activists in a more aggressive direction. Kuhn described the Gray Panthers as "gadflies to keep older, more established...organizations moving toward ever more radical goals." In this they weren't always successful. To give one instance, they fought against, but failed to prevent, a restructuring of Social Security in 1983 that raised payroll taxes, cut benefits, and boosted the retirement age.

Attempting to testify before the Greenspan commission, which set out the main elements of the restructuring, Kuhn was hauled away and arrested, making headlines. Other advocacy groups for the aged went along, however, because they felt it was the best deal they could get. Their willingness to compromise marked the end of more than 40 years of expansion and improvement for America's support system for the aged. Soon after, the movement against Social Security would start to spread its caricature of the elderly as "greedy geezers" devouring the resources of the young.

But the Gray Panthers were influential beyond their numbers in pushing for nursing home reform, an end to age discrimination in hiring, long-term care insurance, and better services that would help the elderly to lead more independent lives. They fought hard for a national health care system and forged strong alliances with influential figures such as Representatives Ron Dellums and Claude Pepper, Senator Paul Wellstone, and Ralph Nader. They participated just as actively in the campaigns for a nuclear freeze and an end to U.S. intervention in Central America and its support for apartheid South Africa.

From the beginning, the Gray Panthers regarded these other causes as integral to their mission. This had fundamentally radical implications, tying the Panthers philosophically to other groups that understood the need to establish a degree of autonomy and control of their environment if they wanted to improve and achieve respect for their lives. For instance, the innovative Over 60 Health Center, which the Gray Panthers opened in Berkeley in 1977, was the product of their desire not just for a clinic that specialized in their needs, but one that emphasized preventive care and was run by the community of users, not just professionals who provided the service.

Shared housing—"congregate living arrangements" in which people from a span of generations came together to form a household or family of choice—was one of the Gray Panthers' most ambitious concepts. Networks in Berkeley, Brooklyn, Denver, and Boston explored the idea. A group of Gray Panthers in Boston actually secured a grant to open a Shared Living Project residence, and the practice continues to spread modestly in some neighborhoods.

What the Over 60 Clinic, shared housing, and some other Panther projects had in common was an underlying, if not always conscious, critique of the New Deal-Great Society model for social progress. That model put the definition and fulfillment of social needs into the hands of technocrats: those schooled, trained, and indoctrinated to provide a professional "service." While it accomplished quite a bit in the decades before Reagan and the "Great Reversal," it provided very little voice for the people who participated in government social programs and received government assistance. Besides a name, one of the things the Gray Panthers shared with the Black Panther Party was a desire to bring social assets back under community control.

"Planning in an economic democracy must be under the control of elected representatives of the people while utilizing the expertise of scientists, technicians, economists, workers, [and] consumers," a Gray Panther manifesto from 1977 said. "Some planning [should be done] on the federal level, but much can be by regional and community bodies [with] as much local control as possible."

The Gray Panthers, like most social democratic-leaning movements in the 1970s, advocated a kind of decentralized mixed economy that firmly subordinated private enterprise to public need. But that kind of synthesis became less tenable after Reagan, when the continuing conservative dominance in Washington persuaded many grassroots progressive groups that they had to move to a more top-down model to defend their gains and survive.

The Gray Panthers experimented with such a structure, which meant investing more control in a Washington office that would mobilize the local networks when an issue or a bill came up that required "turnout" or contact with an elected official. They were also trying to cope with a decline in the movement itself. Panther membership fell in the 1980s, with the passing of some activists and, more importantly, the failure of many younger members to stick with the group, undermining the lifecycle model Kuhn and other early organizers had hoped would sustain it. However, the movement survived and in recent years has attempted to move back to the original network model.

But why the decline? The Gray Panthers were in part victims of their own success. Many of the large and small initiatives they pursued in the early decades—annual indexation of Social Security benefits, an end to mandatory unemployment, kneeling buses—became reality. Others, such as nursing home reform, national health care, and the mainstreaming of the disabled have been tougher slogs, but now claim much broader support. Meanwhile, the Gray Panther model of activism has been diffused: in the U.S. with groups like Grandmothers Against the War and in other countries through organizations that directly copied it (Graue Panther in Germany, Les Panthères Grises in France, and more).

All of which points to the effectiveness of the simple but shrewd frame the Gray Panthers presented: a group of elderly women and men adopting a militant style of organizing that people had previously assumed was reserved for the young. But the movement's survival also suggests that they have benefited—may, ultimately, depend on—Kuhn's insistent focus on a radical vision: in housing, health care provision, sexual relationships. This aspect of the movement is where, if the Gray Panthers persist, they could play an important role, not only in pushing against social and economic barriers, but in creating new ways to live beyond them.

"Until rigor mortis sets in," Kuhn said, "do one outrageous thing every week," and she meant it.