papers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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?

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

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

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.