News From A Parallel World

The Death Of Santa, And Other Indicia Of Cultural Collapse

2009-11-21T03:37:31+01:00

Fifty-five years back, the federal government started a big-time scam. It began delivering the letters of children addressed to Santa Claus to a town called North Pole, Alaska, population 2,100, where resident volunteers opened and answered them. These replies, signed by Santa’s elves and helpers, thus had ‘North Pole’ postmarks.

Imagine the joy that’s brought to, literally, millions of kids. Imagine the fun of being one of those volunteers, dispatching smiles to little strangers.

In North Pole, light posts are curved and striped like candy canes and streets have names such as Santa Claus Lane.

It’s all over now. Guess why.

Last year, a Maryland postal worker recognized a local ‘Operation Santa’ volunteer as a registered sex offender. The U.S. Postal Service then decided that letters to Santa would no longer be delivered to North Pole. It doesn’t want any volunteer to have access to any kid’s name and address.

When paranoia becomes institutionalized, what do we suppose happens to us?

In Marin County, California, there is an upscale enclave situated on the Tiburon peninsula overlooking San Francisco Bay. The towns of Tiburon and Belvedere can be accessed by two roads only, Tiburon Boulevard and Paradise Drive. The town council of Tiburon just voted unanimously to purchase and install six special cameras, at a cost estimated at between $140,000.00 and $200,000.00, which will photograph the license numbers of every vehicle entering and leaving.

The photographs will be run through various databases. Tiburon’s police chief said, “I think it makes the community safer.”

At the council meeting, residents spoke in favor of the project. One Yami Anolik, a 64-year-old real estate investor, said she was not worried about violating anyone’s privacy. “If you’re driving on a public road, you gave up your privacy already. If you want to be private, stay at home.”

I suppose so, although thanks to the Patriot Act the government can already enter your home without your permission and without a warrant, and search the place. I don’t think agents are allowed to fix themselves a snack or watch television, but it’s possible that’s in the fine print. If you want to be private, kiss my ass.

We are a nation deeply afraid of its own people.

We are afraid of the first ten amendments to our own constitution. We do not have freedom of speech but “free speech zones” and a closely-controlled mass media. We do not have the freedom to assemble and to petition the government for redress of our grievances. We are no longer secure in our persons and effects from unwarranted searches and seizures. We are losing the right to bear arms.

Our public schools have been turned into factories and our children into unpaid, underaged, corporate trainees whose forced workload exceeds that of the adult population. If you think that is an exaggeration, you do not know what is going on in our schools.

It matters that the empire is cracking down on anything which resembles genuine freedom, even the simple freedom to interact with one another without fear.

We have to fight back. The best way to achieve freedom is to behave as though we already have it.

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A Grandson's Suggestion

2009-11-16T07:07:26+01:00

Remove the warning labels. A simple, elegant approach to elevating overall human consciousness and accelerating the evolutionary process.

One of my grandsons proposed this notion during a dinner table conversation on the state of things in general, which is a topic of some interest to him.

The notice on chain saws: do not try to stop this machine using your bare hands or genitals.

Attractive as this image may be, there are problems. There are the people who don’t read the labels anyhow. And the ones for whom Warnings do not register.

Was a time in America when the cigarette manufacturers ran commercial ads on the television, product endorsements for Camels and Luck Strike with doctors saying how smooth the smoke was. I am not making this up.

Then came the righteous who actually believed that banning the tobacco gang from advertising would fix everything and, indeed, it probably helped avert consumption of a lot of cigarettes, which we can pretty much agree is a good thing.

But now, saved from the predations of that particular plant, the television audience is favored with a tidal wave of drugs, legal and backed by the pharma boys, the biggest drug pushers in the world.

There’s a drug available for women which simplifies their contraception regimen. No more taking the pill all the time and remembering and using one of those little wheels, no. The new product is taken only once a month. What could be better?

The lilting background music, the woman depicted smiling, living a carefree life, and the hard-to-hear, fast-talking voiceunder which mentions the possibility that the drug would cause blood clots, heart disease, organ failures.. Don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot worse to me than “dry mouth.”

Legal. And because it’s legal, there are lots of people who figure, hey, it must be okay; otherwise, my government wouldn’t let them sell it. Perhaps it’s better if we leave the labels on. There are those who won’t read them anyhow, and there are those among us who know better than to trust them entirely. If the ad is compelling and the voice soft and reassuring and the music pacific, I’m gonna ask my doctor about it.

And the doctors, asked by enough patients, begin supplying the drug because, hey, people want it, and there are the warning labels, and the pharma people dropped off the free samples...

In one of my former lives, I had the occasion to give a short campaign speech to a group of ‘liberal’ movers-and-shakers in a home in the Mill Valley hills, which, if you know Marin County, explains the situation. In answer to a standard question, I alarmed the attendees by saying that most federal regulatory agencies –– the ones founded with the idea that somebody had to keep tabs on the corporate thugs who ran things –– ought to be abolished. I’m not sure whether I really believed that at the time. Probably I sort of believed it, which is where I’m at thirty years later. My reasoning was this: any structure you want to create to regulate stuff will be inevitably corrupted by the people it’s supposed to regulate. When this happens, we get the worst of both worlds: the population gets poisoned six-ways-come-sundown and doesn’t even know it. We think the Food and Drug Administration will cover us around the stuff we ingest, inject, or otherwise use on or in our bodies, and meanwhile those babies are having sex with Eli Lilly and Merck.

Everything is now trending toward ‘natural’ and ‘green’, and is generally neither. Just words to sell things, and meanwhile everywhere you want to look it’s like the Fed guarding the bankers.

In that sense, maybe there’s a larger benefit to removing the warning labels than the likely removal of a few more Sarah Palin voters from the rolls. People might, against our wills, be forced to take better responsibility for what we believe. Lazily trusting the guardians of our public health has gotten us into this mess in the first place. It is pure folly to expect them to help us out of the hole.

And meanwhile, as conversations with my grandsons confirms, the human family has reached one of the most revolutionary times in all of history. The radical alteration of the form of the mechanism of communication has implications we cannot even begin to imagine at this point.

The planet may be seen as kind of “earth-human brain”, its consciousness held back by the relative rudimentary means by which one earth-human brain cell speaks with another, and so on. Hell, we didn’t even locate literacy as a general premise until fairly recently (and in some places in America, evidently, it’s still missing). The internet lights up that “earth-human brain” like suddenly plugging-in the biggest Macy’s Christmas tree of all time. Whhhhaaaaaaaammmm!

Basically, I’m betting on evolution. For some reason best known to a laughing God, the Law of Unintended Consequences keeps us alive and fighting back. It was the Pentagon which invented the internet; now they’re trying desperately to figure out how to control it, censor it, and spy on everyone who uses it. It was the Pentagon which began using LSD-25 in mind-control experiments that, I think I can safely say, backfired all over the place.

Those who would destroy people for their sick purposes, who cannot be entrusted with the stewardship of the planet and yet control it, have seemingly every power at their disposal. They have the guns and the money, and they own the networks and the newspapers. And yet...

They don’t know what to do about the internet and instant communication. They are terrified that all of the deepest, ugliest secrets will escape, and they are right.

In the early 1970s, a guy who worked at RAND, a golden boy of the Defense Department named Daniel Ellsberg, made an illicit copy of a study he had worked on, later known as the Pentagon Papers, and tried to get someone to make them public. Senators wouldn’t touch it: it was classified secret. Regardless of how horrible the crimes it might reveal, perhaps because of that, it was “Secret” and could not be seen by the American people.

The New York Times, after much waffling, decided to publish it, an act I feel sure that paper would not engage in today, but that’s not the point. There was an attempt to get the Supreme Court to enjoin its publication. And its publication helped turn the public against the war against Viet Nam.

Today, Daniel Ellsberg would not have to take the Pentagon Papers to any Senator. Thank God; there are so few these days worth a bucket of warm piss, to paraphrase the late John Nance Garner about the vice presidency. No. And he wouldn’t have to plead with the Times or any other media whore.

He’d post it on the internet. Game fucking over.

Federal government outlaws free speech except in “free speech zones”, and it’s too late. The world’s a free speech zone now. They’ll try to stop it. But they might have their hands full.

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A Modest Suggestion For The President

2009-11-16T02:04:42+01:00

It’s a problem mainly of public relations. As the Obama administration continues to implement many of the Bush regime policies, critics of Bush have begun to comment on this unpleasant continuity. Since the right wing hated Obama’s administration even before it had become one, the defection of the left prospectively leaves him without allies in a vicious town headed into winter.

I have a suggestion.

As purveyors of modern language through its commercial application have noted, it’s all about something called “branding”. After all, Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the other neo-Nazis of the previous executive branch were able to get away with torture by calling it “enchanced interrogation”.

For example, even though the Red Cross study (and, reportedly, a secret Pentagon study) of the inmate population at Guantanamo indicates at least 3/4 are completely innocent of any criminal act, and although Obama promised to close it, the prison remains open. Some of those held will be brought to trial at last, it seems, in New York City, a venue sure to afford them an unbiased jury. Others –– presumably those against whom no evidence exists –– will have their trials in military courts and without the presence of the media or civilian observers.

This public relations nightmare has to be contained. How about this: call it the Guantanamo Bay Refugee Resettlement Program. Has a nice ring to it. Everyone, surely, favors resettling refugees, so long as they’re not being resettled in our own towns.

If that works, and it might, Obama can try out some other ideas. He might shrug-off criticism of America’s continued kidnapping of people by the CIA –– and the torture it outsources to places like Egypt –– by renaming it “The Extraordinary Rendition Weight Reduction Plan”.

Assassination of foreign leaders would become merely a “realignment of American interests abroad”. Sounds a lot better than cold-blooded murder, doesn’t it?

Look, I’ve got my squirrely theory about Obama, why he’s doing the horseshit he’s doing, and probably I’ve written about it before. Nobody believes my theory and I may not even believe it myself, but who knows? It’s a cinch he’s aware of who really runs the country and much of the world, as well as the limits placed on any President by the lesson of Dallas, still quite pertinent after 46 years. Damned right he knows.

So perhaps it’s a question of what’s possible. Perhaps, as usual, it’s up to us. In the meantime, we’ve got The Rendition Diet to keep us amused. Somewhere, Vonnegut is laughing his ass off.

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The Freak And The Law

2009-11-07T02:21:06+01:00

Last week, Giants’ ace Tim Lincecum, a kid with one Cy Young Award already and likely to grab a few more, got popped for speeding in Washington State, before seven in the morning and with the distinct aroma of marijuana in his vehicle. Several grams and a pipe.

Timmy, known as “The Freak” in Sports Illustrated, has invited comment by his long hair and his perpetually-relaxed countenance. Other pitchers look grim. They wear a “game face”, a hard stare that does not waver from first pitch to last. Not Lincecum, who can be seen grinning and even laughing between innings. Now we know why.

They’re gonna legalize it pretty soon. Yeah, I know, the Sarah Palins of America will be aflame with indignation and jealousy but they won’t stop it. It’s finally a settled matter that lots and lots of folks, ordinary folks, celebrities, pols, judges, punks, astronauts, Olympic swimmers, and so forth, lots know how much a few grams is, what it looks like, and what happens when you put a pinch in the bowl of Tim Lincecum’s pipe and take a puff.

In the same newspaper which trumpeted Tim’s arrest, a news column on page C4, the juxtaposition of the surge in pot arrests nationwide since Bill Clinton began the crackdown in ‘92, and the increase in the number of those who partake of it. In other words, criminalization is not exactly working.

And nobody much cares. That’s the thing. And there’s the money. Lord, the money! In taxes it would collect from Mendocino and Humboldt Counties alone, California could wipe out the deficit. Legislators could start buying stuff for their districts again. Pressure’s off. Pass that joint, will ya?

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Why Does Bud Selig Hate Baseball?

2009-11-05T07:18:10+01:00

So the World Series is over. Four months until the boys of spring, summer, and fall converge on Florida and Arizona to prepare themselves for the 2010 season. That’s a lot of days to trade stories and speculate about the future around the hot stove in the general store.

Personally, I was rooting for the Phillies, as was most of the American sporting public, largely because the Yankees are a team more purchased than developed and also, maybe, because a lot of those pin-stripers seem like such assholes. Maybe I’m wrong about that part.

But at least there are some good things about skipping a seventh game, not the least being I don’t have to hear Tim McCarver run his mouth before next September. Also: the incessant camera shots of ‘celebrities’, at least a few of whom belong behind bars instead of the camera railing at Yankee Stadium. Kate Hudson had an excuse of sorts, being the amorous partner of New York third baseman Alex Rodriguez, but who is Kurt Russell dating? And then Donald Trump, and that putz Rudy Giuliani, you see what I mean by the prison reference.

And the commercials, even with the sound muted I know what those sleazebags are saying, the insurance companies like Allstate and State Farm, not to mention the dingbat for Progressive, all of these being people you might want to shoot just because they’re so offensive to humanity. Sigh. Hell, I don’t really want to shoot them, although, to paraphrase what Mort Sahl once said about Woody Allen, I’d like to slap that Progressive ditz silly except it looks like someone already has.

As my friend JBD is fond of noting, the guys who run the major league game have done what they can to ruin it. It used to mean something, the World Series. Hard to credit now.

The Yanks and Phillies were worthy participants, that’s something. Not like one of those seasons, 162 games where the best teams are eliminated in fluke ‘playoffs’ by ‘wild-card’ teams and we’re treated to bad exhibitions with squads like Colorado, no, at least not that.

But thanks to the Lords of baseball, Bud Selig and his boys, what was once a final, ultimate showdown, a clash of cities and personalities on a great stage, has been reduced to just another corporate product, a game as the draw for selling shit instead of a main event.

Baseball is meant to be played in the sunshine. That is its nature. Before the greedheads got their paws on it, when there was still a real Commissioner who took only limited shit from the owners, the World Series was played between the best teams, in the sunshine, the first week of October.

Once in a while, it rained. Hard as it is to visualize for those of us living in paradise, it sometimes rains in early October back east. That’s okay. A game could be postponed to the next day. It did not snow or sleet. Players’ lips were rarely blue. Under these conditions, one could say it was a fair test of skill, a match played in an arena and in weather which respected the game.

But thanks to Bud Selig and the other toads who run professional baseball, those days are gone, literally.

When rot sets in it’s usually incremental. At first, there were a few night games, during the week. Weekends remained daytime affairs. The argument ran, it gave working people and kids a chance to see games on television they’d otherwise miss.

However, it was not about the children. It never is when you get right down to it (memo to the trustees in the Tam Union High School District: go fuck yourselves). It was about money.

It was about money, too, when it was decided that weekend games should be played at night; can’t have broadcasts competing with football, can we? It was about money when the seasons were extended, when interleague play was begun, when everything became about licensing and contracts.

It was about money when the playoffs were not the World Series but ‘divisional’ matches, and there were more rounds invented to “keep it interesting”, although baseball never did need gimmicks to “keep it interesting” for people who cared about it. Even the promos now, the slogans that Major League Baseball runs at us, claim that it is about “more than baseball.”

Bulletin to Selig: only an ignoramus would devalue baseball by claiming it needed anything more.

Walt Whitman once said that baseball was a blessing which could redeem the national soul. Don’t know if it’s still true... it’s a magnificent game, but we’ve got a serious deficit in the redemption department. Last time I checked, the kids still played it with joy, the stuff the grown-ups have clearly traded for cash. Might be a close call.

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Got Your Assessment Right Here

2009-10-18T00:49:25+02:00

Assess this you dumb fuckers.

Yes, I have an attitude problem today. Good time for you to close the page and move on to other, more acceptable sites. There are clowns on bicycles on YouTube. Of course, living as I do in Fairfax, Marin County, there are clowns on bicycles right down the hill from me.

It’s other sorts of clowns who elicit feelings of homicide in me today.

Two items:

The local high school has sent warning letters to parents this week. If your child has missed any classes, or been “tardy” more than once to any class, or to all classes combined, since the school year began in August, you, the parent, may be reported for possible prosecution under section of the

I am not making this up. Not only that, your child’s problem absenteeism or habitual ‘tardiness’ may be used to delay him or her from obtaining a driver’s license, presumably under the theory that a child who is late to class may be late going through an intersection.

The second item, in the Chronicle: “State’s math scores near bottom.” Must be the ‘tardiness’ problem. More on this hilarious circumstance in a minute; I haven’t finished the tirade I’ve been working up to.

The letter from Drake High, allegedly written by an assistant principal, is a stunner. It is written in the classic edu-speak style, the use of words to conceal and manipulate. Just reading it was sort of an exercise in nostalgia for me, because I once served a three-year sentence on the board of trustees of the very Tamalpais Union High School District in which Drake is located –– the original term was four years but I busted out, and because the nausea it induced had that too-familiar quality.

God, those people were assholes.

Back to the letter. Here it is, with translation for humans:

“The...high school staff wants to foster communication between families and the school. This letter represents one of the ways we can communicate with you about *’s attendance.” [We want to let you know that we can cause trouble for you and your child].

“This letter has been sent to you because our records indicate that * has at least two unexcused absences or tardies in one or more classes this semester, as shown below, and that he has been identified as truant according to Education Code 48260.” [We are not kidding. There’s a law that we can use against you].

Thereupon, the ‘record’ is printed. In *’s case, he is said to have ZERO absences or ‘tardies’ in the following periods: 0, 1st, 2nd, AT, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, AFT, IS, and N. No, I do not know what the acronyms mean and am sure I don’t wish to know.

* apparently has TWO such absences or ‘tardies’ in 3rd period. That’s it. Two, since August.

Now comes more specific threats:

“In addition, it is important for you to know that the state’s education policy (Education Code 48260.5) requires the parent/guardian to compel the student to attend school. Parents/guardians who fail to meet this obligation may be guilty of an infraction and subject to prosecution pursuant to Article 6 of Chapter 2 of part 27. Your truant student may also be subject to arrest under Education Code 48264, and can be subject to suspension, restriction, or delay of his driving privilege pursuant to Vehicle Code 13202.7.” [If your child is late to class more than once, we can have you arrrested, and the kid, too].

Now, that’s how to “foster communication.”

There follows a couple of paragraphs about how you have no chance of changing what “the records show” and that you had better read the school’s voluminous Parent/Student Handbook for details on how absences or ‘tardies’ automatically reduce a student’s grade, just in case the other threats haven’t scared the shit out of you.

The parent/guardian is then advised to “Contact his assistant principal to discuss strategies to improve his attendance and/or alternative educational programs... We want to work with you to make sure your child attends regularly and benefits from the rich and educational (sic) opportunities at Sir Francis Drake High School.” [I think we already know the nature of such a “discussion.” We may push your child out of Drake].

Most parents are not conversant with the California Education Code. Perhaps their child has been late to a single class twice in the first six weeks. They are suddenly at risk of arrest, and their child is at risk of suspension.

You may well ask yourself, what the fuck is going on here?

I’ll tell you what’s going on. Under the blantant falsehoods of “communication” and “rich educational opportunities” the educrats of the Tam District are throwing a grenade through your front door and pretending it’s a bouquet. I suppose it’s a matter of taste, but I find this form of fascism to be the worst, the guy smiling as he sticks in the knife.

I’ll tell you what’s going on. For at least forty years, the schools have been filling up with students who are quite at home in the electric age. They/we are emphatically post-industrial people. But the education system has –– after a brief flirtation with reality in the 1960s and 1970s –– has become more and more industrial in design and function. It should surprise no one that the system doesn’t work anymore. But that has not prevented its increasingly harsh imposition.

Back East, a six-year-old was suspended for bringing a ‘spork’ to school. Another child was expelled for bringing a serrated knife along with a birthday cake. Childhood is over. The education system does not want students to have them.

The “rich opportunities” students enjoy, in grades one through twelve, include more than an entire month of standardized testing. There are ordinary tests, of course, and AP tests in high school, and federal tests for the “National Assessment” program, the ‘STAR’ tests in California, and numerous others, including an ‘Exit Exam’ which by definition prevents some students who otherwise passed every high school class from graduating.

All of these tests are “snapshots” in the words of the idiot who ran the curriculum in the Tam District when I was there. The more, the merrier. We have embraced a mania for measurement as a substitute for real learning. One cannot measure learning; one can instead measure memorization. And because the public (and the real estate lobby) are demanding “results,” those void of imagination have built a system which punishes it.

The Chron story on California’s math scores is, like all such stories, loaded with comments from bewildered educrats and utterly bereft of even a pass at explanation. Across every race and ethnicity, English-language-speakers and non-speakers, low income and high, California’s fourth and eighth graders –– the groups tested –– scored below the national average. In fact, California’s scores exceed those of only two states: Alabama and Mississippi.

Yea! We’re number forty-eight!

High school students in the Tam District are routinely facing four hours of homework every night. That’s about eleven hours of compulsory work a day. Including weekends and most holidays –– when students ‘catch up’ with their work –– people between the ages of eight and eighteen (although you can legally leave school at 16) spend around seventy hours each week performing school-related tasks.

It’s easy to see where this is going. When I was on the Tam board, one counselor told me that she believed half of the students were ‘clinically depressed.’ There was widespread incidence of self-destructive behavior, including cutting, eating disorders, and attempted suicides. The district didn’t want to deal with it; the board refused to hold a hearing. When perhaps seventy-five students sacrificed their homework time in order to attend a board meeting to ‘testify’ about conditions in their schools, the board used a two-minute egg timer to cut people off in mid-sentence.

At least two of those creeps are still on the board, having nothing else to do with their lives and deeply dependent upon the interconnection between self worth and being introduced at basketball games.

The language of the threatening letter to the Drake parent brought back the crippling reality of edu-speak. With a smile, they will say they wish to ‘communicate’ with you when clearly this ‘communication’ consists of their orders and your obedience to same. We are working hard for your kids, and in the event that they are late to class a few times, we can suspend them and arrest you.

It would surprise me greatly if American high school campuses don;t become, within a relatively short period of time, staging areas for massive civil disobedience. Even though many teenagers are being kept relatively docile by way of moronic mass media, constant academic pressure, and pharmaceuticals for their depression and anger, that kind of shit won’t work forever. Kids have a desire to learn, and it’s an ignorant system which thinks it can stifle that. And they have iPhones and PDAs galore.

And not only that. Because what is being done now to children, elementary school through high school, is not only antithetical to learning but antithetical to the sensory reality of an electric age generation. It is therefore historically doomed. The only real question is how much crockery will be broken in the process.

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The Continuing Education Of Rush Limbaugh

2009-10-17T07:26:54+02:00

I haven’t seen a pro football game in maybe twenty years, so out of touch that I was surprised to learn recently that there are teams I’d never heard of, lots of them. And although I don’t plan on watching any games now, I’ve become a big, big fan of the Indianapolis Colts.

The Colts are owned by a fellow named Irsay, a family deal that goes back to before they left Baltimore.

When it was announced that a group of prospective buyers for the Cleveland franchise included Rush Limbaugh, Irsay declared that he would do whatever was necessary to derail the sale. Limbaugh, Irsay said, was not the kind of person who ought to own a football team.

If you share my view that life affords us all interesting opportunities to overcome our own character faults, then the decision by the ownership group to dump Limbaugh was another in his thusfar unlearned lesson, which is that we’re all human, including people we don’t agree with, and that when you treat people unfairly you can expect the same in kind.

Remember his drug bust? He had somebody carry bagloads of oxycontin for him, obtained through another name. He had a serious addiction and got caught breaking the law. Had this happened to any other public figure on the other end of the political spectrum, Rush would’ve been calling for his head. It would seem that a major course in Irony, maybe Irony 101, is on his curriculum, but he is not doing his homework.

Now the free market he pretends to worship has shown him a dark side. Hey, if you want to exclude people from opportunity because you don’t like them, that’s the American Way. Isn’t it? Will he get it this time?

Here’s what fascinates me about Rush. He’s being given a grand cosmic education, some of it in full view thanks to his love of publicity, his arrogance, and his unwillingness to look deeply into the mirror, and we all get to watch his progress or, sadly, lack of same.

It will almost certainly get to him if this keeps up. Everything he does, seemingly, coming back on him, and eventually he will just stop coming up with excuses. Or, as John Lennon said, ‘sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun. If the sun don’t some we’ll get a tan by standing in the English rain...’

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How Can We Miss You...

2009-10-13T22:32:28+02:00

Ah, Willie Brown. In the words of the great country standard, how can we miss you if you won’t go away?

I suppose it’s kind of petty of me to complain. I live in one of the great magic places on the planet, and if we have to suffer the intrusive presence of the sort of public personage who makes Donald Trump look dignified, that’s a rather small price to pay.

Plus, I can always stop reading the newspaper and watching television, and given the fare available with each of these I’m likely to be better off. Still...

I remember Willie from a long time back, the early sixties, in fact, when he and the notorious Burton brothers ran the statewide Young Democrats out of San Francisco and my friends and I tagged along as the Marin County contingent. We learned plenty, watching those guys operate, and it was a pleasure. They were good.

I once saw Willie raise cash from a large audience of party faithful by calling on people by name and turning them upside down until all the money fell out. It was the most impressive fund-raising evening I’ve ever witnessed.

In the early eighties, I’d just opened a law office when the phone rang from Willie’s chief of staff: the Speaker wanted me to run for the Assembly again and could send a quarter of a million smackers my way to smooth the road to Sacramento. I had to turn him down for a variety of sound reasons, but I retain a fondness for the generous offer.

I do not have a great ideological beef here. There are, as many have noted, lots worse guys running around. True, Willie’s great causes have morphed over time from the poor and dispossessed to the rich and possessed, but he’s got expensive tastes in clothes, cars, and female companions and its takes a whopping bank account for that sort of frivolity.

I’d prang the sucker for peddling his talent to the highest bidders except that these days even that doesn’t raise anybody’s hackles. Jesse Colin Young’s recording of Chet Powers’ “Get Together” is being used to sell disposable diapers, John Lennon’s work is promoting telephones and PDAs, and Bob Dylan has turned his catalogue over to, well, evidently every commercial enterprise he once made fun of. I suppose I’d sell out, too, but nobody’s offered me enough.

No, Willie’s become unbearable because he cannot permit his public persona to fade away. He’s doing sports commentary for Comcast, God help us. He shows up everywhere, invited or not. And he writes a Chronicle column called, swear to God, “Willie’s World.”

In “Willie’s World” everything is, naturally, about Willie. In Sunday’s column, he led with the observation that Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Prize for one thing only: being black. Then he wrote:

“I expect an Oscar, a Tony, and a Pulitzer will all follow, and all will be equally deserved. The Nobel is great news for Obama and for America, but bad news for the Rev. Al (Sharpton), Jesse (Jackson), and me, as the prize committees have now met their quota.”

Whew. Willie, I can smell it from here.

When somebody gets famous, especially over a long journey, there is the risk that he or she will begin to leak resentment. Note that Sharpton and Jackson, both black, both ministers, ran for President. Brown never ran, but he was Assembly Speaker of California and Mayor of San Francisco. The presidency certainly ran through his mind once or twice.

Willie is still running for something, for the confirmation that he is important. How sad that a man this talented and carrying undoubted past accomplishments now so publicly bemoans his falling status and so reflexively grasps at whatever flies by. The world is in some sense no longer Willie’s, and he is afraid he will disappear.

Hey, Willie, I share your pain. We’re hitting the last decades, you and I, too old to be king no matter how deserving and increasingly aware of our own mortality. We had aspirations, and then shit happened. Someone in your circumstance, you might wonder whether anyone really loved you or it was only the power and your ability to command it. That’s a bad thought at three a.m., no matter how much your wardrobe cost.

Recently, Bay Area Democrats held a meeting at the Fairmont Hotel in the City. If you live out here, or are onto the politics of Governor Schwarzenegger, you know there are extreme tensions in state government. California, as most others, is facing budgetary holes it can’t fill without either increasing taxes or gutting programs.

Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, has refused to sign any legislation whatever –– on any subject –– until Democrats give him what he wants on a water bill. Really. If you want to know why a governor would freeze the entire state government over water, see “Chinatown” again. He ‘unfroze’ himself only today, but hadn’t at the time of the gathering at the Fairmont, and anyway extortion doesn’t sit well with some people.

Into the Democratic dinner, the aforementioned Willie Brown ‘introduced’ Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was and is the equivalent of bringing Dick Cheney to a meeting of the ACLU steering committee. You can imagine what then transpired.

But in “Willie’s World,” the discourtesy with which the Governor was received (there was considerable booing, and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano invited him to “kiss my gay ass”) was equivalent to the interruption of President Obama’s State of the Union address by whacko Joe Wilson. Seriously.

Then he writes, “After the dinner I went to the bar and got a tap on the shoulder. It was Arnold, insisting that I join him. He was completely unfazed... The only reference he made was to ask me jokingly, ‘Hey, what are you doing with all those crazies?’”

A better question would be, what are all those crazies doing with Willie Brown?

My guess is that Willie never developed any healthy hobbies. This has left him bored now that the power has passed, and desperate to keep his dick swinging. That he has been thereby rendered easy pickings for a marginally-clever manipulator like Arnold Schwarzenegger has not dawned on him.

Of course, in the grander scheme of things, we ought to share the responsibility for this parody of Willie Brown. For reasons likely discovered by opening up the... uh... darker psychology of the modern American, we shower ridiculous praise on celebrities; and the celebrities nearly always thereupon turn into false gods, worthy only in delusion, and in the approval of total strangers.

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Welcome Home, Roman Polanski

2009-10-09T06:35:03+02:00

Welcome home, Roman Polanski.

We’re glad to have you back. We know it’s been a tough thirty years or so, what with the travel restrictions and this thing hanging over you here in California, U.S.A. Hey, look, if she’d been a couple of years older you’d be in the Senate by now, instead of being flown-in courtesy of the government, but it’s better late than never.

We show your movies all the time on American television. Chinatown, of course, and those Oscars. By the way, do you still have the statuettes? The Academy asked me to ask you.

If you’d been in Tennessee and she’d been your cousin, you could’ve married her and everything would’ve been cool; just ask Jerry Lee Lewis.

We don’t want you to think we’ve ignored you. I know it probably seemed that way pretty often, since the U.S. government didn’t make much fuss over you through six administrations, if you count Ford, but we’ve gotten a progressive into the White House, change we can believe in, and one of the changes is that we take care of old business.

Actually, you might feel honored that you’ve been invited back. After all, we’re now “turning the page” on every criminal enterprise from illegal wiretapping to torture, but we think enough of you to make an exception. No more turning the page so far as you’re concerned.

A cynic could believe that this is simply a great way to sell ugly cars and cowpiss beer to the viewers on F*X, that sex plays, as they say, especially the kind that Republican members of Congress fantasize about when they’re ostensibly reading the bailout legislation.

But don’t you believe it. We’re bringing you home because we’re a nation of grace and forgiveness, a beacon of justice and the rule of law in the world.

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Holding Up My Pants

2009-10-08T06:07:00+02:00

So I was standing there on the court floor of the Marin County Hall of Justice, holding up my pants with one hand while trying to slip my belt back through the loops, and thinking about the state of things, which is personally fine these days but collectively dismal if it’s the country I am thinking about.

People adapt. This is both our blessing and our curse. If the human race did not adapt to its earthly environment it could not make it, yet it is our collective ability to adapt to craziness which, eventually, can sink us. This is what philosphers think of as ironic and what I think of as God’s sense of humor.

In this particular lifetime I have seen us adapt to the metric system, Sammy Davis, Jr., fast food, and the nuclear arms race. Politically, what used to be a lie is now “spin.”

They have a metal detector, along with security personnel, waiting for everyone who seeks admission or has been summoned to the courtrooms at the civic center. John Mitchell, Nixon’s disgraced Attorney General, once observed, “this country is going to go so far to the right you will not even recognize it.”

We’ve adapted to metal detectors everywhere, especially in public buildings or places where masses of people congregate. We’ve been told that ‘heightened security’ is necessary to protect us from vague but powerful forces known as ‘terrorists.’ We are surrendering freedom in increments. We will, if we fail to change course, one day awaken in a country which no longer has a meaningful Bill of Rights.

I’m all in favor of adapting to the natural environment. The human race has no practical alternative if it wishes to survive. But what exactly such adaptation consists of is a dangerous question and we don’t seem to have an answer just yet.

People lie to us about public matters. They wish to scare us into buying whatever it is that they’re selling, and it works. When it’s pop music or television shows, the damage is not so great; there are alternatives. Genius often rises anyhow. But when it’s public policy, when it’s wars or economic measures, the penalties are more severe and harder to reverse.

When I was a kid, there were strawberries. Today, except at farmers markets and the occasional health food emporium, there are these things they call strawberries but aren’t. They appear to be strawberries. However, beneath the gassed-to-red skin the flesh is white, watery, faintly metallic.

Retaining the terms, eviscerating the meaning, what we’ve got left is not what we thought we had and not what we’d been promised, once upon another time. It’s something to consider when you find yourself standing there next to a metal detector and holding up your pants with one hand because somebody said we had to adapt to a fictitious, post-something world.

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Reunion

2009-10-06T06:35:17+02:00

Notes from a reunion...

To veterans of the San Rafael High School experience, circa 1964-5, a few notes of interest or disinterest, depending, on the class of ‘64 reunion held Friday and Saturday, those who have survived the years and had the inclination and circumstance to attend the festivities.

Friday evening was originally a no-host bar –– one pays for one’s own intoxicants –– at San Rafael Joe’s, but this was changed last minute because it turned out a class of escapees from Marin Catholic had actually booked the same place and time. SRHS backed down from this potentially horrific confrontation, which at first struck me as unnecessary given that among our returnees were pretty much the entire offensive line of the Bulldogs’ fall ‘63 MCAL champions, including the Ahern boys, not to mention JBD, who in my opinion is still looking to knock an MC linebacker on his ass, but I changed my views upon the news that we’d switched to a place now called the ‘Peddler’s something-or-other’ which, in golden days, had been Dominic’s Restaurant.

Dominic’s was the site of the ‘64 senior ball, an event which evokes few specific memories from anyone, in my opinion largely due to the combination of that evening’s inebriated madness and the present day’s deterioration of what Poirot fondly calls the ‘little grey cells’. But it was also a signpost, one of those distinct moments in time shared by many, and the specifics, though few could be conjured (or invented) by the survivors, retained a special sort of electricity.

And so, being there on the water, with the ghost of SRHS hovering over the canal, northeast and lit by a full moon in Aries, there was a gathering, upstairs where we would not startle otherwise unsuspecting restaurant patrons trying to swallow lobster and farm animal on the main floor.

There are the people who aren’t there, the ones we’ve temporarily lost due to their evacuating the corporeal form and the ones we’ve lost because they’ve evacuated the area and maybe that part of their histories. We’d talk about them sometimes. What ever happened to.....

I’ve got a lot of sensory data in my cranium right now from the Friday evening event and from another the following day, a barbeque deep into Sleepy Hollow. It’s hard to know about my class; a reunion is a sort of odd selective grouping, and conversation, though often fun and occasionally illuminating, cannot go on and on, which it needs to do to offer much revelation. Some things are things people need to get around to, and there isn’t that kind of time.

Time, yes, it was there, perched just beyond the pool at the Colson manse. I believe I saw it wink once.

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Sharks In The Water

2009-09-29T09:52:37+02:00

“When there’s blood in the streets, buy property.” So says Jodie Foster to Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s heist thriller “Inside Man.”

Now that there’s blood in the streets of America –– metaphoric, perhaps, in most cases, but ugly nonetheless –– the buyers are hitting the bricks. There’s money to be made out of the suffering of others and this is a great time for it.

Ran into a friend in United Market this afternoon, a Marin County realtor who’s seeing the carnage up close. “Everybody’s trying to hang on,” she said, “but there are sharks in the water.”

Have you noticed that’s how it always works? The guys with the assets, or with ready access to yours, wait for the bottom. Often, they’ve had a hand in creating the mess to begin with, e.g. the federal reserve bank and its owners, but that’s a detail. The important thing is that they can capitalize on the misery or loss of others; that, let’s face it, is the main engine of capitalism.

Along with the inherent nature of wealth and privilege –– that it multiplies itself –– is the ability to cash in on cycles of boom-and-bust. And although some among us wish not to know it, that is one of the main ingredients in monetary cycles in the first place.

For example, the stock market. The cover story is that the market reflects success and failure in commercial enterprises, that one ‘invests’ in this –– bets on the winners and losers –– and hopes thereby to grow one’s own wealth. Certainly, those with inside knowledge, I’m talking real inside knowledge, not the kind they made an ‘example’ of with Martha but the kind where you have the information because you manipulated it in the first place, those guys win. When you buy stocks, you’re hoping you can ride a trend better than the average schmuck. Maybe you can. But most investors are average schmucks, and they will surely lose when the gang at the top decides to rock the market.

The federal reserve bank, which is NOT, repeat not a governmental body, and which is in fact far more powerful than the government when it comes to money and the economy, helped engineer the greatest theft in world history over the past year, and nobody is going to prison. They are going to resorts in limos on the inflated ‘retention bonuses’ they paid to themselves and using the trillions extorted from the people to ‘consolidate’, i.e. buy up weaker enterprises.

And so Bank of America, Citigroup, and Chase are taking over Wachovia and Washington Mutual, and other lesser players with the money delivered to them without serious national debate by a Congress at once corrupt and stupid. It was an ‘emergency’, we were told by everyone, from Bush to Obama, and that the trillions would be used to loosen-up credit and get the economy moving. Only the money isn’t being used that way and there’s nothing the suckers can do about it now.

What we are witnessing, not to mention being run over by, is a calamity artificially-induced for the purposes of monopoly.

Don’t believe me? Try answering a few questions.

Why would the Congress pass the bailout legislation without actually reading it? As with the ‘Patriot Act’, it ran to thousands of pages and was not available to members of Congress, let alone the media, until within an hour of the vote.

Why is everything a bait-and-switch situation? As with the invasion of Iraq (and the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan), the ‘explanation’, the rationale, changed wildly after the fact.

Why is no one accountable? As with the criminal wiretapping of millions of telephones, the interception of e-mails (both of which are ongoing under Barack Obama), and the illegal detention and torture of innocent people, we are told to ‘turn the page’ on the prosecution of perpetrators.

These are not great riddles, elusive of understanding. They are merely dangerous questions. We can solve them ourselves –– substantial information and documentation is available online; check out sites such as thirdworldtraveler.com or brasschecktv –– or continue to ignore them. We have such a choice. But either way we cannot be easy of heart and mind.

To pursue the deeper truths of America and how it is governed, and by whom, is to rattle our own crockery. Yet, to go the other way is to condemn ourselves to a nightmare become real, an Orwellian world in which everything we believe is palpably false. Such is our circumstance, the inevitable result of a citizenry which has forgotten ‘eternal vigilance’.

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...Like The Children Of The Family...

2009-09-18T07:45:43+02:00

The war on drugs, like the war on terror, is a systemic invention necessary for the accumulation of wealth and power. It’s therefore phony. And whatever you’ve come to believe about it is probably corrupted because there’s no way to get at the truth.

It’s an old subject, usually discussed along ideological lines. That is, the left, many of whose members smoke pot, want to legalize its favorite drugs; the right, many of whose children smoke pot, want to jail everybody responsible.

The government, meanwhile, carries on a ‘war’, which is the politically-safe thing to do, even if it’s a fraud. Government and fraud, two things which go together like ham and eggs.

The fraud part is: they’re not really trying to stop the drug trafficking. I know, I know, all that money, the DEA, the FOX News specials, the santimonious speeches. All horseshit. Sorry.

For too many years to count, Mexico’s government was controlled by a single party, and that party was on terms with the growers and dealers. Everyone understood that the conversion of this particular cash crop to real cash was a deal too lucrative to mess with, especially if the boys at the top were getting their cut.

The U.S. government has known this for a long time, and you can bet every President knew it, too. And so presidents from FDR to Barack Obama have paid homage to the ‘drug war’ while countenancing its failure.

It’s just one of those dirty little secrets that the pols know and nobody talks about. But the fact is that if the DEA and border patrol folks stopped drug trafficking at the Mexico/U.S. line, the economy of Mexico would collapse. First cousin to this is the traffic in illegal immigrants. Although there is some effort on the part of federal cops to catch and expel them, most of the North American power structure needs the present situation.

Not only do illegals help suppress wages, thus enriching businesses, they compete for low-end jobs, thus increasing the rate of military enlistment, which is a hard sell these days due to crazy wars and the probability that a soldier in Afghanistan or Iraq will be maimed (an estimated 40,000 so far). And illegals send a lot of cash back home. That is also a critical value, for the U.S., having created massive dislocation and unemployment in Mexico via NAFTA, cannot afford to have a revolution just south of Arizona.

In one of the most revealing comments ever offered by a U.S. President, Richard Nixon once said that “the American people are like the children of the family...”

It was revealing not because it exposed Nixon’s attitude but because it reflected the attitude held by just about everyone in Washington, including the leaders of both major parties. And it helps explain how this country, in the midst of banking and insurance scandals and wholesale thievery, can print enormous sums of money and then hand it over to the worst perpetrators. It’s like giving bank robbers zero-interest loans.

What the pols all know and fail to share with the rest of us is this: they have secrets about America, about who runs it and how decisions are made, and the actual power of a legislature or, indeed, a President, is severely circumscribed by the reality the rest of us are not to be trusted with.

That’s why it makes no sense, the junk they hand us. There’s the reality of it, what the ‘grown-ups’ are so sophisticated about, and the fantasy we’re given because we’re just ‘children’ in America’s family.

When examined, the cover stories on pretty much everything fall apart, but we don’t examine them. We’re aided in our ignorance by the unending circus of American culture, the spinning balls and colored beads, the ‘entertainment’ and the officially-sanctioned drugs. We are in fact what Bill Hicks called the puppet people. History has shown that we can be convinced of anything.

We are not a family. We are of course the most powerful empire the world has ever known, and we act like it. The U.S. has troops in 177 countries around the world. Why? It has today the greatest disparity between rich and poor in its history. Why? Its system of public education no longer teaches critical thinking. Its criminal justice system encarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any other nation. Its monetary system is an operation presided over by the Federal Reserve, which is a private board of directors comprised of the largest banks.

Why? Most of us don’t ask. We don’t want to know. We are complicit in our habits and docile in our politics. We know the government lies to us, yet we believe what it says.

The entire health care ‘debate’ has been about trivialities and invented ‘issues’. The only serious way to fix health care is a universal, single-payer system, yet this was ‘taken off the table’ by the President right from the start. We do not hear intelligent discourse from the pols or in the media about the nature of the health insurance industry and whether it makes any sense to have one.

The health insurance industry is, of course, a protection racket. Thanks to the trumpeted ‘health care reform’ about to be adopted, the government has turned it into an extortion operation.

An estimated 50 million Americans without access to health insurance, most of them unable to afford it. The government’s answer is to require them to buy insurance.

I don’t have any answers. I have some hope, however.

My hope is based on two things. One is the internet.

It is frequently complained of that we can’t rely on the information flying through cyberspace. It is ‘unreliable’. I am happy about this. When people can no longer trust what they read and hear, they are presented with the chance to use their noodles for something beyond keeping their ears apart. Whether we do so, and then act on what we learn, or slip deeper into intellectual coma, that’s yet to be decided. But there’s a chance, and that leads me to the second thing:

There’s a new generation out here which is in many ways smarter and hipper than any which has preceded it. Despite the never-ending bombardment of junk, a lot of kids have evolved ways of filtering which facilitate rather than impede understanding. I know some of them and they are not happy about what they’re seeing. That makes them the direct lineal descendents of another generation which also didn’t buy –– for a time, at least –– the lies peddled by a corrupt cultural structure.

I offer this small fragment of optimism in the face of the deep disappointment I and many others already feel about Barack Obama. I don’t need to recite the litany of Bush policies continued and even expanded under the new President. Change, my ass.

Yet, there are always people. You know, people. Real people. You, me, our friends and families, the folks we know or run across in the world. Yes, there are some shits, no question. There’s a guy at WestAmerica Bank in Marin County, USA, for example, who is truly a flaming asshole. But most people I know are quite different: they are generally honest, caring, honorable folks. They try to do the right thing, they try to learn, help one another, appreciate life, even love. That’s pretty cool.

Readers of this blog have gotten a break recently because my computer and its keyboard got watered, and I haven’t been able to write anything without unrequisitioned letters popping up in the text, a lot of ‘a’s and ‘q’s for some reason. I tried a couple of cures but they did not work. So I brought the thing in to the local mac store –– not the big Apple thing at the mall but the guys in a storefront in town –– and resigned myself to bad news.

I can’t afford a new mac; I can’t afford not to have one. The guy at the mac place at first said it’d be three days, diagnostic tests, he couldn’t tell. Then he softened a little, checking the thing out. Not enough memory left for yesterday’s box score. He advised replacing the original G4 chip with a one gig. Suddenly, the text flew from the keyboard.

Turned out the mac guy had a keyboard he could scavenge from another machine. He cleaned it, popped it in, no charge.

No charge. No charge for a customer who clearly didn’t have a clue, was somewhat desperate, and willing to pay whatever the going rate just to get this thing back and operable. No charge (except for the memory) and no waiting three days.

Couple of weeks ago, a guy in San Francisco thought about how people are going hungry more these days and how that bothered him. He decided to feed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to those who could really use them. And he put the notion on facebook. Now there are groups of people not only in San Francisco but in Austin, Texas, and on the east coast, and in London doing the same thing.

Obama wasn’t the dream. The dream was the dream, and it still is. It’s the same dream a lot of us have carried for a long time, keeping that flame lit through some hard fucking times, and it doesn’t belong to Obama, it belongs to me. Anyway, Obama himself doesn’t want it. Remember what he said? We are the people we’ve been waiting for. We. You and me. The faces in the mirrors. Us.

We can argue, and I can write these vitriolic screeds on my blog to air-out my brain and release a little pent-up anger, but whatever the ‘real’ state of things, bankers or no bankers, insurance whores or no members of congress, it’s always been up to us.

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Dear Barack

2009-09-11T09:03:12+02:00

Dear Barack:

I feel as though I can call you Barack since we’ve been associated on a great, successful political campaign, and together we found our way through cynicism, doubt, racism, and apathy. I should add that for me, not having my candidate shot was an unexpected bonus.

I’m writing to you because I think you may be overlooking something in the trouble you’ve run into trying to arrange health care for the forty-five million who can’t presently afford it.

Of course, the legislation you are apparently willing to sign these days actually won’t do much to help the poor; in fact, by requiring that everybody buy insurance from the corporate thugs who are already peddling it, it mostly imposes more burdens on those least able to support themselves right now.

I mean no disrespect, Mister President, but what the fuck happened here?

I do believe that you’re a nice guy. I think you’re really smart. Those are welcome qualities in a chief executive, and we haven’t had the two in one President since Jimmy Carter, and look what they did to him.

Smart isn’t enough. Check the histories of recent U.S. Presidents. Never mind that Lincoln obsession thing Doris Kearns Goodwin cooked-up and you bought into. This isn’t 1860 and you’re not Abe. Abe came to Washington before the bankers owned everything and before a massive secret police apparatus , as these things inevitably will, turned on its creator. Also, Abe did not have good bone structure.

Look at FDR and Truman, Ike, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon... those guys. It’s instructive.

Which of those guys changed the country and how did they do it? FDR had a huge majority and a country willing to be led; he also had some friends who knew where the bodies were buried. Still, FDR only managed to survive because General Smedley Butler refused to join in the conspiracy to depose him.

The President who stands out is, of course, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Lyndon was a son of a bitch, it’s true. That helped some. He also had some decent Senators, including a majority leader who didn’t need GPS to find his own ass. There were honorable people on both sides of the aisle in both houses, something which I suppose seems like a dream to those too young to remember.

Nonetheless, in order to get Medicare passed, and the Voting Rights Bill, and Head Start and the other ambitious ‘Great Society’ programs, Lyndon was known to knock heads together. The Burton brothers, one of whom was the Democratic House whip at the time, tell the story of the President kicking the Speaker of the House in the shins –– literally –– to make his point, and he was not above political blackmail and naked threats about people’s careers, not to mention whatever treasures he got out of the FBI wiretaps Edgar Hoover shared with him.

Johnson was a bastard. But he got the thing done. Other things he may have engaged in, including the worst felonies one can commit, are not the point here. It is not necessary to have anybody killed. But it’s necessary on the national stage to run people over if you have to.

Stop playing nice, Barack. It was a smart approach to the ‘black guy running for President’ thing. It nearly disarmed half the racists. But this is no longer a campaign thing; it is a President thing. It’s running the country, not running for office. And if you really want to work some change we can believe in, you will have to start kicking some ass.

You can’t make a deal with the insurance corporations. They are half of the problem. It’s about money. They will do anything not to have to lose any of it. They’ve paid off most of Congress and nearly all of the mainstream media, and they’ve stirred-up the most shameless horseshit since the red-baiting of the 1950s.

If you want to change this rotten system, then go after them. Expose the liars. Tell those Senators like Baucus and Nelson to back universal care or expect the party to starve them for re-election cash. That ought to get their attention, the weasels. You don’t need the photos and the hooker affidavits. Just mention their liquor store bills and their tax returns.

Dirty politics? It’s called hardball. Nothing of substance has ever been enacted in Washington, D.C., without it. Lots of damage has been done in its absence, c.f. James Earl Carter, previously mentioned.

As for the insurance hustlers, who says that medical care has to be solely a private endeavor? If they want to operate in competition, let them. Or quit. We won’t miss them.

You’re not Abe Lincoln, my friend. You’re not John Quincy Adams or JFK. No, you’re not LBJ, thank God. You’re the President. You’ve got a little over three years left on a first term. You have a majority in both houses and you won election by landslide.

So, stop flirting and get serious. If you lose, we all lose, and we can’t afford to.

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This Cannot End Well

2009-09-10T06:13:09+02:00

Look. We’re on the side of warlords, drug dealers, and crazies in Afghanistan. Explain to me again how it’s not like Viet Nam in 1964. We’re running airstrikes against civilians pretty much every day, and the only dispute which reaches the media is the finger-pointing over ‘mistakes’ when the bodies really start piling up.

On Friday, September 4th, U.S. fighter jets attacked about 120 villagers who had gathered to siphon petrol from a couple of stranded tanker trucks the Taliban had stolen in the northern province of Kunduz. More than seventy were killed. The dead were not “enemy combatants”, “militants”, “insurgents”, or any of the other charged euphemisms the Fatherland media uses to deflect a victim’s humanity. They were just ordinary people caught in a war zone.

To the top U.S. (and NATO) commander, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, this was a public relations problem. Smith blamed German troops for letting too many hours pass before visiting the bombing strike. He said that it was important to “hold the ground” after a strike and “determine what happened before the enemy comes out with its own version of events,” according to an AP article out of Kabul.

I’ve got my own version of events, and I haven’t even seen the carnage on YouTube yet.

Meanwhile, the Afghani government we’re backing, led by Hamid Karzai, is in the process of blatantly stealing the presidential election. The votes have not yet all been counted, we’ve got about 80%, according to press accounts, and Karzai “leads” with 49% to his nearest rival’s 32%.

I say stealing because, well, here’s part of the New York Times story:

“Afghan election workers loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted yet still registered hundreds of thousands of ballots toward the president’s re-election, according to senior western and Afghan officials here.” Wow, sounds worse than Ohio.

“The fake polling centers, as many as 800 in all, existed only on paper, said a senior western diplomat on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the election results. But local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Karzai in the election last month came from each of these places. ...Besides creating the fake sites, Karzai supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Karzai, the officials said.”

In some provinces, again according to anonymous Western sources, the number of ballots reported in favor of Karzai exceeded the number of people who actually voted by a factor of 10. ‘We are talking about orders of magnitude,’ the senior Western diplomat said.”

President Obama has deployed more than 68,000 more troops to Afghanistan, probably on advice from Gates and the generals. Evidently, that will not be enough.

As Lyndon Johnson escalated in Viet Nam, he raised the American troop presence from 15,500 to over half a million. Each new deployment was announced with promises that thye sacrifices were ‘worth it’ and that ‘victory’ was near. There were coups and counter-coups, and there were ‘mistakes’ and atrocities. And in the end, the United States wasted billions of dollars for nothing, lost fifty-five thousand young soldiers for nothing, killed a million or more Vietnamese for nothing, poisoned the landscape, wrecked families and ecosystems, all for nothing.

Well, not quite for nothing. The U.S. paid for construction of enormous air and coastal facilities, dredging Cam Ranh Bay. Brown and Root of Houston, the lineal precursor to Halliburton, made a great deal of money. U.S. weapons manufacturers got richer. The CIA established a source of untraceable funds through the heroin trade, much of it processed at a converted Pepsi-Cola plant in Vientiene, Laos, and flown on Air America planes.

Last year, despite the international financial meltdown, the U.S. and U.S.-based corporations sold a record amount of weaponry to the rest of the world, and the American ‘share’ of the market is now about 70%. In second place? Italy at about 5%. We are unquestionably the greatest producers and users of weapons of mass destruction in world history.

The U.S. is at war right now against Afghanistan and Pakistan –– what else would you call it when thousands of innocents are being killed by our bombs? –– but we have armed forces stationed in one hundred seventy-seven countries.

177 countries. I didn’t know there were that many.

Ask yourself what for.

To fight ‘terrorism’?

As a result of the events of September 11, 2001, the American people gave the government and its security apparatus authority to ignore the United States Constitution. In its wake came the Orwellian “Patriot Act”, adopted by Congress without even reading it. The President has the power now to arrest you and hold you indefinitely without a lawyer and without charges being brought against you. The spy agencies have the power to intercept your mail, your phone calls, and your e-mail, and you have no legal recourse.

The Obama presidency has continued the Bush policies on these deeply dangerous programs and has maintained in federal court that it need not disclose whether groups or persons have been illegally wiretapped. Guantanamo is still open. The American Red Cross estimates that 75% of the people still held prisoner are innocent of any crime.

Afghanistan’s civil war has complex and tangled roots. There are no ‘good guys’ here. Once we backed and helped arm the Taliban. Now we back and arm the warlords and watch the Karzai regime blatantly steal an election. This cannot end well.

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Living With The Animals

2009-09-07T01:58:53+02:00

The college football season has begun. I know this because a player for Oregon has been thrown off his team for cold-cocking a player from, I think, Boise State following the latter’s narrow victory in the opener.

I’ve seen the video, players from both teams milling around, some with helmets off. The Boise State player, one Byron Hout, grabbed the Oregon player, star running back LeGarrette Blount, and appeared to follow a few brief remarks with a smirk just before Bount knocked him on his ass. It was a really terrific punch, a right cross, I think it was. Boom!

According to the AP story, it happened like this:

“Celebrating the victory on the Broncos’ trademark blue turf, Hout yelled in Blount’s face and tapped him on the shoulder pad. Before Boise State coach Chris Petersen could pull Hout away, Blount landed a right to Hout’s jaw, knocking him to his knees.”

Perhaps Hout, a defensive end, was reminding Blount that Boise had held him to minus-five yards on eight carries, rubbing it in a little. Perhaps Blount, his pride wounded and now having to endure some smart-ass lines from that burr-head cracker, just snapped. Maybe it was playing on blue (!!!) turf. It adds up.

Blount will never play for Oregon, or probably anyone, again. Hout will get a good “talking-to”. Violence is not acceptable from football players once the whistle blows. Before that, take the fucker’s head right off, you get featured on one of those “Play of the week” videos.

Look, it’s the nature of the endeavor. High-stakes football, as in war, requires a serious course of desensitization. Most people do not easily jump at the chance to decaptitate someone; if they’re going to do the program any good, that fussiness has to be excized. In boot camps and training camps, the mental object is the same: bring the recruit past the point where he or she has any reluctance to inflict pain, injury, and even, in the military, death.

Certainly we all know this. We’ve got a highly-militarized society, and that came about because we’ve been sold on the regrettable necessity for official violence. Therefore, when a 72-year-old motorist in Florida is hit with 20,000 volt taser shocks because she objected, verbally, to a traffic stop, we shake our heads but we move on.

Move on. Nothing to look at here.

Right now one of the major under-reported scandals involves the staggering suicide rate among Iraqi war veterans; an even bigger scandal: returning vets who kill others, including their own spouses or families.

The reason that nobody wants to talk about it is that the implications are evident. Teach millions of young people to objectify and assault, and in the case of the military, to kill, and you’ve got to figure some of them will keep right on going.

Violence may be a tactic for military commanders, politicians, and football coaches, but it’s not something human beings can turn on and off like an electrical switch. Therefore, recruits have to be brainwashed. It is necessary that this be so; you cannot run an army if your troops hesitate in combat situations.

Military psy-ops have long realized that most people have ‘triggers’ which can elicit violence, and various programs employing psychological testing have been used to locate ‘special’ people who are both unusually agreeable to inflicting pain and unusually susceptible to modes of programming.

The disclosure of some of the tortures engaged in by American forces in the fake “war on terror” was accompanied by the careful explanation that these were the acts of rogue personnel. Indeed, soldiers have been prosecuted. Yet the programs which make torture possible are intentionally devised by military and political planners, and the administration of torture is a conscious policy.

It’s a long way from a football program at a major university to Guantanamo and the other hellholes America now operates around the world, yet there is a formulative link.

What we have elevated as important in the U.S., what has come to represent ‘success’, has necessarily created a culture of violence and predation. We are seeing its effects in every area of our lives, from the great bank heist to drug wars in our streets. We are seeing it in hate radio and in staged or incited incidents at supposed town hall meetings on health care.

LeGarrette Blount is one guy, a black running back from Mississippi playing at Oregon, who snapped, not without some provocation. But these days most of the nails are not being pounded down.

It is passing curious that quite recently another football sucker punch, one that sent the victim to the hospital, has been swept under the carpet by mutual consent among the perpetrator, the victim, the police, the city powers-that-be in Oakland, and for that matter the state authorities. The head coach of the Raiders, white, incidentally, caved-in the face of an assistant coach; witnesses told about it. But nobody’s talking now. It’s an “internal” matter.

If you’re important, it’s an internal matter. Criminal outfits such as Bear Stearns handle their own problems, no need for the government to bother. If you did what Citibank executives did, you’d be in prison.

The culture of violence never helps the poor. It never helps anybody on the lower end of the scale because violence is used most effectively by those with the wherewithal to command it and the juice to get away with it. That ain’t you. It’s Monsanto and Chevron, and Boeing, and whoever hires Blackwater Security, which has changed its name to “xe”, presumably because the old name was too closely associated with murder.

The culture of violence doesn’t help most people. It’s pervasive now because it has paid off so far. We’ve let it happen, maybe even invited it. We are now inured ourselves to the infliction of pain, boot camp recruits by proxy. Cops taser an old woman in her car, we notice but are moved only for an instant. The old woman, we didn’t know her. What’s on television tonight?

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Mistakes Have Been Made

2009-09-04T08:12:47+02:00

Like you, probably, I’ve got this enormous email address book. Not like you, probably, I have developed the habit of passing on to those I regard as like-minded others various bits and pieces of internet stuff –– articles, cartoons, references.

The lucky recipients are mostly close friends and political types. I don’t send to clients. My clients already have enough to worry about.

Every once in a while I strike a nerve. Not the good kind. The kind where someone goes batshit. This I truly regret but, as Presidents like to say, “mistakes have been made.”

Like you, probably, I have opinions. Not like you, probably, I am impelled by whatever curse is attached to it to express these opinions as forcefully as I can manage. Florid imagery, for example: not really necessary. But one should have fun with words. All children enjoy words until they’re told to shut up. I was never told. Blame my folks.

So I write this blog, and even call it that now, though the practice is entitled to more elegance, or at least should strive toward it. I write about things that interest me. Yippee! You can drop your subscription but you can’t fire me. You can yawn and keep silent. You can post comments (but I can erase them if I want to, just like The New York Fugging Times).

But a lot of stuff doesn’t make it to the blog. Stories in the net about pot studies, or U.S. policies and practices in Afghanistan, or off-the-wall curiosities in fringe physics, these get passed on to relatively small numbers of friends and acquaintances via email.

Once in a while, someone fires back.

Yesterday, I distributed to a handful of lucky readers the latest cartoon by Tom Tomorrow, which I get to see at Salon.com. My opinion of Mr. Tomorrow in general is that someday he ought to receive a presidential freedom medal, or whatever that thing is that they gave Frank Sinatra.

Among the traits I value in Mr. Tomorrow is this: he does not blink.

Yesterday, a non-blinking Tomorrow evicerated the Obama administration’s dismissal of any inquiry into war crimes (ours), which happen to include at least a hundred captives who appear to have been murdered while in custody (International Red Cross), and he indicated his opinion that we endorse what we permit and that in failing to hold responsible the monsters who did these things we become monsters ourselves.

Then he channeled the late Bill Hicks.

Bill Hicks, for the uninitiated, died young, in 1993, but while he was dangerous while he lasted. Hicks, like Tomorrow, was not shy about hellish truths, especially when people didn’t want to hear them. He got plenty of abuse. “You’re goin’ to Hell, boy!” the crowd shouted in Tulsa. “I’m already in Oklahoma,” he said. “I thought you were going to tell me my return ticket was cancelled.”

Hicks talked about the sort of things most of us would prefer to ignore, then followed it with: “Go back to bed, America. Everything is under control. Here’s a hundred episodes of ‘American Gladiator’...”

We are in love with our distractions. They protect us from having to confront what’s going on in our country. Besides, as John Kaye observed forty years ago:

“there’s nothing you and I can do, you and I are only two; what’s right or wrong it’s hard to say, forget about it for today, just stick our heads into the sand, pretend that all is grand, and hope that everything turns out okay...”

So I forwarded the Tomorrow cartoon and got this by reply mail:

“...I just don't know what message you are trying to send with this crap. I know you always have to buck the system . . . is that just any system? You know what . . . . maybe I'm just too "trying to make my life work while at the same time trying to help where I can and realizing that I'm not fucking god!.”

Interesting. This particular friend is one of the best, most generous people I’ve ever known, someone who thinks of others and acts on it. But the letter’s tone was of anger. The writer was taking this very personally. But why?

If we have reached a level of consciousness beyond that of, say, the ordinary garden slug, we are aware that our lives are governed to an incomfortable extent by systems –– social systems, political systems, economic systems, and so forth.

It should be evident that the system in America is barely hanging on. It’s fucked-up even more than usual. Some folks, what the Greeks would have called ‘citizens’, believe that it is an obligation of free people to something about it, especially when they’ve been given the favors of a good life. I buck the system: that’s my job.

We all feel limitations. We all at some point shuffle off this mortal coil, which is about as limiting as you can get.

Right now in America there are widening gaps –– between what we see in the streets and what we’re told, and between what we’re told and what we sense is the truth. America’s afraid of the mirrors these days.

On a deep level, we’ve reached a moment of disillusionment even “American Idol” can’t quite fix. A society in decline contains numerous signposts, and these are visible, and we don’t know what to do about it.

The worst is the helpless ambivalence of the Obama administration in the face of brute force.

We were counting on his election, counting on it as though it was the rescue ship come for the survivors of the past forty years.

Watching Obama now, and what is being done to him by forces beyond his control, is a painful exercise. He has taken what he thought would be the likeliest path to fixing the disaster of health care in America, and he’s going to lose. The only real chance for actual reform, universal, single-payer care, was abandoned at the start; what remained, weak though it was, is being picked apart by the whores in Congress on instructions from their corporate sponsors. The media is useless, as usual.

Health care is the least of his problems. The United States is now tied down in a war we cannot ever ‘win’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where troop levels are being steadily increased, casualties are rising, and the resemblance to Viet Nam in the 1960s and 1970s is striking.

The government is still spying on everybody, without warrants, in flagrant dismissal of the Bill of Rights, and arguing in court that illegal government behavior cannot be prosecuted or tried in a civil case because the documents which would prove the case are confidential and we don’t get to see them for reasons of ‘national security’.

The money’s all gone. It was illusory anyhow, but the American people have no idea what the Federal Reserve System –– the ‘Fed’ –– does, nor how it is run and by whom. Most people think the Fed is part of the government, answerable to Congress. The Fed is of course a private bank. The Bank, as it were. It’s really monetary policy determined by the members, which are the world’s largest banks, in secret.

We have witnessed, in broad daylight, the biggest crooks in the country loot the public treasury, then construct a ‘bailout’ which would further enrich them and permit consolidation, i.e. the big banks eating the smaller ones. The bailout money, the largest expenditure of public funds in history, is not accounted for; there is no audit trail. The money was appropriated without oversight on its use.

We’re living with a big case of cognitive dissonance. We know Obama’s a good man. We know it’s too big for him. It’s too big for anybody. As a disappointment, that’s pretty real. We could hose ourselves during the Bush years with the fantasy that it was George and Dick and those neo-Nazis in disguise who were the problem. Get somebody decent in the White House and it would all change.

It was a fantasy, people. Electing Barack Obama was the one thing, probably, which could at least slow the momentum of this hell-bent rush to totalitarianism, but it doesn’t seem to be working out so far. Perhaps that accounts for my appreciation of critics such as Tom Tomorrow, who get past the willful ignorance of America’s inhabitants if only through cartoons.

Obama said that we are the people we’ve been waiting for. If that’s true, we have to insist that our government face the truth about itself, and that’s not going to happen if we’re not able to do the same.

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Your Call Is Very Important To Us...

2009-08-29T01:49:17+02:00

Your call is very important to us. Please hang yourself with this line and we’ll cut your body down as soon as weather permits.

You know, there’s an aspect of the national idiocy surrounding ‘health care’ which the left ought to take a hard look at. We can dismiss the rantings of the ideologues and their “socialism” rhetoric, and the nauseating million-dollar television commercials which urge us to all ‘work together’ while accomplishing nothing. But there’s something else, and it’s a matter which will plague any attempt by Obama or any future administration, if there is a future administration, to confront corporate power in America.

A lot of Americans just plain don’t trust the government to run anything. We believe that even though the ‘private sector’ is out to rob us, it does so efficiently. It may toss our concerns down the rathole, but it still has something to sell. The feds, on the other hand, are not only useless but completely unreachable.

Your call is, of course, of no importance to anyone, public or private, unless you can back it up with military might or cold cash.

I’ve been looking for my mail for five days now. I know it’s out there somewhere because people have sent things to me in it, including two checks from an unsurance company in Pennsylvania which my clients are counting on to pay their bills. For five days, my business office has gotten no mail; this is not possible in the ordinary scheme of things. I get junk every day. You know what I mean.

But for five days it is at zero. Yesterday, I telephoned the U.S. Postal Service. These are people ready and able to service you on a moment’s notice, often when you don’t even request it. The fellow I spoke with explained that the route carrier was gone for the day, his supervisor was gone for the day, and the matter would be checked out on the morrow.

Comes the morrow and guess what?

No mail. No checking out. The carrier’s gone again. The supervisor’s gone again. The man I spoke with suggested that I call again on Saturday morning. Evidently, screw-ups are a fact of life at the Postal Service and my dilemma is simply another source of amusement for bored or intoxicated employees.

By the way, forget the ‘rain or sleet’ thing, it’s not even overcast. It’s a bright, sunny day in paradise. My office building has an elevator.

There is deep-seated antipathy in America for anything which looks as though it might be run like the Post Office, or the FBI, or the Department of Education. It’s not the result of right-wing propaganda, though there’s plenty of that as well. It’s the result of life experiences. We all know you can’t count on the government to deliver anything, and we know that if we inquire or complain we will be shipped instantly, as my old friend Iain would say, to the back-ass end of nowhere.

See, nobody’s really accountable. That’s the deep-seated poison that infects the culture, the society, the economy, and the body politic. We instinctively do not want to cede power over anything to these people because they have removed themselves from our reach. It is, in fact, Big Brother. We’re already there.

Personally, I would turn over the nation’s health care delivery system to amazon.com, but not to Harry Reid, because amazon.com gives a damn whether the package arrives.

The Obama health care ‘proposal’ or ‘package’ or whatever noxious expression is being used these days for that one-legged chicken being dragged through the public forums of the nation, is doomed, and it was doomed from the beginning. Any serious attempt to deal with health care would start with dismantling the insurance racket, and that is not going to happen so long as most members of both parties get paid off, which they are right now.

A while back, the Democratic Party, being corrupt and cannibalistic, had no idea how to handle “social issues”; it promptly lost several elections. Unless it figures out how to handle the “government is useless” issue, it will go under again, and be dumbfounded as to why.

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If You Can't Laugh...

2009-08-27T08:11:36+02:00

It was a fellow named Hugh Romney who said, “if you can’t laugh, it’s just not funny.” Or something like that.

Mr. Romney, who is known as Hugh to maybe a dozen friends and as Wavy Gravy to maybe forty million others, knows whereof he speaks. I’m trying to keep these words alive in my mind. As another hero of mine, Robert Mitchum, hopped-up and pissed-off in the remake of “The Big Sleep” says, “I’m in a rare mood tonight.”

Got a friend who’s a lawyer, thoroughly decent guy, really, really good lawyer, who just found out that a former client who ripped him off a couple of years ago has filed a suit against him for malpractice. My friend did a great job. He doesn’t really have to worry about the suit for several reasons, including that he cannot lose.

But if you’ve ever been sued, not to mention pissed on by a (former) client, then you know what it feels like. It’s the sort of experience which makes you sick to your stomach. Being right doesn’t matter.

Got to laugh, as Wavy says. Otherwise, you’re down at the corner bar with a hundred bucks in cash, trying to recruit three guys you don’t know to pay somebody a visit. Not a good idea on so many levels.

Have you noticed that people are acting even crazier than usual these days? I have.

Guy was arrested off a Southwest plane bound for St. Louis last week when he groped a fellow passenger whom he did not know, exposed himself, and finally punched her in the face. The astounding part of this story is that after he did all of that, flight personnel simply moved him to another seat.

Really. Did they think he was a Republican governor?

The malefactor, one Darius Chappill, 21, was finally subdued and arrested after he began shouting incoherencies, according to the FBI report, and disrobing. His charm was captured, partly en flagrante, on a passenger’s phone camera. Darius is a burly fellow; in the photo he does not look happy.

The moral of the story: in America, if you put your hands on a stranger’s thigh, try to grope her, then punch her in the face, you will be offered alternative accomodations. If you take your clothes off it’s a federal offense.

The story reminded me of another one from maybe ten or twelve years back, which was the subject of the funniest high school exam ever not given, at least I don’t think it was given because the teacher would’ve otherwise been exiled to Kenosha. It, too, involved behavior aboard an aircraft. The exam consisted of numerous multiple-choice questions and was entitled a “Values clarification,” and centered on the activities of one Captain Busboom who urinated upon a sleeping passenger.

If I could find the damned thing I’d print it here because it always deserved much wider circulation, and it’s somewhere here in my workroom, but I’m too tuckered out right now to find it and you’d excuse me if you saw this place.

Anyhow, there are people in each of these airplane tales to whom the incidents were not at all hilarious. But I don’t know them, and I may laugh without penalty. The more recent one, with the punching, is not too funny, but the times are like that. Fifteen years ago, probably Darius would’ve been content to simply pee on his victim.

Caught the last twenty minutes of “Wonder Boys” on television, that amazing film, and the music over the credits, Dylan’s “Things Have Changed”, which is one bitter, cynical song with lines such as, “Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose; any minute now I’m expecting all Hell to break loose...”

If you can’t laugh...

Come on, you know the world’s upside down.

I’m feeling defensive, maybe. Ted Kennedy’s dead and since there is internet access available now to anyone, including those who are otherwise indistinguishable from tree stumps or rabid badgers, I’m expecting the worst. There’s also the continuing saga of Barack Obama confusing history with myth about Abe Lincoln and ‘compromising’ himself out of power.

And there are the various popular retrospectives, too. Forty years since Woodstock, the stunning human success it exemplified now fed back to us in sanitized, disfigured forms, brought to us by Pepsi, with the aforementioned Dylan’s song, “Forever Young”, reminding us that youth is about commerce.

No, I’m not going to see the Ang Lee movie, no matter what it is.

But if you can’t laugh...

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A Small Case Of The Big Lie

2009-08-22T09:08:21+02:00

It’s a small case, at least in the great scheme of things, but it’s a great example of the Big Lie. I’ve been thinking about it because it’s ‘Back-To-School’ time, with lots of sales of the exciting crap, new and old, with which every child is supposed to be armed before venturing to educational glory. Except for the financial strain some of this nonsense puts on plenty of ordinary families, the mania is nearly harmless.

The Big Lie, as it’s generally understood, comes out of Orwell by way of Adolf Hitler, whose propaganda minister frankly explained that people could be brainwashed en masse simply by repeating a lie. The bigger the lie, Joseph Goebbels said, the more it would be believed.

I periodically rant on this blog about various mechanisms used by people to control public policy, including political assassination and the destabilization of various governments around the world, not exluding our own. Because these manipulations and shootings occur as manifestations of agreements among these people, they are, by textbook, conspiracies.

It is but one hilarious aspect of the Big Lie in America that those who raise troubling questions or point to inconvenient facts are dismissed across the mainstream media as “conspiracy theorists” –– the meaning of which is not in the term but in the ridicule it’s meant to incite. The public is thus predisposed to ignore these things. The murder of an American president, to cite one example, is popularly regarded as equal in significance –– and as mysterious and unknowable –– as such matters as the existence of space aliens or whether George Bush the younger is really Nancy Reagan’s love child.

Talk about anything of real import and you will be dismissed as a nutcase. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin has not been incarcerated.

As Vonnegut might have said, since he said it all the time, and so it goes...

School, though, specifically public schools in the U.S., they’re good or bad, we like ‘em or we don’t. Teachers are underpaid, or not. Teachers unions are positive or negative, depending. Students go to classes and, after a while, they get pieces of paper which permit them to go on to the next school, and eventually they turn into accountants or worse.

But the failures of the school system, whatever they may be and however vague our own interest in or knowledge of particulars, hey, it’s hard to get it right. Our educators, the ones who emerge from graduate programs where any remaining sense of humanity has been leeched from them, are well-meaning, fine people who know what they’re talking about so that we don’t have to. Right?

Well, no, no, and no. Not fine, not well-meaning, and know what they’re talking about like Sarah Palin understands health care. You’ve got to admit, it takes real genius to help lead a populist movement which seeks to shaft the people.

If you think educators are better at running the school system in America than Palin would be running Health and Human Services, you are wrong. It’s that fucking bad.

When it comes to education, we seem to have been enveloped in a weird, gossamer fantasy; the rot could be seeping right up through the floorboards and we think it’s roses. I’m not sure what it is, this fantasy, maybe we think educators are intelligent and though we don’t like or trust intelligence we are ready as hell to turn over the structural mechanism to it because we’re too busy doing important things ourselves.

Public schools in America are in serious, serious trouble. More accurately, the students are in trouble.

Once upon a time, it was generally accepted among educators that the best schooling was that which invited inquiry, which involved students in the rather significant work of learning to think critically. Public education in the U.S. exploded in the aftermath of World War II. Schools were built and teachers recruited, and the baby boom generation was on the way. There is near-universal agreement that the public schools reached their peak in the early 1960s. America was in a race to the moon by this time, and there was great excitement about careers in science and mathematics.

The new teachers and even some new administrators just went hog-wild wherever they could get away with it, and there was money for the arts, lots of money, and courses in logic or philosophy. High school students read Plato and Aristotle, and talked about it.

There was also widespread agreement among educators, and in the society at large, that students, especially high school students, needed a balance between academia and the other parts of their lives. Adolescents were permitted to be adolescents; they were afforded time and space to develop socially and emotionally as well as academically.

There was a recognition that Learning involved an array of pursuits. Schools were expected to provide intellectual resources. Students were expected to ask questions, try things out, make mistakes. It was, in retrospect, a golden age. And, no, I am not forgetting the fact that during this time many schools and districts in the country had fewer financial resources than others, that there was widespread segregation, de facto if not de jure, and that girls did not enjoy comparable athletic or academic opportunities to those available to boys.

So if you want to talk about increased equality of opportunity, fine, but that’s another conversation. Because while various mechanisms have been used to broaden and democratize opportunity, the opportunity to which they apply has been evicerated. In other words, now everybody gets a slice of pie, the only problem being that most of the pie has been eaten by others and what remains is dried-out and probably poisoned.

There is today an enormous difference between the quality of instruction theoretically available from brilliant and dedicated teachers and the quality of instruction finally delivered to students by the system and its ruling assumptions. In these differences lies the key to seeing what’s wrong and why.

Before we begin that scary exercise, consider this: should not the quality of our public education be at least roughly equivalent to the quality of the teachers we’ve got? One can use the best ingredients and still turn out a meal which is somewhere between inedible and fatal if actually ingested. To any sane person, this would indicate that the cook got the recipe wrong. But in America’s educational kitchen, the response is quite different: kick out some ingredients, try a few other brands, use ever-more-precise measuring devices, and reassure the vaguely-uneasy diners that the next meal will be just terrific.

In the last stage of the disintegration of the industrial age, we are seeing the limits to which that form of ordering our universe can bring us. We have become the cultural manifestation of that expression about the person who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. We can measure the shit out of any detail, and thus have come to uncritically accept the ludicrous notion that only that which can be measured is of value.

You know what can’t be measured? Learning. Know what can be measured? How many factoids can dance on a pinhead.

Once this became the central focus –– for political reasons as much as for any other, but that’s the subject of a different writing –– it was off to the races. Schools were turned into testing factories, education reduced to a common denominator devoid of inquiry, thought, passion, curiosity, and intellectual engagement.

In order to pull off something this damaging, a Big Lie was essential. After all, when you’ve got waves of high school graduates who can’t seem to manage elementary logic nor locate Afghanistan on a map, people begin to notice. Thus, in the 1980s, by the time the failures manifested in ways too obvious to ignore, the politicians and educators had to come up with something that looked good.

In California, with our astounding escalation in encarceration –– America jails a higher proportion of its citizens than any other nation in the world, with a wildly disproportionate percentage being black and latino, nearly all of them poor –– prison construction gobbled up the spare cash not already siphoned-off by other schemes, the educational system wasn’t going to get real money. But the public was clamoring, newspapers were editorializing, realtors were getting restless, and something had to be done.

Into the breach rode the testing companies, a sort of Readers Digest consortium of fake experts and second-level intellects. What they promised, and subsequently delivered, was a cheap mechanism for calming down the voters. Thus came the era of unending standardized tests, the claim being that with these tests the educators could fix whatever was broken (and weed-out teachers whose students could not raise their scores).

It is a recipe for failure to demand increased “productivity” of people to whom you do not allocate increased resources.

What ensued was predictable. Pressures for academic numbers forced the perversion of the schools’ curricula; fewer and more expensive openings for college admissions drove high school students toward depression and suicidal ideation; teachers had less time to devote to inquiry because the system required memorization of what testing companies declared to be important ‘facts’; students routinely found themselves with three and four hours of homework every night, and the simultaneous demand that they bulk-up their resumes with athletics and/or community service.

Because college admissions had become much harder, a fifteen-year-old sophomore finds herself taking ‘advanced placement’ courses in order to score a grade point average higher than 4.0. I know what I’m talking about. I met more than a hundred of these kids while serving my sentence on the local high school board.

While the testing mania continues to serve as a smokescreen for the utter vacancy of the system, it causes enormous damage to the adolescents –– and, now, pre-adolescents, because the pressures have followed the obvious downward spiral and now infect elementary schools everywhere –– it claims to care for.

California administers a week of testing in the spring called STAR. School ratings are published and comparisons made with previous years, and for a while, until the cash ran out, there were monetary awards to spur-on the troops. STAR is comprised of norm-referenced tests, which is to say they record outcomes by comparison. This means that for every school whose numbers ‘improve’ there is another whose numbers ‘get worse’. It is not necessary to be Einstein to figure out why this renders the entire enterprise useless.

And then there is the nature of the testing itself. We are concerned not just with the decisions about which facts are important and which aren’t or, as it actually is, the inclusion or exclusion of what is worth knowing. That alone is a crime against learning. But we had better acknowledge that any test, regardless of who wrote it, cannot help but contain the cultural perspectives of its creators.

Check out this recent Chronicle headline: “Gaps in test scores remain wide”. Guess what? Hispanics and African Americans have not managed to “close the gap” in testing with their white fellow students. The Chronicle, in its unconscious idiocy, captioned the scores with the term “Achievement gap”.

Yup, those blacks and latinos just ain’t as smart as us crackers. Unless it turns out that the test-makers, being us crackers, albeit intellectual crackers, are of the same variety as the fresh-faced boys and girls in white suburbia high.

Oh, the wailing and rending of the garments among educators.

And now we have something else to hammer the kids with: the exit exam. In California, it is not sufficient to have passed your classes for four years in a public high school. You must also now pass a grand final exam, dreamed up by educrats and other moral failures, and if you don’t you will be denied a high school diploma.

Predictably, there is a steady stream of kids who don’t pass and therefore are denied graduation with their peers. Add to this the growing number now who drop out before that. What do you have?

You have a guaranteed low-income work force for the nation’s corporations –– Starbucks thanks you, the Gap thanks you, McDonald’s thanks you –– and ready ‘volunteers’ for the all-volunteer army.

Consider for a moment the obvious: if you give high school students an ‘exit exam’ which they all pass, then the exam was too easy. Thus the exit exam is inherently calibrated to fail a given percentage of students, regardless of their grades, their records, or their true level of education.

By the way, bet you can guess who’s seated on California’s state Board of Education, the folks who dream up this great stuff... that’s right, Donald Fisher of the Gap. Just another liberal trying to help out the kids.

Do not look for help out of Washington. The complete collapse of “No Child Left Behind” hasn’t shaken bureaucratic and political support for its poisonous central tenets, and Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan of Chicago, is a proponent of standardized testing as the organizing foundation for educational policy.

The reason I keep talking about the Big Lie in this context is that, while we have sometimes selectively applied it to cover Bush policies, we as a society show zero awareness that it is routinely used by damned-near everybody. Because people are gullible, because the mass media has been totally prostitited, and because it works.

The machine rolls. That’s the point. It and its mechanisms are now ubiquitous in American life. Men and women in business suits sit around polished boardroom tables and discuss the ways and means of empire, and they act on them.

When the public’s business is run, directly or indirectly, by corporations, it is run by the wealthiest and most powerful. We are not to be entrusted with the truth about it.

Recently, it was disclosed that the CIA under George Bush had instituted a program in which Navy Seals and other special ops personnel worked as death squads, going into other nations with lists of people to be killed. Then came the disclosure, yesterday, that Blackwater assassins had been used as well, with plenty of killing farmed out to a private contractor.

The cover story for this latest astounding revelation contained the assurance that the program never actually got implemented; nobody got murdered, according to the government. However, the people who initially leaked the story of the death squads to famed journalist Seymour Hersh did so because they were “sickened” by the systematic executions of people they thought were probably innocent.

Does anyone reading this believe that with the election of Obama and the appointment of a new CIA director this program will be discontinued? No, it has simply been driven further underground.

The reason the education scandal is so bad is that we are systematically ratcheting-up the rat-in-the-maze pressures on our children. The results of this are predictable. And most of America remains dangerously ignorant.

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The Wrong Man

2009-08-16T06:18:18+02:00

On March 27th of this year, the Corte Madera branch of Bank of America, in Marin County, California, was robbed by a man who handed a stick-up note to a teller and made off with $22,000.00 in cash.

One week later, on April 2nd, police arrested 60-year-old Stuart Silman at his home and charged him with the crime. The evidence was pretty strong: Silman had been at the bank’s ATM shortly before the robbery, looked like the guy on the surveillance video, and was picked out of a photo lineup by bank employees. Also, according to the police, he wore similar clothing to that worn by the robber, drove a smiliar car, and was of similar age, weight, and height.

But Silman wasn’t the guy.

Silman is a lawyer. I recall him a little bit. I’ve had a case with him or against him at, or maybe he was part of a bench-bar settlement panel I appeared before. Or he was one of the counsel involved in a case where I was an arbitrator. In this business, and in this relatively small community, everybody runs across everybody sometime.

Well, as we know by now, lawyers are just like the rest of us, no better but, despite popular opinion, no worse. There are crooks with law degrees and some of them wind up in the U.S. Senate. It was inevitable that, in hard times, one of them would find himself desperate enough to go into a bank with the idea of a mass withdrawal.

But Silman wasn’t the guy.

And Silman’s been cleared of all charges not because he is innocent but because he is a professional with access to resources, the wherewithal to hire private investigators, the knowledge to go after exculpatory records, such as Golden Gate Bridge videos, and a nice slab of honest-to-God luck. Without these things, he would be trying to work out a plea bargain to keep from dying in prison.

And Silman wasn’t the guy. He just looked like him.

Fortunately, he was able to hire people to conduct the kind of investigation the cops should have conducted but didn’t. His cellphone records had him in San Francisco at the time of the robbery. The bridge camera got him going through.

It was while prosecutors were ‘reviewing’ the evidence he gave them that Silman got lucky. The bank was robbed again, on July 25th. On August 6th, police arrested a suspect. Presumably around this time someone –– perhaps a bank employee or two –– noticed that the August 6th robber was the same guy who’d run off with the cash four months earlier. A few days later, charges were dropped against Silman.

Interestingly, the police captain whose people had initially busted Silman, one Todd Cusimano, said there were “striking similarities” between Silman and the new suspect, one Scott Hall, but declined to release photos or say why Silman had been targeted in the first place. The eyewitness “identifications” had apparently been made on the basis of the photos. Even now, Cusimano insists that Silman “was a viable suspect until the evidence showed or proved otherwise...”

Let’s imagine a slightly different scenario. Let’s say that the person wrongly arrested and charged for the April heist had been someone without the money to hire an investigator and without an alibi backed-up by cellphone records. Let’s say the perp had been latino and the wrong guy had also been latino. Let’s say the perp had not returned to stick-up the same bank but had moved operations south and was now robbing banks in Bakersfield.

We all know how that scenario would have played out.

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"If you vote for Goldwater..."

2009-08-08T08:39:52+02:00

The problem with torture, it turns out, is not torture per se but the uncomfortable possibility that somebody will find out about it. That appears to be the position of the Obama presidency, you know, change you can believe in.

Once again the Justice Department has gone into federal court to argue against disclosure, this time of photos which depict some of the fun and games our boys and girls on the front lines, and some in the dungeons, have been amusing themselves with.

According to Obama, the public should not see any of these materials because it might inflame the sensibilities of some of those against whom the tortures were, and probably still are, directed.

When it comes to crimes against humanity, including murder, we have been told we need to “turn the page,” presumably because the criminal acts of the state occupy a special place in the law.

No one, for example, is talking about “turning the page” when it comes to John Walker Lindh, the scapegoated poster boy for Bush’s phony “war on terror”. Lindh remains in federal prison for, probably, evermore. And no one with any brains at all would argue that his ‘crimes’, if any there really were, were greater than the routine horrors visited upon often completely innocent “suspects” by our military and secret police apparatus.

The response of the Obama administration to the existence of gruesome photos like these, and its consistent legal support of censorship, secrecy, massive spying on American citizens, and the vitiation of the right to trial, differs in no material respects from the response of the Nixon administration to the leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo. Forget the crimes. Locate and suppress the source.

Reminds me of a great joke from the Lyndon Johnson era. Guy says: “They warned me that if I voted for Goldwater, I’d get a massive military budget, and the escalation of the war in Viet Nam, and sure enough...”

Let’s see: abandonment of the constitution and Bill of Rights for purely expedient purposes, growing federal power and secrecy, a widening, escalating war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Guantanamo stays open, people held in prisons without charges or trial and subjected to torture. Did Bush cancel the elections?

Oh, that’s right: we got a moderate instead of another crackhead on the Supreme Court. Well, big whoop.

I don’t know what the reason is for the present rancid state of national affairs. I don’t know if Obama’s secretly JFK, walking a fine line between changing the world and trying to stay out of the crosshairs. Or if he’s Jimmy Carter, well-meaning and so far over his head he’s on his way to irrelevancy. Or if he’s LBJ, fast after some devil’s bargain or other, give the bastards what they want in exchange for...something...

As the American right was once so fond of reminding everybody, during the height of the fake “Cold War” which preceded the latest one, it is a great lesson of history that appeasement is a mistake. But history’s lesson is not about one nation appeasing another but of otherwise mindful, empathic people, occasionally political leaders, appeasing those internal forces which traffic in fear and use their powers to control the whole damn system. That’s what happened in Germany. That’s how liberty was destroyed and the door opened for the holocaust.

I’ve some news for the “the troops keep us free” crowd: no military has ever kept a nation free; they have all too often been the mechanism for killing freedom on behalf of the financial oligarchy, c.f. Honduras right now. America’s kept what freedom its got because there have been a sufficient number of ordinary people willing to fight the power. That’s it. Without them, without a muckraking press, or a populist candidate, without exposés and leaked, disgusting photographs, we’d be in worse shape than we’re currently in.

Any country willing to bury the truth about itself is risking burying itself as well. I hope to God Obama knows this and starts acting on it, because if he doesn’t, all the feel-good initiatives and White House pep talks and faith-based volunteers won’t keep us out of the ditch, and it’s a deep fucking ditch.

And that’s the way it is...

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Wyoming Lamb, Marshall McLuhan, and the Giant Twitter

2009-08-08T03:01:45+02:00

There was a bumper sticker years ago which read: “Eat Wyoming lamb. 20,000 coyotes can’t be wrong.” Or something like that.

I thought of it when I noticed that the pageviews of this blog had exceeded 40,000. That wouldn’t be too bad if it was a daily average, or even the average per new entry, but since it covers more than two years and counts the total number of pages seen by all visitors combined, including the bizarre traffic spikes whenever I wrote about the CIA’s less than benevolent activities, the actual popularity of Lookingglass.blog.co.uk ranks well below that of Wyoming lamb and probably doesn’t go down any better.

There have been 12,681 visitors over the past 28 months, which counts each time a reader returns for more. A given article attracts roughly 100 people. Not much for cyberspace. Not much for a neighborhood. I could probably bring in 100 by writing in a private journal and then leaving it lying around a government building.

I’m not whining, you understand, and I have no complaints. Even though I’m as filled with the great melodies of my own voice as the next egoist, I do not take it personally that the multitudes have not flocked to my site; the multitudes have much else to do and have no great need for erratic and often barely amusing commentary, especially when they have so much of it shoveled at them each waking moment.

In case you missed the news, everything you thought you knew about the human race and its future on planet earth has been utterly wiped out.

We are living in an age defined by irrelevant archetypes. We can’t help it. The entire mechanism by which we have communicated with one another for, well, all of history, has been supplanted by something new, something whose bare outline is just now beginning to take shape. It is changing everything. Everything. That is not hyperbole.

I’ve written a bit about Marshall McLuhan before and it’s tiresome to repeat myself. Check out what he was talking about in the 1960s. “War and Peace in the Global Village”. He was the first to figure out what was happening, the electric age and what it might mean. He was at the time widely lionized by students and widely criticized by liberal intellectuals who hadn’t the foggiest notion what he was talking about.

If you read him today you will probably be stunned at how prescient he was.

The way in which human beings communicate with one another is primary to the evolution of the species, much the way communication among brain cells is primary to the evolution of the mind. McLuhan’s first sensation-causing publication was of “Understanding Media: the extensions of man.” He saw the end of industrial culture, economics, politics, and the beginning of the Electric Age.

McLuhan was not wild about what he saw coming, which puzzled the aforementioned students as much as it confounded the aforementioned intellectuals. It would be in many ways a return to a tribal sensibility, he said, but that in itself was neither good nor bad. We would find out how we felt about it along the way.

One of my peculiar jobs is as a plaintiff’s personal injury lawyer. Over the past ten years I’ve seen an escalation in accidents caused by somebody talking on a cell phone; lately, the space-case drivers are texting at the time of the accident. We apparently can’t help ourselves. We are driven to ‘stay in touch’ with pretty nearly everybody we know, it looks like. At the same time, public transit riders and cyclists are traveling in a sealed environment of ear buds and MP3s. What can this mean? That we want to wire ourselves to those in our chosen circle –– which for an amazing number includes, evidently, tens of thousands of total strangers –– while ignoring, ‘tuning out’, people in our immediate vicinity?

Are we enmasse (re-)designing our own psychological spaces?

If so, what does that portend for our culture?

In what people refer to as the ‘sixties, the first electric age generation danced free-form as though inhabited by Isadora Duncan, passed pipes among themselves of shared new sacrament, loved music with drums, drums and electrically-amplified guitars, grew their hair, and otherwise behaved in a manner which scared the piss out of our elders. We were just the beginning, and we knew that, but we didn’t have any idea than did our elders of what was to come.

I get it about the tattooes, and I get it about the inter-dimensional stuff, and the music is not a surprise, nor is the greater tolerance for differences among us when it comes to race and gender and sexual identification. The young are aware that it is a single planet.

I get it about pot smoking; since marijuana is the perfect drug for an electric age tribal culture, its popularity will continue to grow and its legality is a foregone conclusion.

But what I don’t get, what I don’t come close to getting is the twitter thing. It’s a stretch to manage the notion of FaceBook and MySpace, but okay, you want to amass enormous numbers of pretend ‘friends’ for reasons I don’t understand and am afraid to. But twitter??? I mean, what the fuck?

We are living in a relatively small historical window where the most amazing and tumultuous changes are manifesting, and in which the earth is being suddenly ‘lit-up’ electronically, as though we are each a cell in the human mind and these cells, after forever being slow to communicate with each other, are now talking instantaneously. The enormity of this for humanity is impossible to exaggerate.

So I’ve got my blog, and occasionally toss some shit into the vast, vast story being written out here. I know I would reach more readers by contributing to ‘The Bohemian’, a great community paper on the Pacific Coast, but there is something nice about running this into places where the paper is not delivered.

Explain twitter, somebody.

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Horsing Around

2009-07-31T21:54:36+02:00

Last year, a fellow named Rodell Vereen was placed on probation in Columbia, South Carolina, for the crime of buggery, which has nothing whatever to do with either a non-human life form or a horse-drawn carriage, even though it turns out to have something to do with each, if you follow.

If you follow, don’t follow too closely.

Rodell was busted for enjoying sexual congress with a horse named Sugar at the Lazy B Stables in Little River. His probation incuded an order that he stay away from the place.

But Rodell, it turns out, is a victim of the love that dareth not speak its name. He could not stay away from the only horse who has ever truly understood him.

Recently, Sugar’s owner, Barbara Kenley, noticed that “Sugar was acting strange and getting infections...” She also noticed that things had been moved around inside the barn, including bales of hay stacked near the horse’s stall. She began hanging around the stables but didn’t learn anything. So she installed surveillance cameras.

When she saw Rodell and Sugar horsing around, she didn’t call the cops. She was certain he’d return and, for reasons best left to your fertile imagination, she wanted to, uh, catch him in the act.

Rodell is in custody, following a footrace between Vereen and Kenley, which Kenley won. He is looking at five years in the slammer this time.

I offer this bit of human interest as a public service to those among us tempted to see ourselves as crazy. We aren’t even close.

Have a nice weekend.

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Deep Politics and Honduras

2009-07-30T04:12:06+02:00

I’ve been trying to write something for a couple of weeks now and finding little success at it. This is annoying for several reasons, one of which is that in the absence of new titles my blog is now attracting the kind of crowd I could feed with the left-overs in my fridge, not that I’d mind. But there are already millions of webLogs out here in space, and this one, however brilliant and insightful, is already rushing toward obscurity...

I’d give it up, I really would, but for the visceral response I still have to the enormous lies in the daily press and the undeniable reality of living in an America so well brainwashed that sustained screaming would not necessarily be the act of a crazy person.

The something I’ve been trying to write about is, well, to be blunt, what Peter Dale Scott calls “deep politics.” I’ve been trying to write about it not only because that’s what’s being played out right now on the world stage –– after all, it’s always being played out –– but because it’s become a bit more visible than usual, necessarily, I believe, due to the circumstances attending it.

Deep politics. Scott being able to speak for himself, I can say only what the term means to me: it’s the stuff that’s going on that doesn’t show up on CNN or in national (or local) publications. We get, as you know, cover stories. The cover stories are promoted for two reasons. First, to distract attention from something else, and, second, to create a propaganda wall of “reliable” and “trusted” authority.

Cover stories are always necessary when things have gotten messy. For example, the murder of a head of state, even when it’s not the U.S. President, can sometimes cause quite a stir. When that’s going to happen, it’s always good to create a fiction ahead of time. For example, if a nation’s leader is to be removed, or killed, he or she must be painted as ‘anti-democratic’, ‘unstable’, and ‘power-mad’, not to mention a friend of someone we already don’t like, a favorite whipping boy being Castro or, now, Hugo Chavez. That’s not very hard to do given that the mass media has long been owned and operated by the same guys who sponsor the event in question.

History is loaded with examples. When the CIA kills a foreign head of state, the deceased is demonized, viz. Allende in Chile, Arbenz in Guatemala, Sukarno in Indonesia, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and so on. That way, Americans are given the gift of misconception; we are able to dismiss any troubling thoughts about whether such a foreign policy is, perhaps, reprehensible, because probably the dead guy was no good, allied with commies, or, these days, terrorists.

Americans are really good at pretending to be ignorant as shit, especially given the last sixty years of our history, and therefore it doesn’t take much.

What I’ve been trying to write about is Honduras, in the context of deep politics. Because not only is the truth being rather blatantly buried in and by the mass media, but the story underlying it appears to be itself a cover for something else.

On the surface, we’ve got a military coup. American media describe the leaders as dissident military officers, supported by Hondurans concerned that the President, Manuel Zelaya, was undermining democracy.

The first articles in The New York Times, that august journal of crap still trading on an old reputation, and Associated Press stories out of Tegucigalpa, leaned heavily on the explanation that the coup had occurred because Zelaya planned to manipulate his way into remaining in power beyond expiration of his term.

From the first AP dispatch:

“Zelaya, a leftist ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, had refused to cancel an unpopular constitutional referendum that some saw as an attempt by him to stay in power beyond the one-term limit. The (Honduran) Supreme Court had deemed the referendum illegal.”

It would’ve been precisely as accurate to write:

“Zelaya, a communist and notorious sex pervert, had refused to cancel an unpopular referendum that some saw as an attempt by him to sell the nation’s children into slavery...”

Zelaya's referendum, planned for the day the coup took place, was a nonbinding poll. It only asked voters if they wanted to have an actual referendum on reforming the country's Constitution on the November ballot. Even if Zelaya had gotten everything he was looking for, a new president would have been elected on the same November ballot. So Zelaya would be out of office in January, no matter what steps were taken toward constitutional reform. Further, Zelaya has repeatedly said that if the Constitution were changed, he would not seek another term.

The AP dispatch, therefore, itself exposes its fraudulence. Not to mention: if the referendum was “unpopular”, then it wouldn’t pass anyhow. Right?

Zelaya’s ouster at gunpoint was carried out not by “patriotic” Honduran officers so dedicated to democracy that they had to prevent incipient tyranny but by military men trained at the notorious U.S. death squad training academy called the School of the Americas. (The S.O.A. has nearly been closed by vote of Congress on two occasions, but it survives on the claim that it teaches Latin officers the benefits of democracy, a flagrantly ludicrous story; it has changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, but little else).

Zelaya, you see, had become a severe problem for the Honduran ruling class and its North American ‘friends’ in the CIA and corporate worlds. A wealthy man himself, Zelaya had identified more and more with the poor. He was moving to slow the appropriation of his country’s resources, perhaps even reverse it, by the multinationals. That could not be tolerated.

But there is another layer of power struggle whose fingerprints can be found here, and it involves President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the CIA.

Three items:

1. Principal advisers to the junta are Lanny Davis, who is both a political operative and close friend and associate of Hillary Clinton, and Bennett Ratcliff, another close Clinton friend and former senior executive for one of Washington’s most powerful public relations firms. Davis, former legal counsel to Bill Clinton and central to Hillary Clinton’s recent campaign for President, has made millions as a lobbyist for multi-national corporations.

2. The U.S. government maintains military bases and a military presence in more than one hundred nations around the world. Honduras is no exception. At Soto Cano air base, about 60 miles north of Teguchigalpa, there are more than eight hundred American soldiers.

3. Honduras has been a part of the U.S. “anti-drug” program, with more than a million dollars annually going to its military. This program is widely known to be directed by the CIA as a rather thin cover for “anti-terror” activity, the new euphemism (remember “anti-Communist”?) for popular control and suppression of dissent. The leader of the coup, General Romeo Vasquez, is a graduate of S.O.A.

There is little doubt that Barack Obama opposes the coup. His public statements have been unambiguous, terming the military overthrow of Zelaya illegal. Unless he is dissembling completely, Obama didn’t know about this in advance.

But some people certainly did. It is inconceivable, for example, that Lanny Davis and Bennett Ratcliff did not know. As the advisers to Micheletti and the generals, Davis and Ratcliff would have been the source for planning the public relations aspect of the coup.

The military leadership’s story is that Zelaya’s referendum threatened democracy because it might have led to his being able to remain in power after his term expires in January of 2010. Though false on its face, the mainstream U.S. media bought this line without questioning it.

What the media does not mention is that the coup leaders have shut down television and radio stations and arrested journalists. It has imposed curfews and killed dissidents and demonstrators.

Since the Zelaya referendum was not about, and could not possibly have led to, a new term for the President, how come the military attacked his home, spraying it with bullets, and kidnapped Zelaya?

The fake new President, a corrupt hack named Roberto Micheletti, actually told the press, “I’m sure that 80 to 90 percent of the Honduran population is happy with what happened today.” Let’s see: an “unpopular referendum” (according to the AP stories) was averted with an act of violence against the President, and this act would please practically everybody in the country.

If you are having trouble with the logic of this, you would not be alone. It’s not only transparent it’s so thinly scripted that it would be laughed at by an ordinary fifth-grader. I mean, if there was no need to oust Zelaya anyway, and he couldn’t get elected to a county commission, why did this happen?

It happened because there was in fact a deep, desperate need to take over Honduras, a need nobody’s expressing because it is so disgustingly immoral that even a crazy-assed cover story was considered better than telling the truth. We may wonder what that is.

On one level, the first one down, let’s say, it’s about power and money. No surprise here. It’s always about power and money. The Zelaya referendum only sought to learn the voters’ opinion about whether the Honduran constitution –– in its present form, written by Americans and their friends among the Honduran ruling class –– should be open to amendment. Specifically, given it’s origins, the present constitution makes it impossible for Honduras to control its own natural and national resources. Monetary, corporate empires wish to own these resources, as we know. cf Iraq. Oil companies are all over these situations, as have, increasingly, other concerns which seek to control a nation’s water supply.

Read that again. It is not a joke.

But there are popular movements growing all over Latin America and they are shaking off a century of foreign control. In nation after nation, and specifically in the neighborhood of Honduras, democratic elections are yielding populist issues and candidates. It’s not “Kitten Comes To Hollywood.” There are serious struggles for power going on everywhere; in Latin American nations, the U.S. runs various secret spy and security operations, sometimes through surrogates, sometimes directly.

It is clear that the U.S. government, acting as business agent for Bechtel, Halliburton, Chevron, Monsanto, and so forth, can not always send in the Marines. This might be an unpopular policy domestically, not to mention there aren’t that many Marines. So it’s done in other ways: through secret operations, many of them involving murder. Recently we have been treated to the fact that Dick Cheney actually ran a death squad operation out of his office, an international one, and that black ops teams entered other nations carrying death lists.

Is any of this getting through out there?

Barack Obama is President, but his election didn’t do shit about the very real, permanent empire America has long ago become. This empire has seen renegade President before; it got rid of the last couple.

Historians who know the real story of the Kennedy administration (and, for that matter, Eisenhower’s), know that a President who wishes to change ANYTHING in the direction of monetary or social fairness in the country is in serious trouble. It is simply not permitted to deprive the monsters of anything.

This is also obvious in international policies. How else would you explain the undeniable fact that Halliburton received billions of dollars for projects which it did not complete, or in which safety shoddiness led to the deaths of American service members. These were no-bid contracts. They are not in jail. How is that possible?

The CIA, as the enforcer part of the deal, especially in other countries but increasingly in the U.S., too, has not only toppled foreign governments but has engaged in a wide range of activities designed to destabilize or corrupt these governments, their police and their armies. This is often without the consent or even the knowledge of an American President. The CIA’s budget is secret; not even Congress, not even the President is permitted to know what that is, and historically it has augmented government funds with its own participation in international drug trafficking.

During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the Company, as the CIA calls itself, was getting its sea legs. It overthrew several governments with the permission of Ike (and the Dulles brothers), and a few without the permission of JFK. It was doing what it wanted and, as it turned out (JFK famously threatened to “smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.”), Presidents were to be manipulated or handled in some other fashion.

This is not a good place to get too deeply into the JFK/CIA story, but a part of it involves CIA operations which were designed to force Kennedy to do what the Company –– and its corporate friends –– wanted him to do. Eisenhower later complained that they’d tried to manipulate him into attacking “Red” China. With JFK, the first test of will came over the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

In the last year of Ike, the CIA and Pentagon dreamed up a plan to invade Cuba and rescue the place for the mafia, AT&T, and the sugar barons, who’d been kicked out by Castro’s revolution. With Kennedy’s election, the plan continued; now, however, due to Kennedy’s caution, they’d had to promise that it would be carried out by Cuban expats and would lead to a popular uprising. No American military support would be necessary, they assured JFK.

But the CIA knew better. It knew that Castro’s revolution was not only popular but backed up by a pretty good military outfit. In order to succeed, the ‘invasion’ would require direct U.S. air cover to knock out Cuba’s air force, if not actual invasion support using U.S. troops. Running this hare-brained scheme was Allen Dulles of CIA and the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Kennedy smelled a rat from the start, expressing skepticism and demanding that the generals sign a document attesting to their opinion that the operation would work without American force. The CIA believed that once the invasion had begun Kennedy could not let it fail, that he would be forced by circumstance to intervene directly. They miscalculated. And that miscalculation triggered the chain of events which led to the President’s murder.

John Kennedy, of course, knew full well how dangerous these people were. A close friend asked him, in early 1962, whether the fictional account of an attempted military-led coup against an American President, “Seven Days In May”, could really happen. He responded that it could, and he outlined how: if there were a ‘Bay of Pigs’ event, he said, and if it was followed by a second such clash with the JCS. Later that year, he overrode the unanimous advice of the military and refused to attack Cuba.

The Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Soviet missiles had been installed in Cuba. Had he heeded the views of his generals, several America targets, including Washington, would have been engulfed in terror. As historians have shown, the Soviet missiles, contrary to what our military had assured Kennedy, were already operational.

The crisis in Honduras today, in its internal mechanism, is eerily similar to the clash between JFK and the interests of the military and the corporate structure it advances.

There is zero chance that the plotters, being advised by Davis and Ratcliff, had not had pretty good assurance that they would not be forced out by the United States. They had direct lines not only to the CIA but to the Secretary of State as well.

Obama certainly knows this. He knows who Davis and Ratcliff are. Someone calculated that the President, beset by an unstable economy, the health care program’s eviceration at the hands of the whores in Congress, the middle east mess, Iraq, and the growing war in Afghanistan, would not have the capital or attention left to direct the necessary response in Honduras. They may be proven right.

But the immediate question of Honduras is secondary to the larger one, the deep politics question whose threads can be seen poking through the surface there. This is an empire. Why we should expect it to behave in a fashion different from other empires is a mystery of human psychology.

I’ve had troubling conversations with friends on the left. There’s a lot of anger over a lot of issues, and I share it. I mean, finally, a President who’s not obviously craven and insane, what an opportunity! Protect the Bill of Rights, prosecute the criminals, end the wars, you know the list.

I hope we can look at politics, real politics, deep politics, with eyes wide open, because if ever there was a critical time in our history, this is it.

Since November 22, 1963, it’s been the job of the President to promote military and corporate objectives. This has, not unexpectedly, led to pointless and brutal wars, unimaginable carnage, and the wasting of the earth’s treasures. Domestically, it has led to the successive looting of the nation by the Savings & Loan industry, the insurance industry, the weapons manufacturers, the energy companies, and the banks. They have taken everything.

Obama stands on the precipice along with the rest of us. Empires fall. Historically, great attempts to save a collapsing empire and return it to its best days have always failed. Those determined to strip a nation of all its treasures will not hesitate to kill on occasional Kennedy if that becomes necessary.

I think that Obama is trying very skillfully to reel us back in, and to stay alive while he’s doing it.

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A Brief Lesson In Statistics, Or, If It's Really Boring Maybe Nobody Will Notice

2009-07-10T07:27:14+02:00

Straight-faced story in the Chronicle, out here in San Francisco: the California Superintendent of Education, a hack named O’Connell who harbors additional political ambitions, and don’t they all, announces that the imposition of the ‘Exit Exam’ on high school students is a rousing success! Because the scores are improving. Really.

I love Jack O’Connell, I do, because he’s a wonderful example of just how far beneath contempt the state’s educational bureaucracy has become. It is a closed system of supreme illogic, people with fat salaries chasing their own tails.

Over the decades since the ‘sixties, California’s high schools have steadily gone to rot. At some point, this became obvious, and so the thing became a political issue. But pols, being often venal as well as slow-witted, were loathe to spend actual cash on education, having already gotten beneath the sheets with the prison industry, agribusiness, and other heavy commercial hitters, and were thus looking for a cheap fix.

The cheap fix is standardized testing, zero tolerance, and the elimination of frills, such as art and music programs, civics, and the development of critical thinking. To see how well this has worked, just look out the bloody window.

There are serious long-term consequences of this madness, some of which I’ve mentioned in earlier ravings, and the subject is worth a lengthy diatribe –– I’m fooling around with notes for a book –– but it’s enough here to note only the stunning idiocy which equates rising test scores with improved education.

It works this way. Let’s say that I’m in charge of education (there are people I know who would pass out at the prospect), and I want to set it up so that you think I’m doing a swell job. I declare that nobody will graduate unless they can pass a test I’m going to give them.

The test is devised and administered. Results come in. They show that a certain percentage of students are able to memorize a certain percentage of factoids and regurgitate them in test form. I follow this up by tweaking the test and pounding hard at the factoids. Scores get better. See, wasn’t that easy?

Nobody seems to notice the irrelevancy of the factoids to real life and real life skills. Also, nobody notices that a test may be manipulated from year to year to render it easier or harder to pass. I can get ‘better’ scores anytime I want them just by fiddling the materials.

The concept of awarding diplomas only to those who pass an exam is inherently crazy because the only way anybody will buy it is if some people fail. And by composing a test of a particular degree of difficulty, I can guarantee that the failure percentage will be anything I want it to be.

If everyone passed, the test would be considered invalid. If everyone failed, the test would be considered invalid. Only with a pre-determined failure rate can I prop-up the fakery, but luckily it’s entirely in my own hands.

What O’Connell and his jolly crew do not talk about are the rates of high school suicide, drop-outs, clinical depression, vandalism, and drug and alcohol abuse. Teachers report an epidemic of cheating. Well, what the fuck did anybody expect?

The ‘philosophy’ which underlies this approach to education is the functional equivalent of the notion that beating slaves improves their morale. Nobody questions the premise, although it is the premise which is fatally incorrect. On a national level, Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, buys the same premise. The damage this will cause in the future cannot be overestimated.

Learning does not take place when a student is under tremendous stress. That is not a new idea. Real educators have always known this. But we are a culture which has gone into overdrive, pushing harder and harder at an ever-narrower idea of ‘success.’ We see it in sports, where high school athletes, especially football players, are doping themselves to add muscle mass –– I had an interesting conversation a few days ago with a Redwood High student who knows the jocks –– and we see it in academia, where kids are cheating during the week and drinking themselves insensate on the weekends.

But the scores are improving. Just ask Jack O’Connell.

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Obama's War

2009-07-09T07:53:46+02:00

The early returns have an eerie familiarity. U.S. troops pushing a major offensive into “enemy” strongholds in the countryside, Pentagon flacks with charts and pointers, the mass media uncritically trumpeting “success”, the President promising that nobody’s gonna push us around.

This time it’s Pakistan and Afghanistan. Forty-some years ago, it was Viet Nam. Each time, a Democratic President with a working majority, popular support, and an ambitious domestic program. Same bleeding war.

A few days ago, the government of Pakistan reported that more than 700 innocents have been killed since the first of the year, most by remote-controlled missiles, drones. At this time there are already about half a million refugees streaming north, ahead of the American war. In Pakistan, as in Cambodia in the late ‘sixties, it cannot possibly end well.

We are waging a war in Pakistan for the same reason Lyndon Johnson began a secret war into Laos and Cambodia: the main event had begun spilling across borders. The Vietnamese insurgents were able to duck across the lines, move supplies, find sanctuaries. So, too, the Afghan rebels. Wars of imperial purpose can never be confined to targets; they spread. As in Viet Nam, so it is in Afghanistan.

Lyndon Johnson assured the American people that he wanted peace. In the meantime, he wanted conquest. The U.S., often through a Texas company named Brown & Root –– the precursor to Halliburton –– built enormous permanent bases in the occupied land. In a sense, the politics of the matter was secondary. The point was control over economies and resources.

Barack Obama was carried to unlikely victory on a great wave of anti-war sentiment. He promised to end the war in Iraq and bring American troops home. LBJ won by a landslide against Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee whose bellicosity worried the electorate. When Johnson took the oath of office in January, 1965, the U.S. had fewer than 16,000 military personnel in Viet Nam, none of them combat troops.

Robert McNamara died recently. Known principally as a major architect of Johnson’s war against Viet Nam, he had come to recognize both the horror and the futility of the enterprise, but not before more than fifty thousand Americans –– and a million or more Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians –– had been killed.

Just as was the case with Viet Nam, at the beginning, Obama’s widening of the theater is popular with the general public and taken by the media as a sign of toughness and resolve. Everyone talks about supporting the troops, as they are fed into a hopeless conflict and maimed in growing number. As always, a corrupt and generally ignorant Congress appropriates the money and is afraid to criticize lest its members be seen as unpatriotic.

In one sense, Obama’s war is closer to the one waged by Richard Nixon. Johnson’s assault on Viet Nam had become a liability, in the same way that Bush’s invasion of Iraq had backfired. Nixon pledged to end the war; instead, he invaded Laos and Cambodia. Obama’s war is already spreading across the subcontinent and, like the ones pursued by Johnson, Nixon, and Bush, it is creating new enemies every minute. We have bombed wedding parties, local gatherings, schools, and hospitals. As in Southeast Asia, the ‘enemy’ is ubiquitous and defined by body counts and not any recognizable ideology, culture or behavior. If you are hit by missiles, you deserve it.

In press accounts, so pathetically biased, ignorant, and xenophobic, the term being used now is “militant.” We are killing “militants.”

I’ve seen all of this shit before. In the ‘sixties, the Pentagon released figures on “enemy casualties” that later turned out to have been inflated by a factor of 10, and to have included water buffalo. Also, it included children. America tried everything: carpet bombing, ‘strategic hamlets’, special forces murders, napalm, deals with drug warlords. In the end, we had so lost all sense of moral compass that Nixon and Henry Kissinger unleashed the infamous “Christmas bombings” –– in the North two months AFTER a deal had been struck to end the war. Why? Because Kissinger argued that we needed it to convince our “allies” in the South of our continuing ‘resolve’. It was mass murder as public relations stunt.

Today, the lies are more sophisticated, they’ve had to be, but there is little difference in the death and misery. Most Americans accept as an article of faith that our militaristic adventurism is ‘necessary’ for reasons of national defense, a ludicrous proposition on its face. And while the U.S. builds enormous, permanent military facilities inside other nations, its government pretends that its presence is temporary.

Geopolitics is about money and the control over global resources. It is America’s conceit that our foreign policy is grounded in fairness and in assisting other nations. That has never been true. It has also never been less true than it is now.

As President Obama journeys to Russia and elsewhere in search of arms reduction agreements, America’s military-intelligence operations are ongoing in hundreds of places around the world. The U.S. has had special ops forces in Iran for quite a while, just as it did in Iraq and Pakistan before the recent unpleasantness. By now, you could probably recite the names as well as I of the countries whose democratic and/or popular governments have been overthrown by America’s CIA in concert with local thugs. Millions of people have been murdered by the fascist governments we have installed in Iran, Indonesia, Cambodia, Chile, Salvador, Greece, well, as I said...

Millions of human beings. Human beings who loved and were loved, who had families, friends, joys, and the array of life’s events to which they brought meaning, care, and passion.

It was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, responding to a reporter’s question about civilian deaths in Kosovo, who remarked, “We think it was worth it.”

The fact is, as Scott Fitzgerald said about the very wealthy, the political elite are “not like you and me,” and they are aware of it. It is the basis for policies which can entertain terms such as ‘kill ratio’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘extraordinary rendition.’ The people being kidnapped, tortured, and killed are not named Allbright, Clinton, Bush, Rumsfeld, Kissinger. To the latter, war’s victims are mere figures in calculation, part of the profit-and-loss statement.

Obama still talks about closing Guantanamo, but worse conditions, worse tortures, are inflicted on thousands now being held without charge in worse prisons in Afghanistan. He does not speak of these. Nor does he speak of closing the School of the Americas, now under a new name, which trains South American death squads.

The Bush policies on kidnapping remain in force; so do those pertaining to domestic wiretapping, and breaking-and-entering without a warrant.

Having read Obama’s first book, I remain convinced that he is a rare President, someone who, like President Kennedy, might actually hear the weeping of the world. If so, he is also aware of the realities of power. He is constrained. He knows what happened in Dallas in 1963.

Jack Kennedy, in the words of his lover, Mary Pinchot Meyer, “was moving too fast.” He tried to bring the country’s secret police and the CIA under control. He wanted to end the arms race. Historical ‘revisionists’ have buried it, but that’s who he was.

At a back-channel meeting during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Robert Kennedy told Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, his brother was “under tremendous pressure to use force against Cuba. If the situation continues much longer, the President is afraid that the generals may seize power...”

Meanwhile, America’s wars are part of an enormous military-intelligence deployment whose actual budget remains secret, even from the President.

This is the situation in which Obama finds himself. And Afghanistan is his war. Whatever his actual calculations, whatever the pressures, he obviously feels that it is necessary to expand it and to fight it. But Obama’s war cannot be won. It is Viet Nam all over again, and it will bleed us as it ruins that nation, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, murdering children, bringing home veterans whose rates of depression, domestic violence, and suicide exceed those of Viet Nam.

“We think it was worth it,” Allbright said. Obviously, someone thinks so now.

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Amnesia

2009-06-25T06:17:48+02:00

Companion stories today on Truthout and Alternet, different authors, the same question: was the Iranian election rigged? Then came the response of the Obama administration: we don’t buy Ahmadinejad’s claim of a “landslide” victory.

Well, that’s pretty fucking rich.

Personally, I have no opinion on the Iranian deal because I haven’t examined whatever evidence there is, but I do have an opinion about crooked elections in the United States. That’s a subject I know something about.

America’s electoral history is, of course, chock-full of great stories. There’s Landslide Lyndon Johnson’s 87-vote Senate seat election and Box 13, and there’s Richard J. Daley’s notorious ballot stuffing in Chicago which arguably swung Illinois in 1960 and thereby elected Jack Kennedy.

There’s the 2000 election, where Bush won a first term only because hundreds of thousands of blacks were disenfranchised, Florida was flat-out lifted, and a compromised Supreme Court ordered the recount stopped.

But in 2004, all previous thefts were reduced to insignificance in the most collossal invalidation of a free election in history. And nobody in government or the mainstream media seemed very interested.

I’ve mentioned this before but it’s worth repeating. Many political people knew by midnight on election day that the 2004 vote was rigged. The reason they knew this is that political people know how exit polls are conducted and what they mean.

I remember that night very well. I’d already learned during the day of massive lines and extraordinary turnouts in Democratic strongholds throughout the nation. Coupled with the pre-election polling trends, this indicated a probable landslide for John Kerry. Early returns validated it. Then came the exit polls.

What pols know about exit polls is that they are better than 99% accurate. Always. A one percent difference between an exit poll and the actual reported vote would be considered an anomaly.

On election night, 2004, exit polls showed a Kerry landslide in both popular and electoral votes. It was over. George Bush, looking at the same numbers, was despondent. But then something odd happened.

In one state after another, notably in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado, and three other “battleground states”, the announced votes were between 6 and 8 percent different from the exit poll results, and in each case the reported numbers showed the switch from Kerry to Bush. In six of these states, the switch was enough to give the electoral votes to the President, completely altering the national outcome.

Having once been deeply involved in politics, I was familiar with exit polls. I was familiar with the methodology. Watching the returns at a dinner party at a friend’s home in Mill Valley, I knew that something was terribly wrong. Later that night, on the internet, I accessed the exit polls as first reported on CNN and compared them with the returns. The pattern was unmistakable. In 43 states, the returns mirrored the exit poll percentages exactly. In 7, they were wildly divergent, all in Bush’s favor. The first statisticians who looked at this were stunned. A Pennsylvania professor wrote that the odds against this happening were, roughly, 100,000,000-to-1.

It turned out that many people noticed the same thing and were alarmed at the implications. But the mass media ignored both the evidence and the clamor. What little controversy there was seemed to center on the more traditional methods of vote theft, with voting machines unavailable in urban or college town precincts, voting lines that ran for more than a mile in some places in Ohio, hundreds of thousands of uncounted ‘provisional’ ballots (nearly all of these cast by non-whites) in Ohio, and wholesale disenfranchisement in states such as Florida, where private companies were hired by Republican Secretaries of State to “purge” voter rollsof likely Democratic voters.

There were the occasional stories of weird returns, such as counties in Virginia where voting machines began to count backwards, and Ohio, where more votes were said to have been cast for George Bush in one town than its total population. But when it came to the larger question, the mass media just danced around.

I wrote an op-ed piece for the local newspaper; the editor, an old friend, told me that they wouldn’t run it. It was crazy, he said. And he pointed to an article in the New York Times which cursorily noted the charges some were making and then dismissed them as the ravings of the lunatic fringe.

Okay, I can work with that. I’d been relegated to the fringe so often in 40-plus years of adult life that I was comfortable out there.

But then the scary shit began to surface. First came the “undervotes”. An undervote is what it’s called when a voter marks his or her ballot for some candidates but not others. For obvious reasons, the highest number of cast votes is at the top of the ballot, with undervotes showing up in small increments further down, e.g. a voter who selects a candidate for President and another for Governor may skip the choice for state treasurer.

Typically, undervotes are a very, very small percentage. But in 2004, in key precincts in Florida and Ohio, especially, the undervotes reported for President were as high as SEVENTY percent. This means that in those places, seventy percent of those who actually voted in other races, supposedly skipped the Bush-Kerry race.

Nationwide, the undervote numbers in several districts in “battleground states” ran to the hundreds of thousands. That is a conservative estimate. Some investigators believe the true number is in the millions.

Then there were the numerous reported instances of ‘vote-flipping’, where voters saw their electronic, touch-screen votes for Kerry register as votes for George Bush.

To ignore the widespread and incontrovertible evidence of electronic fraud, the mass media and the politicians committed a criminal conspiracy. There is no doubt that it occasioned fierce arguments behind closed doors. One such argument is reported to have taken place between Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards. Edwards was furious and demanded that Kerry go public, that they challenge the legitimacy of the election. Kerry demurred. It would cause a constitutional crisis, Kerry said, to which Edwards is said to have replied, “So what!?”

In my lifetime I’ve witnessed several conspiracies deprive the nation of its elected leaders. Each time, the official story, while ludicrous under sober examination, was accorded august authority, sanctified on the networks, written into “history” books and taught to the next generation. This is how empires control the public mind.

Few people have the time or inclination to get into it. Those who do are subject to dismissal as crackpots. No one wants to be thought a crackpot; much easier to ‘prove’ your sanity by going along with what you’ve been told.

Over the years, one claim I’ve heard is this one: if these things had been conspiracies, someone would’ve talked. What’s so utterly sad about this argument is that the person offering it is unaware of the fact, the plain, unvarnished fact that people have talked; you just don’t get to learn of it. And even when it reaches the popular press, it’s mostly dismissed. Perhaps you recall the deathbed confession of E. Howard Hunt. This was actually covered in Rolling Stone, but it was ignored everywhere else. Hunt was dying. He told his son about Dallas and what he knew of the assassination of John Kennedy.

Old news, apparently. Yawn.

Not so old news: people have now come forward to talk about how they were recruited to build a fool-proof computer program for electronically rigging the 2004 presidential election.

There is a documentary called “Uncounted” which you must see. In it, that election is examined in detail, everything from systematic disenfranchisement to the hundreds of thousands –– perhaps millions –– of uncounted and/or thrown away “provisional” ballots. And then comes the testimony of men who were hired to rig the touch-screen voting machines. In Florida, one was asked by Congressman Tom Feeney to create a ‘back door’ program which would alter votes and make itself untraceable.

Watching these people talk about it is gut-wrenching. These were Republicans, conservatives, people who supported George Bush and Dick Cheney and believed in them. But in a couple of cases these were also people who believed in America, people who were self-described conservatives. They are obviously in shock. They still can’t believe that it happened, yet it happened to them.

If you watch this film, you will know these men are not lying. But let’s assume that they might be. Doesn’t it seem logical that, on an issue which strikes at the very heart of a free society, we’d want to know? Wouldn’t it seem obvious that exploring their veracity, at the very least, was worth the trouble?

The history we are taught is a false history when it comes to matters of empire. Perhaps in a hundred years it will be thought not to matter. Everyone involved will be long dead. Even the JFK murder, where evidence was destroyed wholesale and plenty more was locked up for fifty years by government order, is considered to have taken place so long ago that it no longer bears on our own lives.

It’s easy to let the matter slide these days. After all, with the ongoing destruction of the middle class, the transformation of the United States into Banana Republic Empire, and the theft of everything else that isn’t nailed down –– and they’re prying the nails out of what is –– there are other matters to worry about. Plus, Obama won, right? So what difference does it make now? 2004 is history.

But, however convenient such an excuse might be, and however much false comfort we might derive from it, that’s a dangerous conclusion. Because in our world, in our country, right now, criminal conspiracies are being hatched, not only by some local thugs who ‘plan’ to stick up a bank but by corporate thugs who plan to stick up the nation.

They do it because they can get away with it. They get away with it because the rest of us choose ignorance and selective amnesia.

So forgive me for being amused at the U.S. government’s and news media’s outrage at what is happening in Iran. And forgive me for wondering why some people, in some nations, unlike in America, care enough about their rights, their freedoms, and their countries to demand an accounting.

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Wide Open

2009-06-02T07:02:08+02:00

Went to a meeting tonight, got in the car and motored out somewhere. My excuse for this break from my reclusive existence, and if you can say that sentence fragment three times without blowing it you’re too functional and something is wrong with you, is that the meeting centered on a matter which not only interests me but concerned, directly, an old friend and cultural hero.

The specific point of the gathering was a call to “Save the Coastal Post”, a monthly newspaper of general, mostly local, circulation which has been tweaking the ears of idiots and the powerful, which I concede is occasionally redundant, for around thirty-five years. The man who created and still runs the paper is the old friend.

The reason the paper is struggling right now is that the Coastal Post, which is actually named The Great Western Pacific Coastal Post, finally pissed-off the pro-Israeli lobby enough to incite some ugly shit. Among the items: large quantities of the paper stolen from its distribution sources like public markets and newsstands. Also: a lot of phone calls were made to advertisers to convince them to pull their ads or face boycotts.

So the issues are things like freedom of speech, which is no small consideration, plus the survival of a very important community asset. But how is it going to be accomplished?

There were some pretty smart cookies in the room and ideas got tossed around, but what distinguished them for me was that they were all over the place. Various proposals designed to raise the paper’s profile locally, entice subscribers ($24.00 for a year’s worth, which ain’t bad –– the letters section alone is worth it), take on the would-be censors, have value, and they’ll help for a while. But the larger question, the one nobody is yet able to answer, is this: in the age of corporate media ownership and mass media consolidation, where will the independent voices come from and how will they be heard?

After all, freedom of the press was based on the absolute necessity of dissent in any society which expects to be free politically.

Meanwhile, somebody has to pay the cost of producing and disseminating material. In the world of mass media, the costs are enormous and are borne by advertisers who are interested in much more than selling you a physical product. They are interested in controlling editorial content. Let’s face it, Boeing is not trying to sell me a bomber; they are trying to sell me on the idea that my government should buy it. They are trying to sell me on the idea that my country needs it, that I am at risk without it. They are selling war.

But the Great Western Pacific Coastal Post is of no interest to Boeing. That is its secret weapon. Because in this new internet world, at least at this moment, all bets are off. Nobody knows how to control the internet and nobody knows how to best use it to advance ideas or political power.

Instead of focusing inward, perhaps the Coastal Post can run the other way. The editor mentioned that the website has at times generated hundreds of thousands of views. That’s because search engines have connected information-seekers with information. Well, why not? It’s wide open.

Marshall McLuhan observed nearly fifty years ago that, historically, the old media invariably became the content of the new media. As in many other respects, he is being proven right. But no one is yet sure how this will evolve. Newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle are getting thinner and lighter by the day, with odder and odder front-page stories and large photos. Whatever they think they’re up to, it’s not working.

That means there’s room. Freedom of the press is going to be tough to stop on the internet. It may be possible to find a way to secure it, to guarantee it, in fact to cause it to blossom into a real nightmare for Boeing and the rest of them, so long as we can figure it out first.

Check out www.coastalpost.com.

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Nobody's Going To Jail

2009-05-24T04:08:00+02:00

In the sixties, it was Brown and Root, the Houston-based contractor whose founders were buddies of Landslide Lyndon Johnson. Brown and Root got a lot of government deals, exclusive and non-bid, including the huge Cam Ranh Bay military base in (South) Viet Nam.

Herman Brown and Johnson went back to the fifties, where they combined for LBJ’s ascendency to the Senate thanks to box 13 and the rigged Texas election of 1952. The relationship remained cozy right to the end. Johnson’s war helped make Brown and Root wealthy beyond measure.

Brown and Root became an outfit named Halliburton and was later itself turned into a subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, spun-off two years ago. Such is high finance.

Something else about high finance: it trumps high politics.

Maybe you thought that with the election of a young, smart, progressive President, the country was through with the more excessive corruption of the Bush years. If so, you would have been wrong.

While Dick Cheney dodges criminal indictments around the rest of the world, makes speeches defending torture, and rakes in ‘deferred compensation’ from Halliburton, KBR, despite a record which entitles its executives to some long-deferred time in a federal penitentiary, continues to collect huge new government contracts and even “tens of millions of dollars in bonuses”, according to an article in Reuters.

As many as five U.S. soldiers have been electrocuted so far due to half-assed KBR work in Iraq. A Senate committee charged with looking into the scandal asked that the army, which continues to issue multi-million-dollar contracts to KBR, send a witness to testify about this. The army declined to do so.

A little history:

In February of 2007, the Defense Department’s Contract Management Agency issued a report on Halliburton/KBR’s work in Iraq which noted, in part: “Primary safety threat, theater wide, is fire due to the inferior 220 electrical fixtures found throughout Iraq. Improper installation (and) substandard equipment purchases...”

Nothing was done. In September, 2008, the CMA’s agency commander, Captain David Graff, wrote a letter expressing his outrage at the situation. “We cannot overemphasize the significance of the lack of sustained electrical support services being provided by KBR in Iraq to maintain the minimum life, health and safety standards in support of our (troops)”, Graff said.

The contracts have continued to this day. KBR was recently awarded a new $35 million deal for work in Iraq, including electrical work.

Last week, an electrical inspector hired by the army to review its U.S.-run facilities in Iraq, testified that 90% of KBR’s wiring in newly-constructed buildings was not done properly, meaning an estimated 70,000 buildings where troops live and work are not safe. “We found improper electrical work in every building we inspected,” Jim Childs told investigators.

So we’ve got what amounts to a criminal corporation which bought its way into a chunk of federal money at least as far back as the 1950s, operating pretty much like it owns the government. It identifies ‘needs’ –– created in the public mind and backed by the mainstream media –– which the government must fill, e.g. an invasion of a foreign country; then it monopolizes the field, buys a few members of congress, and snares a stream of lucrative contracts.

It does not have to actually fulfill these contracts. As the Government Accountability Office has reported, there are billions of dollars in war-related funds actually missing, unaccounted for, and there are more billions in waste because hundreds of major projects –– contracted for with Halliburton/KBR, Bechtel, and others –– have been abandoned unfinished. The profits must be sensational.

Corporations such as KBR answer to no one. Spokeswoman Heather Browne said, “KBR remains proud of the work it performs in Iraq. We remain committed to engaging in a transparent, and more importantly a fact-based, dialogue on this issue while pledging continued full cooperation and support to the military.”

Hey, those electrocuted soldiers? Shit happens. How’s that for “fact-based”?

William P. Utt, KBR’s chairman, said that the company was not expected to meet the U.S. electrical code. The codes used in buildings it maintains “throughout the war zone” (translation: the ones without the top brass) “were known and thought to be acceptable.”

More than a year ago, Halliburton/KBR got a government contract on some work right here at home, hundreds of millions to build “detention centers” where large numbers of people might be held against their will, i.e. imprisoned. Presumably, these are being built. The contract was let, according to the Bush administration, because it was believed that such facilities might be necessary to hold illegal immigrants or for “civil unrest.”

We are so bloody naive in America. The fact is that we are an empire, easily the most powerful and wealthiest in human history. We know this about Empires: they are intrinsically nests of murder and corruption. They couldn’t possibly be otherwise. Why would we think that?

Every empire eventually collapses internally because its powerful are too greedy and crazy to avoid sucking the life out of it. That’s what’s been happening in this country for at least sixty years but the predation has increased exponentially since the 1980s. Once it was discovered that the Savings and Loan industry could be looted without much penalty, it was wide open.

In California, executives of the public power company, PG&E, made a deal with Enron, shipped its profits to a “parent” corporation (also called PG&E), and in a single day voted its executives multi-million-dollar bonuses and then, in the afternoon, met with lawyers to plan a bankruptcy filing. Nobody went to jail.

Now the bankers are doing it. Not only are the big boys not being penalized, a couple of their guys, Geithner and Summers, are now running the economic policy of the Obama administration. Man, that is some serious hardball.

Talked with a fellow the other day who works with banks all over the country and has friends at the fed. He had this to say: over the next twelve months, the government is going to close a thousand banks. This will mean that a thousand small institutions, community banks, will be taken over. But don’t worry: your deposit’s safe because these banks will then be sold to Wells Fargo and Bank of America and Morgan Chase.

Think about the implication of this. Think about what it means and what the point is.

Here’s what it looks like to me: the banking system was looted by people who knew that what they were doing –– pimping every stupid loan possible in an escalating and wildly-inflated real estate market –– would eventually crash the system. But that was okay because they could get away with it and, AND, they could use the ensuing crisis to eat all of the little banks.

After all, Citigroup, those twisted thugs who spent four hundred million bucks of OUR money on “naming rights” to the Mets’ ballpark, is “too big to fail.” But you know a bank or two in your town which isn’t. You see, there are those ‘neighborhood banks’ which will be found to be “under-capitalized.” Why? Because they made construction loans on commercial properties which now, thanks to the crash, have nobody to occupy them.

Citigroup and the other criminals are, of course, the ones who are “under-capitalized”, and through their own intention. But they are “too big to fail”. They can do anything, take anything, fake anything, run everything. You and I are not too big to fail. It is perfectly acceptable if we are unemployed, so long as there aren’t so many unemployed it becomes necessary to use those Halliburton/KBR detention “facilities”.

One more small thing:

Corporations now employ their own armies. The Blackwater scandals in Iraq, where private thugs operated as death squads run by corporations, caused it to change its name but not its circumstances. The American government has done little to challenge this dangerous situation. In effect, we now have death squads killing people with, essentially, impunity; individual killers may occasionally be sacrificed if the public gets to noticing and objecting, but the deals are going on regardless.

Once any group is licensed to kill abroad it takes no time at all for these things to come back home. Ask John Kennedy. That was the last time a real threat arose to the way things were being run. Look at old footage of Kennedy going after the steel executives, the oil executives, the war-profiteers. It’ll make your hair stand on end.

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