Category: Current Issues

Which to Celebrate This Year: Easter or April Fool’s?

Gandhi:Jesus

This April 1st, I fear I won’t be able to say “Happy Easter” to anybody. I’m even thinking about boycotting the festival altogether as a cruel April Fool’s hoax.

That’s because Easter is a celebration of life’s triumph over death. Yet we “Americans,” despite the fact that 70-75% of us claim to follow the risen Christ, find ourselves immersed in a culture of death. We love it; we’re actually necrophilic. Somebody’s got to protest that.

Examine the evidence so out-of-sync with Americans’ faith claims:

* Our Religious Fundamentalist Party, the G.O.P., is engaged in all-out terrorism on God’s creation. Republicans are worse than the Taliban or ISIS. Alone in the world, they bully every creature on earth by denying human-caused climate change. Millions of humans and billions of other creatures will die as a result.
* Totally beholden to the arms industry, U.S. politicians of every stripe choose violence as their first response to most problems they face. Their remedy for school shootings? Above all, don’t adopt the common-sense policies that have worked in every other industrialized country. Instead, bring guns to school; arm kindergarten teachers!
* Rather than pursue nuclear disarmament, they tear up past agreements and modernize our overwhelming arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (They stand willing to totally destroy North Korea for doing something similar!)
* While claiming to be pro-life, they wage a genocidal war in Yemen (and half a dozen other places) where millions of children face mass starvation and an unprecedented cholera epidemic.
* Our Commander-in-Chief proposes a military parade in D.C. that will cost up to $50 million that could be better spent on programs to help veterans needlessly traumatized by our country’s absolutely futile and endless wars.
* In fact, nothing has changed, except for the worse, since Martin Luther King identified the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.

On Easter Sunday, doesn’t all of this seem ironic – and infuriating?

That’s because everything I’ve just described profoundly contradicts the Christian faith so many Americans claim as their own. Jesus was non-violent. He refused to take up arms to defend himself or his family and friends. He had no fear of death. Or rather, he overcame his fear and endured torture and capital punishment rather than take a life. Protecting himself or his loved ones by killing or sacrificing others was not Jesus’ Way. Quite the opposite.

He taught his followers the Golden Rule (MT7:12). He said we should love our enemies (MT:5:43-48). When attacked, he told his followers to put away their swords (MT26:52). In the midst of his death throes, he prayed for his executioners (LK23:34). His Easter greeting was the repeated phrase, “Peace be with you” (JN20:24-29)

Imagine if 70-75% of U.S. citizens:

* Truly accepted those teachings
* Refused to succumb to today’s necrophilia because of our faith in Jesus’ Way
* Called upon that faith to demand that President Trump sober up, stop the
bombing, and abjure permanent war that is the cause (not the solution) of the world’s problems
* From that same faith perspective, recognized the NRA, the arms industry and their political servants for the terrorists they are

A faith like that would be worth embracing; it would make a difference and bring many of us back to our faith roots.

It might allow Jesus’ followers to say (and truly mean) “Happy Easter” instead of sneering “April Fool’s!”

The Florida School Massacre Is Domestic Terrorism: and the NRA and the Republican Party Are Terrorist Organizations

School_Shooting_Florida

It was domestic terrorism pure and simple. Our children were its object. And our politicians don’t give a damn.

Of course I’m talking about the most recent school shooting in Florida. There, Nikolas Cruz, an expelled high school student slaughtered 17 of his former schoolmates.

But Cruz was white and a gun worshipper. So the politicians don’t care. Instead of talking about the most elementary, common sense restrictions on gun ownership, they bow down before the NRA and a sacralized interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Instead, they offer their de rigueur “thoughts and prayers.” They explain how “this is not the time to politicize the tragedy” by discussing gun control. They explain away the massacre’s causes in terms of the Mr. Cruz’s supposed mental illness.

However, just imagine the reaction if the shooter were an immigrant, a DACA dreamer, if he were black, or especially if his name were Mohammad! The response would be generalized and immediate regardless of constitutional protections, regardless of international law. Conclusions would be drawn about the intrinsic violence of Islam and about how immigrants are criminals and prone to mayhem. We would be told that all of them need to be expelled and/or excluded. There’d be references to “ISIS links.” There’d be talk about bombing, drones and military options.

Everybody knows that’s all true.

Moreover, if the shooter had been Muslim or immigrant, we would never hear mention of mental illness on his part. (Apparently, the victims of colonial control, war and U.S. bombing remain psychologically impervious to such effect.) There would never be sympathetic statements (as in the case of Charlottesville) about “very fine people” that can be found among those sympathizing with the violence.

If you doubt that, just recall that following 9/11 and shootings by Muslims, constitutional protections like the 4th Amendment were overridden without a second thought. In case you’ve forgotten, this is what the Amendment says:

‘The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.’

Despite those clear words (every bit as “sacred” as the Second Amendment), the government now claims the right to surveil all of our e-mails, and listen in on our phone conversations. Moreover, it says it can extrajudicially kill U.S. citizens anywhere in the world regardless of what the Constitution might say. And this despite the fact that terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, compared with the frequency of school shootings, have been far rarer. Since the beginning of this new year, school shootings like the one in Florida have occurred once every 60 hours!

No, the time for calling terrorism by its true name has long since arrived. Nikolas Cruz is a terrorist. The NRA is a terrorist organization. And so is the Republican Party (along with pro-NRA Democrats). As Noam Chomsky has indicated, because of its stand on climate change, nuclear warfare, and (I would add) gun control, the GOP is the most dangerous organization in the history of the world. They are all terrorists and terrorist sympathizers.

In the name of our children that must be said and its logical conclusions acted upon!

Pedophilia in the Church & U.S. Military = the Same Syndrome: Young People Should Abandon the Army Just as They’ve Abandoned the Church

vignette-bacha-bazi

Sex scandal and pedophilia were in the news again last week. And this time it deeply involved more than the Catholic Church, Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey.  No, it struck even closer to home than that for all Americans regardless of their religious affiliation. It involved an institution even more revered than Rome, Hollywood, or any Christian denomination.  I’m talking about the U.S. Military.

Yes, we all know about Pope Francis’ faux pas last week when he appeared to embody the ecclesiastical “old boys” syndrome by defending Juan Barros, a Chilean bishop who apparently had shielded a notorious pedophile priest from legal prosecution. The pope’s snippy defense of his prelatic friend, smacked of the cover-ups of child abuse that have come to light in the church over the last 30 years. According to the syndrome, Catholic bishops throughout the world have moved pedophilic priests from one parish to another, where the sociopaths typically continued preying on unsuspecting altar boys and confessional penitents.

Such procedure and its accompanying hypocrisy are prominent among the reasons young people and others have abandoned the church altogether.

A similar procedure involving the U.S. military should persuade young people to despise and reject military service.

I’m referring to an article published in the New York Times last week about a pedophilic practice in the Afghan military known as “bacha bazi” or boy play. It involves the widespread abuse and rape of underage boys by U.S.-trained Afghan Army personnel.

And how does this involve the U.S. military? Its leaders have adopted virtually the same policy that Catholic prelates have used over the years. They’ve turned a blind eye to the scandal and in doing so have allowed it to continue.

You see, there’s such a thing as the Leahy Law on the books. It legislates that when a recipient of U.S. aid commits gross human rights abuses, all aid to the offender must be cut off. Yet, to block application of Leahy, the U.S. and its military arm have invoked another law. It states that in the specific case of the Afghan War, no other U.S. laws apply.

Is that cynical enough for you? Does it remind you of the practice that has brought such opprobrium on the Catholic Church?  Imagine the corruption of two supposedly highly moral organizations (the Catholic Church and the U.S. military) that go out of their ways to protect pedophiles and prevent enforcement of laws that would penalize child abuse! Yet, that is exactly what two of our most trusted institutions have allowed to happen.

Add this black eye for the military to the “Me Too” scandal of sexual abuse of women enlistees in various service branches, and you end up with an outfit whose sexual corruption absolutely dwarfs that of the Catholic Church. Fully 40% of female military personnel claim they have been sexually assaulted by their peers. Eighty percent say they have been sexually harassed. If military women must endure such abuse at the hands of their colleagues, can you imagine how the abusers treat “enemy” women?

It’s time to face the facts. The U.S. military is at least as sexually corrupt as the Catholic Church. It’s time for our decent young people to vote with their feet just as they have with the church.

None of them with any shred of conscience should enlist.

Bernie’s the Man: His Town Hall Meeting on Single Payer Healthcare

Bernie-Sanders-Town-Hall

Tonight, Bernie Sanders held our nation’s first-ever D.C. town meeting on single payer health care. But he didn’t do it on national television or on cable. Instead, the meeting had to be held online. It was sponsored jointly by the news outlets, The Young Turks (TYT), Now This, and Attention.

Such sponsorship was necessary because the mainstream media (MSM) largely sponsored by Big Pharma, have no interest in an issue so vital to the American people. Network and cable are more focused on Russia-Gate and President Trump’s incoherent tweets. Predictably then, the MSM will continue to repeat Big Pharma’s tone-deaf talking points about single payer health care (see below).

All of this means that Bernie Sanders is yet again ahead of his competitors on the communications curve just as he was in 2016 on the campaign-funding curve. Then he established himself as the most popular politician in America despite spurning contributions from large corporate donors. Similarly, although holding his healthcare meeting online, the ever-creative Mr. Sanders maximized tonight’s audience. According to TYT’s Cenk Uygur, in order for Bernie to capture an audience of size comparable to the one he reached tonight, he would have to appear on CNN more than a hundred times.

In any case, the meeting was a model of efficient organization, relevance, and clarity. It featured three panels of three persons each, and had them discussing our nation’s healthcare crisis, the cost of single payer programs, and the success of such programs in Canada, Norway, and France. The message was quite simple:

  • 36,000 Americans needlessly die each year, because they have no healthcare. (Imagine the response if that many were killed by terrorists each year.)
  • Healthcare is a right, not a privilege.
  • But even if that right isn’t recognized as such, our present system is undeniably over-priced, wasteful, inefficient, and insane.
  • It actually has uninformed bureaucrats dictating instructions to highly-trained healthcare providers
  • Who waste untold hours arguing with insurance companies and filling out forms.
  • Inexplicably, it excludes dental and optometrist expenses as though they were luxuries.
  • Moreover, our system rewards callous employers who refuse to provide healthcare for their workers by giving them an edge over competitors with conscience who do.
  • The system even has taxpayers subsidizing the wealthiest family in America, the Waltons, by providing Medicaid to their underpaid workers.
  • Single payer systems everywhere in the industrial world provide better care at half our cost.
  • Everywhere they are so wildly popular that it would be politically suicidal for any politician to suggest their replacement with the U.S. system.
  • Single payer is popular because it requires no premiums, co-pays, deductibles or out-of-pocket expenses.
  • Compared to such savings, any tax increase to fund the system here would be miniscule.
  • A single payer system even exists in our own country; it is called Medicare.
  • After Social Security, Medicare is the most popular government program in the nation’s history.
  • Yet, our elected representatives refuse even to acknowledge single payer’s success anywhere,
  • Because they are paid off by insurance and pharmaceutical companies to do so.
  • Medicare can be easily universalized by simply lowering the age for eligibility from 65 to the day of a child’s birth.
  • Despite the disinformation of opponents, doing so would not cost more. It would cost far less! Remember, we already pay twice as much for inferior healthcare as those countries with single payer.

In a TYT follow-up to Bernie’s program, one right wing viewer ignored its entire content. Instead, he tweeted those typical Big Pharma talking points I mentioned above. The tweeter summarized the town hall meeting in three points: (1) everything is free; (2) the rich will pay for it, (3) I don’t know how much it costs.

As the TYT commentator observed: “There’s at least one thing Single Payer can’t do. It can’t cure stupid.”

The Truth Behind Mr. Trump’s Crude Metaphor

Shithole

President Trump’s done it again. He’s snatched away the patina of political correctness that normally conceals the brutal realities of a U.S. policy. His recent words about “shithole countries” say more than most imagine, not only about Haiti and Africa, but about history, colonialism, immigrants in general, and (surprisingly) about faith-inspired anti-colonial resistance. In other words, the offensive imagery is profoundly revealing and worth probing for its subconscious meaning and implications for immigration policy.

Begin by considering the operative words themselves. They were pronounced in the context of a White House meeting about immigration policy. There Mr. Trump wondered “Why do we want all these people from ‘shithole countries’ coming here?”

Such poetic metaphor suggests two meanings. On the one hand, it might imply that Haiti and Africa are somehow anal sphincters. They are orifices from which excrement exits a body. In other words, Haitians and Africans are nothing but human waste.

Alternatively, the geographical locations themselves would be places of defecation. They are toilets or outhouses. They exist to receive excrement – presumably from the likes of Mr. Trump and the country he represents. Accordingly, the countries he referenced are thereby reduced to wastelands.

Either comparison (sphincters or toilets) distorts the brutal history of colonialism. In every case that process has impoverished previously prosperous populations of countries and whole continents characterized not by poverty, but by a wealth that far outstrips that of the colonizers.

In fact, the colonial world’s wealth (three growing seasons, lavish biodiversity, rich rain forests, herds of exotic fauna, expansive acreage, abundant mineral deposits, and, in many cases, oil) are the very reasons why European and American colonists invaded them in the first place. They forced their ways in to transfer the colonies’ wealth to the “Mother Country” to feed her voracious bestial, but resource-starved industries.

In other words, rather than receptacles for receiving waste, the colonies’ function became the enrichment of the much poorer imperial centers whose conquistadors invaded and plundered them. In that sense, Europe was the shithole. As sphincter, it exuded sickly white marauders who plundered the lavish wealth of thriving black and brown indigenous peoples.

And in every case, after the Second Inter-Capitalist War (aka World War II), when the colonized rebelled to reclaim their own abundance, the colonizers intervened repeatedly to keep the stolen resources flowing to the shitholes up north – to keep in poverty those they had impoverished.

Ironically, Haiti represents a case in point. There attempts at re-appropriating stolen land and other resources have repeatedly been repulsed by foreign invaders.

Haiti’s rebellion began in 1791 shortly after the French Revolution. It was then that Toussaint Louverture led the first successful black slave rebellion – against the country’s French imperialists. Such effrontery to white supremacists has never been forgiven.

The unacceptability of blacks and browns in rebellion explains the U.S. support of the brutal Tonton Macoute under the Duvaliers (“Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc”). Their death squads were responsible for the assassinations, torture, and disappearances of thousands of Haitians from 1957 to 1986. The CIA supported them at every step.

The threat of Haitians struggling for liberation from foreign control also explains U.S. opposition to former priest and liberation theologian, Jean Bertrand Aristide. (And it’s here that the previously-mentioned connection to faith enters in.) In 1993 Aristide was elected with 67% of the vote. Aristide’s popularity and the reason for CIA opposition to his presidency is suggested by the connections the former priest made between his faith and his rejection of the U.S. rape of his homeland under the Duvaliers. In a January 1988 interview, he said “The solution is revolution, first in the spirit of the Gospel; Jesus could not accept people going hungry. It is a conflict between classes, rich and poor. My role is to preach and organize….”

Even before the 2010 earthquake (which killed 300,000 Haitians!!), Haiti’s infrastructure and social fabric were devastated by reactionary outrages against faith-inspired struggles for national control of the country’s own resources. Haitian society still reels from the policies of American clients concerned only with preserving their own wealth and cooperating fully with the foreign agendas of their D.C. puppeteers.

None of this is acknowledged by the Trump Administration, the mainstream media, our TV talking heads, or even by the leadership of the Catholic Church. Instead, everything has disappeared down the shitholes (Again, please excuse the crudeness of Mr. Trump’s metaphor) residing between the ears of those concerned.

The fact is that all colonized countries particularly in Africa have rich histories like Haiti’s.

This means that the poverty and desperation of immigrants from those places is explainable by a combination of colonialism, counter-revolution, and (very often) religious persecution.

The president’s crudeness has afforded valuable opportunity to recover all of that hidden history. It provides occasion for appropriating the memory so important to denizens of the Global South in general.

Their people are not human waste. Their countries are extraordinarily rich, not poor. Instead, both have been systematically plundered and impoverished. Our lavish lifestyles are the direct result.

Put otherwise, all of us can benefit from Mr. Trump’s vulgarity. It can lead us to flush the toilets our brains have become.

Such cleansing can reveal the real reasons that the United States must accept immigrants not only from Haiti and Africa, but from other Global South countries its policies have devastated repeatedly for so long. The immigration question is one of justice and reparation.

Flush away!

The Effing Morons Have Taken Over: It’s Time for Revolution!

Moron

Recent events have shown that our government has no legitimacy at all. None.

As a result, we should all be out in the streets every day. We should be joining a revolution in response to the incendiary words of the Declaration of Independence identifying the right and duty of citizens to dethrone abusive governments:

“. . . when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce (the People to) absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

With this posting, I’m inviting us to think about rebellion in the light of the most egregious of the “abuses and usurpations” we have been made to endure.

And here I’m not just referring to the outrageous Trump administration whose “tax reform” ignores the country’s majority and which is in the process of looting our national treasury on behalf of the already filthy rich. Just watch: they’ll soon be coming for our Social Security and IRAs.

[By the way, do you know what that tax plan represents? It’s not just a refusal to tax the rich to pay for schools, hospitals, roads and bridges – and those ridiculous wars. Rather, it’s a plan to borrow from the rich to pay for those senseless conflicts. In other words, instead of having the 1% pay for their oil wars; we’re paying them! Taxpayers borrow from the banksters to meet those “unfunded mandates,” and then PAY THEM INTEREST rather than COLLECT THEIR TAXES!! The result will be an additional $1 trillion in debt over the next 10 years. What a scam on the part of those liars who up until the Trump election were deficit hawks!]

But that’s not what I’m addressing here.

Neither am I referring to Trump’s completely arbitrary, unlawful, and severe provocation of Muslims across the world by his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Everyone knows that Zionist repression of Palestinians is the root cause of Islamic terrorism. Yet (to avoid Rex Tillerson’s more explicit designation) this effing moron is in effect inviting further 9/11s. (Remember that when the inevitable attack comes and everyone’s asking again, “Why do they hate us?”)

I’m not even referencing climate change and the ignorant decision on the part of “the most dangerous political organization in the history of the world” to unilaterally deprive our grandchildren of nature’s abundance. (Those are the words of Noam Chomsky. Regarding such despotism, he has famously said, “The party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand.”)

No one has the right to commit such outrage.

All of those acts (and many others) should be enough to persuade us that any trace of democracy we may have once enjoyed is gone. The man in the White House and these criminals in Washington don’t represent any of us – just their club of plutocrats that includes Democrats as well as Republicans.

But even their latest acts of gross ignorance and unprecedented kleptomania are insignificant compared to their greatest outrage.

And here I get to my main point.

It involves not just the Trump administration, but all of the criminals who have run our national horror show since the end of the Second Inter-Capitalist War (aka World War II). They’ve all been terrorists and mass murderers. ALL of them: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and now Trump.

According to Daniel Ellsberg’s new book, The Doomsday Machine: confessions of a nuclear war planner, every one of them stood ready to use nuclear weapons to incinerate 98% of the world’s population in one fell swoop. Ninety-eight percent! (Ellsberg, of course, is the most famous whistle-blower in history – the one who released The Pentagon Papers in 1971. Now his new book reveals what he learned during his stint as an insider formulating U.S. nuclear war policy.)

That policy was not just about deterrence or response to a first strike by the Soviets. It involved a policy of FIRST STRIKE now so dear to Mr. Trump’s heart. Eisenhower, for instance, was firm in his insistence that in time of crisis there could be no waiting for a Russian attack. For him (and subsequent occupants of the White House) our country had to strike first. In Eisenhower’s mind and in those of his successors, “first strike” was best and “second strike” was a distant second best. “No strike” when provoked was unthinkable.

Guided by such policy, from the early ‘50s onward, plans targeted every city of over 25,000 inhabitants in Russia and its satellites, and in China too.

The planned destruction is mind boggling.

How many people would be killed? How about 100 Holocausts – 600 million? That was the Pentagon estimate when the world’s population was 3 billion.

And it didn’t even count deaths resulting from Russian and Chinese retaliation!

Neither did it take into account the smoke and debris that would be swept up into the atmosphere blocking out the sun and causing nuclear winter. That climate change would make food production impossible and have any survivors starve to death (except perhaps about 2% of the world’s population near sea coasts that could provide mollusks and other ocean foods).

Pentagon estimates are that about 2/3 of the planet’s population would perish. Actually, (counting deaths from Russian and Chinese responses) the figure would be far closer to 3/3.

No one should have decision-making power like that. In Jefferson’s words, its arrogation by morons amounts to “abuses and usurpations” designed to reduce us all to circumstances equalling “absolute Despotism.”

But it gets worse. According to Ellsberg, no single person had the power to initiate a nuclear war. Many people did (and do) — down to the rank of Major in the field or Pacific Fleet commanders in the navy. If communication were cut off, and if those morons judge they are under nuclear attack, they have the power to respond in kind.

Is that terrifying enough for you? “Abuses and usurpations” anyone?

The fact is we are all effing morons for allowing this non-government to survive without rebellion.

So what should we do in response to such outrages? At this point, I’m not sure about particular steps. But at the very least we should

  • Throw the bums out. In 2018 truly drain the swamp. Get rid of ALL Republicans and their Democrat enablers.
  • Replace them with Bernie Progressives – with a goal of reviving the New Deal that provably raised living standards for all Americans, not just the rich.
  • Institute a special war tax to fund the on-going war on terrorism – to be increased with each new conflict.
  • Before imposing such taxes, hold nation-wide binding referenda on their advisability.
  • Stop dead our country’s nuclear weapons modernization program.
  • Begin serious world-wide negotiations for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
  • Force Israel to honor U.N. Resolution 242, thus removing the major cause of international terrorism.

And if none of that works, make discussion of rebellion and revolution respectable again – in the name of Jefferson’s brave words. It’s our patriotic duty!

 

That Gun in Men’s Pockets: Sexual Assault & Our Militarized Culture

Mae West

Recent furor around the sexual harassment of women by famous men has reminded me of the old Mae West tag, “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

It’s made me wish that all of us were as perceptive as Ms. West in implicitly connecting aggressive male sexuality and gun violence – especially in our militarized culture. Such sensitivity might help rid us of danger posed by real guns, which is far greater than “the boss” flashing or fondling his metaphorical counterpart in front of understandably shocked and repulsed female underlings.

In other words, I’m waiting for the day when the female-led sea-change we’re now witnessing around the gun in men’s pockets might attach itself to the weapons in their holsters and on missile launch pads. It would revolutionize our world. There mostly white misogynists currently shape not only Hollywood stories, news reporting, music, and comedy, but also our country’s domestic and foreign policy. There the male solution to everything seems to involve guns, bombing, and threats of violence.

Think about it: Both the gun referenced by Mae West and real guns are pretty strictly male things. Anatomically, women simply can’t exhibit the pocket gun. And strutting about with a Glock on their hips or an AK 47 on their shoulders seems fairly distant from most women’s reality. I find it hard to even imagine a mass shooting perpetrated by a woman. Has one ever occurred? (In fact, mass shooters tend to be white middle aged men with actual records of domestic abuse.)

Why this male fixation?

Feminist commentators as far back as the ‘70s had It figured out. They said that male exhibitionism and aggressiveness with that gun in their pockets isn’t really about sex. No: it’s about power.

After World War II, men resented the entry of women into the public sphere. Harassing them sexually was one way of putting them back in their place. “You don’t belong here; get out” was one message. Another was, “Unless you ‘put out’ for me, you won’t be hired or advanced.”

Both messages drove many women away or into jobs like teaching or nursing where female community was easier to find.

In other words, sexual harassment represented male response to female threat to their traditional territory and power.

Might something similar be said for men’s love affair with real guns – for their fascination with their size and power and capacity for multiple bursts? Is it a response to a world where women and other outsiders have entered white male bastions?

Consider the evidence provided by the most testosterone-soaked bastion of all, the U.S. military. There at least 25% of women report having been sexually assaulted; 80% say they have been sexually harassed. And, of course, rape of “enemy” women has long represented one of the spoils of war – including for U.S. servicemen. If they are so willing to sexually assault their colleagues, what do you think our soldiers do with enemy women?

The answer for all of this is a profound change of patriarchal systems designed to denigrate, harass, intimidate, silence, devalue and assault not only women, but anyone who threatens male privilege. The answer is for men to take the lead in betraying our fondest ideas of masculinity and our reliance on weapons to solve political problems. It is to deconstruct completely our misogynist culture.

That means imagining and crafting a world run by women – or at least where without harassment or assault, women are allowed to achieve proportional representation in national assemblies. In such a world, diplomacy, dialog, and compromise, would predictably represent the default diplomatic position rather than immediate resort to military hardware.

Simply put, our militarized patriarchy isn’t working on any level. Predatory masculinity has been exposed in the workplace. For those willing to see, the harmful failure of its martial equivalent also stands evident in the world at large.

Acknowledging that exposition and countering it with female energy would change everything.

Feminists as Our Natural Leaders: Reflections on the 40th Annual Meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association

 

Angie

Last weekend I attended the 40th annual conference of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in Baltimore, Maryland. I accompanied my wife, Peggy, who directs the Women and Gender Studies Program (WGS) at Berea College, where I taught for 40 years (1974-2014). Peggy was there with a colleague and seven of her WGS students. The gathering’s theme was “Feminist scholars and activists engage the movement for Black Lives.”

Given the theme of the conference, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by the diversity of attendees. Nonetheless, I was astounded by what I saw. It seemed to me that 50% or more of the attendees were women of color (WOC).

From the opening plenary, the atmosphere was absolutely electric and energizing.

Even more, I was pleasantly surprised by the radical nature of everything I observed there. It put me to shame in terms of revealing my own timidity that restrains me from being more outspoken and calling things by their real names in this time of unprecedented crisis. By comparison with what I heard and observed in Baltimore, my own writing, speaking, and teaching are far too understated. As one of the presenters I heard put it, “civility is overrated.” The times cry out for thoughtful radicalism.

“Radical” in this case means discourse attempting to uncover the roots of our world’s problems identified by NWSA speakers as the white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist patriarchy. On feminist analysis, that’s what’s behind today’s resurgent fascism with its racism, misogyny, cult of denial, massive incarceration, voter suppression, police violence, gun worship, daily mass shootings, universal surveillance, union-busting, climate-change reversals, threats of nuclear war, pay disparities between men and women, and overriding fear of immigrants, Muslims, and the heterogendered. In the language of NWSA presenters, the problems are “intersectional” – the results of inter-related elements of a multi-faceted oppressive system with patriarchy as its taproot.

Put otherwise, women aren’t merely victims of some monolithic patriarchy; they are oppressed by misogyny, racism, ageism, and prejudice against queers, immigrants, the aged, and the differently abled. Resistance to such oppression is signaled today by coalescing movements that include black queer feminists, domestic workers, home health care providers, restaurant employees, and agricultural laborers.

With such inclusivity, the discourse I heard at the NWSA was far from the blah, blah spouted by the overwhelmingly conservative, white, elderly and protofascist males who continue to run our country. Unlike the self-described “bad ass organizers” in Baltimore, the academic representatives of the predominantly male political class typically cultivate silence and equivocation in the service of their own professional advancement disguised as intellectual respectability.

For their parts, the NWSA women were far more incisive. That’s because their scholarship is rooted in their insurgent activism. Embracing the role of “outsiders within” (the academic establishment), the goal of feminist hell-raising and scholarship is a just distribution of society’s benefits determined not by what humans can work for or achieve, but by what everybody needs. Their focus is not so much piercing the infamous glass ceiling that prevents the well-educated and wealthy from advancing within corporate hierarchies, but protecting and repairing the floor boards splintering and eroding beneath the very feet of women at the bottom of neoliberal constructions.

Take, for instance, the opening plenary presentation. It centralized a conversation between Angela Davis and Alicia Garza.  Davis, of course, is the iconic and by now septuagenarian Black Panther scholar and activist who once led the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Her current efforts are directed towards abolitionism – the uprooting of prisons, policing, and education as we know them.  Alicia Garza is one of the three founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM). A widely published activist, she currently directs special projects for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. (When, at the beginning of her remarks, Garza asked for any who had participated in BLM demonstrations to stand, a third of the audience, it seemed, got to its feet and received a warmly appreciative ovation.)

Here are some of the (paraphrased) key thoughts Davis (AD) and Garza (AG) shared with us on opening night:

  • AD: At this otherwise depressing moment in history, I’m encouraged by the activism evoked by the ongoing right-wing revolution. Left-wing revolution is once again in the air. With the Boycott, Divest & Sanction Movement (BDS), Palestinian liberation is now openly part of the agenda. Together we stand on the left, but on the right side of history.
  • AG: Revolution is a process, not a destination. It is the transformation of how power operates – a passage from punitive, predatory, power-over models to cooperative, interdependent ways of operating. Revolution in this sense expands the notion of “our loved ones.”
  • AD: The world does not revolve around the United States. The struggle is global. We must learn some humility and be willing to sit at the feet of liberation movements in the Global South – for instance, from the black feminist movements of Brazil.
  • AG: Black Lives Matter is not an instance of “identity politics,” as the FBI alleges by inventing the category “black identity extremists.” The FBI category represents just one more official attempt to dismantle BLM. The underlying assumption of its phrasing is that we’re not all in relationship with each other and with over-arching institutions. On the contrary, identity is shaped by capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. It’s not that BLM cares only about its particular group. It’s that BLM realizes that when black people get free, everyone gets free.
  • AG: Feminism is about challenging normativities.
  • AD: We need art, because we can’t say it all.

Women like Angela Davis and Alicia Garza are inspiring. They evince much more courage than most males I know – or, let me say it clearly, much more than me! Once they enter the realm of critical consciousness, feminists become our natural leaders. Somehow they seem less attached to the cult of personality. They know how to cooperate. This isn’t the movement of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or John Lewis. Its leadership is more collective than that – more empowering and inclusive. Their range of issues are more, well, “intersectional.”

That’s the hope I found at the 40th anniversary meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association meeting. I’m glad I went.

Trump’s Border Wall: It’s Land Theft, Exploitation & Murder Solidified in Concrete & Steel

Reagan wall

President Trump’s pledge to build a wall along the Mexican border raises two interesting questions about borders themselves and about border crossings:

  1. Why do the rich consider borders sacred when poor people cross them without permission?
  2. And why do those same rich not consider national boundaries sacred when they cross them even against international law?

First consider borders themselves. They are completely arbitrary.

I mean, in historical perspective, current demarcation lines dividing countries are totally artificial and changeable. Many of them, for instance in Africa and the Middle East, were drawn up in a field tent by basically ignorant imperial generals.

The colonial outsiders’ overriding interest was stealing the resources of the areas in question. So they formed alliances with local chiefs, called them “kings” of their new “nations,” and drew those lines I mentioned describing the area the nouveau royalty would govern.

But the colonial conquerors did so without knowledge of traditional tribal habitats, shared languages, or blood connections between families their random lines separated. As a result, from the viewpoint of the groups divided, the problem with borders is not that people cross them, but that the borders cross peoples.

Closer to home, that ironic crossing phenomenon is best illustrated in the cases of Texas, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah. Before 1848, all those states were part of Mexico. Then following the Mexican-American War (1846-’48), the U.S. border crossed Mexicans in those new states and they suddenly became foreigners in what previously had been their own country.

In 1848, ordinary Mexicans viewed the entire process as highway robbery. So their descendants often speak of contemporary Mexican migration to “America” as a Reconquista – a justified re-conquest of lands stolen from their forebears.

Nevertheless, 170 years later President Trump wants to solidify America’s unlawful annexation of huge swaths of Mexico by building a wall along this relatively new line of separation. His argument is that borders are sacred, and that people who cross them are “illegals” and criminal. But that just raises questions about his rich confreres’ attitude towards borders.

So let’s consider that second point.

Fact is: The rich disrespect borders in two principal ways, one “legal” and the other completely otherwise.

So-called legal border crossings are claimed as a right by international corporations. According to its free enterprise principles, Wal-Mart, for example, has the right to set up shop wherever it wishes, regardless of any resulting impact on local merchants, farmers, or suppliers. Thus capitalists claim license to cross into Mexico in pursuit of profit. They legalize their border crossing by signing agreements like NAFTA with their rich Mexican counterparts.

Meanwhile, workers (the second key factor in the capitalist equation) who are impoverished by “free trade” enjoy no similar entitlements. For them, borders are supposed to be sacrosanct, even though the boundaries prevent them from imitating the rich by serving their own economic interests – in their case, by emigrating to wherever the availability of good wages dictates.

Workers everywhere intuitively recognize the double standard at work here. So they defiantly cross borders without permission.

The other disrespect for borders on the part of the rich is more insidious. It takes the form of their own defiant transgression of international law by crossing borders to drop bombs on poor people wherever and whenever they wish, without formal declaration of war. (Imagine if poor countries claimed that right vis a vis their wealthy counterparts!) In the so-called “war on terror,” borders have become completely meaningless.

The point is that we “Americans” need to re-examine our attitudes towards borders and border walls. Borders, after all, are not sacred to the rich. Never have been. So why should rich corporatists expect workers and refugees from the wealthy’s destructive and illegal border-crossings to respect boundaries the elite have drawn so arbitrarily and violated so cavalierly?

Mr. Trump, tear down that wall!

What Have We Become? Pompeo and Pence Cause Us to Look in the Mirror

CIA

Who are we as a nation? What have we become? The answer to those questions should scare the hell out of us. Evidently, we’ve become an absolutely brutal, soulless people – frightening beyond belief.

This time I’m not referring to our “leaders’” moronic denial of climate chaos that menaces the lives and futures of our children, grandchildren, and the entire planet. I’m referencing instead our status as a blatantly terrorist nation that on religious principle (in North Korea) casually threatens to wipe more than 25 million people off the map in a single instant as early as tomorrow. TOMORROW!

Three recent revelations evoke my alarm. One was a statement on October 26th by Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA. The second issued the next day from the mouth of vice president Pence. The third came the same week with the release of the 50-year-old Kennedy Assassination Papers that put flesh on both statements making them mind-numbingly terrifying.

Consider Pompeo and the assassination revelations first.

At a forum convoked by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Pompeo who has proudly supported torture, and who heads an agency that has sponsored coups, assassinations, and omnipresent black-hole prisons declared that the CIA has to become “a much more vicious agency.”

Those were his exact words! And shockingly, they represent acknowledgment on Pompeo’s part that the CIA has always been vicious. (If it has to become “more vicious,” I guess, in Pompeo’s eyes, it was merely less vicious previously.)

According to Webster, Pompeo’s term means “dangerously aggressive.” Its synonyms are brutal, ferocious, savage, violent, dangerous, ruthless, remorseless, merciless, heartless, callous, cruel, harsh, cold-blooded, inhuman, fierce, barbarous, barbaric, brutish, bloodthirsty, fiendish, sadistic, monstrous, murderous and homicidal.

As descriptors of an extremely prominent agency of the U.S. government, those adjectives could apply to our entire D.C. apparatus, couldn’t they?  They could describe us!

Is that what we want to be in the world?

And just how vicious has the CIA been? It’s here that the assassination disclosures come in. They clearly show that from its birth in 1947, THE CIA HAS BEEN A FULL-FLEDGED TERRORIST ORGANIZATION that could hardly be more vicious. In fact, because of its reach and resources, it clearly surpasses the vice of any terrorist group or crime syndicate in the world – including ISIS.

The papers show that in the past the agency has stood ready to kill indiscriminately by sinking ships, setting off bombs, using chemical weapons, and murdering heads of state as its routine modus operandi – all the while covering its tracks and leaving clues that implicate designated enemies like Russia and Cuba.

If the CIA has stood ready to engage in such mass false flag atrocities 50 years ago, and if now Pompeo wants its cadres to step it up, where do you think they will set their limits? Will they fly airplanes into tall buildings? Will they assassinate presidents? Have they?

In other words, Pompeo’s assertions and the assassination papers lend credence to conspiracy theories of all kinds. Fact is the CIA is a conspiracy factory!

That there are no limits to the brutality housed in Langley, the White House or in American souls was made clear by the earlier-referenced statement of Vice President Pence. This self-proclaimed man of God, who had previously identified himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican – in that order,” recently disclosed the true object of his faith. And it’s certainly not God, love, or the Prince of Peace. It’s nuclear weapons! Speaking at Minot Airforce Base in North Dakota, Pence declared “. . . there’s no greater force for peace in the world than the United States nuclear arsenal.”

What have we become as a people? What have Christians become?

On both counts, we have not only lost direction. Blood-thirsty, brutal, fiendish and monstrous, we have lost our souls.

And remember, those adjectives aren’t my invention. They represent the boastful, carefully-chosen sentiments of the leaders we have somehow allowed to represent us.

God help us!