Uncategorized – About Things That Matter

A Failure Already? Bill Maher Declares Zohran Mamdani “A Straight Up Communist”

How respectable liberalism helps defend systems it claims to oppose.

One of the earliest dynamics I imagined in my recent novella (Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President & Changed America Forever) was not triumph, but backlash. The story assumes that the moment entrenched systems are seriously challenged, the response will not be curiosity or patience, but immediate verdicts of failure — long before structural change has even had time to begin. That reflex is not accidental. It is part of how power protects itself.

Which is why the speed with which Zohran Mamdani has been declared a disappointment is not surprising at all. Three weeks into office and New York’s housing crisis remains. Imagine that — after three whole weeks!! Rents are still unaffordable. Shelters are still crowded. Families are still doubling up, and young people are still leaving the city they love because they cannot imagine building a stable future there.

But what has been just as revealing as the impatience is the source of much of the outrage. Some of the loudest denunciations of Mamdani have come not only from the right, but from television personalities who still market themselves as liberals — most notably Bill Maher — who appear genuinely appalled that a major American city might elect someone who does not instinctively genuflect before market solutions.

Forgetting about our nation’s history of racially segregated neighborhoods and ghettoes, ignoring real estate and banking redlining, gated communities, white flight, and the exclusionary practices of the Trump family itself, Maher ridicules the obvious fact that home ownership in the U.S. has been and remains racist and an instrument of white supremacy. Think about it. Think about the racial impact of using property taxes to determine the quality of public schools. Yes, Mr. Maher, home ownership in America is racist.

However, by the standards of contemporary political commentary, such amnesia and willful ignorance has apparently provided enough time to declare defeat.

What is more striking still however is how little these attacks have to do with actual housing policy. They are not debates about zoning law, construction finance, or tenant protections. They are ideological rituals. Mamdani is denounced not only as a “socialist,” but as (in Maher’s words) “a straight-up communist,” as if these were self-explanatory epithets rather than political terms with long and very specific histories.

Red-baiting, once a reliable weapon of the right, has now become comfortable entertainment for liberal audiences.

One might reasonably expect professional commentators to understand the vocabulary they deploy so confidently. However, they evidently do not. Instead, we are offered ideological pantomime: capitalism good, socialism bad; privatization efficient, public ownership corrupt; taxes theft, regardless of what they fund or whom they protect. These slogans are not arguments. They are incantations — repeated not to clarify reality, but to prevent serious discussion of alternatives that might threaten existing concentrations of wealth and power.

Yet after just a few dinner-table conversations, even my own middle school grandchildren could explain what Maher and others seem either not to know or not to care to acknowledge. My grandkids knew that socialism refers to public ownership of the means of production, the use of regulated markets, and limits on extreme wealth through progressive taxation. They knew that communism, in classical political theory, is not a description of any society that exists or has ever existed, but a hopeful vision of a future. It’s a North Star goal in which abundance is shared, class divisions disappear, and even the state itself — always a structure used to enforce class hierarchy — withers away.

My little grandchildren also knew what most economists acknowledge without controversy: that every functioning economy in the world today is a mixed economy. They all combine public and private ownership, regulated and freer markets, and redistribution through taxation. To repeat, they are “mixed economies” — every one of them. The question is however, in whose favor are they mixed — in favor of the rich or of the poor? In the U.S., it’s the rich. In China, it’s the working class.

Moreover, what Maher and others call “communism” has already proven to work in the United States. They called it the New Deal. They called it Keynesianism, and it gave us workers Social Security, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation for injury on the job, and a 40 hour work week. It made unions legal and provided jobs, income, and socially valuable work for millions of impoverished Americans when the government stepped in as employer of last resort. Its creation of the national park system made the U.S. government the country’s biggest land owner — the master of the planet’s most important “means of production.”

None of this is radical. It is introductory political economy.

What is radical, apparently, is saying any of this out loud on American television without first wrapping it in nervous apologies.

Housing policy then becomes not a question of long-term public investment and institutional redesign, but a morality play in which reformers are expected to perform miracles on cue — and are mocked when they cannot.

Yet the truly unrealistic position is believing that deregulated housing markets will somehow, after decades of failure, suddenly begin producing widespread affordability. The evidence is overwhelming that they will not. Left to themselves, housing markets maximize return on investment, not human stability. Luxury construction thrives; low-income units stagnate. Rent rises faster than wages. Speculation accelerates displacement. Public housing deteriorates under chronic underfunding while private capital flows freely into high-yield developments.

To call this “natural” is to mistake policy choices for inevitability.

If anything, the realistic position is the one Mamdani actually represents: that reversing these dynamics will take sustained political will, public investment, and institutional rebuilding — none of which can be accomplished by executive decree or cable-news bravado.

This is why ideological labels matter less than practical institutional policies. Passing tenant protections may not make headlines, but it changes lives. Securing funding streams for public housing repair may not trend on social media, but it prevents future crises. Rewriting zoning laws to allow denser, community-controlled development may not satisfy the appetite for spectacle, but it reshapes what becomes possible over time.

In other words, housing reform requires democracy — not performance.

In Against All Odds, accountability is not about scapegoats. It is about public reckoning with systems that were allowed to persist because they benefited the powerful and numbed the rest of us into acceptance. That kind of reckoning, whether in fiction or in real cities, cannot happen instantly. It unfolds through institutions slowly being repurposed for the common good rather than private extraction.

What Mamdani’s first weeks in office really reveal is not failure, but the size of the inheritance: decades of bipartisan accommodation to a housing system that treats insecurity as an acceptable cost of growth.

If we are honest, the scandal is not that housing has not been fixed in three weeks. The scandal is that it was allowed to deteriorate for thirty years while political leadership congratulated itself on “vibrant markets” and “urban renewal.”

Progressive politics, if it is to mean anything beyond branding, must be judged not by speed alone but by direction: by whether public institutions are being rebuilt rather than hollowed out, by whether power is shifting toward those who have long been excluded from shaping their own living conditions, and by whether economic life is being reorganized around human needs rather than speculative return.

Those metrics take time to register.

The Arc of Justice Alliance grew out of this same realization: that without new public imagination — and new public institutions to match it — we will remain trapped in systems that treat structural injustice as unfortunate but inevitable. Stories, movements, and policies must reinforce one another if democratic repair is to be more than a slogan.

That is why I write fiction alongside essays like this one. Not because stories replace politics, but because they can help us picture futures that our current institutions make difficult to imagine — and therefore difficult to fight for.

Three weeks is not a verdict. It is barely the opening scene.

The real question is not whether Zohran Mamdani has solved housing yet, but whether liberal America is willing to stop mistaking ideological comfort for political realism — and to admit that serious reform will always look dangerous to those who have grown accustomed to a system that works, more or less, for them.

A Second Excerpt From “Against All Odds”— Chapter Seven, “The Sovereign Ledger”

Editor’s Note / Author’s Introduction

I recently shared here and at OpEdNews the opening chapter of my novella Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President & Changed America Forever. I published the novella in the belief that narrative can sometimes open moral and political reflection in ways that formal analysis does not.

Rather than continuing sequentially, I’m offering today a later, stand-alone chapter — Chapter Seven, “The Sovereign Ledger.” I chose this chapter because of its real-life echoes of The Epstein Files. Like the latter, this chapter confronts a question that democratic societies routinely avoid: how do nations acknowledge wrongdoing, make accountability public, and prevent political reconciliation from becoming mere collective amnesia?

Although this chapter occurs well into the story, it does not depend on detailed knowledge of earlier events. It represents a turning point where personal courage gives way to institutional reckoning — and where justice becomes a matter of public structure rather than private virtue.

I offer it in the hope that it may prompt reflection not only about the future imagined in this story, but about the present we are still struggling to shape.

Chapter Seven: The Sovereign Ledger

“There are moments when a nation learns that its worst suspicions were not paranoid enough.”
— Arc of Justice Alliance, Internal Briefing, March 2026

The first sign was not outrage. It was nausea.

People would later remember where they were when the Ledger surfaced, but few would remember what they felt in those first minutes.

Not anger. Not disbelief. Something colder. Something intimate. As if a locked room inside the American psyche had been opened, and the air that escaped was foul beyond imagination.

The file appeared without announcement.
No whistleblower stepped forward.
No press conference was called.
No government agency took credit or responsibility.

At 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, mirrored across thousands of servers worldwide, a compressed archive appeared under a single title:

THE SOVEREIGN LEDGER
Internal Records of Federal Continuity, 1998–2028

Within minutes, links propagated across independent newsrooms, encrypted forums, municipal networks, and university servers. By sunrise, attempts to suppress it had already failed. The file had been copied too many times, by too many hands, in too many jurisdictions.

It was not a leak. It was an exhumation.

The Ledger was not one scandal. It was a system. Thousands of pages documented how power in the United States had long operated through a shadow economy of indulgence, coercion, and silence.

What the public had been encouraged to understand as “isolated incidents” appeared instead as recurring patterns—engineered, financed, and protected.

There were private air manifests tied to shell corporations. There were sealed settlements paid with public funds.
There were non-prosecution agreements signed by federal prosecutors who later received corporate board appointments.

And there were the names.

Lawmakers.
Judges.
Intelligence officials.
Media executives.
Foreign dignitaries.

Some appeared once. Others appeared again and again.

The most disturbing files concerned what the Ledger referred to—with chilling bureaucratic neutrality—as “leverage assets.” Young women. Underage girls.
Migrants without documentation.
Runaways pulled from foster systems.

They were trafficked not primarily for profit, but for control. Sex was the currency. Shame was the collateral.

The Ledger documented how parties, retreats, “philanthropic conferences,” and private residences were used to compromise powerful individuals—and how those compromises were then archived, categorized, and deployed when obedience was required.

One internal memo summarized the logic plainly: “Exposure risk ensures policy compliance across administrations.”

What shocked readers most was not the existence of depravity—Americans had learned to expect that—but the scale of institutional cooperation required to keep it hidden.

FBI investigations were quietly reassigned. Victims were pressured into silence through civil settlements.
Journalists were warned off stories by editors citing “national stability.” Judges were persuaded to seal records indefinitely. Even deaths the public had been told were suicides appeared in the Ledger as “containment events.”

One line, buried deep in a Justice Department review, froze the nation:

“Subject’s death neutralized further reputational cascade.”

The Ledger did not accuse. It docu-mented. Emails. Bank transfers.
Flight logs. Surveillance transcripts.

It showed that the system had not merely tolerated abuse—it had absorbed it, metabolized it, and used it as governance.

By midmorning, the country had stopped pretending. Trading halted on multiple exchanges. Congressional offices closed without explanation. Cable news anchors struggled to read prepared statements with steady voices. Parents read the Ledger and felt ill. Survivors read it and wept. And millions who had never trusted Washington finally understood why.

It wasn’t incompetence. It wasn’t polar-ization. It wasn’t gridlock. It was rot.

Trust did not collapse slowly. It vanished.

Zohran Mamdani read the Ledger alone.

He sat in the Blue Room at City Hall long after staff had gone home, the city glowing beneath the windows like a living organism unaware of its diagnosis. He read until his eyes burned.

What struck him was not outrage—that came later—but grief. The Ledger did not describe monsters hiding in shadows. It described men in suits, speaking softly, shaking hands, protecting one another. It described a republic that had confused continuity with morality.

When he reached the annex detailing municipal pressure programs—how cities like New York were financially squeezed into compliance, how mayors were surveilled, how reform efforts were quietly strangled—he closed the laptop.

“So,” he said aloud, “this is why nothing ever changes.”

Naomi entered without knocking. Her eyes were red.

“They’ll deny it,” she said.

“They already are,” he replied. “They’ll say it’s foreign disinformation.”

“Too many fingerprints,” she said.

“They’ll say it doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” Zohran said, “because people believed them once.”

She hesitated. “Do you know what this means?”

He nodded slowly. “It means the country is going to look for someone who isn’t in that file.”

The Ledger did what no election, protest, or ideology had managed to do. It made the old system unbelievable. Not unjust—unbelievable.

People stopped asking which party was responsible and began asking whether the system itself deserved to survive.

Governors issued contradictory statements. Federal agencies fell silent. Courts postponed hearings without explanation. And in living rooms, kitchens, union halls, and classrooms across the country, the same realization settled in: We were governed by people who could not govern themselves.

When authority evaporates, something always rushes in to replace it. In New York, the Arc of Justice Alliance released a single statement:

“Legitimacy is not inherited. It is earned—and it can be lost.”

Zohran said nothing publicly for three days. When he finally spoke, he did not attack Washington. He did not cite the Ledger. He did not accuse. He said only this: “Power that survives by hiding crimes forfeits the right to rule.”

The silence afterward was absolute.

Somewhere between that moment and the next sunrise, the republic crossed a line it could not uncross. The Sovereign Ledger had not merely exposed corruption. It had revealed that the American government no longer governed by consent—but by concealment.

And once concealment failed, nothing remained.

Concluding Reminder

Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President & Changed America Forever, explores questions of political accountability, public trust, and democratic repair through narrative rather than policy argument.

Readers interested in the complete story can find information about the book by clicking here. All proceeds from the novella’s sales go to the Arc of Justice Alliance which is applying for tax-exempt status.

How Even the American Left Keeps Falling for Regime-Change Narratives

Just when public attention is turning—once again—to unanswered questions about Jeffrey Epstein, his powerful associates, and the long history of elite impunity in the United States, we are suddenly confronted with a new foreign-policy emergency. Once again, we are told that events abroad demand our immediate moral outrage, our emotional investment, and our political alignment with the very leaders who are most eager to change the subject at home.

This is not coincidence. It is political deflection.

The Trump administration has every incentive to flood the media with international crisis narratives that redirect attention away from institutional corruption, judicial failures, and the uncomfortable truth that powerful men rarely face consequences in this country. And nothing serves that purpose more reliably than the familiar spectacle of righteous outrage against a designated foreign villain.

So here we go again.

We are being told—urgently and with manufactured moral certainty—that we must side with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel and Donald Trump’s America in condemning alleged mass killings by Iranian security forces. We are invited to clutch our pearls over reports that “thousands” may have died in Iran in the past week alone, while the credibility of those numbers goes largely unquestioned and the geopolitical context goes mostly unmentioned.

The timing is convenient. The narrative is familiar. And the political utility is obvious.

It all ignores the fact that for more than two years, Israel, with full political and military backing from the United States, has devastated Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed. Hospitals, schools, and water systems have been systematically destroyed. Starvation has been used as a weapon. Yet U.S. officials have either remained silent or have actively shielded Israel from accountability in international forums.

Now those same officials present themselves as guardians of human rights, suddenly appalled by civilian deaths.

Fortunately however, moral authority is not something that can be turned on and off like that at political convenience. By enabling mass slaughter in Gaza, Israel and the United States have forfeited any claim to be neutral or trustworthy narrators of human rights abuses elsewhere. When they point the finger at Iran, they do so with blood soaked hands.

What is most troubling, however, is that much of what passes for the American “left” appears ready—once again—to follow their lead.

Even progressive outlets that have long criticized U.S. imperialism are amplifying claims about Iran with little scrutiny, as if we have learned nothing from Iraq, Libya, or Syria. The familiar script is rolled out: heroic protesters, savage security forces, and a population yearning for Western-style liberation.

But we have seen this movie before. And we know how it ends.

Consider a striking example from just this week. On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. During the interview, Panahi acknowledged something crucial: because of internet shutdowns and information blackouts, he said, “I do not have any trustworthy news from inside Iran. I don’t know what is happening. I don’t know where my colleagues are, where my family is. It is only the bits and pieces that you hear.”

And yet moments later, he spoke confidently of thousands—perhaps 2,000, perhaps even 20,000—killed by Iranian security forces. The interviewer did not challenge the figures, ask for sourcing, or remind viewers that casualty estimates in politicized conflicts are often wildly inflated during the early stages of unrest.

This is not serious journalism. It is narrative reinforcement.

None of this is to deny that Iran represses dissent or that many Iranians have legitimate grievances. It is simply to insist that repression alone does not explain why certain countries suddenly dominate Western headlines, while others—such as Israel—are insulated from scrutiny even when their actions are far more destructive.

The difference is not morality. It’s the way imperialism works.

Recall that immediately after 9/11, General Wesley Clark publicly revealed that the Pentagon had drawn up plans for regime change in seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, and Iran. While the timeline shifted, the strategic objective did not. Iran has remained a top target of U.S. and Israeli policy for decades, regardless of which party occupies the White House.

Political scientists such as John Mearsheimer have described how these operations tend to follow a consistent pattern:
First, economic sanctions that cripple daily life and undermine public confidence in the government;
Second, support for opposition movements, often including covert funding and the use of provocateurs to escalate unrest;
Third, aggressive information warfare, in which unverified or exaggerated claims are circulated internationally to delegitimize the targeted regime;
Fourth, threats of military intervention—or actual intervention—once instability has been sufficiently inflamed.

This is not speculation. It is documented policy history. Libya followed this script. Syria followed this script. Iraq followed this script with catastrophic results.

Sanctions, in particular, deserve far more attention than they receive in Western reporting. They are not “smart” tools that surgically target political elites. They are blunt-force attacks on entire populations, restricting access to medicine, banking systems, and basic imports. They produce precisely the social desperation that then gets cited as proof of governmental illegitimacy.

In effect, we help create the crisis, then point to the crisis as justification for further intervention.

And after Gaza, skepticism about Western moral posturing is not cynicism. It is responsibility.

What is perhaps most disheartening is how easily even progressive voices are drawn into amplifying the early stages of these campaigns. Figures who would never have accepted Pentagon talking points about Latin America or Vietnam routinely accept them uncritically when the target is Iran. Good intentions do not prevent anyone from becoming useful to empire.

True solidarity with the Iranian people would start by opposing both domestic repression and foreign destabilization. It would recognize that sanctions are not neutral policy tools but instruments of social punishment, designed to fracture societies and manufacture crisis. And it would reject the deadly illusion that U.S.-backed regime change delivers democracy rather than collapsed states and endless violence.

We know this because we have already seen it—in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria. These were not humanitarian successes. They were geopolitical experiments whose costs were paid by ordinary people.

The lesson should be obvious by now: when governments that have just enabled mass civilian slaughter suddenly rediscover their concern for human rights, we should ask what strategic objective that concern is meant to serve.

After Gaza, Western outrage over Iran cannot be separated from Western impunity in Israel. One exposes the hypocrisy of the other. The crucial fact is simple: the U.S. does not fund uprisings, enforce sanctions, and manipulate media narratives out of compassion.

It does so to maintain empire. To keep its hegemony.

Those who truly care about the future of Iran should resist becoming foot soldiers in yet another regime-change campaign. They should demand diplomacy, economic normalization, and international accountability that applies to allies as well as adversaries.

Above all, they should remember that justice does not arrive on the wings of bombers or through the quiet work of covert operations.

It never has.

And if the past quarter-century has taught us anything, it is this: the loudest voices claiming to defend human rights are too often the ones preparing the ground for the next war.

Author’s Note

This essay connects to themes explored in the author’s recent ChatGPT-assisted political novella, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever, which uses storytelling to examine how media narratives, economic coercion, and permanent war distort democracy at home and abroad. Both the novella and the Arc of Justice Alliance / Project 2029 project argue that real security comes not from regime change or military dominance, but from building a “Republic of Care” grounded in democratic accountability and human dignity.

Rescuing Faith from Capitalism: A Theological Response to Project 2025

Readings for 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Ecclesiastes 1:1-2, 2:21-23; Psalm 90 3-6, 13, 14, 17; Colossians 3: 1-5, 9-11; Luke 12: 13-21

I’ve recently been invited to join the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA). It’s a new progressive think-and-action movement designed to offer a coordinated, long-term alternative to the far right’s increasingly authoritarian agenda.

No doubt you’ve heard of the Republican Project 2025. Backed by the Heritage Foundation and other major right-wing institutions, it’s a blueprint for seizing executive power, dismantling federal regulatory structures, militarizing domestic politics, and further entrenching white Christian nationalism. It is as serious as it is terrifying.

The Arc of Justice Alliance is our answer. It recognizes a hard truth: for over 50 years, the U.S. right has invested billions into building a machine—media networks, policy mills, judicial pipelines, and ideological training camps for candidates. Progressives, by contrast, have often been merely defensive, scattered and uncoordinated. That’s changing now. AJA is bringing together scholars, activists, spiritual leaders, artists, and organizers to craft a long-term vision for democratic justice, human rights, and environmental sanity.

But here’s something that may surprise you: one of the right’s most potent weapons has been theology.

The Republican machine has spent decades coopting the Judeo-Christian tradition, turning it into a moral fig leaf for capitalism, nationalism, and even genocidal violence. Faith has been hijacked—not just by televangelists, but by policy strategists who know how powerful religion can be in shaping hearts and winning votes.

The results? A public religion that celebrates guns over peace, capitalism over compassion, and settler colonialism— in Palestine and elsewhere—over human dignity.

As a liberation theologian, I’ve been invited by AJA to help reclaim the authentic Judeo-Christian tradition. To rescue the voices of the prophets—from Moses to Jesus to Paul—from those who’ve turned them into champions of empire. We’re done letting Jesus be portrayed as a flag-waving American whose top moral priorities are deregulated markets, gun rights, and misogyny.

This week’s liturgical readings couldn’t be more timely. They mock the cult of wealth accumulation and call for spiritual liberation from materialist obsession. Ecclesiastes calls it “vanity” to work endlessly, lose sleep over your earnings, and die before enjoying anything. Psalm 90 reminds us life is brief—we might not wake up tomorrow. Paul tells us to set our minds on things beyond consumerism, and Jesus, in the Gospel of Luke, outright laughs at the man who builds bigger barns while ignoring his soul.

These aren’t just pious musings. They’re indictments.

They expose what capitalism demands of us: exhaustion, anxiety, competition, disconnection. They also expose what it consistently fails to deliver: peace, community, purpose, or justice.

Here’s the deeper issue: capitalism isn’t just an economy—it’s a theology. It teaches that your worth is your wealth. That you are alone, in competition, in a world of scarcity. That power, not compassion, is what keeps you safe. That “salvation” is financial security.

But the deeper tradition—the one the AJA seeks to reclaim—teaches something radically different.

It teaches that our lives matter not for what we earn, but for how we love. That justice, not greed, is the heartbeat of the universe. That our deepest wealth is found in community. That joy is a collective act of resistance.

And crucially, it teaches that we must name and dismantle the systems—economic, political, and religious—that keep us enslaved to fear and false gods.

That’s why we’re building the Arc of Justice Alliance. Not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a spiritual and moral response to empire. We are building a machine of our own—not to mirror the right’s authoritarianism, but to match its discipline and exceed it in vision.

So let’s stop pretending the Gospel is about prosperity. Let’s stop letting capitalism wear a halo.

Let’s laugh, like Jesus did, at the absurdity of endless accumulation. Let’s build networks of joy, resistance, and solidarity. Let’s speak clearly, act boldly, and remember what freedom really looks like.

This is what the moment demands. And this is what the AJA stands for.

Please join us!

Repost of My 2019 Article on Jeffrey Epstein

Of course everybody’s talking about Jeffrey Epstein. The topic is often presented simply as a tale of his perversion possibly with connections to Donald Trump. But it’s much more than that. As Whitney Webb has pointed out in two 500 page books on Epstein, it’s about “Government by Blackmail.” It’s about Israel’s Mossad and why Zionists can exercise nearly absolute control over the U.S. government, no matter who’s president. With Webb’s help, I saw all that six years ago, when I published the following essay on OpEdNews and when I followed it up by another piece on the use of the phrase “conspiracy theory” to dismiss any deeper probes into Epstein’s identity. So, here’s what I wrote in 2019.

___________

Epstein Was Suicided; That’s How Our CIA Does Business

I could hardly believe my eyes this morning, when I read in Alternet that Jeffery Epstein was found dead in his jail cell of apparent suicide. And I find it hard to believe that he killed himself, especially since he’s been on “suicide watch” since the discovery of apparently self-inflicted marks on his neck ten days ago. Instead, I suspect he was killed by the CIA. My suspicion is based on my close reading for the past few days of muckraker, Whitney Webb‘s three-part expose’, “The Jeffery Epstein Scandal: Too Big to Fail.”

Webb’s series makes the point that the Epstein pedophilia scandal threatened to blow apart the entire U.S. government house of cards. It opened up a potentially devastating window not only on the sordid lives of Epstein and his close friends, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, but on the profound corruption of the entire U.S. government and of international politics as a whole. Though connected with the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church, the scale of the Epstein branch of institutionalized child abuse absolutely dwarfs the shameful hypocrisy of justly vilified ecclesiastical criminals.

Epstein’s federal trial was scheduled to begin next summer. This means that the details of his crimes (and, more importantly, those of his high-placed patrons’) would steal headlines at the height of the general election of 2020. The evidence to be presented there is said to comprise more than one million pages.

In the light of what I’ll detail below, one can only imagine the surprises contained therein and whom those pages implicate. And given Epstein’s close association with Donald Trump and the Clintons (not to mention the other billionaire residents of Palm Beach Island in Florida), the trial and evidence presented at that crucial moment would likely have had an impact of the presidential election. Wayne Madsen for one, speculates that it may have already influenced the resignations of several Republicans from the House of Representatives.

Epstein, of course, is the alleged hedge fund tycoon whose central role in a pedophilia network came to light when he was arrested last July on Federal charges of sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York. Previously, he had been convicted of molesting an underage girl, but had mysteriously served what’s been described as the most lenient sentence in history for crimes like his — 13 months in a county jail during which he was free to leave during the day.

Alexander Acosta, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Labor was responsible for securing the ludicrous sentence, when Acosta served as Attorney General for the Southern District of Florida. On Epstein’s arrest last July, the FBI found hundreds of photos, videos, and recordings of child molestations some of them allegedly involving prominent public figures.

According to Webb’s expose’, the Epstein story is merely the tip of a dark iceberg much bigger than most of us realize. The darkness below the surface stretches back more than 75 years. It involves not only Epstein, but the CIA, its Israeli counterpart the Mossad, the Mafia as a CIA asset, the mysterious MEGA Group of influential billionaires, many government officials, and other high rollers with familiar names.

Webb’s series unveils what she terms “Government by Blackmail” an all-encompassing political strategy that began at least as far back as the conclusion of the Second Inter-Capitalist War. As the phrase suggests, Government by Blackmail consists in luring heads of state and other powerful world figures into compromising situations (often with underage “prostitutes” of both sexes), filming them in the process, and then using such evidence as leverage to extort huge sums of money, to extract favors and actually shape the world’s political economy. It extended to the Mafia, for instance, a virtual license to kill without legal repercussion.

As an alleged intelligence asset himself (of either the CIA, Mossad, or both) Epstein’s job was to gather the required evidence. To that end, he placed in compromising and seductive situations government officials from across the world. His mansions, private islands, and fleet of jet planes provided the venues. They were the sites of fabulous parties featuring alcohol, drugs, and underage “call boys” and “call girls.” All the locales were equipped with sophisticated recording devices, both audio and video, and two-way mirrors for recording acts of criminal pedophilia and other crimes or embarrassments on the parts of Epstein’s “friends” and acquaintances. Invitees included heads of state from across the planet Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, of course, among them.

But, Webb reveals, Epstein is only the latest iteration of Government by Blackmail. He’s the clone of figures like the Mafia kingpin Myer Lansky, and Lew Rosenstiel (of Schenley distilleries). During the ’70s and ’80s Rosenstiel, Lansky’s close friend, regularly threw what his fourth wife (of five) called “blackmail parties.” According to Webb, the photos and recordings gathered there long kept Lansky out of trouble from the federal government. They also delivered entire cities to Mafia control in the post WWII era. In fact, Lansky entrapped for blackmail purposes, numerous top politicians, army officers, diplomats and police officials. He had photos of FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover in drag and performing homosexual acts.

Rosenstiel’s protegee and successor as blackmailer-in-chief was Roy Cohn, who at the age of 23 was a close adviser of Senator Joseph McCarthy. More importantly, he was also associated with Mafia bosses, J. Edgar Hoover, the Reagan White House and has been described as a mentor of Donald Trump. His mentor!

Simultaneously, Cohn took on the central role in the blackmail pedophile racket Lansky and Rosenstiel had started. As usual, its main targets were politicians often interacting with child prostitutes. That was the source of Cohn’s power. So were his dear friends in high places including (besides Clinton and Trump) Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy, Barbara Walters, Rupert Murdoch, Alan Dershowitz, Andy Warhol, Calvin Klein, Chuck Schumer, William Safire, William Buckley, William Casey, and top figures in the Catholic Church.

It’s those latter figures that connect Cohn’s pedophile ring as inherited by Jeffery Epstein with the Church’s scandal. It directly involved “the American pope,” Francis Cardinal “Mary” Spellman, and Cardinal Theodore “Uncle Teddy” McCarrick. Father Bruce Ritter’s Covenant House (a multi-million-dollar charity for homeless and run-away boys and girls) was also deeply implicated. In fact, when Ritter’s involvement in sex acts with his underage protegees came to light, it was secular powers more than ecclesiastical forces that rallied to his defense.

Another pre-Epstein blackmail king was Craig Spence, a former ABC News correspondent who became a prominent DC lobbyist and CIA agent. All during the 1980s he provided child prostitutes and cocaine for Washington’s power elite. For purposes of blackmail, Spence used the now-familiar devices of video cameras, tape recordings, and two-way mirrors. His little black book and “favor bank” records have been described as involving a Who’s Who of Washington’s government and journalistic elite, this time including Richard Nixon, William Casey, John Mitchell, Eric Sevareid, John Glenn, and key officials of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, as well as media celebrities and military officers. According to the Washington Times, during the Bush administration, Spence had permission to enter the White House late at night to supply “call boys” to top level officials there.

Significantly, in the light of Epstein’s demise, just shortly before his death (also quickly ruled a suicide) Spence expressed fears that the CIA might kill him — apparently for knowing too much about connections between Nicaragua’s Contras and CIA cocaine smuggling to support them. But according to Spence himself, his knowledge went much deeper. Shortly before his similarly alleged suicide, he told Washington Times reporters: “All this stuff you’ve uncovered (involving call boys, bribery and the White House tours), to be honest with you, is insignificant compared to other things I’ve done. But I’m not going to tell you those things, and somehow the world will carry on.”

The Contra connection shows how in all of this, the Great Enemy of the hidden powers described here (involving the White House, CIA, FBI, Mafia, Mossad, powerful lobbyists, “fixers,” and billionaire political donors) was socialism and communism. The latter’s world project was 180 degrees opposed to governance by the moneyed elite as represented by the blackmail project of Epstein and his predecessors.

And so, it was important for blackmailers to support the prosecution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, back McCarthyism and J. Edgar Hoover, to undermine the Soviet Union, attack Cuba and Fidel Castro, protect organized crime bosses, and to make sure that projects like the Sandinista Revolution of 1979-90 failed. To those ends, it was even more important to inveigle left-wing politicians and officials from socialist countries into the international blackmail dynamic described here.

As for Epstein himself, following Cohn’s death (from AIDS) in 1986, he quickly took up his mentor’s mantle. As described earlier, Epstein became an FBI informant in 2008 yet more evidence of the agency’s long-standing involvement with and protection of pedophile rings for purposes of blackmail.

In summary, the Epstein scandal has finally made public a decades-long pedophilic blackmail operation at the highest level. Ultimately run by the FBI and CIA, (i.e. with the knowledge, approval and participation of law enforcement), it has involved prominent politicians, businessmen, police and military officials, celebrities, and ecclesiastical officials. The scandal has touched the current U.S. president and may still bring him down.

In the meantime, it has left behind a trail of broken lives in the persons of the children exploited for the pleasure of old white men whose debauched proclivities have been parlayed into economic and political power. On Epstein’s watch, the operation has spread to Central America and beyond, becoming truly international in the process.During the 2016 presidential campaign, Pizzagate fascinated right-wing conspiracy theorists. It alleged that the Clintons were somehow involved in a child prostitution operation run out of the Comet Ping Pong restaurant and pizzeria in Washington, D.C.

If a debunked Pizzagate theory caused such stir, and if pedophilia expose’s within the Catholic Church have brought it to its knees, one can only imagine the revolutionary potential of the documented disclosures that would inevitably come to light in a Jeffrey Epstein trial. It would reveal pedophilic involvement by public figures far surpassing the scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. It could bring down not only the Trump administration, but the whole international House of Cards.

One can only hope . . .

Syria: Another Regime Change Operation by the U.S. & Israel

I’m always disappointed with Democracy Now’s (DN) coverage of Syria. Its reporting on the fall of the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad was no exception. It described Assad’s deposition as primarily a triumph of freedom and the will of a brutally repressed people.

Absent from DN’s narrative was the straightforward truth that the fall of Assad was the fruit of another regime change operation. It was part of the U.S. plan announced in 2001 to depose seven governments in five years, viz., Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Iran.

Though the American timetable was overly optimistic, with the change of regime in Syria, the U.S. has succeeded in hitting six of its seven targets. Only Iran’s government remains in place.

Let me show you what I mean by summarizing DN’s account, contrasting it with its counter narrative, and sketching the way U.S. regime change operations work.

The Official Syrian Story

For years DN’s usually critical founder, Amy Goodman, has for some reason sided with the United States and Israel by uncritically repeating their official story about the Zionists’ neighbor to the north. It tells us that:

Bashar al Assad is a brutal dictator who succeeded his dictator father to rule Syria with an iron fist for the last half century and more.
He has not only claimed absolute power in Syria,
But has run an extensive secret prison system there (a “human slaughterhouse”) where captives are systematically mistreated, tortured, and held without charge.
His use of chemical weapons against those objecting to his rule is well documented by independent witnesses such as the Syrian Civil Defense Organization, the “White Helmets.”
For all these reasons, the U.S. and Israel have long held that “Assad must go.”
“Moderate rebels” have recently transformed that imperative into facts on the ground. Thankfully, they have successfully overthrown the hated dictator.
Since his removal from office, his brutality and consequent unpopularity have received ample testimony and denunciation by ordinary Syrians who are universally celebrating his fall from power.
Thus the U.S. and Israel (as champions of democracy, just war, and humane incarceration, and as opponents of torture and the killing of innocent civilians) have triumphed once again in yet another mid-east country.
The triumph mirrors what they have accomplished so idealistically and benevolently in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia and other countries benefitting from their wars fought for democracy and peace.

That’s the official line DN’s Amy Goodman consistently presents and/or implies.

A More Complete Picture

However, what Goodman’s account fails to explore are its following contradictions that would have us forget that:

The foreign powers advocating and celebrating the end of Assad’s cruelty (i.e., Israel and the U.S.) are the current perpetrators of genocide in Palestine. Arguably, that deprives them of ability to convincingly champion human rights in any forum. It demonstrates that they have no concern about civilian deaths, secret prisons, unjust torture, democracy, freedom, or peace.
In fact (according to George Galloway) during its war on terror, the U.S. used Syrian prisons as black sites to which they rendered “terrorists” for torturous interrogation.
Moreover, the “moderate” agents fulfilling the U.S. and Israel’s imperative to remove Asad from power are successors to the very “terrorists” responsible for al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks 23 years ago).
That is, while designating Syria as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” the U.S. has once again allied itself with al-Qaeda as it had in Afghanistan during Russia’s war there (1979-1989).
Additionally, the U.S. has crippled the Syrian economy by illegally occupying its eastern oil fields since 2014 effectively stealing its oil revenue since then.
While Israel has similarly occupied its neighbor’s Golan Heights.
Syria’s economy and population have suffered severe hardships under a U.S. sanctions regime that started in 2011 and whose effects worsened following a massive earthquake in February of 2023. For years they’ve had to function on the provision of a single hour of electricity each day.

Civil Discontent in Syria

As for the testimony of Syrians applauding and celebrating the fall of Asad . . .. It too demonstrates the effectiveness of standard American policy against designated enemies whose political “regimes” the U.S. wishes to change. That policy never deviates from the following procedure:

Vilify the regime leader as the latest incarnation of Hitler.
Under the pretext of punishing him, use sanctions, economic blockades, bombing, propaganda, bribery, election interference, terrorism, and internal subversion whose real purpose is to make the lives of locals so miserable
That they will arise,
Overthrow the regime in question,
And celebrate the victory as the triumph of democracy.

This is the standard policy followed not only against Syria, but against official enemies such as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

The subversion invariably causes the threatened governments to adopt their own counter-policies that the U.S. and its allies then describe as authoritarian, oppressive, and brutal. The policies include imprisonment of compromised political opponents, jailing and mistreatment of terrorists (no harsher btw than the mistreatment of prisoners in Israel and the U.S.), and restrictions on (usually foreign allied) press along with fifth column civil and religious organizations. All these government actions provide further evidence of the illegitimacy of the regimes in question.

They also provide well-meaning news sources like Democracy Now with reasons to uncritically repeat imperialist talking points.

Conclusion

Listening to Democracy Now’s account of a people’s triumph in Syria after more than a half century of dictatorship made me think of Cuba. As a friend of the revolution there and as a frequent visitor to the island, I couldn’t help thinking how in the case of a successful uprising there (God forbid!), a similar sort of account might be concocted.

There’d be the same people dancing for joy in Havana’s streets and the same people saying on camera how relieved they are that the hated regime had been deposed. There’d also be the same ex-pat Cuban professors from prestigious U.S. universities sharing the joy and supplying historical details about the brutalities of Castro’s legacy.

Misinformed viewers would be led to conclude “Thank Goodness Cubans are finally free!”

But if the current Syrian template were followed, those viewers would never be stimulated to question the official story. They’d never be reminded of the disastrous effects of 60 years of sanctions, blockade, and acts of terrorism against the state. They’d never know about attempted assassinations of the country’s president. Neither would they think critically about the effect of anti-Cuban propaganda on their own psyches.

The point I’m trying to make here is that questions should always be raised about official stories concerning designated enemies of discredited imperialist countries like the United States and Israel.

They should be asked as well when perpetrators of genocide decry the human rights record “dictators” carefully selected from a long list of tyrants routinely supported by the complaining parties and when the black sites and “slaughterhouses” of the offending dictators have been used by their accusers themselves.

Yes, critical reporters should be able to identify such contradictions.

Simply repeating “the official story” helps no one.

Democracy Now is usually better than that.

“Sound of Freedom”: Its Underlying Conspiracy?

I’ve just seen the surprise blockbuster movie “Sound of Freedom.”

It’s the story of Tim Ballard, the ex-CIA, and Homeland Security operative whose real-life crusade against child sex trafficking is the film’s subject.

The Angel Studio’s release on July 4^th surprised everyone by far outgrossing “Indiana Jones,” even though “Sound of Freedom’s” budget was by comparison extremely low, and despite its depending on word of mouth for much of its publicity.

Like most viewers, I found the film exceptionally moving, its acting splendid, and its cinematography of the highest quality. I’m not surprised that some are even talking about Academy Awards.

(By the way, despite “liberal” criticisms, “Sound of Freedom” made no mention whatsoever of QAnon, conspiracy, Pizzagate, adrenochrome, or political parties either Democrat or Republican. There was no hint of any of that.)

Instead, “Sound of Freedom” straightforwardly focuses on one topic, child sex trafficking. It accordingly summarizes itself in six spare words: “God’s children are not for sale.” Others have expressed its imperative in just three: “Connect the dots.” The first summary reveals the film’s shocking content and (understated) faith perspective.

However, the film’s dot connection uncovers a suspiciously limited political perspective. Intentionally or not, its nearly invisible political viewpoint ends up subtly heroizing the CIA, Homeland Security, and the Colombian police, while vilifying “rebels” against the corrupt authority all three represent.

In what follows, let me show you what I mean by (1) briefly acknowledging the deplorable problem addressed by “Sound of Freedom,” (2) highlighting the film’s suspicious CIA connections, (3) its missing dots, and (4) suggesting the “Sound’s” promise for stimulating dialog across liberal-conservative divides.

Child Sex Trafficking

To begin with, the “Sound of Freedom” is so moving because it is factual, not fiction. It describes a huge problem it identifies as the fastest growing criminal enterprise the world has ever seen. In fact, child sex trafficking, it says, already grosses more money than international arms trafficking. Its annual income will soon surpass that of the worldwide drug trade.

Moreover, and as noted above, “Sound of Freedom’s” main protagonist is also real and highly admirable. As movingly portrayed by Jim Caviezel (of “Passion of the Christ” and “Count of Montecristo” fame), Tim Ballard joins the CIA and later Homeland Security as an act of patriotism following 9/11.

Significantly, Ballard’s fundamentalist Christian faith made him especially attractive to Homeland Security which, he says, preferred such commitment from its agents in the War on Terror.

Eventually, Ballard’s duties introduce him to the issue of child sex trafficking. It so hooks him that he ends up risking all to combat its evil. Months before qualifying for a lifetime CIA pension eventually worth millions, he decides to leave the agency when it identifies as unacceptable overreach his desire to continue “rescuing Honduran kids in Colombia.”

CIA Connections

Despite such idealistic motivations, “Sound of Freedom’s” links to the CIA and Homeland Security as well as those with apolitical Christian fundamentalism raised uncomfortable questions for me.

It has raised questions for others too though usually for reasons different from mine. As earlier noted, liberal critics have pointed out the film’s alleged connections with QAnon conspiracy theories. After all, they point out, its sponsors include arch-conservatives like Mel Gibson, Jordan Peterson, and Mexico’s Carlos Slim, one of the richest billionaires in the world.

As for its theological perspective, it’s worth pointing out that anti-liberation theology commentator, Glenn Beck, is one of the film’s principal sponsors. All of them – Beck, Gibson, and Peterson deny Christianity’s connection with social justice, limit its moral applications to the personal realm, are opponents of Pope Francis, and regret the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

Moreover, “Sound of Freedom” overwhelmingly connects child sex trafficking to official enemies of the United States.

Perhaps most revealingly, it locates trafficking centers in Colombia and Honduras. Both of those countries have been headed by governments firmly supported and/or installed by the U.S. through regime change operations. By all accounts, their police and militaries are cesspools of corruption and brutality – far from the heroic law enforcement agencies portrayed in the film.

Additionally, “Sound of Freedom” offers no suggestion of well-documented U.S. government involvement in or toleration of underage sex trafficking. For instance, there’s not a word in the film about Jeffrey Epstein and his nefarious association with the CIA, with Israel’s Mossad, and prominent government leaders – much less about rampant pedophilia among Christians themselves.

With that in mind, Homeland Security’s post-9/11 preferred recruitment of certain types of Christians indicates a heavily ideological bias towards fundamentalist religion. As such, its understanding tends strongly to exclude comprehensive social and historical analysis of child sex trafficking in favor of moral and psychological explanations of individualized and gang-related behavior. It excludes structural criticisms of capitalism’s relationship to the issue as well as, for instance, the connections between such abuse and Christianity itself.

All that can remind the attentive viewer that “Sound of Freedom’s” story is not that far removed from the CIA and Homeland Security whose very business is to deceive the rest of us.

That for me raises the following question: Can an organization dedicated to lying on behalf of what Martin King described as the world’s “greatest purveyor of violence” be trusted to tell the whole truth about those its employers have designated as mortal enemies (i.e. “rebels” against U.S. client regimes)?

And does the film’s inspiring story represent yet another vehicle intended foster admiration of three-letter government agencies and to feed the hatred of “America’s” official enemies?

Supplying Missing Dots

My answer to both questions is “Quite likely.” That is, “Sound of Freedom” might well be seen as an elaborate attempt to whitewash and rehabilitate the CIA and Department of Homeland Security as well as to nurture antipathy towards “rebels” against U.S. puppet regimes.

The plan for doing so might run as follows:

Tap into an issue that will horrify any morally sensitive person, viz., child sex trafficking.
Causally connect that issue with America’s designated enemies,
Through a medium (Hollywood film narrative) that ignores Washington’s own well-established connection to the problem in question,
By distancing the film’s CIA protagonist from that agency and Homeland Security through his resignation from (but continued connections with) those agencies.
Favorably link the story with fundamentalist understandings of God and country,
While “connecting its dots” to the “real enemy” portrayed as left-wing forces in the Global South, and (in favorable reviews) public-school sex education programs, open borders, transgender therapies, and the gay pride slogan “We are coming for your children.”
And vilifying as trendily “woke” and conspiratorial those tying underage sex traffic to capitalism, the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, world leaders, and church hierarchies.
Have film sponsors such as Glen Beck and Elon Musk buy out theaters to boost its box office ratings.

Stimulating Left-Right Dialog

To me, none of that seems farfetched. In fact, given:

CIA admissions about its elaborate psyop programs,
Its former director’s public confession about the agency’s routine practices of lying, cheating, and stealing,
As taught, he said, in “entire courses” instructing agents about the complexities of conspiracy and propaganda
Detailed in covert projects such as COINTELPRO, MKULTRA experimentations, and Family Jewels assassination programs,
As well as more recent Epstein revelations about the involvement of U.S. and international “leaders’” in underage sex trafficking,
And Christian involvement in institutionalized pedophilia,

it’s no stretch to imagine CIA sponsorship of “Sound of Freedom” to whitewash the agency’s deep involvement in “Government by (sexual) Blackmail” as well as in covering up the complicity of international elite in underage sex trafficking.

Conclusion

Be that as it may, at the very least, the undeniability of the child sex trafficking problem coupled with the outrage provoked by the “Sound of Freedom” provide fertile opportunity for conscious raising and dialog about politics and Christian faith across the political spectrum.

On the one hand, the coupling predisposes both conservatives and liberals to entertain the possibility that “our” government and those three-lettered agencies might be more directly involved in the issue than “Sound of Freedom” indicates.

On the other hand, the film opens the door to genuine conversations about the social justice dimensions of Christianity. Like it or not, and despite fundamentalist protestations to the contrary, child sex trafficking is a social justice issue. For instance, its director admits that he wants to “change the world.”

That is, the position that “God’s children are not for sale,” represents a statement about free market capitalism and about the social relevance of Christian faith.

Injunctions to “connect the dots” means connecting ALL THE DOTS even at the risk of accurately identifying the CIA’s undeniable role as a conspiracy theory machine.

Jesus’ Parable of the Sower: When We Think We’re Powerless to Change the World

Readings for 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time: IS 55:10-11; PS 65:10-14; ROM 8:15-23; MT 13: 1-23;

A few years ago, on the 4th of July, Amy Goodman replayed an interview with the legendary folk singer, Pete Seeger. During the interview, Pete commented on today’s Gospel reading – the familiar parable of the Sower.

His words were simple, unpretentious, and powerful. They’re reminders that the stories Jesus made up were intended for ordinary people – for peasants and unschooled farmers. They were meant to encourage such people to believe that simple farmers could change the world – could bring in God’s Kingdom. Doing so was as simple as sowing seeds.

Seeger said:

“Realize that little things lead to bigger things. That’s what Seeds is all about. And there’s a wonderful parable in the New Testament: The Sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don’t grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don’t grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousandfold. Who knows where some good little thing that you’ve done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?”

Farmers in Jesus’ day needed encouragement like that. They were up against the Roman Empire which considered them terrorists. We need encouragement too as we face Rome’s counterpart headed by the U.S. which, for instance similarly regarded farmers in Vietnam.

The obstacles we face are overwhelming. I even hate to mention them. But the short list includes the following – all connected to seeds, and farming, and to cynically controlling the natural abundance which is celebrated in today’s readings as God’s gift to all. Our problems include:

• Creation of artificial food scarcity by corporate giants such as Cargill who patent seeds for profit while prosecuting farmers for the crime of saving Nature’s free production from one harvest to the following year’s planting.
• Climate change denial by the rich and powerful who use the Jesus tradition to persuade the naïve that control of natural processes and the resulting ecocide are somehow God’s will.
• Resulting wealth concentration in the hands of the eight men who currently own as much as half the world’s (largely agrarian) population.
• Suppression of that population’s inevitable resistance by terming it “terrorism” and devoting more than half of U.S. discretionary spending to military campaigns against farmers and tribal Peoples scattering seed and reaping pitiful harvests in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine.
• Ignoring what the UN has pointed out for years (and Thomas Picketty has confirmed): that a 4% tax on the world’s richest 225 individuals would produce the $40 billion dollars or so necessary to provide adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, education and health care for the entire world where more than 40% still earn livings by sowing seeds.
• Blind insistence by our politicians on moving in the opposite direction – reducing taxes for the rich and cutting programs for the poor and protection of our planet’s water and soil.

It’s the tired story of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. In today’s Gospel, Jesus quotes the 1st century version of that old saw. In Jesus’ day it ran: “. . . to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

Today’s liturgy of the word reminds us that such cynical “wisdom” does not represent God’s way. Instead, the divine order favors abundance of life for all – not just for the 1%. as our culture would have it. For instance, today’s responsorial psalm proclaims that even without human intervention, the rains and wind plow the ground. As a result, we’re surrounded with abundance belonging to all:

“You have crowned the year with your bounty,
and your paths overflow with a rich harvest;
The untilled meadows overflow with it,
and rejoicing clothes the hills.
The fields are garmented with flocks
and the valleys blanketed with grain.
They shout and sing for joy.”

Because of God’s generosity, there is room for everyone in the Kingdom. The poor have enough; so, poverty disappears. Meanwhile, the formerly super-rich have only their due share of the 1/7 billionth part of the world’s product that rightfully belongs to everyone.

To repeat: abundance for all is the way of Nature – the way of God.

Only a syndrome of denial – willful blindness and deafness – enables the rich and powerful to continue their exploitation. Jesus describes the process clearly in today’s final reading. He says:

“They look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.
Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in them, which says:
You shall indeed hear but not understand,
you shall indeed look but never see.
Gross is the heart of this people,
they will hardly hear with their ears,
they have closed their eyes,
lest they see with their eyes
and hear with their ears
and understand with their hearts and be converted,
and I heal them.”

Those of us striving to follow Jesus’ Way hear his call to open our eyes and ears. Conversion – deep change at the personal and social levels – is our shared vocation. That’s the only way to bring in God’s Kingdom.

Individually our efforts might be as small and insignificant as tiny seeds. But those seeds can be powerful if aligned with the forces of Nature and the Kingdom of God. That’s true even if much of what we sow falls on rocky ground, are trampled underfoot, eaten by birds, or are choked by thorns. We never know which seeds will come to fruition.

Such realization means:

• Lowering expectations about results from our individual acts in favor of the Kingdom.
• Nonetheless deepening our faith and hope in the inevitability of the Kingdom’s coming as the result of innumerable small acts that coalesce with similar acts performed by others.

Once again, Pete Seeger expressed it best:

“Imagine a big seesaw. One end of the seesaw is on the ground because it has a big basket half full of rocks in it. The other end of the seesaw is up in the air because it’s got a basket one quarter full of sand. Some of us have teaspoons and we are trying to fill it up. Most people are scoffing at us. They say, “People like you have been trying for thousands of years, but it is leaking out of that basket as fast as you are putting it in.” Our answer is that we are getting more people with teaspoons every day. And we believe that one of these days or years — who knows — that basket of sand is going to be so full that you are going to see that whole seesaw going zoop! in the other direction. Then people are going to say, “How did it happen so suddenly?” And we answer, “Us and our little teaspoons over thousands of years.”

The Magic of Bob Dylan

There’s an interesting graffito up in the “huerto” (garden) where I exercise every morning here in the Albaycin barrio of Granada. Written on a prominent wall up there, the scrawling reads, “No es ciencia; Magia es de verdad.”

I’d translate that to say, “Magic is truer than science.” It’s an aphorism I’ve come to believe in the light of these months (September 2022-June 2023) I’ve spent in Spain. The time has been filled with magic.

In fact, in some ways, this may be the most magical period of my life that has been full of enchantment.

I’ve come to make friends of street musicians here who live in caves. We’ve smoked weed together. I’ve studied the Mayan Popul Vul with one of them. My friends have introduced me to the wonders of Tarot and of mushrooms. I’ve been harassed by the police because of them and attended a demonstration on their behalf in front of Granada’s City Hall. It’s been wonderful.

Besides that, here in Andalusia, we’ve struggled with a strange Spanish dialect, lived next to a mosque, witnessed bull fights, and have gone to various performances of Flamenco dance.

Then there was our experience of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, and those trips to Tarifa, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, and even to the ancient city of Fez in Morocco. Soon we’ll spend a few weeks in Mallorca. In Barcelona, (thanks to the generosity of my son-in-law) I attended a Division One soccer game from luxury box seats with full access to food and drink.

But even among such splendid experiences, last night ranks as especially charmed. My 14-year-old granddaughter, Eva, and I attended a Bob Dylan concert in the nearby Alhambra’s Generalife outdoor theater. Pure magic. (See above photo.)

I mean, there we were in a packed house under the stars within the aura of the 13^th century Muslim walled city.

There we were listening to an unparalled artist who in 2016 won the Nobel prize in literature.

He never touched a guitar during his entire performance with a band of five musicians (lead guitar, rhythm guitar, percussionist, bass fiddle, and electric bass). Instead, the Great Man accompanied himself on the piano during the entire performance. He played his harmonica only briefly.

Surprisingly, the performance began with a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Honkytonk Women.” At one point, Dylan also sang “That Old Black Magic.” Other tunes I recognized included “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” and “You Gotta Serve Somebody.”

The show lasted an hour and forty-five minutes and the only sentences Dylan uttered were “This is such a beautiful place,” and those he bestowed on his accompanists as he briefly introduced each one towards the end of the performance.”

Then he was done. And despite a long, standing ovation, there was no hint of any encore. We all left reluctantly and completely inspired.

And this even though the words Bob “sang” (it was more like recitation), were probably understood by few. Remember, we’re here in Spain, where few speak English well. And I must confess that I understood very little in terms of lyrics. For instance, I didn’t even realize that he sang “Every Grain of Sand” until a friend remarked on its performance.

And yet, and yet. . .. It was all quite wonderful.

When I relayed all of this to my wife, she observed that Bob must have invoked some “angelic spirit.” I believe she was right.

However, I believe that the real reason I enjoyed the show so much was because of the presence of another “angelic spirit.” I’m referring to my granddaughter, Eva, who has always called me “Baba.” She was such a good companion – a spirit far more mature, perceptive, beautiful, and appreciative than her nearly 15 years might allow.

Our shared experience will remain a highlight of our highly blessed and extremely special relationship.

Magic indeed!

The Hidden Politics of Holy Week in Spain

So here we are back in Spain after a couple of months (February and March) back in the States.

You might remember that Peggy and I had come here last September to be with the family of our daughter and son-in-law. They had decided to spend the entire school year here in Granada so that their five children (aged 14 to 4) might learn Spanish while broadening their cultural horizons in Europe.

Peggy and I arrived back here yesterday afternoon on a thankfully uneventful seven-hour Delta Airlines flight from New York’s JFK airport. We landed in a rather frigid Madrid and then took a six-hour bus trip from Spain’s capital city to Granada.

There we’re living in the Albaycin neighborhood alongside a mosque within sight of the famous Alhambra, the Moorish walled city built in the 13^th century. It’s such a privilege to be here absorbing the rich Spanish culture highlighted in our neighborhood five times a day by Islamic calls to prayer from a minaret right next to our rented apartment.

Our return coincides with Holy Week and the Spanish custom of elaborate processions ostensibly recalling the events of that first Holy Week when the Prophet from Nazareth celebrated his Last Supper with his disciples, was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, was tortured, and crucified by the Romans, and rose from the dead on Easter Sunday.

The events however are highly political in both the historical and contemporary senses that might largely escape the casual tourist. In that hidden sense, they are marches against Spain’s original and actual enemies and those of its ideological mentor, the Catholic Church.

Let me show you what I mean.

Holy Week Processions

The processions are spectacular. In Granada they wend their way down the Gran Via Colon, past the city’s monstrous cathedral, and passing before the giant statue depicting the “Reyes Catholicos” (Catholic kings) Ferdinand and Isabella (1474-1504) giving permission to Christopher Columbus to embark on his world-changing voyage.

The processions feature huge golden floats burdened with dozens of enormous flaming candles and centralizing much larger-than-life statues of a regal, purple-clad Virgin-in-mourning, or of crucified and tortured Savior. Clerical types (including women) walk behind the statues dressed in cassocks and surplices and carrying candles, crucifixes, and thuribles that fill the air with fragrant incense.

Each float is borne aloft by perhaps 30 unseen men whose humble identity is concealed by brocaded veils beneath which they perform their shared demonstration of macho strength and endurance. From time to time along the parade route, the anonymous bearers stop, fall to their knees. Then suddenly they arise as a single body to the delight and applause of the adoring crowds.

Others in the procession include participants whose costumes inevitably remind Americans of the Ku Klux Klan. However, their pointed hats, veiled faces, and white or red robes are really signs of penitence by sinners admitting their guilt, but mercifully shielding their identities.

Other processors include black-clad gypsy women carrying long, lit candles in their right hands just below their waists.

All of this is accompanied by band after band of drummers, trumpeters, trombonists, and tuba players. They march to deafening rhythmic beats. Here and there, they stop to play mournful dirges in honor of the suffering Jesus.

Hidden Meanings

All of this is quite beautiful and quaint – that is until you analyze what’s really happening in terms of Spain’s history that includes:

· The emergence of the nation-state under Ferdinand and Isabella.

· Their project’s unprecedented political goal, viz., the erasure of diverse Andalusian cultures [including Jews, Visigoth Christians, Muslims, Gitanos, pagan naturalists, (think “witches”], and emerging Protestants of various “heretical” descriptions].

· To that end, the institution of the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834)

· Its infamous persecution of Jews, Muslims, Protestants, gypsies, witches, and “heretics” of all sorts

· The folding of all those identities into a single nationalty called “Spaniard,” which had never till then existed.

· Our contemporary loss of Christian faith and its replacement with the worship of capitalism and its God called “Market.”

In the light of those realities, think about the processional elements earlier described. With their 15^th-century historical context in mind:

· The statue of the regally clad virgin Mary becomes an image celebrating Queen Isabella whose royal robes have nothing to do with the decidedly non-royal mother of the poor construction worker from Nazareth.

· Those wearing those pointed hats reminiscent of the Klan become persecuted “heretics” wearing “dunce caps” (so named by those ridiculing the 13^th century Scottish mystic, John Duns Scotus).

· The statues depicting the batterers and humiliators of the suffering Jesus become the Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella and whom Christian tradition blamed as “God killers” instead of Jesus’ real assassin, the Roman Empire.

· As well, Jesus’ torturers include the dunce heretics par excellence, viz., the hated Moors.

· The black clad women carrying long lighted candles just below their waists become the witches persecuted by the Inquisition. The candles are phallic symbols of their true purpose in life – viz., giving sexual pleasure to men.

· The processions’ martial war drums become warnings to the enemies of the Reyes Catholicos (again, Jews, Muslims, heretics, witches, gypsies) to be afraid – very afraid. The crown’s Catholic inquisitors will kill you.

· The unseen statue bearers become the oppressed artisans and workers who have always borne the burden of supporting royalties and church hierarchies of all types.

· The secular crowds jamming the Gran Via Colon are believers now transformed into mere “Tourists” who represent for Spain a huge influx of cash in service of the only God that matters, the only we’re left with – Capitalism and Market.

Conclusion

When you think about it, Lent and its Easter conclusion represent the ongoing spiritual struggle that involves us all. The season is bookended by Mardi Gras and Holy Week both of which feature political marches masquerading as parades and processions.

Mardi Gras celebrates the human drive towards happiness and community fulfillment – both of which were embodied in that Nazareth construction worker whose first recorded miracle changed gallons upon gallons of water into the finest of wines. Shrove Tuesday’s parades are joyful, drunken, and highly sexualized. Think of those images of dancers from Brazil. Recall Louis Armstrong and New Orleans jazz.

Happiness, joy, fun.

The second of Lent’s bookends is more somber. It’s what I’ve been describing here – the so-called sublimation of all that’s human and joyful into what’s dark, threatening, serious, churchy, and oppressive. And it’s all performed in the name of religion that contradicts that spirit of water changed to wine at a young couple’s wedding.

Why the change?

The answer’s contained in the politics of it all – then and now. More than anything, Spain’s Holy Week processions are reactionary protests intended to obscure and deny the enriching diversity of human experience. The processions are monuments against variety in national identity, in beliefs, in spiritualities, and cultures. They celebrate the elite. They militate against Jews, Muslims, gypsies, witches, Protestants, workers, artisans, and heretics of all sorts. Their musical background is martial and warlike.

To the discerning eye, Spain’s Holy Week events are also stark reminders of contemporary culture’s inheritance of Inquisitional intolerance. Like Ferdinand and Isabella, capitalism and its Market God would flatten out the differences that make us human. No variety called socialism, communism, anarchism, or e.g., China’s “whole process people’s democracy” is permitted. Everyone must conform to the nation-state’s sameness.

When you think about it, that syndrome transforms the crucified and risen Jesus into the patron of oppression.

What a distortion!

Its realization alone might be enough to rescue his message: It’s spring. It’s Easter. Celebrate life, not death. The nation-state is a fraud.