Marge Handley, the prominent Willits heiress and Republican philanthropist, owns a modest new home in a struggling subdivision off East Hill Road in South Willits called Haehl Creek.

Mrs. Handley, 70, can retreat to her Hearst Road ranch out east of town when her Haehl Creek neighborhood seems unpleasant.

Which it is lately for Mrs. Handley.

According to court documents filed by Mrs. Handley, her Haehl Creek neighbor, retired anesthesiologist Gary Bodensteiner, also 70, has not only been harassing her, the doctor informed mutual acquaintances that he had purchased a gun.

The US census recently finished its national popula­tion count leaving rural residents restless over fears of undercounting since the census data is used to determine how much a tax-paying community receives in federal funding. “In 2000 the census listed Anderson Valley having 22% of the population at poverty level, currently the Valley’s free and reduced lunch count is at 83% of our population so that’s a pretty big difference,” said Donna Pierson-Pugh, principal of the Anderson Valley Elementary School.

Barack Obama’s speechwriters are, no doubt, polishing just such a commentary by their boss. In terms of political energy, the event is as inert as Labor Day, itself just around the corner at the start of September. But this year brings welcome relief from such pietism. The premier anniversary celebration of the March has been hijacked by the right-wing commentator, Glenn Beck. The prime speaker will be Sarah Palin, the Tea Party’s pinup girl and as unlikely as any woman in Alaska ever to have had a pinup of MLK on her dorm wall. To have the March on Washington honored by Beck and Palin is as shocking to liberal America as installing Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern slave states in the Civil War, next to Lincoln in the Memorial — an insertion which will no doubt be approved by Congress, and endorsed by Obama in the interests of bipartisanship, just as soon as the 14th Amendment is repealed.

Beck admits that when he scheduled a rally in Washington on August 28 to boost his new book, The Plan, and strut his stuff to the Tea Party masses, he had no idea it was the anniversary of the March. But he swiftly turned ignorance into opportunity. He’s now saying that’s he is working “to finish the job” that was at the heart of the 1963 March on Washington and King’s vision. Beck claims the ideas of Dr. King have been corrupted and that he will resurrect the true King. As part of this mission, Beck is trying to separate Dr. King from social justice and limit King to advocacy of individual Christian salvation.

According to Dedrick Muhammad of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, writing on our CounterPunch.org website last week, “Beck has even reached out to distant relatives of Dr. King, like Dr. King’s niece. After questioning her several times he gets her to say that King was not about social justice or government redistribution of the wealth.”

From the left comes the angry response that King was, indeed, committed to the need to redistribute wealth in order to advance a juster nation and was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, in the course of a visit to black city workers on strike.

If Beck’s hijacking provokes some honesty among the left in general about King and about black leadership today, then Beck will have performed a useful service. Too late now to organize the obvious, a huge counter demonstration to call Beck to accounts and run him and Palin off. The left is too weak for that, having now given up gluten which has given us leavened bread for 5,000 years.

The March of 1963 was actually called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It wasn’t King’s idea, but that of A. Philip Randolph who had planned a similar march in 1941. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was only one of five main sponsoring groups. Some of these saw the march’s purpose not as high-flown talk about dreams but as harsh reproof of President John Kennedy. They accused him of dragging his feet on giving legislative heft to the civil rights movement that had moved into high gear three years earlier. Julian Bond’s speech denouncing Kennedy’s weakness was famously censored by the March’s organizers.

King’s political career was heading into crisis. Three years later, in 1967, he was booed by blacks at a rally in Chicago. He recalled later what he thought that night: “I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not-too-distant day when they would have freedom ‘all, here and now.’ I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they had felt we were unable to deliver on our promises. … They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.”

It was one thing to force a chain restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina, to allow blacks to sit at a previously Whites Only counter; it was quite another to attack the racism embedded in the American system so savagely excoriated by the greatest American black revolutionary of the 1960s, Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965.

Beck, to a certain extent, has it right. In 1963 King was on the same tack as another man professing confidence in the American system to engender justice out of an innate, individually virtuous moral tropism to do the right thing — Barack Obama in 2008. King was wrong then, just like Obama is two generations later. It’s a matter of class war, not individual character traits.

King moved to the left in the mid-60s. He had to. In Riverside Church in New York, a year before his death he gave a far more powerful speech than 1963’s “I have a dream” address. He called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. … A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. …[T]rue compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar… it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

This was a far cry from what White Power wanted from King, which was the soft rhetorical pillow on which all Dreamers could lay their heads: MLK’s 1963 dream that “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

On August 28, 2010, 47 years after the March for Jobs and Freedom, America has plunged into the vortex of long-term mass unemployment. No jobs, particularly for young blacks. So much for jobs.

What about freedom? Thirty years ago, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails in the United States. Today, the number of prisoners in the United States exceeds 2,000,000. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32%, or 1 in three. Black boys are five times as likely as white boys to go to jail. Former prisoners are permanently relocated on society’s margins, these days some five million of them, denied the right to vote in most states.

Professor Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow argues convincingly that we have a purposeful system of mass incarceration, with blacks as the prime victims. Today, in this fearful crisis there is no effective black leadership, starting with President Obama who has marvelously fulfilled his function as political sedater of black aspirations, starting with the promotion of his own success story. “Yes, we can.”

Oh, no they can’t. It’s not in the Master Plan. Black politicians are well aware that most of their black constituents will stay with Obama till the end, whatever he does. So most of them remain quiet — and yield the stage to an opportunist like Beck, flanked by Ms. Palin. Malcom X, who called the 1963 March on Washington “a picnic” and “a circus,” would have had a good laugh about that.

The Left & Iraq: Snatching Defeat

from the Jaws of Victory

“The US isn’t withdrawing from Iraq at all — it’s rebranding the occupation… What is abundantly clear is that the US, whose embassy in Baghdad is now the size of Vatican City, has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon.”

So declared Seumas Milne of The (UK) Guardian on August 4. Milne is not alone among writers on the left arguing that even though most Americans think it’s all over, they say that Uncle Sam still effectively occupies Iraq, still rules the roost there. They gesture at 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, “advising” and training the Iraqi army, “providing security” and carrying out “counter-terrorism” missions.

Outside US government forces there is what Jeremy Scahill calls the “coming surge” of contractors in Iraq, swelling up from the present 100,000. Hillary Clinton wants to increase the number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 to 7,000. Of these contractors 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly “third country nationals,” typically from the developing world.

“The advantage of an outsourced occupation,” Milne writes, “is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq.“

“Can Iraq now be regarded as a tolerably secure outpost of the American system in the Middle East ?,” Tariq Ali asked in the New Left Review earlier this year. He answered himself judiciously, “They have reason to exult, and reason to doubt.” But the thrust of his analysis depicts Iraq as still the pawn of the American Empire, with a “predominantly Shia army — some 250,000 strong— …trained and armed to the teeth to deal with any resurgence of the resistance,” all this with “the blessing of the saintly Sistani’s smile.”

The bottom line, as drawn by Milne and Ali is oil. Milne gestures to the “dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq’s biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies.”

Is it really true that though the US troop presence has dropped by 120,000 in less than a year, Iraq is as much under Uncle Sam’s imperial jackboot as it was in, say, 2004, even though now no US troops patrol the streets? If Iraq’s political affairs are under US control, how come the US Embassy — deployed in its Vatican City-size compound, (mostly as vacant as a foreclosed subdivision in Riverside, California and planned in the same phase of megalomania) cannot knock Iraqi heads together and bid them form a government? Those 50,000 troops broiling in their costly bases are scarcely a decisive factor in Iraq’s internal affairs; nor are the private contractors.

Is a Shia-dominated government really to America’s taste and nothing more than its pawn? It was Sistani who forced the elections of 2005, calling Bush on his pledge of free elections, thus downsizing the excessive representation of the Sunni — who boycotted the election anyway. And if all this was a devious ploy to break “the Iraqi resistance” how come the United States constantly invokes the menace of Iran and decries its influence in Iraq?

The “Iraqi resistance” invoked in worshipful tones by Tariq Ali, as opposed to his ironic “saintly” reserved for Sistani, means, in his perspective, the Sunni. But if the Sunni ever had a strategy beyond a strictly sectarian agenda, it was scarcely advanced by blowing up Shi’a pilgrims and their shrines and setting off bombs in marketplaces. If Moqtada al Sadr has been side-lined by the US and its supposed creature, Sistani, why has he been described as the “kingmaker” since his success in the parliamentary election this past March?

As for the contractors, those sinister Third World mercenaries should not be oversold, unless the Shiites are supposed to quail before ill-paid Peruvians, Ugandan cops and the like, who will now be supposedly handing down orders to the Iraqi government. This takes a very imperial, and contemptuous attitude towards the capabilities of the Iraqi people.

If this really was a “war for oil,” it scarcely went well for the United States.

Run your eye down the list of contracts the Iraqi government awarded in June and December 2009. Prominent is Russia’s Lukoil, which, in partnership with Norway’s Statoil, won the rights to West Qurna Phase Two, a 12.9 billion-barrel supergiant oilfield. Other successful bidders for fixed-term contracts included Russia’s Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas. Only two US-based oil companies came away with contracts: ExxonMobil partnered with Royal Dutch Shell on a contract for West Qurna Phase One (8.7 billion barrels in reserves); and Occidental shares a contract in the Zubair field (4 billion barrels), in company with Italy’s ENI and South Korea’s Kogas. The huge Rumaila field (17 billion barrels) yielded a contract for BP and the China National Petroleum Company, and Royal Dutch Shell split the 12.6 billion-barrel Majnoon field with Petronas, 60-40.

Throughout the two auctions there were frequent bleats from the oil companies at the harsh terms imposed by the auctioneers representing Iraq, as this vignette from Reuters about the bidding on the northern Najmah field suggests: “Sonangol also won the nearby 900-million-barrel Najmah oilfield in Nineveh. … Again, the Angolan firm had to cut its price and accept a fee of $6 per barrel, less than the $8.50 it had sought. ‘We are expecting a little bit higher. Can you go a little bit higher?’ Sonangol’s exploration manager Paulino Jeronimo asked Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to spontaneous applause from other oil executives. Shahristani said, ‘No’.”

So either the all powerful US government was unable to fix the auctions to its liking, or the all powerful US-based oil companies mostly decided the profit margins weren’t sufficiently tempting. Either way, “the war for oil” doesn’t look in very good shape.

Milne advances the odd idea that with the (entirely imaginary) US “control” of Iraqi oil “the global oil price could be slashed and the grip of recalcitrant Opec states broken.” In fact, the last thing the majors want is to cut world oil prices.” Ask BP.

Milne and Ali are being naive and credulous in taking at face value US officials declaring that they are not wholly withdrawing and they will still be in business in Iraq for the foreseeable future. The reason for saying this is that they don’t want to see their influence go wholly to zilch. They therefore have to maintain — and are dutifully echoed on the left — that their power in Iraq is only a little affected by reduction of troop numbers from 150,000 to less than a quarter of that number.

The US line on this is in one sense sensible: In Iran many Iranians saw the hidden hand of Britain behind developments long after the Brits’ real power had faded almost to nothing. In the case of the US in Iraq it is easy to sell this when the right and left agree that the US is too powerful to have suffered a defeat.

The American right tried to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by claiming that “the surge” — a pr ploy by General David Petraeus to mask US withdrawal — was a military success, rather than the Sunni abandoning “national resistance” and throwing in their lot with the Americans. The left — or the substantial slice of it hewing to the Milne/Ali line — snatches defeat from the jaws of a victory over America’s plans for Iraq by proclaiming that America has successfully established what Milne calls “a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region.”

Iraq is in ruins — always the default consequence of American imperial endeavors. The left should report this, but also hammer home the message that in terms of its proclaimed objectives the US onslaught on Iraq was a strategic and military disaster. That’s the lesson to bring home.

(Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.)

Wednesday night’s Community Services District meeting at the Boonville Firehouse was uncharacteris­tically testy, and grew testier as the evening wore on as trustees traded verbal jabs with each other and aimed a couple of body blows at Fire Chief Colin Wilson.

The first skirmish arose when the Recreation Commit­tee proposed a “playgroup” at the preschool at The Elementary School. (The Anderson Valley tends to the utilitarian. The elementary school is called The Ele­mentary School, the high school Anderson Valley High School. Scissors, rock, paper.)

The playgroup would be conducted by a local woman celebrated for her childcare abilities. This mega-mom would provide childcare for the tots of several younger teachers while instructing other younger mothers in the fine points of child rearing, all of it seemingly innocu­ous.

The last American combat brigade in Iraq has left the country, so the Pentagon announced this week. The 40,000 personnel from 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division began crossing into Kuwait August 19. The US combat mission in Iraq — Operation Iraqi Freedom – is scheduled to end on August 31.

The least credible human in America is a president or a general guaranteeing imminent victory, plus with­drawal of troops from the quagmire of the day.

The rhetorical embroidery decorating this pledge changes little from decade to decade. In 1970, President Richard Nixon declared that the Vietnam War was pro­ceeding so auspiciously that he was planning to pull out 150,000 American troops. The South Vietnamese forces, he asserted, were now of sufficient military competence to carry the brunt of the fighting.

The truth was that the South Vietnamese forces were ill-trained, averse to battle and led by corrupt officers booking their flights to America. The war was lost, but it dragged on for another five years.

In Iraq in 2007, General Petraeus famously announced his “surge” strategy and confided to visiting journalists that the strategy was working well, with “astonishing signs of normalcy” in Baghdad. Monica Crowley of Fox News nominated Petraeus for the “most honest person of the year”.

The truth was that in substantive terms, for reasons entirely unrelated to the fictive “surge”, the Sunni had given up fighting the Americans. Baghdad was in ruins, the war, in terms of the objectives declared in 2003, was a disaster.

In 2008 Obama campaigned on pledges of with­drawal from Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan. At the start of this month, addressing cadets at West Point military academy on August 2, 2010, the president  said that the war in Iraq had been won: “This is what success looks like.” Departing US troops will leave behind a “democratic” and “sovereign” Iraq, one that is now “no haven” for “the kind of violent extremists who attacked America on 9/11.”

It’s a bizarre definition of success. Furthermore the US State Department, also General Odierno and others, feels it necessary to emphasize that US involvement in Iraq is far from over.  More on that here next week.

What about Obama’s pledge, when he was selling his Afghan surge last year,  that withdrawal there would begin in 2011? Here’s where serious domestic politics — always the driver of foreign policy — takes over. The Democrats feel they cannot go into any election in either 2010 or 2012 and be accused of “losing” in Afghanistan. This, unlike Iraq, is Obama’s war.

The Obama administration has said the US would begin to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in July 2011. But last Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Petraeus, now in command of US and coalition troops in Afghanistan, said the withdrawal date was “conditions-based” and that it was possible it could be pushed back further.

“Conditions-based,” cynically but accurately defined, means what Obama can tout as “mission accomplished.” That’s a tough sell for the foreseeable future, since there’s zero evidence that the US-led coalition is achieving anything that can be sold as “success” in Afghanistan.

But the Pentagon is trying to push “success” nonethe­less. In an interview last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said “everybody – all of our partner nations and I think everybody in this government – would agree that two things are central to success. One is building up the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), which is going pretty well, and governance, which is going, but not as well. It’s still moving in the right direction, but a lot slower than we would like.”

No credible reporter would endorse Gates’s opinion on the zeal and efficiency of the ANSF and every credi­ble reporter notes the utter corruption of “governance” in Afghanistan. In terms of domestic politics here in the Homeland, the US cannot quit — and will not do so by 2012 because there is zero evidence for any substantive achievement. Unlike Iraq, a victorious “surge” is not a saleable proposition as Petraeus acknowledges.

The Afghan war, launched covertly three decades ago, will be with us for at least two more years, and maybe several more , the need for protraction  buttressed by such shock tactics as the picture of an Afghan woman with her nose cut off by the Taliban, featured on the cover of Time recently. It was certainly a horrible piece of barbarism, inflicted because the woman had breached the Talibans’ concept of moral propriety.  The message was that with premature US withdrawal a lot more women’s noses will  be sliced off, or women lashed and then shot for imputed “adultery” years after their hus­bands had died. I did feel all the same that balance should have required Time also to feature bits of human flesh strewn around after a Predator missile had landed on yet another Afghan wedding party, an inevitable fea­ture of what happens so long as  the US stays.

The only reliable definition of “success” in any of the United States’ martial enterprises is the effective destruction in economic, social and environmental terms of the target country. That certainly happened in Iraq and is a process far advanced in Afghanistan.

The Extreme Action Hero

The best laid plans don’t always work out. In the won­derful slice of her book How to Become An Extreme Action Hero, featured last Friday on our site, Elizabeth Streb describes what happened…

“when my life partner, Laura Flanders, [AC: niece of yours truly] turned forty … I  wanted to give her a su­preme and symbolic gift. I conceived of a fire dance, a conceptual one. I named it ‘BlazeAway.’ It was per­formed to a Melissa Etheridge song with the lyric, ‘I’m the only one who’d walk across the fire for you.’

“A fire was lit as large as the square my hips outlined. The idea was to walk up to the fire along a narrow lane, just long enough so that by the time I got to the blaze it would be quite large. I crouched down and flew into the air, making a very large horizontal X with my body, arms, and legs, and landed dead center on the flame. It was supposed to go out. But when I looked under my stomach and stood up, I realized that I was on fire, fully ablaze…”

You can read the rest of the story on our website, CounterPunch.org. I strongly recommend Elizabeth’s book, decorated by a truthful blurb by Mikhail Baryshnikov, “Fearlessness and intelligence combined — that is what makes Elizabeth Streb’s work so potent and beautiful.” ¥¥

(Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.)

]]> http://theava.com/archives/7936/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/7923 http://theava.com/archives/7923#comments Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:42:29 +0000 Laurel Krause http://theava.com/?p=7923

On August 7 and 8, the Kent State Truth Tribunal (KSTT) traveled to San Francisco to record and preserve narratives from west coast-based original witnesses to and participants in the 1970 Kent State shootings.

My sister Allison Krause was one of the four stu­dents killed at Kent State and our tribunal has provided an opportunity for me to follow in my father Arthur Krause’s footsteps and discover the truth for my family. My father, who for over ten years fought for justice in the courts, would add, “and not let our government get away with murder at Kent State.”

Skuntown/Willits — Mark Scaramella’s report on the County Supervisors August 3 meeting in Covelo was right on target — a reality-based, bullshit detecting analysis in a few concise paragraphs.

The Mendocino National Forest has been “occupied” from the get-go by the locals: logging, livestock grazing, poaching, joyriding, and, more recently, pot growing.

Since the current big-time occupation by outsiders — allegedly Mexican drug cartels — the good old boys feel threatened and dispossessed.

I went to get my hair cut the other day in the town of Fortuna and waited ten minutes while the elderly barber finished buzz-cutting a young Mexican American. After the young man had exited under his thin skullcap of black stubble, Don the barber sighed and said, “That’s the third boy I’ve cut today who’s headed into the Marines. They all say the same thing. “There’s no work around here and I’ve got a family to support.” When I tell them to hold off, they say the same thing: “Too late. I’ve signed up.”

This is Humboldt county, northern California, where the marijuana boom is in its final paroxysms, with people flocking from around the world to get a piece of the action, just like they did in the Gold Rush. One of the many places selling bags of good soil to marijuana growers ($10 a bag, 8 bags to each marijuana plant, grown in a 100 foot x 30 foot plastic greenhouse, $25,000 or so) had a $300,000 day lately. So there’s more money here than most places across America, where the situation is truly desperate.

Corporate profits are up 41% since Obama’s election; yet half of American workers have suffered a job loss or a cut in hours or wages over the past 30 months. They’re saying around 28 million people either have no job or one that doesn’t yield them enough money to get through the week. On Friday, August 13, the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted on its home page that “Employers initi­ated 1,851 mass layoff events in the second quarter of 2010 that resulted in the separation of 338,064 workers from their jobs for at least 31 days.”

Millions are plummeting into total destitution, having reached the end of their 99-weeks of unemployment benefits. Their only option then is the soup line at a church and getting on the waiting list for a homeless shelter. The nearest big city north of me is Portland, Oregon, adjacent to the Oregon City bunker of Counter­Punch co-editor Jeffrey St Clair. The downtown area in Portland is filled with homeless people, napping on steps, bedding down on cardboard in doorways. Jeffrey kayaks frequently down the Willamette and can see colonies of the destitute all along the river bank, from the shipyards to Willamette Falls, sleeping under thin plastic and gray skies.

California agriculture and much of the construction industry depends on undocumented workers coming across the border from Mexico — minimum cost $1000 — for an 8-day walk through the Arizona desert. Since building is in a terminal slump, many Mexicans would like to head back home till times improve, but nowadays it’s so tough to come back across that they daren’t risk it. Hence the paradox: trying to lock “illegals” out means locking them in. Frank Bardacke who lives in the farm town of Watsonville, a couple of hours south of San Francisco, recently described amid an important piece in our newsletter a bank robbery by one young, desperate immigrant.

“Several months ago,” Frank writes, “Jario took his father’s pickup truck, drove 20 miles to the upscale tourist playpen Carmel By the Sea, and walked into the local branch of the Bank of America. He waited in line to see a teller, and, when his turn came, he pretended to have a gun under his shirt and quietly demanded that the teller give him her cash. As she was passing out the money, he apologized for frightening her; meanwhile, she was hiding a GPS device among the bills.

“He left the bank, his crime apparently unnoticed, and returned to the truck for the drive home. On the way, he got confused and took a wrong turn through Monterey before he got back on the right road home. Twenty police cars from four different police jurisdictions fol­lowed the GPS signal and stopped him 45 minutes after he left the bank. He immediately confessed, explaining that he needed the money to help his dad pay the family mortgage. When his case came to trial, the DA pressed for two years in State Prison. The judge decided that six months in the county jail and five years probation would be enough.”

In Texas or anywhere in the South the fellow would probably have got 25 years. But in desperate times one can expect people to do desperate, stupid things, and this decent judge showed compassion and understanding. One can’t say the same for many Americans, starting with the Republicans in Congress who’ve been happily voting for a cut-off in benefits for the jobless, while simultaneously engaging in the politically insane enter­prise of repealing the 14th Amendment, no longer mak­ing it a constitutional provision that those “born or natu­ralized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Do the Republicans want to cede Texas and Florida permanently to the Democrats?

Conspicuous good works are always a feature of Depression, the rich zealous to purchase moral insur­ance. Some billionaires, led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, have been pledging that they will earmark not less than 50% of their personal wealth for charity. But since whatever they give away is tax deductible, so revenues to Uncle Sam will drop.

The rich don’t get to be rich by being the nicest guys in the shark tank. As Carl Ginsburg recently remarked in a fine piece on CounterPunch recently, “In its fledgling years, profits on Bill Gates’ software were reportedly 70% annually. Another way to gauge Gates’s billions is by catching a glimpse of the multitudes of students priced out of the computer market — thanks in part to that Great Giver’s expensive software — lined up daily at community college libraries for some free access to computers, each machine an expression of Gates’ crea­tive commitment to profit in the +40% range — a gift Gates gave himself that keeps on giving. As Gates told Fortune: ‘The diversity of American giving is part of its beauty.’”

We can probably expect more laid-off workers going postal, as David Rosen discussed on CounterPunch.org last week. On August 3, at 7am, Omar Thornton showed up for a disciplinary hearing at the Hartford Distributors, a Budweiser distribution warehouse in Manchester, Con­necticut. Thornton had been caught on video pinching some beer. They asked him whether he wanted to be fired, or just quit. Thornton pulled out a handgun and killed seven fellow employees before shooting himself dead. Before he loosed off his last shot into his head, Thornton, a black man, called a friend on his cellphone and said he’d taken care of some racists who’d been giving him a hard time. Unemployment means fear and fear nourishes racism, all the more because we have a black president. Racism is drifting across America like mustard gas in the trenches in World War One.

And, final token of hard times, we have Bonnie and Clyde on the run. In their latest guise the duo consists of John McCluskey and his cousin and fiancee, Casslyn Welch, who’s no Faye Dunaway. She threw some wire cutters over the fence of her man’s Arizona prison. Cops suspect them of killing a couple of retirees, then stealing their truck and heading north up to the Canadian line through Glacier National Park. That’s the last sanctuary in America of Ursus horribilis, the American grizzly. Behind them the cops, ahead the bears. It could be the first movie of a new time.

Marriage’s Fiercest Defenders

Last week I wrote about the Prop 8 decision handed down by a federal judge in San Francisco and evoked the irony of gays striving to save the sinking ship of mar­riage. Here’s a letter from Marc Salomon, who says he’s a 21-year gay anarchist in a committed relationship, married only when it was illegal, and who’s “probably gonna tie the knot in the future when it becomes legal again.”

* * *

Alex,

It should not go unnoticed how same sex marriage got to this point, and what impact the experience has had on the gay rights movement.

As you might know, only 15% of LGBT are in a rela­tionship circumstance where they would marry. Yet this issue has dominated LGBT activism for the past two decades. Along with gays in the military, which served 1.5% of LGBT, these two conservative issues have crowded out progress on consensus economic issues, housing and job discrimination protections, which would appear to be in the interests of the vast majority, those of us who must compete for housing and employment.

In the early 1990s, conservative homosexuals began to sue for the right to marry. They won in the Hawaii Supreme Court in the mid 1990s and that instigated the backlash with the Defense of Marriage Act as the center­piece. At that time, Clinton, a straight white male philan­derer, glibly promised to end the ban on gay sin the military.

That worked out well.

In ’04, Gavin Newsom, another straight white male philanderer, ordered the county clerk to issue marriage licenses irrespective of gender. That led to the California Supreme Court granting LGBT suspect status and allowing same sex marriage.

Reactionaries easily qualified an amendment to the California constitution, which barely passed in 2008.

And then it took the straight, white male establish­ment figures like Boies and Olsen to win this case.

Shit just happens. Who would have thought that the chain of events outlined above — wealthy fags sue to be married, backlash against queers swells, straight white guys define our agenda, marriage ends up with decisions that grant LGBT exemptions from discrimination in California and in Walkers’ court in a case launched by straight white guys?

The issue of marriage is just a vehicle. The payload is the state ending discrimination in all of its practices. It is disgusting to me that marriage ended up getting us here, but I think that I can see daylight through Kennedy.

Yet still queers are getting fired, not getting jobs and losing housing because there is a flashing green light signaling that we can be treated like second class citi­zens.

Up or down?

Meet the Amarnath Shivalingam

Our latest newsletter is choc a bloc with terrific pieces. Peter Lee reports on the ghastly ongoing strug­gles in Kashmir, and the enormous tensions caused by the Hindu shrine of the Amarnath Shivalingam. This is a large ice spike displaying the lingam shape, formed by water dripping on the floor of the immense Amarnath cave in the remote high mountains of Kashmir. In 2006, disaster struck. Climatic conditions caused a failure of the Shivalingam and it did not form at all. A crude and clearly-handcrafted snowman pinch-hitting for the Shiv­alingam outraged the Hindu faithful. Lee’s story lays out the macabre saga and the overall political tragedy.

Meet the women trying to reform America’s insane sex offender laws. JoAnn Wypijewski talks to them, describes their struggle.

“Food security” … “sustainable agriculture” … “slow food” … “food sovereignty.” R.G. Davis separates the real from the phony in the world of organic food.

(Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.)

]]> http://theava.com/archives/7881/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/7877 http://theava.com/archives/7877#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:58:22 +0000 Robert Tashbook http://theava.com/?p=7877

One of Barack Obama’s campaign slogans as he ran for President two years ago was, “The change we need.” Unfortunately, for those in the Federal Criminal Justice System, this change has proven to be the opposite of the what they needed. To date, President Obama has not pardoned anyone, has not reduced a single Federal pris­oner’s sentence, nor has he used his constitutional pow­ers to reduce or eliminate a single person’s fines.

The Obama Administration’s treatment of its current majority ownership of bailed out General Motors and its standoffishness toward the pioneering but troubled ShoreBank, a community bank based in Chicago, are les­sons in how the Big/Bad fare in Washington, D.C., as compared with the Good/Small.

Having shed its bad assets and abandoned its com­mon shareholders, the new GM emerged from bank­ruptcy in 2009 with a clean balance sheet and lots of tax­payer cash. For the first two quarters of 2010, it has sig­naled a comeback by reporting over $2 billion in profits.