capitaleezm

First, the good news:

"WASHINGTON — President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said." --New York Times

But ongoing:

At least 716,760 people have been killed, and
1,397,255 seriously injured in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Actually, we've killed a million in Iraq and displaced two million.

Gaza's death count from Israeli attacks: 1,284. 4,336 wounded. Vast majority were civilians.

And here's the latest on Bushite fascism:

The NSA spied on everyone.....(Raw Story/Edwards/Kane)
Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."

Tice further explained that "even for the NSA it's impossible to literally collect all communications. ... What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata ... and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected."

According to Tice, in addition to this "low-tech, dragnet" approach, the NSA also had the ability to hone in on specific groups, and that was the aspect he himself was involved with. However, even within the NSA there was a cover story meant to prevent people like Tice from realizing what they were doing.

"In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them," Tice told Olbermann. "What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year -- and it made no sense. ... I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me."
http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=13973
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Flagging the Inauguration

Remember the great Flag Frenzy of 2001? Do you remember the little plastic flags fluttering from every car, the flag stickers, the flag t-shirts, the flag everything, and the insistence against all logic that these displays were about citizen solidarity only, and not about conformity with the new regime of secrecy, hierarchy, insecurity, imperialism, fascism, and acceptance of the lie of 9/11, that some terrible change had occurred that forced us all to accept a degradation and diminution of life, liberty, and happiness? Do you remember all the damned flags? They're still with us; at my day job, they're on the vehicles in two places, they're sewn onto the shoulders of many workers even though there are strict rules about uniforms. And the flags still mean conformity, blind obedience, the rule of the faceless mob, the kneejerk elevation of militarism to stainless heroism. Well, the flag means that today. But for a few hours Tuesday, the flag meant something different.

I realized as I headed to work Tuesday that, with the ascension of Barack Obama to office, there was a small window of time in which the US flag took on a largely celebratory tone. Tuesday morning (that is, Pacific time), waving the flag meant that one might be celebrating the inauguration of some different qualities to the Office of the President of the United States.
Don't get me wrong, I'm ready to take on Barack Obama's regime for its imperialism and corporate capitalism. But Barack Obama is intelligent--a teacher of Constitutional interpretation--genuinely compassionate to all appearances, sane, steady, forthright, and a complete repudiation of the sort of NASCAR Bubba politics that brought forth the security gates and the flag patches that gall me at work daily.
Believe me, there are a number of my fellow union workers --maybe not the majority, but a number-- who were very uncomfortable Tuesday morning about the state of affairs. After all, their hero George Bush was fading away under a cloud of anger and accusations, and The One that they had been warned about--"the Messiah," as one worker bitterly and sarcastically muttered to me--was taking the sacred Commander In Chief slot away from them, and thus taking away their years of smug association with righteous power. Well, there was no way I was going to soften the blow.

So imagine the dismay and confusion when the American US Red White And Blue Flag walks into the workplace --a six foot cloth banner-- wrapped around the shoulders of a despised leftist transsexual. "Thank you," a National Guard member said, when she saw the flag, then mumbled, "I think." Clearly there was something wrong with this picture. It took a second, but they caught on to the fact that I was up to something. To wield the flag like that, I needed some sort of Bubba authority--like military service, or at least church affiliation. I clearly wasn't American enough to wave a flag. Tolerating my presence in the workplace is enough of a strain, now I'm picking up the sacred emblem of righteousness and wearing it around?

How could things get any worse, they asked themselves, and I could see it on their faces, and I asked myself the same question. How could things get any worse, so that I can rub their years of triumphant hypocrisy in their faces?
Well, it got worse, when I whipped the flag off my shoulders and whooped with joy, when Barack Hussein Obama corrected that jackass Supreme Court Chief and took the Oath of Office. Funny, there were no eyes cast with a glaze of adoration at the flag then, as it swirled majestically over their heads, lightly tickling the television glow of the Inauguration. No, funny thing, the flag seemed to have an opposite effect. There was no cheer in NASCAR Mudville that day, even though one of their own, the bigot Rick Warren, had been chosen to spew Jesusisms all over the stage. That was a sop and they knew it. That flag wasn't supposed to be in the hands of an abomination like me--but in the sudden confusion of Bubba emotions, no one could articulate their rage. It was beautiful.

So the flag got stuffed into my backpack. I'll bring it out later, when Obama invades Iran, continues to occupy Iraq, and escalates in Afghanistan--then I'll burn it. It was definitely five bucks well spent, even if the money did go to a Chinese capitalist.
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President Obama has a capitalism problem. He had to use every bit of his political clout to get the Democratic Congress to release the second half, the $350 billion of the legislative bank bailout. One might think that the money would be easier to release to Obama's Administration, since after all it went with so much speed to the notoriously corrupt Bushites, but that may itself be the problem. Banks took the money and aren't lending it out. They have contractual, and thus legal obligations to their stockholders, and they aren't going to give out money that won't be paid back as corporations collapse in the financial earthquake. And of course they don't give a damn about the average worker, they built their fortunes by squeezing the blood out of the working class and if the workers perish, that's not their problem. Maybe the masses can get a job cleaning the pool. Let them eat canned corn.

The latest Great Leap Sideways is the concept of the aggregator bank, sometimes called the Bad Bank. In this scheme, the bad loans are gathered together and sold off to a government bank, thereby cleaning up the remaining portfolios in the commercial banks. The government then tries to squeeze something from its Bad Bank assets, and confetti falls from the majestic towers of Wall Street as America gets back to work. The problem is, no matter how many goodies we give to the inheritance class and their banks, they're not going to lend it out. They're not in the charity business, as they will be quick to tell you. So the Bad Bank is a bad idea, and it will lead to further collapse and loss of government funds.

However, something is going to have to be done. The system is collapsing at an accelerating rate. For the inheritance class, this means that democracy may raise its ugly head.

(WSWS.org) Patrick O'Connor has this to say about Obama's plans as revealed in the Geithner confirmation hearings:

"No one objected from either party when Geithner, in his opening statement, indicated that the Obama administration intends to deal with ballooning budget deficits resulting from government handouts to the banks by slashing bedrock social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. He told the committee, "Our program to restore economic growth has to be accompanied—and I want to emphasize this—has to be accompanied by a clear strategy to get us back as quickly as possible to a sustainable fiscal position." It was necessary to demonstrate, he added, that "we as a nation will return to living within our means."

"Marketwatch noted: "He [Geithner] said the budget would have to tamed on a five-year horizon. Along these lines, Obama is looking for a 'mechanism' to move forward on entitlement reform on a bipartisan basis."

"Meanwhile, the banks are being rewarded with a new bailout package involving sums of public money substantially larger than that already committed by the Bush administration under TARP and related programs."
http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/econ-j22.shtml

There are some cogent comments on this from Michael Parenti on globalresearch.ca., titled "Capitalism's self-inflicted apocalypse." Here is a small excerpt:

"Democracy becomes a problem for corporate America not when it fails to work but when it works too well, helping the populace move toward a more equitable and livable social order, narrowing the gap, however modestly, between the superrich and the rest of us. So democracy must be diluted and subverted, smothered with disinformation, media puffery, and mountains of campaign costs; with rigged electoral contests and partially disfranchised publics, bringing faux victories to more or less politically safe major-party candidates.

"The corporate capitalists no more encourage prosperity than do they propagate democracy. Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.

"A prosperous, politically literate populace with high expectations about its standard of living and a keen sense of entitlement, pushing for continually better social conditions, is not the plutocracy's notion of an ideal workforce and a properly pliant polity. Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work—for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth. [Words of Michael Parenti on globalresearch.ca]

"In the corporate world of "free-trade," the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world's population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.

"Consider the United States. In the last eight years alone, while vast fortunes accrued at record rates, an additional six million Americans sank below the poverty level; median family income declined by over $2,000; consumer debt more than doubled; over seven million Americans lost their health insurance, and more than four million lost their pensions; meanwhile homelessness increased and housing foreclosures reached pandemic levels.

"It is only in countries where capitalism has been reined in to some degree by social democracy that the populace has been able to secure a measure of prosperity; northern European nations such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and "Denmark come to mind. But even in these social democracies popular gains are always at risk of being rolled back.

"It is ironic to credit capitalism with the genius of economic prosperity when most attempts at material betterment have been vehemently and sometimes violently resisted by the capitalist class. The history of labor struggle provides endless illustration of this.

"To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order."

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11929
[That is just a small excerpt of Parenti's excellent article; read more at global research.]


The new Administration, however, isn't as isolated as the previous one, and no doubt would like to get the ball rolling. The funny thing is, they can't, not by giving more billions to banks. They do have a way of getting things going quickly, though, and they'll get around to it only when every other avenue has been closed off and the wolves are closing in. You know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about socialism.

We need socialism now. We need, for a start, fully socialized health care--not a bailout of the bloated health care profit industry, but a direct nationalization of the hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. No more profit from sickness! That sould be our rallying cry. I demand nothing less, and in fact nothing less will keep this society from a health disaster.

Now for the fun part: I demand that the banks surrender. They should not just be nationalized--that's in the cards and they know it. No, there should be no mere takeover of their clandestine, Byzantine, corrupt functioning, as their profiteers sail off to sunny destinations on their two-hundred-foot helicopter-pad-equipped yachts. No, I say we take their semisecret, illegal offshore assets, the ones held in the Lesser Antilles and other tax havens literally by the trillions. They took it from us, let's take it from them, in the name of justice and survival, and let's use it to build a new society. And it'll be easy. A couple of gunboats per island will do the trick. Sail the US Nimitz to Aruba, and we'll see how long they'll hang on to those trillions.

I'm talking about revolution here, and as usual I'm far too early. I think maybe my lifetime is far too early, but I'm willing to put it to the test. After all there have been other surprises--just ask Jesse Jackson. Revolution! And the first thing to do is to raise our desires for that new society by imagining just how good it could be.
Why not, for example, decentralize power distribution? The only real reason we have central power plants, wasting half their energy through the inefficiencies of long-distance power distribution, is so that money can be concentrated in the hands of the inheritance class. Coal power plants aren't needed at all; with a combination of decentralized solar, geothermal, wind power, and conservation, we could all have just as high a standard of living. Imagine neighborhood power plants distributing electricity to as few as ten homes each, supplemented by each household's solar panels. We could have that, and full employment, and the parasite class could go hang. We could have that, if we take our money back.

How much wealth is healthy for a human being? Do you think you could be satisfied in your efforts and toils with three million per year? I agree, and I think wealth should be limited to that amount. Anyone who feels they need more than three million per year can have a fully-funded, top-quality socialized CAT scan to see what is wrong with their head. Corporations should be abolished and replaced with transparent cooperatives, responsible to the society and to their workers. Once we do that, we'll wonder how we were ever so crazy as to create vast inpenetrable hierarchies. Our grandchildren will ask us, 'Why did people put up with corporations?' What were we thinking? 'Why were there two million people in jail and the streets swarming with brutal cops, grandma? What was that all about? Were people just crazy? Did we really kill a million people for oil profits?'
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Regular listeners will recall that I recently read part of a statement by the often-censored head of Nasa's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, James Hansen, warning that time was running out to reverse climate change. It will come as no surprise he hear now that time has indeed run out for deliberations about palliative measures. Here is part of an interview this week in the Guardian (in Great Britain).

"Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen, who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added.

Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford to put off change any longer," said Hansen. "We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."

Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.

Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead as the world's greatest carbon emitter and the planet's largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.

Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of the WWF's top conservation award - first warned Earth was in danger from climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several unsuccessful attempts by the White House administration of George Bush to silence his views.

Hansen's institute monitors temperature fluctuations at thousands of sites round the world, data that has led him to conclude that most estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric temperatures are too low and too conservative. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says a rise of between 20cm and 60cm can be expected by the end of the century.

However, Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of ice sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim backed last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists who said studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far more likely figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres, enough to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations. ....[more at Guardian.co.uk]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama
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predictions

I could start with the easy prediction: Propaganda mindsets will prevail in 2009.

Thus, instead of asking why Afghanistan is occupied by US troops-- since even the FBI admits there is no evidence proving that Bin Laden, with the collaboration of the Afghans, perpetrated the 9/11 hijackings-- US citizens will ask "what is the best way to help Afghanistan help itself?" The chauvinism, racism, and pure violent evil of such a question will not come up in public discourse. Likewise, the fact that the Gaza prisoners' rockets have retaliated at a rate of 1/100th the rate of Israeli violence for the last several years will remain obscure. It will be an unwelcome fact. Here's another one we won't talk about: we negotiatied to free all Iraqi prisoners that weren't charged with a crime. But we haven't.

Maybe it's a terrorist fact, skulking around in the bushes somewhere. Some facts are just plain offensive to decent people. Like those pictures of Gaza toddlers' severed heads-- they will be denounced as hysterical demagoguery. How dare they. Is there no decency?

We think as we are told. Thus we do not say "Every penny of the Treasury/Fed/legislated bailout for those rich bankers must be accounted for! What, their wages come to $1000.00/hour? How outrageous! It must be their damnably corrupt Banker's Union!" No, we do not say that. We are meek. Quiet. We hand over the keys to the mint and step backward, bowing, bowing. Not looking up.

Accountability, I prophesy, won't happen. I have a vision of Christo--remember him?--wrapping up the Statue Of Liberty like a mummy, to show that after the failure to impeach, the failure to prosecute the telecom spying, the failure to prosecute torturers and warmongers, Liberty is but a mummified zombie (he could include a loudspeaker at Liberty's mouth endlessly repeating "BRAINZZZ..." in an asthmatic monotone)--but no. Uh uh.

I'm pretty sure these predictions are correct, so you can start calling me Swami. Other predictions are a little more difficult, but not impossible--like the economy; you'd think with all the hand-wringing, I'd be inclined to get all contrary, and say things will be all right. But that's not the case at all; I'd say there isn't nearly enough hand wringing right now. Now is the time to wring your fool hands off, say I. One word: hyperinflation.

Yup, hyperinflation. Not only does 'hyperinflation' have an impressive five syllables, it is the word to describe what happens when you attempt to print your way out of national bankruptcy. Who is going to buy up the debt on all those trillions? "Not us," say the Chinese. "Not us," say the Japanese. "Who you looking at," say the Saudis. I, Swami, say that hyperinflation may come hop-hop-hopping our way, maybe before the year is out. If I lose my Swami status over this, I'll be okay with it. Just buy me a drink or something (or trade hoarded beans for it).

Now, if I were an adept Swami, I'd tell you whether the sunspot maximum, coming this way after a too-long sunspot minimum, will knock out power grids worldwide or not. There's no telling, really, though it is tempting to speculate that oscillation in one direction--towards the just-ended and too-long minimum--might be followed by a pendulum swing the other way. Last time the Sun got really cranky, nineteenth-century telegraph lines caught fire. Everything else kept on keeping on, though, because it was the nineteenth century, and everything from the electrical, sewer and water supply to ship navigation was NOT dependent on feeble electrical patterns pulsing in silicon flakes. So this is an either-or: either it's not a problem, or we're all gonna die.

Screaming.

script

Before I talk about the war on Gaza, I’d like to present a little background information.

Not long ago the Palestinians were informed of the decree establishing the sealing of Gaza.
Gaza was sealed off by checkpoints and a high wall. Its construction took many months to complete. The work was carried out by the construction firm Schmidt & Münstermann. The Gaza wall was 3.5 m high, topped by glass and barbed wire.
There were already 445 deaths in Gaza. The death toll thereafter rose rapidly: in January 2009 to 898. Then the monthly figure fluctuated.
Gaza's ties with the outside world were handled by the Transferstelle, an Israeli authority that was in charge of the traffic of goods, both into and out of Gaza.
Several methods were employed to carry out the smuggling operations: through buildings that were connected with buildings on the Israeli side, across the wall, through camouflaged openings in the wall and through underground tunnels. Smuggling on a larger scale also took place at the gates. Policemen, soldiers, Palestinians, and Jews were involved, bribery was the order of the day. The tunnels were bombed mercilessly.
And despite that, without paying attention to the victims, the smuggling never stopped for a moment. When the street was still slippery with the blood that had been spilled, other [smugglers] already set out, as soon as the "candles"** had signaled that the way was clear, to carry on with the work....
Children and women were also engaged on a smaller scale, risking their lives too. Every day smugglers were caught, paying the ultimate sacrifice. According to press accounts the necessary food, smuggled into Gaza, represented 80% of all the products brought in.
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You will notice that there are inaccuracies and peculiarities in the account I just read. That is because it is not an account of the condition of Gaza, it is a pastiche of accounts of conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto. I just changed a few words--I changed "ghetto" for "Gaza," German for Israeli, 1941 for 2009, and I added the phrase "the tunnels were bombed mercilessly" out of whole cloth. But the sealing of the area, the desperation, the intent of extermination, is much the same. To be fair, Israel intends to let starvation do the work entirely, rather than rushing the Palestinians off to death camps.

Does Israel intend a wider war? More on that in a moment.

You may wish to call Oregon Senator Ron Wyden at 503-326-7525, to give him your opinion. His motto is "standing up for Oregon."

comingXupXonXkbooXradio

This December 25th, I'll be talking about Mithra and his visit from the Three Kings generations before the Christ legend was ever thought up. Why should people cling to a religion that was cooked up for State control sixteen hundred years ago? Yeah, that's right, sixteen hundred and change, not two thousand...that's at 9AM Thursday, Yule/Saturnalia/Solis Invictus Day, also known as Christmas.

There will be a brief interview with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, too! Call in with your favorite drink recipes (especially mimosas!), and get ready to sing along with satiric tunes. Oh yeah, and Merry Solstice to all!

gayToday

The triumph of Barack Hussein Obama was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least the extent and ferocity of the coordinated Republican attempt to remove whole communities of voters from participation. The Republicans did their best to cover their crimes—they produced three persons in Tennessee who claimed that their votes had been flipped to Obama, but then those persons disappeared and it became obvious that they were frauds. There was the whole unjustified attack on ACORN community organizing, too, but after the truth came out, that ACORN had been perfectly responsible in its registration drives, that meme only worked up the god, guns, and gays base, and had no effect outside those pointy-headed borders.

The roll of election theft incidents is truly too large to address in this space.

This is the time and the opportunity to replace the US broken elections system with a nationwide, independent, internationally supervised election system. In civilized countries, like Canada and Australia, there are no problems with local yokels trying to disenfranchise voters by the thousands; everyone votes on a paper, with a big box next to each candidate or issue that you put a check in, yes or no, the ballots are hand-counted, and the results are ready that evening. It's not rocket science. There are no constantly-breaking-down secret-squirrel ES&S or Diebold machines—there never was a need for them. The need is for a commitment to actual citizen participation on an equal basis, and that is where our me-first video-game SUV-owning culture breaks down. But despite decades of indoctrination, you and I aren't consumers. That word should be viewed as the insult it is. We are citizens, and we should be fully vetted participants in society. We have a right to vote, therefore we have a right to free and accessible information and education. Education and information should never have been turned over to plutocrats, whose agenda is the domestication of the popular mind.

............
Measure 8 has passed in California, and the queer-bashing will begin anew.

As a queer with a 14-year relationship, I am infuriated at the vicious and underhanded attempts by religious bigots to undermine my marriage. My marriage is sacred—it's a joyous union of life partners, not a three-year consumerist breeding agreement punctuated by divorce. My marriage is as sacred as any other, because I'm a human being with human rights, and among those rights is equality. If you can get married, so can I. If you should get your partner's Social Security and pension after your partner's passing, so should my partner. Who would deny it to her? Who would go to my partner after my passing, and say "I'm sorry Ani, but since your partner changed gender, you are condemned to poverty?" Who among you would do this evil deed?


There are some who argue that their god demands that queers be punished by stoning to death, and I stand by their right to argue for that idiotic god. They just can't act on its recommendations. This is a secular society, and anyone who expects me to abide by the rules of their god must first bring their god along and show it to me. Let it impress me with its wisdom and power and the fact of its existence. Until then, the queer-hating god has no power over me. No fair shooting me or beating me to death with a baseball bat, and saying God told you to. Oh no. You trot that god out here right now and it can just explain its business right before my eyes. Nor can you open up a Bible or a Koran, I don't care what they have written down—people wrote those words, and they were wrong. So bring the god itself, or else admit that the whole anti-queer religious concept is your personal or cultural speculation, and nothing to do with reality nor science.


Likewise, I'd like to have someone explain to me how the Constitution or civil society countenances a procedure in which a referendum can be used to deny human rights to some segment—any segment—of the population. We the people developed these democratic instruments to expand human rights, not to restrict and deny them. The anti-queer movement is a pitiful thing, a puppet of neocons since the beginning, a successful effort to turn the working class against itself. The logical extension of its illogic is the ovens where Hitler burned a million genocided queers just prior to 1945. There is a monument in Amsterdam to that occurrence, and it serves to remind everyone of the logical end of queer-bashing. Queerness is obviously an evolutionary advantage for large mammaliam populations, and it won't go away, and even Hitler did not burn it out, because it's in our genetic code, thank goodness. The brain of Evolution is older and wiser than the brain of Hitler, thank goodness.


So I think we need a queer monument in this town, something big. But times are getting tight, so no need to spend a lot of money on it. We'll just rename Hawthorne Bridge. Right now it's named after the head of a bygone asylum for the insane, which of course included persons who were merely transgender or queer. So from now on it's the Queer Memorial Bridge, and I call on the City Council to provide a large bronze plaque giving the history of the Gay holocaust, and some buckets of pink paint. I'm serious. Who will go to the City Council with me? Hooray for the Queer Bridge! The Queer Bridge connects East and West with a cheerful pink lift span. All who travel it will affirm human rights for all. Celebrate the Queer Bridge!

yeswedid

Obama Acceptance Speech



Theme: UNITY



Boilerplate aside, this was an interesting speech. As the French horns lingered in cascading sixth chords, President Elect Obama stressed again and again the need for everyone to come together. In his litany of the types of Americans making up the whole, he included "gays and straights" along with everyone else—something unimaginable for a Bush or McCain Presidency. Of course he also set the furniture for a new Camelot, mentioning his wife Michelle and his children Sasha and Meliya, and a First Dog yet to be named. Young partiers whooped and stalked the streets in cities across the nation, as the new President urged Americans to abandon cynicism and embrace the idea that "change has come."



An acceptance speech may be viewed as the first act of a new Presidency, though the Inauguration will not come for a couple of months. Obama emphasized the two occupations, which he called the "two wars," as challenges for his new Administration, but he also pointed to the financial meltdown, and, encouragingly, mentioned "a planet in peril" in the same breath. As I listened to the list of agenda items that followed, I was pleased to note that this euphemism for climate change had come in the first tier. Following that primary category of challenges, the shovel-list continued: Healthcare, education, jobs—"putting our people back to work," as he said, which is a better formulation than the usual boilerplate indicating breaks for the rich that we've heard since Reagan—and then he acknowledged that he needed to "repair alliances" with the globe, and he then called for patience.



He will need a lot of patience, not least because his entire prospective treasury has already been robbed, in a maneuver of arrogance, cynicism and collaborationism that he also voted for. I believe that this is the time to lay the groundwork for a completely utilitarian and necessary maneuver, one that is unthinkable now but will become inevitable later, that is, that Obama will be unable to move forward without confiscating the wealth of the great corporations. Obama will need to nationalize Exxon, Mobil, and BP, and he will need a solid groundswell of support from all of us. So start talking about it, please!



Obama also departed from the toxic attitude of the Bush Administration by stating directly, though not in as many words, that he would be open to dissent. Dissent has been nearly criminalized under the neocon regime. What a breath of fresh air that is.



Citing the experience of a 106-year old African American voter, Obama pointed to what he called the genius of America—the ability to change. He had already stated that only here could he have such social mobility—a point easily challenged by anyone familiar with social mobility statistics in France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, of Finland, but a hopeful sentiment all the same.

debate

It's amazing how far we have been browbeaten to the Right. This society is well domesticated, so that we turn to a man who proposes to expand a sadistic, immoral occupation of Afghanistan, a man who supports the provision of vouchers to religious parents so that they can avoid the secularizing effect of the real world on their children, a man who poses as morally superior to gays, reserving marriage only to nongays--to this man, the Left looks with great hope and longing, and throws its collective shoulder to the wheel of his election. It's absurd, disturbing, disheartening, and it's only rational. Because on his right, as the other major candidate to aspire the Executive Branch, an angry poseur awaits his appointment by caging rules, voter purges, voter intimidation, midnight electronic voter machine chicanery, or even the Supreme Court.

On this side, imperialism and corporate hegemony; on that side, imperialism, corporate hegemony, and a bizarrely fascistic military/industrial theology that promises to make all of us cowering serfs. I'll be fleeing to the same side of the cage as the rest of you, but let no one say I believe the cage is open.

McCain is truly disgusting. In last night's debate he was a caricature of frozen grimaces, angry sneers, "air quotes" to show his disdain for the idea of taking women's health seriously, and even rolling eyes--this last his
reaction to Obama's seemingly ordinary but actually quite shocking revelation of the facts on the ground in Colombia, where death squads rule the day and democratic union leaders are assassinated regularly and with impunity. You're not supposed to be allowed to be a Senator, to get that far in the US political process, and ever say that sort of truth out loud, but Obama doesn't seem to understand that yet, and it clearly irritates Grandpa Heart Attack. Shut the hell up, Grandpa was mugging, no one cares about the god damn little people in Colombia. But apparently Obama does still make that kind of mistake. I like that.

One of the funnier moments was the whole "Joe the Plumber" meme, which comes in a long line of traditional easy visual references for the Great Unwashed--that's supposed to be you and me--you know, "Harry and Louise," or in Reagan's 1980 campaign, "the bear in the woods." A simple image for simple folk. That was McCain's nuclear assault, if you will, and Obama treated it like a softball lob and batted it out of the park. Turns out "Joe the Plumber" actually has a handy quarter million to buy out a business with, which is more than you and I will ever see, and McCain wanted to pretend that he was just some working-class shmo who wanted to get by; but Obama pointed out that if Joe had really been so ordinary, he would pay nothing under Obama's tax adjustment, which merely restores some mild taxation to the owning class. The Republican Party has a long-standing sucker play in which the masses are reeled in by thinking that by removing reasonable taxation and regulation from the parasite class, from the billionaires, they will be allowed to become billionaires too someday. It's easy to show, with comparative data from social democracies, that the US system works against class ascension and not for it, that Joe will never, ever become a billionaire no matter how hard and how intelligently he works; but the myth has seemed unbreakable until yesterday, when Obama simply pulled out a pin and popped it. McCain's attempts to bluster the meme back into life fell flat. And I liked that too. Maybe McCain's slurs against Obama as a socialist terrorist would have carried some strength to the casual observer, if McCain hadn't come off as a superannuated ranting nut.

And I'll say this about age: It wouldn't matter if McCain had actually released all of his medical data, and if he didn't insist on the rightness of his grossly privileged and sexist life. He cannot appear modern in the presence of his trophy wife, who he obtained after dumping his first wife after a disfiguring car accident. Modern people point to the rightness of their path wile acknowledging the errors of their past, but McCain would rather no one dare ever mention his trail of smashed aircraft and destroyed Savings and Loans. That's what makes him look old--his angry response to ordinary examination, as if he were a member of an untouchable class, the sort of class the US population wishes to dispense with, to move onward to an egalitarian future.