Everything Is Broken

It’s not that I don’t care about Park Service workers, but 264,000 women and children were cut off from the supplemental food aid program, WIC, in North Carolina this week. Until Congress passed and Obama signed the “National Avoidance of Embarrassment Act” grieving military families, coping with the loss of their husband or wife, father or mother, and struggling to bury their loved ones, were forced to go searching for charity to provide proper burials for those lost in Afghanistan. The purpose for of US involvement in Afghanistan is now shrouded in uncertainty, but even as the loved ones ask why, America tells them you are alone. Even as the families wonder whether theirs will be the last to die for a cause no longer noble, except for political expediency, America cannot be bothered to care. Military leaders testified in Congress months ago that a shutdown would prevent the payment of burial benefits. We could ask that those feigning surprise to be ashamed, but the next battle is too near. Shame never enters the lexicon of those who sit in governance along the Potomac.  

Reopening national parks wouldn't move me at all. Let the lady in the harbor stare across the closed fence of her border. Let her be the only one left in America still willing take in “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Let her stand as a monument to our selfish stupidity. The idea that public opinion can be bought by opening the public parks repulses me. Americans have adopted the language of cable TV, all victories and losses calculated in political terms. Whether we, as citizens, assist grieving families, or feed poor women and children does generate the same zing. The decency we show each other is the true measure of who we are, but by that measure our record is awful.

Then just when you thought, just when it appears that the scale on which we measure our values is permanently damaged and irreparably, it turns out we can sink lower. As I write this Congress is considering ways out of the Shutdown crisis. Republicans love cutting taxes. They can always be used as red meat for the lion.  The tax most commonly discussed for action these past days has been the medical device tax. This is a 2.7% tax, on items that are commonly marked up hundreds of percent. In 1982, yes that’s 1982, the NY Times reported that Medicare paid for 80 to 90% of all pacemaker implantations. According the Times, the actual cost of manufacturing one was $600 in 1982, but medical device companies were routinely charging the hospitals $2,000 to $5,000.  These cost were then passed directly onto the Federal Government and paid through Medicare. Today, pacemakers costs can start at $12,000 and some range in price many multiples of that.  In what other area has technology gotten more expensive?  

That is the economic backdrop for the face saving measure, the “National Avoidance of Embarrassment Act II”. This is the way out of the Shutdown impasse now being formulated in Congress. There will be a delay in the device tax for two years, a complete cave to a narrow special interest group who’s lobbyists did not go home during the shutdown. That is a how low we have sunk.

Poll numbers notwithstanding some continue to wallow in the mess of slime and uncertainty they have created, some are still calling for an end to Obamacare. But the real failure springs from the narrow selfishness of our collective humanity. Keith Ellison made me cringe yesterday, when he said repeatedly that the truckers attempting to shut down traffic in DC in protest of Obamacare ought to vote their self-interest. Don’t these truckers need good roads and good health care, he wondered? Fair questions. But have we lost so much our sense of community, that the only interests that people can be motivated to pursue at the ballot box is those that can be defined as their self-interest? Is there no interest greater than our own that we could support with our vote? Ellison’s priorities are no different than mine, but his language if spoken by a wealthy Republican, say a Romney, for example, would be front page news. 

Shutdowns come and shutdowns go, but the community based commitment to our fellow citizens is being shredded daily. Racial ethics continue to boil beneath the surface. Some talk of the black community in Chicago and elsewhere and what “they” do, and what “they” haven’t done, and what “they” ought to do with their bootstraps. I understand not all of these comments are spoken with racial bias, but it seems they are heard and repeated with deeper and darker hues of bias. Those who suggest that “our” community is suffering (as opposed to “their” community) are classified as naive liberals, often dismissed with the label. When the conversation moves to class, the condemnation grows louder. Anyone who suggests that poor people, especially the working poor,  are suffering disproportionately in our society, they are met with a fuselage of indignation from wealthy and powerful interests claiming class warfare. Class lines are even more noxious in our national dialogue than race, often because they are released from the stigma of race. The white emperor has issues, but the rich emperor is willing to fight for his, and the financial resources he can raise to field his army is great and even now expanding. In Roman times, the vast army was fielded from those in society dispossessed and in search of validation, the ancient equivalent, perhaps, of bigots and truckers.

America has always had segregated communities. We have a long history of allocating services unevenly to those of different social classes. But this is the worst of who we are.  Money and power and the corruption they create are the source of the gridlock in Washington. It’s certainly not new. Race is the armor and shield, by which a poor white and poor black circle each other in anger and humiliation, prepared to fight. Distracted, neither questions those with wealth and power.  The People's House, repeated ad nauseam by  Boehner and his lieutenants, has become an Orwellian façade to cover the fact that more than half of the Congressional class of  2012 is a millionaire.

Americans increasingly condemn those with neither wealth nor power, laying all our woes at the feet of the poor, hungry, and dispossessed. For as many times as talking heads postulated the causes of the miscommunication and intransigence, how many times did anyone note the explosion of campaign cash flowing into the Potomac City and postulate that as a cause? Both parties feed at that trough, leaving neither motivated to shine a light on it.

Any talk about American greatness is distorted through the prism of wealth. Our national wealth has been horded into the hands of a narrower and narrower cabal. From their bunkers they fire “Americans for Prosperity” salvos. It is not only the Koch Brothers, their wealth derived from environmental toxins, and lack of worker safety. They are just the meanest and ugliest of the villains, but they are not alone. Kapra’s, Mr. Potter, in his decrepit wheelchair and mossy blanket, would have been a victim if “It’s a Wonderful Life” were remade today. A few real estate transactions and some questionable cultural choices?  WTF? Really? That’s all you got?  

In the run-up to the collapse of Lehman, and the near collapse of the world economy, trillions of dollars of dog-sh** investments traded hands. The bankers were the first in line, got in early, and when they needed to get out the government built a $700 billion bridge called TARP back to their moated mansions. Few remember the Tea Party originally formed at the grass roots as a response to the TARP legislation which was all in for the bankers and provided nothing for the homeowners screwed by predatory lenders and their masters on Wall Street.

The credit rating agencies like Moody’s and Fitch made millions as well. Matt Taibbi has written extensively of their role in the con. These are the agencies that now set the standard of value for US bonds, for whose pleasure the president and a handful of semi-sane Republicans are trying to dance. The financial interests showered money on Washington and continue to do so today. Medical device makers are just small time players in this game, but their impending victory is just a sign of what we are as a governed people: Last in line for consideration. For if there is an organized financial interest and an issue, the interest with the donations will always be heard first and last. It is not clear who speaks for the American people in either party.

Those who really care have become timid, and in ways prudish. When weighing “on the one hand” against “but then on the other", sometimes there is no other hand. Dan Rather's excellent book, "Rather Outspoken" goes into some detail to explain the corrosive effect of large corporate interests in news gathering organizations. Sometimes the man telling the story is wearing a fancy suit even as he picks your pocket, destroys your community, and loots your home.

We see the hurt in our communities, but we no longer “dream things that never were and ask why not.” We are too busy bickering about bullshit. We talk about what is good for the President, and how this plays for the dems, the GOP, and their base, but ignore real human suffering. Politicians from both sides of the aisle postulate that the real pain is coming, as if a pregnant woman clutching the hand of her small child in search of food is not pain enough. That she is often a 10^th generation black women only makes the pain more searing. It ought to shame us. Instead facts like that are used to shame her.

I acknowledge that I am a liberal. On this blog and on FB in the places I post, I know my views are more easily accepted. I acknowledge that I come here for reassurance and affirmation, depressed and frightened about where the center of the country resides now. Many of us are anachronisms. We are more liberal than the general population by several measures. With little effect, we pillory the other side with our meme’s and outrage. But if we go into communities in Georgia, or South Carolina, or even, Brooklyn New York, we would be despised other. Though we share woes and anxieties and bills, we vote for our party and “they” vote for theirs. Each party then polishes their arguments and disagreement down to a fine nub of inactive gridlock. Then once all the blood has been spent the only victor, the one that comes out on top, is the medical device industry. In Georgia or on the Uppper West Side, who voted for them?

Economic liberalism had its last gasp in 1968. Then we lost Bobby and Martin within two months of each other, and many of our fellow travelers set off in a drug fueled binge of nihilism. Those who did not, those who kept up the fight like Leslie Cagan, the mother of 1,000 protests, and Medea Benjamin, of Code Pink, become unfashionable, in ways even more so than the dreadlocked middle-aged white guy in the tie-dyed shirt and purple sweat pants who stayed way too long on the Haight.

I feel increasingly isolated from the American dialectic of left and right, liberal and conservative. I agree with those who say that we are spending money we don’t have. I’m tired of hearing the President’s supporters keep talking about the President’s claim to historic reductions in deficit spending. Are we so jealous of our victories that we cannot acknowledge that the Republicans pushed much of it on him?

The deficits are going down, but every honest person in the country knows they are going to start going up again at the end of this decade. Entitlement reform is coming, today, tomorrow or in two weeks or two years, but it is coming. Income inequality is an oozing wound on our national conscience or ought to be, that does not mean that the current rate of growth in Social Security, and more acutely Medicare, expenditures is sustainable. Do we not have the means to both put entitlements on a more sustainable path even as we address that oligarchic nature of wealth in this country (and around the world)  and sets plans to slowly reconfigure the economic construction of our society?

The President absolutely needed to defend his signature program, his legacy, Obamacare. Traffic on the Federal site is five times what was expected, which suggests a lot of interest for a program we are told Americans hate. It’s amazing that the president got his plan passed before this shitty environment enveloped all of us.

But his record of reform in almost all other areas is ineffective or incomplete. He reformed the college  loan program, removing predatory financial interests, but then buckled to Republican pressure on rates.  He got Dodd-Frank passed, but four years later has yet to get the regulations written. The president hit a right-wing roadblock on the environment and global warming, but he has been far too timid. He has moved on CAFÉ standards for mileage and emissions from coal plants, but the latter especially stands on less than firm ground for the long term. And he has presided over an explosion of investment in fossil fuels, especially in environmentally unsound fracking. In 2012 he ran on the increase in output he presided over, essentially stiff-Armed the environmental movement. He seems to think indecision on the Keystone pipeline, something a Republican president would almost certainly overturn, is an adequate policy.  Financial interests lie at the core of almost all these battles, sometimes lining up with the president, sometimes, actually almost always with Republicans, and in rare cases dividing their support between the parties. Voters get their say every two or four years, but lobbyists, weighed down with campaign cash, never stop talking.  

Obama has been an effective bulwark against the right wing crazies in Congress, but from climate to employment, to the budget, or campaign finance reform he has accomplished little else. I will defend Obama as a good man, and undeserving of much of the crap that has been splattered across his presidency. I will even say there are elements of greatness in him, but he has not been a great President. To be a liberal do I have to defend him?

Even as plans are laid to cut supplemental food aid, and chop kids out of Head Start, the Pentagon budget remains a bloated embarrassment. Early child education, something every person of means provides for their kids, has become a plaything for politicians to bandy about. Head Start has many limitations, but in a lot of cases it may be the only chance that a kid has to break the cycle of poverty which is their family tradition. Must it be sacrificed for another boat or plane?

It is long past cliché that our national priorities are f***ed up. Our community, our nation, is not willing to provide food or housing for the poor. Simultaneously we refuse to provide the means such as education to fight their way from poverty. We tell people to get off welfare and get a job even as we acknowledge there are no jobs, especially for low skilled workers with inadequate education.

For me I am in another place now. I am a liberal. I despise what the right has become, but hold no particular pride for this President or for the state of liberalism as a political force with a moral core. I define my liberalism in the way I think about race, and gender and sexual orientation. I define it in the largess, the sense of decency and honor I would like to see in our society. I'm a crazy liberal on guns, and a libertine on a host of issues from drugs to immigration. I do not believe we're too poor to accomplish real reform, and lift millions from poverty and desolation. Our imagination is cramped and our sense of community is dented, both in ways for more profound then the limits of our wallet. We just don't like to admit it. I acknowledge that money cannot solve every problem, it cannot even cure poverty. But if applied with love and compassion it can ease suffering.

Even to liberals the poor who live us among us are nameless, faceless, statistics. We no longer demand our Democratic President even talk about them. God Bless him, Keith Ellison was arrested this week while demonstrating for immigration reform. So much of the rest of the Democratic establishment has drifted away slowly from the subject, just as they did with gun control,  and almost any commitment to Social Justice. Nothing to see here, get off the corner, Johnny. Move along, move along.

This country is too rich to be so freakishly cheap and extravagantly selfish with our resources. After Lehman and TARP, every one of those Gucci loafers just wandered back to Connecticut with the millions they literally swindled from Congress and the pockets of their customers. From there they used their upper crust superiority to try to push one of their own, Romney, into the Presidency. Manipulating the process to get one of their own right back into the Whitehouse after the debacle of 2007-2008 would have been stunning defeat for America. They lost that one, and now sit in bitter recrimination fighting among themselves.

Meanwhile, in America, one in four who live in poverty. They are never the subject of political dialogue, except in the context of bootstrap lectures. 50 million require supplemental food aid. This is raised as a campaign issue only to pillory their shiftlessness. One must never speak of the the hole in the recovery they represent. 7-1/2% unemployment seems locked in as the new normal. Much of this is both chronic and endemic, caused by the collapse of manufacturing and Government jobs, once sure paths to the middle class.  Even as the infrastructure crumbles and America lags further and further behind in educational standards, no plans or proposals are in place to solve the employment problem or any other. Instead we get a two-year delay of a tax on medical devises.   

Is it any wonder that the song that plays in my head on constant rewind these days is “Everything is Broken”?

Everything is Broken, Bob Dylan, Oh Mercy, 1989

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBXn9PptgN8

Charlotte Observer, Cuts to WIC, Oct-08, 2013

http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/10/08/3265206/nutrition-program-for-moms-and.html

CNN, Fisher House to the Rescue for Military Death Benefits, Oct-09, 2013

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/09/us/fisher-house-death-benefits/index.html

The NSA Ate My Rights

There is a drip, drip, drip, of facts. I know there are still those who defend the NSA program, and continue to attack Snowden. I wonder about them. What will it take for Americans to understand that in the wake of 9-11, we have traded in many of our personal liberties?

Obama has suggested that Americans need to endure a bit of inconvenience in order to maintain our security and that the dialogue among Americans on the program is both necessary and important. Even so, he has denounced American awareness of the program through Snowden, Greenwald, The Guardian, The Washington Post and other media outlets. But member of his own administration, up to and including the president have given misleading and incomplete answers as to the extent of the program. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the White House and/ or The NSA ought to be held in Contempt of Congress and that release of documents ought to be forced through subpoena. That would be interesting, but the sad truth is that Congress with few exceptions has shown no interest or capacity for oversight. Like most Americans the prevailing attitude in Congress has been to bury their head in the sand while  the NSA tramples the Constitution and our Civil Rights.

Whatever has been released through courageous reporting, particularly based on the efforts of Greenwald and Snowden, is only a fraction of what is knowable.

This is so much worse than what we have been led to believe. For those that disagree, taken the basic facts of the case, I would like to know what the alternative argument would be.

Following is a partial list of what has been reported. Again none of this would have come out without Snowden and Greenwald:

“The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.”
--The Guardian, June-2013

“The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.”

--The Guardian, June-2013

“The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans…”

--The Guardian, June-2013

“The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document…”

Washington Post, June-2013

Despite Government assurances that the programs are critical to and used solely in the case of National Security Investigations, the information has been shared at least with the DEA and potentially other investigative agencies, who are now attempting to cover the source of the information since this is a prohibited activity:

 “A day after we learned of a draining turf battle between the NSA and other law enforcement agencies over bulk surveillance data, it now appears that those same agencies are working together to cover up when those data get shared. The Drug Enforcement Administration has been the recipient of multiple tips from the NSA. DEA officials in a highly secret office called the Special Operations Division are assigned to handle these incoming tips, according to Reuters. Tips from the NSA are added to a DEA database that includes 'intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records.' This is problematic because it appears to break down the barrier between foreign counterterrorism investigations and ordinary domestic criminal investigations. Because the SOD’s work is classified, DEA cases that began as NSA leads can’t be seen to have originated from a NSA source. So what does the DEA do? It makes up the story of how the agency really came to the case in a process known as 'parallel construction.'"

--Washington Post, August-2013

Multiple media outlets have reported that the NSA has also shared the data with it’s counterpart in the UK. Though we are told that the surveillance generally does not target specific communications which are protected, the sharing of the information with both the DEA and UK Intelligence agencies suggests that that is a misleading picture.

In subsequent reporting the tech firms in an effort to protect their brands have asked for permission to publish the number and nature of the requests they have received from the Federal Government.  

“The largest Internet companies in the United States have joined forces with top civil liberties groups to call on the White House and Congress to increase the transparency surrounding the government’s controversial National Security Agency surveillance programs. Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Twitter are among the tech giants that have signed a letter to the feds, asking for the right to disclose more information about national security data requests. Notably absent are the nation’s largest phone companies, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which have remained silent about their participation in the government’s snooping program.”

--Time Magazine July-2013

President Obama has repeatedly referred to the fact that members of Congress were briefed and that the program comes under the broad review of the FISA court. However…

“Ten of the court’s 11 judges — all assigned by Chief Justice Roberts — were appointed to the bench by Republican presidents; six once worked for the federal government. Since the chief justice began making assignments in 2005, 86 percent of his choices have been Republican appointees, and 50 percent have been former executive branch officials.”

--NY Times, July 2013

As far as Congress goes, there are layers of questions regarding the levels of statutory oversight.

“NSA Director Keith B. Alexander claim[s] that the Intelligence Committees didn’t find any NSA wrongdoing may be technically true. But that’s only because Congress appears to not have been fully briefed on the NSA’s compliance record. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) reportedly did not receive a copy of the 2012 NSA audit released by Gellman until The Post asked her staff about it. Upon seeing the audit, a statement from her staff said that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”

--Washington Post Aug, 2013

 It appears even possible that some member of Congress chose to keep details of the program away from the prying eyes of other members of Congress.

 “A letter drafted by the Obama administration specifically to inform Congress of the government’s mass collection of Americans’ telephone communications data was withheld from lawmakers by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee in the months before a key vote affecting the future of the program.

"The February 2011 document was declassified last month and has been cited repeatedly by administration officials and legislative leaders as evidence that the surveillance program had been properly examined by Congress as part of an aggressive system of checks and balances.

"A cover letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees that was sent with the document asked the leaders of each panel to share the written material with all members of Congress.

"Ronald Weich, who was an assistant attorney general at the time, wrote that making the material available to Congress would be an 'effective way to inform the legislative debate about reauthorization' of the provision of the Patriot Act that served as the legal basis for the phone surveillance. A similar document was available to all members of Congress in 2009, prior to a 2010 reauthorization vote.

"But the House Intelligence Committee opted against making the 2011 document widely available. Instead, the committee invited all 435 House members to attend classified briefings where the program was discussed — briefings that critics say were vague and uninformative.”

--Washington Post, Aug-2013

So in the end what we get is a massive government surveillance program overseen by a FISA court, packed with Ex-Executive Branch employees, mostly Republican, and with scattered Congressional oversight.

I understand the political imperative of Obama’s speech and his statement that “The programs are secret in the sense that they are classified. They are not secret, in that every member of Congress has been briefed. These are programs that have been authored by large bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006. Your duly elected representatives have consistently been informed."

Let’s just say that was misleading at best.

He talked about FISA court review: “This program, by the way, is fully overseen not just by Congress but by the FISA Court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them and that they’re — it’s being out consistent with the Constitution and rule of law.”

Well, can we now at least admit that those that challenge these “protections” as mere words may have a point? Under what other circumstances would the President not have mentioned the Republican imbalance on a court pack court reviewing his administration's decisions or programs?

 Is it any wonder that a lack of transparency has led to violations of the laws that created the program, or more broadly Constitutional protections of free speech and association and against illegal search and seizure?

 
“’We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,' a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.’”
--Washington Post, Aug-2013

 The entire program in my view becomes exponentially more dangerous when one considers it in the context of other surveillance  conducted by the Federal Government of those pursuing their Constitutionally protected First Amendment Rights, the Occupy Movement.

 “On May 20, 2013, The Center for Media and Democracy 
released the results of a year-long investigation: "Dissent or Terror:
 How the Nation's Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With 
Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”
The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained
 from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details how
state/regional "fusion center" personnel monitored the Occupy Wall
 Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012.”

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Government_Surveillance_of_Occupy_Movement

Step right up, get your red hot Constitutional Rights here. Act soon, supplies are going fast...

I Am Malcom X

I have been reading Manning Marable’s gorgeous biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. This was no accident. I am back to a lengthy car commute and audio books definitely help pass the time. Perhaps more fundamentally, throughout the Zimmerman trial liberal pundits drove me to near shoe throwing distraction as they refused to acknowledge how poorly the trial was going for the prosecution. I am very much with the juror that said that based on Florida law she had to acquit, but she still felt George Zimmerman got away with murder. Brother Malcom didn’t have much use for white liberals. I’m pretty much sick of them at the moment myself, even though I am one. On the conservative side, a series of missteps by the media, the prosecutors, and the police gave white race hustlers a wide berth to complain bitterly of unequal treatment for poor Hispanic George Zimmerman. The undertow of “See, we’re not racist. We’re defending the Hispanic guy!” was stultifying. I’m pretty sick of all of them. 

So it was more than the re-ignition of my hour-each-way commute that drew me to Marable’s book. I have enormous respect for Malcom X. Marable paints a far more complex, and in way mays more troubling, picture of the Black Muslim leader than either Haley’s biography, or Spike Lee’s movie, but it is so much more a human portrait. He suggests that the Malcom the hustler, then known as Detroit Red, was perhaps less a gangster than he wanted to let on, but the commitment to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI) was at least as deep, if not deeper, than we had previously known.

Yet what emerges is a powerful human soul searching for an honest understanding of the world around him and the ways that he could act to change it for the better. Marable tells the many stories of the times when Malcom X dipped his toe in the cool waters of integration and community. The minister debated Bayard Rustin, at least three times.  In the exchanges he often bitterly ridiculed the entire civil rights movement. Labeling civil rights leaders—people many people, myself included, consider giants of American history-- as Uncle Toms was a well-worn tactic in Malcom X’s rhetorical tool-bag. But in a sign of the complicated milieu in which Malcom X operated and the subtle ways his mind worked, years later A. Phillip Randolph, the African American leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, named Malcom to a collation he formed to address racial concerns in Harlem, their shared home. It is a measure seriousness with which Malcom approached the goals that Randolph espoused that he took the work seriously and work cooperatively.

Randolph and Rustin are founding fathers of the non-violent, integrationist civil rights movement. They   worked together for decades before the March on Washington, where Dr. King gave his “I have a dream” speech. The two men had primary roles in organizing the March. Biographies of both King and Rustin suggest that Rustin, who was gay, steered King towards non-violence. Attacking these men alienated Malcom from the mainstream civil rights groups operating at the time. It’s a shame because there was lot of truth buried beneath some of that bitterness.

Malcom X rose twice, in two distinctly separate circumstances, to break loose of chains that bound him to lesser versions of himself. This story of redemption, woven inextricably into America’s DNA, is of course the majestic story of the life of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Malcom X. Marable’s book shows, brilliantly, that the story is many shades different than what little most of us already know. Both the Autobiography, co-authored with Alex Haley, and the Spike Lee Movie suggests sudden stops and transformations, the first after prison and then the second after his Hajj to Mecca. What we see in this new telling is that Malcom’s entire life was a hajj, a pilgrimage in search of, and for, reason. Malcom travels frequently between the world and ideas of hot militant pan-African nationalism and cooler, more conciliatory coalition building with moderate civil rights leaders. Long before the transformative trip to Mecca Malcom already knew that political change could only come through a blend of the hot and the cold. He also came to see the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, as a deeply flawed ultimately conservative leader, who was leading his people down a dead end path.  

Malcom X appears as both a better man then we previously knew, but also a more deeply flawed individual. Yet, I can only aspire to the kind of courage he found to rise above his limitations, especially in breaking with the NOI when he had to break with the ideology that literally saved his life. It is the reason, even today, I admire Malcom X , so much. I was reminded in reading of the many facets of Malcom X’s public persona. He was a separatist militant, and political savant, and the minister for a flock scattered over dozens of temples across the country. He drew from the poor and working class, many of whom were isolated.   His life resonated because the minister’s central theology, and that of NOI religious practice, was based on the ability for those following the Messenger, as Elijah Muhammad was called, to completely transform their lives. The spiritual house built by Malcom X and the NOI resulted in lifting tens of thousands from the desperation of crime and drugs.

Beyond the black supremacist dogma which was real, piercing, and in some cases stunningly off track, the core of his political argument was that integration was doomed to failure because white society would never cede their supremacist authority over blacks. Though Marable indicates Malcom X had far more, and much earlier alliances, with integrationist civil rights leaders, he makes clear that Malcom X neither trusted or particularly believed the Southern integrationist civil rights leaders or their white Northern liberal partners. He was highly critical and deeply skeptical of the black middle class’s commitment or intention to reach out to the mass of poor and working class blacks with which he had the greatest affinity. Until his split with the Nation, Malcom suspected the motives of all parties except the NOI. Ironically, it was members of the Nation that would arrange for this death, albeit under the watchful eye of the FBI.

The Muslim religious profile is not for me, and other areas of the program are of course problematic. But this last the critique of a society which may or may not move towards complete equality between the races, and within which he perceived the real potential for powerful interests to  coopt societal forces struggling to achieve real and lasting change, this Malcom is still worthy of examination. Marble does a wonderful job of that.   

Beyond the personal reformation the Nation offered, Malcom X’s political solutions were threadbare, and during much of his time in the NOI nearly cartoonish. Often they were naïve. However, as he predicted, a disturbing core of poverty and want, isolation and fear, if allowed, would fester and metastasize. Ironically, Dr. King, particularly at the end of his life was making similar arguments.

Malcom X was right about too much. He openly challenged the suggestion that an integrationist strategy would ever free what were then 20 million Negroes, in the shackles of poverty, both in the deep south and in northern ghettos. He was deeply critical of his own community for acceding to the poverty which engulfed them, and the ills that came with it: Drugs and alcoholism, prostitution, violence and desperation. He was happy neither with whites, who were even then saying, “enough already” and blacks who he felt were weak in the face white devil out to destroy them. It remains to be seen when or how America will resolve its problems with race and poverty.

Today there are 36 million African Americans. Roughly one in two finish high school in four years, compared to four in five whites. 20% get college degrees, compared to 1/3 of whites. Almost the same number of young black kids that finish college are either in prison, jail, on probation, or parole. Much of the explosion in the criminal justice population of young black men came about as a result of the War on Drugs, which was followed closely by the commercialization and development of a for-profit prison system. Only recently have drug laws initiated decades ago, including the Rockefeller laws here in NY come under new scrutiny, and in some states, repeal. In the 80’s and 90’s drug penalties diverged sharply between the white man’s drug, cocaine, and the black man’s drug, crack. This exacerbated the problem. Even though criminal justice experts and politicians knew for decades that treatment was far cheaper and more effective than prison, politicians not wanting to appear soft on crime basically sentenced a couple generations of young black men to prison. It didn’t hurt that many states started to experiment with criminal justice privatization which created profit incentives for some if prison populations increased. The results of these racially tinged, morally repugnant, policies is now held up as exhibit “A” in the criticism of the black community as a whole.

Recently conservative pundit, Bill O’Reilly, a fine race hustler in his own right, garnered a lot of press for noting that 70% of black children are born out of wedlock. He seemed to blame this statistic, along with rap music, for the violence and poverty in black communities. In addition to the usual parade of disgruntled yahoos that make up his audience, some liberals and moderate whites applauded, including a friend of mine, who I love like a brother.

The US and most Western countries have seen a rise in out of wedlock births across all demographic groups to the point now that roughly one in two American children are born to single parents. Until recently almost all gay parents with children led households as unmarried couples. So, following O’Reilly’s thesis would it not be likely that there was an overall increase in violence across all demographic groups? As the protectors of gun makers have noted repeatedly since Newtown, violence of all kinds has dropped precipitously since the mid 80’s. This is the period when out of wedlock births grew from roughly one in three to its current level of one in two.

Several factors are converging and changing the dynamics of our society not all of them are leading to breakdowns in civility. Western societies are changing at a rapid rate. Teen births are declining, college admissions are increasing, and the age of child rearing is advancing. In the last ten years the rate of teen pregnancies has dropped the most among African American women, who are attending college at rates that rival whites. Between 2006 and 2009 the number of African American women attending college grew from 1.5 million to nearly 1.9 million.

Surveys since 1970 have shown women of all races having children at a later and later age. This is true for African Americans as well as whites, and reflects the availability of sex education in schools, birth control, and abortion, in other words women’s control of their bodies as well as their dramatic presence in the workforce which lies at the core of much of conservative bloviating While O’Reilly hustled his white audience with a single statistic, much of the core of his real anger is that his world is changing, not only in terms of race, but in terms of the relationship between men and women in our society. As he himself said, “The white establishment is now the minority”. He could have added.” The power of women is growing too.”

Conservatives who tsk, tsk the plague of violence in Chicago, and in essence blame the community, refuse to acknowledge the endless marches for peace and pleas to “Put Down your guns” organized within the community. O’Reilly knows these people are out there. He could publicize their stories, bring light to the struggle, but that would not draw the ratings of an inflamed white audience. Since the country largely abandoned the requirement for our shared pressure on our commonweal, liberals have often been all to glad to take up the charge. They anger easily at the charge of a welfare grandma from Milwaukee pulling down checks from seven different accounts. Yet they show little outrage for the $700 billion shoveled into the banks after the melt down on Wall Street. I won’t deny there are those that express outrage at both sides of the graft equation, but they are few and far between, and at least in my experience the bitter anger is almost always directed more squarely on the welfare cheat grandma than the Wall Street banker with the fancy suit and the good lawyers. Class is just a huge part of the issue now. This is something Malcom X addressed with some regularity as did Dr. King.

There is no question but that grinding poverty, the availability of cheap handguns, and out of wedlock births are a viral combination. Federal funds which support positive community based alternatives and which keep foolish, rambunctious, teenage boys occupied have been cut. This is no disparagement. I have one of those. His mother and I scheme every day how to keep him busy and out of trouble. 

The real challenge is the nihilism at the core of so many African American boys and men. While two  million African American women are attending college, only one million African American men do so. When one looks at the difference in college enrollment for black women and black men, you are left with the impression that black women may have in some way given up on their men. This is not dissimilar to what we see in the country as a whole. In a large chunk of the community school is uncool. Compounding the injury, many of the schools serving the African American community are not particularly good. Here again class is a major challenge. Studies have shown that income is an even better indicator of scholastic performance than race and/ or language. This is perhaps a reason demagoguery on race is so appealing. So long as poor whites are fighting with poor blacks, which is essentially the sociological equation in which much of the South remains hopelessly stuck, no one asks questions about the rich.

The wild young men in black communities, these would have been Malcom’s men, and I can’t help but feel that he was more than a little right. Other than to point at and criticize our society has very little use for these kids. Large parts of the black Bourgeoisie has moved on, also has Malcom predicted. Three rungs up the ladder they seldom look back. A sizable chunk of whites grew tired of the movement decades ago. Richard Nixon may have designed a cynical “Sothern Strategy” to take advantage of white impatience with the movement and its increasingly militancy, but he did not invent the attitudes, he merely exploited them. Political attachment of anti-poverty programs to the struggle for Civil Rights and easily stoked racial animosity, essentially wore down white support for those programs. The golden age did not last long. Massive progress was made in raising people from poverty throughout the 1950’s and especially the 1960’s, but Vietnam dried up some of the pools of funding people just stopped giving a shit about poor people. In the last presidential campaign neither candidates spoke of the problems the poor, or proposed any solutions monetary or otherwise to fix them. Instead we were treated to the silly season of 9-9-9, self-deportation, and vaccinations that cause mental retardation.

Malcom X  preached that integrationists underestimated the guile and strength of the opponents of racial equality. There is no more racist statement that can be made in America today than to deny the problem of racism, but you hear it every day. In state after state Republican politicians have discovered the scourge of voter fraud.  The solution for the non-existent problem just happens to make it harder for minorities, young and poor people to vote. It is not for me to say the intent of these laws is racist. Courts in Texas have already found that to be so. Surely similar conditions exist elsewhere. Police brutality and racial profiling remain as burning an issue today as they were in Malcom X’s Harlem. Just yesterday I saw for the first time the stunning footage which forms the basis for the new movie, Fruitvale Station. The movie is a fictionalized retelling of the death of a young man in Oakland. He was already restrained when he was shot at point blank range, by a police officer who was later found guilty of manslaughter the mildest available charge. The case took place in 2008, and the imagery is shocking. Dozens of people filmed the incident on their cell phone.

I join with those that lament the amount of print and hot air that has been exhausted on the Zimmerman case while a Holocaust was continuing in Chicago, but I part ways when we discuss both causes and solutions and when we minimize these deaths.  

The criticism of rap is so haggard it’s a wonder the horse even gets around the track anymore. The President reminded us once again that he is in fact the first African American President last week with his deeply emotional comments about the Zimmerman case and his own experiences as a young man. Obama may like rap, and O’Reilly’s comments were certainly a good way for him to demagogue his white audience. But c’mon already. O’Reilly is a culturally out of touch demagogue, but I know many of those now applauding his statement grew up when I did. Has everyone forgotten? Conservatives of one ilk or another have been blaming rock & roll, R & B, and “race” music, back in the day, for the decline of everything in this country for 100 years. People used to talk in similar ways about the Rolling Stones. What? Sympathy for the Devil is a gospel song?  Jackson Browne, famously sang Cocaine on the live record, Running on Empty. That’s OK? “We can share the women we can share the wine”, I guess that’s not misogynist? White liberal children of the 60’s pontificating on the evils of rap really are laughable. Obama likes rap in the same way that I do, I think. It’s got a beat and you can dance to it is still good enough for me, and the President I suspect. His Al Green work notwithstanding, The President is a little lame. Gansta’ he ain’t. I saw when they had Carol King in the Whitehouse. Watching him clapping his hands and swaying to and fro, mouthing the words, was a hipster embarrassment.

I do not profess to know how to solve these problems, particularly of nihilistic young black men and boys, but I believe people in these communities know the way out. There are literally thousands of community activists working to stop gun violence and stabilize poor families in communities across the country. There are too many easily accessible guns for sure, but eliminating every single weapon within a 1,000 mile radius of our major American cities will not in and of itself, improve schools, provide better communities, or adequate supplies of food and healthcare. Most importantly they will not build families.

Brother Malcom preached the gospel of self-transformation. He would say, “The white devil won’t lift a finger to help you so you’ll need to take care of yourself.” Many whites of good intention sacrificed an awful lot to help advance the cause of justice for African Americans. Malcom was wrong about that. That said every black kid that adopts that creed will be placing himself ahead of every gang banger in his neighborhood. We all have a duty to help our brothers and sisters, but the less we wait for that, maybe the better off some of us will be. Many people, both black and white, just gave up too easily. The best many people can muster is a tsk, tsk. The first thing most of us could do would be to tone down the criticism and judgmental finger wagging, and dial up the love for our brothers and sisters with the certain knowledge that our life improves, both spiritually and communally, when the lives of those on the South Side of Chicago do.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LW7tJ6T5Tk

"I am Malcom X" Montage from the Spike Lee Movie

 

 

American Influence In Egypt

The American view that our involvement or activities are critical or even valuable in shaping events in Egypt is foolish. America’s influence is limited to the direct threat, included in Obama’s statement yesterday to withdraw all or a portion of the $1.5 billion in aid America provides Egypt each year, more than 80% of which is military.

American dollars flow to Egypt as a result of treaty obligations enshrined in the 1979 Camp David Peace Accord with Israel. The same accords support over $3 billion in military aid to Israel each year, making the two countries, alongside Pakistan, the largest recipients of US foreign support. The Egyptian aid can be withdrawn if certain conditions are met, but Camp David has led to 30 years of peace between Egypt and Israel and any sane American political leader would remove the support at his or her peril and that of our national interest.

A year ago conservatives were sure that the election of the Brotherhood candidate in Egypt proved the flaw in supporting the democratic aspirations during the Arab  Spring in predominately Muslim countries. Many felt, and said so loudly, that the President should have weighed in and perpetuated the dictatorship of the hated Mubarak, and so-called "moderate" dictators across the region.

Despite the obvious foolishness of America putting its finger on the side of the scale opposite tens of millions of Egyptians, the common wisdom was that the hated Mubarak would have been better than the Islamist Brotherhood and their front man, Morsi. It seems American conservatives underestimated the power of the liberal alliance in Egypt, as well as the Egyptian people themselves. In doing so they overestimated American power (again), somehow replacing the illegitimate certainty of their wisdom for that of the Egyptian people.

Look, they said, Obama managed to remove one of America's most reliable Arab allies, and what did we get? Morsi and the Brotherhood. Republicans, supporting trans-vaginal ultrasounds and all manner of male intrusion into the lives of women in this country, rallied for the infringed rights of women in Egypt under Brotherhood rule. 

Many conservatives and a few liberals made a  completely American calculation for a moronically American equation which apparently included Israel, the US, and Egypt, but actually left out the Egyptian people. 

Then, this week, secular forces allied to remove Morsi. It was reported that 30 million people poured into Tahir square this week to support the peaceful protests, an impressive turnout for a population of just over 80 million. Morsi is out. 

For those so eager to blame Obama for the loss of Egypt to Islamists, we would do well to remember that in 2011 Obama only released a statement fully in support of the aspirations for democracy the day after Paramilitary forces on horse and camelback charged crowds of peaceful protesters with sticks and swords. Against a deteriorating backdrop of increasing lawlessness, when Mubarak spoke the next day in fairly vague terms about transition, only at that point, February 10, 2011, did Obama call for “a credible, concrete and unequivocal path toward genuine democracy”.

 
For conservatives this was Obama throwing our ally under the bus. While most honest observers knew that only a Tiananmen type military assault, likely fronted by tanks, with all the attendant casualties, would restore some level of order in Egypt, conservatives still felt the President did not go far enough in supporting the hated Mubarak.  American Conservatives making this argument ignored the obvious fact that the Egyptian military almost certainly would not have obeyed orders to massacre peaceful protesters. This may be called real-politic but it is a morally indefensible position. Those that advocated on that side two years ago have no credibility today.

The first Egyptian revolution was the result of a coalition of Islamist Brotherhood leaders and urban secularists, both deeply oppressed by Mubarak and sick of it. Based on long term Brotherhood organizational strength, Morsi won the election that followed with 51% of the vote, and then proceeded to do everything possible to narrow his collation to his base, something less than 50% of the Egyptian population. After 20 years of dictatorship, Morsi's approach was a prescription for political failure.

During the Brotherhood's period of leadership, both sides viewed the Obama administration with suspicion. Morsi's supporters feel Obama did not adequately support their legitimacy as the first democratically elected Egyptian President. Meanwhile, Americans stood at least publicly silent as Brotherhood security forces in ways both large and small imposed their will on the people. Women were attacked on the streets of Cairo for not wearing the Hijab. Egyptian secularists quickly grew enraged at the US for continuing to support the undemocratic activities of the freely elected President.

During the second revolution the Obama Administration was even quieter, at least publically, than they were in the first revolution. The statement following Morsi's overthrow, far from applauding the result, challenged the military means and warned against mass arrests which the administration must have known were already underway.

Despite Obama’s statement, Morsi's removal is absolutely in our best interest. It breaks the cycle of democratic Islamists which have largely been the result of the Arab Spring. It interrupts Egyptian government support for lawless, militant, activity taking place in the Sinai buffer with Egypt. Most importantly these events provides an essentially liberal, secular path forward, achieved by non-violent means. We can only hope that both the non-violent tactics and the results embolden similar forces in Turkey, Tunisia, perhaps in the long term Syria, and across the Arab world.

A second revolution coming so close on the heels of the first  shows that the Egyptian people will not so easily be led into another couple decades of repression. I would only wish that Americans could consider how great that is, what a wonderful non-violent victory this is, especially so because we had so little to do with it. Egyptian liberals and secularists have seen the limits of American will and power and took their fate into their own hands. I think they see America and Americans much more clearly then we see ourselves. While lasers and fireworks dart through the sky above Tahir Square, once again talking heads and both the American left and right debate the role of US involvement. So patriarchal are we in our views that we simply cannot imagine that the Egyptian people had their own point of view, saw the first anniversary of the hated Morsi’s election as their opportunity, and acted upon it. Secularists, we can hope have learned a few lessons, perhaps the most important that the US government cannot and will not intervene to support or save them.

Now that the Brotherhood has been sidelined there are two centers of power in Egypt. The first is the Egyptian military, which even now acts in its own elitist interest. The second is the crowds in Tahir, fueled by social media, grievance, and the sure knowledge of their power in bringing down two separate governments in a two and a half year period. America is only tangentially part of the equation.

Who Cares About Edward Snowden

The events of the past few weeks revealed far more about Americans and our society than any actual insight to the actions of our government. The media is now obsessed with the Snowden Identity movie franchise in which a man on the run hopscotches international capitals. How one responds to the disclosures is sort of a Rorschach test as to your tolerance of government intrusion into your life. Predictably, the right which sees a government boogeyman around every corner has gone batshit. Glenn Beck, always the voice of measured reason, said, “I’m telling you, America, if we don’t stop this right now, we will be remembered as the most evil nation in history of the world. We will dwarf what Germany did. This is the way totalitarian states are created.” There is no mountain of hyperbolic bullsh** that man cannot climb.

Meanwhile, on the left or what passes for it these days, there has been a chorus of media and governmental officials condemning Snowden in the loudest terms. Mika Brzezinski has gone beyond criticism of Snowden, who she’s determined was “not a whistlebower”, but who she says is a “weasel”,  and attacked the reporter, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who she feels was “too close” to the story to address it honestly or fairly. David Gregory also went after Snowden on what Mark Levin calls, Meet the Depressed. The Wall Street Journal goes further suggesting that Snowden and Greenwald were working in collaboration to “steal government secrets”. Odd that the Washington Post which printed the exact story, some say with even greater detail, has escaped the scrutiny that has found Greenwald. Is it easier in this context to attack a British based paper than one populated by people the talking heads one meets at dinner parties? As so often happens media attention as drifted from the core of the story, massive government surveillance of communications between law abiding citizens in whatever form, to the far more dramatic and immeasurably less important pissing contest between journalists.

As with the Wikileaks case we are told, breathlessly, that American lives will be lost as a result of this breach.  Small problem there, the BBC quoted a Pentagon official in December 2010 as saying that months after the Wikileaks dump that resulted in Bradley Manning being held, naked, in solitary confinement “The US military still had no evidence that people had died or been harmed because of information gleaned from Wikileaks documents.” Just months earlier, in July 2010, Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff was quoted as saying “[Assange] can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier…"

I’m not sure but with summer coming on and the hammock or fishing pole calling my sense is the American public has already checked out. They damn sure have lost interest in the IRS case, where poor Darryl Issa soldiers on in moronic isolation. But we may do well to pay attention to the NSA stories for a few more weeks. Just last week while the Supreme Court was emancipating gays into the freedom of who does what chores around the house, the court also decided that Americans could not challenge the rulings of FISA courts. As the Washington Post editorializes today, “The act permits surveillance without having to show that the target is suspected of anything.” Continuing the Post piece went on to say that, ”The Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiffs’ claims could not be heard because they could not show that they had actually been subjected to the surveillance. The catch: The surveillance is conducted in secret, so no one can be certain that he or she is subject to it.”

The administration has made two claims about these NSA programs. The first, that either dozens or hundreds of plots have been broken up as a result of the programs, can’t be proven. The second, that American Citizens have not been targeted or accidentally swept up in unconstitutional dragnets, cannot be determined even in a court of law.  

This is some of what we do know. A massive data base of virtually all email and telephone communication has been created by US government agencies. While the government claims that actual communications have not been monitored, we are told the machinery is only in place to highlight areas where specific communications would be targeted. Law abiding citizens can relax, I suppose. You didn’t need that right against unlawful search and seizure anyhow. You were just planning a barbecue.

When communications take place between a US citizen and a foreign national, or anyone suspected by the US government, the American citizen has no specific or automatic right against unreasonable search and seizure. Whoops… Go further we have learned that Americans believed to be planning terrorist plots may not enjoy the same constitutional protections as the rest of us, so that unravels the thread a bit more. Suspicion has travelled rapidly from those suspected of terrorism to these reporting the news, so that in two cases that we know of, the AP and a reporter Fox News, actual communications were hacked, monitored, and recorded.

There is rather large security apparatus in place now. It may have been created under Bush, or it may have been initiated earlier, but it exists and it can be taken down from the shelf as needed or desired in any case. The circumstances of which might be unpredictable and since the programs are opaque, potentially illegitimate. According to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) the movements of Non-Violent Occupy protestors were monitored by the FBI, The Department of Homeland Security, and private security interests representing the NY Stock Exchange and several Wall Street financial firms.  It is fair to ask what part of that apparatus was turned against the Occupy Protesters.

As serious as the NSA disclosures here, the suggestion that government agencies are performing similar surveillance, in consultation with large business interests, is several degrees more chilling. While the Supreme Court was insulating the NSA from scrutiny this week it also ruled in another case that further restricted the reach and development of class action lawsuits. Taken on balance the Supreme Court has equated speech with money in the Citizen’s United Case, and then further protected those moneyed interests with a series of rulings restricting class action status. Now the government comes along as a partner to business interests. There was a time Tea Party activists would have raised concerns about big business coalitions with government, especially in the context of a growing security state. But no more….

Whatever circumstances created the impetus for the development of NSA programs it is now clear that they have been perpetuated over 12 years, almost certainly longer, and two presidencies. Since 9-11 the Department of Homeland Security has spent close to a trillion dollars. One example of the spread of those dollars beyond these incredible costly and complex programs was the military and security presence which was marshaled in such short order after the Boston bombings on the streets of Watertown. The sad state of things is that men and women in similar gear have confronted Wal-Mart workers protesting for better wages, environmental concerns, and the formation of unions in Illinois, California, and elsewhere. Americans, assured that the security apparatus is there to stop bad guys, seem to tune out when it is massed to meet occupy protesters or union activists in pursuit of democratic goals through the use of free speech or the right to assembly.

In addition to the DHS budget the US has spent nearly a trillion In Iraq, and about the same in the Afghanistan/ Pakistan theatre. The colossus of nearly four trillion dollars in spending is a living testament to the seemingly secure notion that the #1 priority of the US government is defending its citizens.

Yet, while Snowden sits in a terminal in Russia, the subject of international press attention, something like 600 Americans a week are being killed each week by gun violence. While the nation is transfixed by the Zimmerman case, about half the six hundred lost lives will be African Americans killed by other African Americans. An obscene number will be children, not Newtown Kids of course, but 6, 7, 8 and 9 years olds nonetheless. While Senators argue about assault weapons and high capacity magazines, the overwhelming majority of gun deaths are murder or suicide by cheap, easily obtained, pistols.

While China and India make massive investments in infrastructure and education, America remains mired in a dead-end conversation about deficits. In 2012 about 60% of those that took the ACT college entrance test showed insufficient knowledge in at least two of the four basic subjects, English, math  science, and reading. More than a quarter were not prepared in at least two of the four subjects. Yet, that same country has the creativity and financial resources, the intelligence and technology, to monitor for National Security purposes every call, and every email which is initiated or ends in the US.

We can harness the algorithms to show which of those making a call or sending an email is dangerous. Yet we could not save Chastity Turner, shot in the neck while washing her dogs on her front porch in Chicago. While we obsess about deficits, 17 million school age children do not have enough food in their stomach so that they can learn every day. Charities do heroic work in filling the gap, but the SNAP program which provides about $1.50 a meal per person is called wasteful and worse, a vote seeking bribe.

Republicans argue that Democrats rule over a donor state of the needy. Kill the programs that feed the poor and house the homeless they argue. Some of them, they point out rightly, have been in existence for decades and poverty hovers at levels unchanged since the end of the Great Society push in the 60’s. Conservatives say that what America needs is jobs not handouts. While we can agree with that we might ask why abortion gets so much more of their attention, or if they have any employment solutions that extend beyond tax cuts for the super wealthy.

Recently a Republican Congressman released a list of all the great stuff you can get for the week using your SNAP (food stamp) benefits. He listed everything from soda, to Honeycombs cereal, to canned beans. Nowhere included was fresh meat like chicken, fish of any kind, or fresh vegetables. Almost everything was processed which basically equates to too much sugar and salt, too many calories, and obesity. But in fairness neither party has shown sustained commitment to the problems, concerns, or life and death struggles of the poor. Anti-terrorism is far sexier and easier to run on.  It’s certainly easier to raise money from military contractors, then people in Bed-Stuy or the South Side of Chicago.

Personally, I don’t care much about Snowden. I sympathize with those who ask how a 29 year old got access to so much information. But let’s be honest, when you grow the apparatus this quickly to this size and scope, and create so much profit incentive for private firms and individuals to participate, this is what’s going to happen. I see Snowden as neither a hero nor a villain. I am deeply uneasy about his certain knowledge of what was best for all of us. But the paramilitary presence lined up against the Wal-Mart protestors is no cause for patriotic joy either. We can debate the NSA programs, but I would greatly prefer more dialogue about those hungry and poor, sick and deprived, among us.

When I was a young man I was literally schooled about issues in the gay community as a witness to the discreet and awful silence about the AIDs epidemic which was literally killing people I knew. Then President Ronald Reagan only broke his language boycott of the words HIV and AIDs to argue against education.  He hoped, I think, that his silence would make the problem go away, but as the ACTUP community noted again and again: Silence=Death. When the Supreme Court ruled favorably on Gay Marriage this past week, I thought back to the friends I knew then. Marriage would have been a dream for Eddie and a couple guys I knew named Joey. They would have been happy to be alive. So it is in this spirit that I can ignore the international intrigue surrounding Edward Snowden and ask simply, while all that sh*** was happening, and all that friggin’ money was being spent, how many lives could we have saved?

http://faithnmagic.blogspot.com/2013/01/uncivil-liberties.html