Sherbert (a slight return)....

Sorry, my non-existent audience, if you've noticed that I've been silent for these many months -- it seems like every time I want to comment on current events, both the Democrats and the Republicans say and do something more idiotic than the thing I wanted to rip into them about in the first place, and the next thing you know, I'm 8 months into a silent spell.

I didn't add my voice to the Movement of the 99% beyond the facebook comments because it seemed blatantly obvious to all but the wilfully-blind and intentionally-ignorant that the times, they are a'changin. When corporations control the government, textbooks suggest you have the start of fascism, and I'll agree with that premise. There were many other voices crying out during the peak of the Occupy Movement, and in some ways the coordinated beating down of the various Occupy [YOUR TOWN HERE] will force a political maturation beyond the drum circles, three-word chants, and free food for the masses. Since I wasn't directly involved, I didn't feel my voice needed to be added to the commentary, and I couldn't really expound upon the subject any better than those actively involved within the movement.

So what drove me out of exile and back onto this platform? A couple things. First, the story that serial-cheater Newt Gingrich has signed a pledge forbidding adultery in his "defense of marriage," a very act that makes the audible sound "CHUTZPAH" when vocalised.

"Serial-cheater Newt Gingrinch has signed a pledge forbidding adultery"

*CHUTZPAH!*

Now, all of this is his (and a great number of culture fascists) belief that marriage is so weak, so fragile, that allowing two consenting adults of the same sex to wed, and get the benefits of such union, would make any of his multiple marriages less sacred.

If it weren't so serious a case of homophobic discrimination it would almost be laughable. I've got friends and family members who are gay, and I want them to have the same rights I'm entitled to if I ever get married. I see no difference between my hypothetical relationship, and any of their very real and loving relationships.

The fact that serial cheaters like Newt and Rush are the biggest proponents of this mythical idea that marriage is weakened by allowing gays to marry points to the very weakness of their argument, and proof that you just can't fix stupid.

Okay, topic one down, what was the second thing that brought me out of early retirement? Funny enough, it also involves Newt, who opined that, having not learned a bit about labor history, we should return to the days of child labor.

Not only that, but he's also advocating for a return to unpaid labor for corporate America -- a throw-back to the simple days of slavery, when people weren't paid for their labor, and corporate America profited.

Both ideas, not-so-oddly, were applauded and found great support amongst the audience, a point hammered home by Keith Olbermann.

So, the GOP has been reduced to the party of child and slave labor, the party that believes corporations are people, and that pizza is a vegetable.

Anything else?

Well, yes. Senator Ron Johnson, dumbass from Wisconsin, asserts that good workers don't make minimum wage, that essentially, good workers get promoted, or otherwise move on to high-paying (some might say, non-existant!) jobs that have magically flooded the market.

Senator Johnson, who married into a family with millions in their bank accounts, seems to miss the flip side of the argument -- that good companies don't pay their workers minimum wage, that instead a good company, feeling a part of the community in which they earn their profits, provide a living wage to their workers so that they can afford housing, food, health care.

Good companies don't force communities to subsidise their failure to provide a living wage to their workers by providing housing assistance, health care assistance, and other social welfare programs to people who work full or near-full time, like workers of billion-dollar corporations like Wal-Mart, who spend millions fighting labor unions fighting to empower workers, hiring lobbyists to court Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Good companies don't pay their executives millions in stock options and bonuses while declaring poverty, saying workers, and labor unions, have to sacrifice for the benefit of the company.

So this post comes full circle, an argument in support of the Movement of the 99%, Occupy Wall Street, and Occupy [YOUR TOWN HERE].

And lastly, in an effort to soften my image as extreme leftist, I provide this cute image of my childhood heroes, Bert and Ernie, my favorite gay couple on Sesame Street.

Sheep and Goats....

Forbes Magazine tell us that social security can not go bankrupt and gives us a convincing argument of why that is so.

So why, then, are billionaires and the plutocrats in mainstream politics forever telling us we are doomed?

Because, they have a Randian alternative to social security, one where THEY benefit from all that money being exchanged.

See, billionaires want to kill social security so they can make trillions off us poor working folks when they set up mandated privatised retirement accounts. With those accounts set up, the billionaires and their brokers can make big bucks speculating with our money, with little risk to them but BIG risk to us if their betting and wheeling and dealing doesn't pay off. Like a casino, it's house rules, and the game is set up so that the house wins.

Charlie Sheen has been blasted far and wide for his crazier-than-fuck behavior at his one-man shows he's doing around the country, but more and more I see it as a cleverly-crafted social critique of the highest order. When people in the audience complain about his performance, he says, "I've already got your money!"

Bill Maher, I think susses out the critique too, by comparing Sheen to Wall Street:



Wall Street billionaires are giving big bucks to mainstream politicians -- and effectively framing the message -- to make sure social security goes away, because in the end they know it doesn't matter if OUR privatised retirement accounts get zeroed out by THEIR speculation -- either way, they already have our money.

To these militant objectivists, they are Ayn Rand's John Galt, and what happens to us if they lose our money isn't even of secondary concern to them. It is survival of the fittest, and so long as they have our money -- or at the very least skim the trillions to be made off the top of our money if they have their way -- that is their primary, Randian concern, and if we are to work til we're 85 because we can't live on the crumbs left by their bad decisions, so be it, because, they already have our money.

In their world, there is no safety net, because the existence of poor folks is anathema to THEIR progress to Galtian perfection. Ayn Rand is their god, and her solution is now being pushed by the GOP.

Being publicly agnostic with a shading of atheism, it's perhaps odd I would turn to the Christian Bible for insight and guidance, but to me, there are very radical, very militant, very progressive lessons to be learned, and the GOP's march away from the Bible is warned against in the lesson of Matthew 31-40:

The Lord did say in so many words to the sheep -- "what you did for the most poor, destitute, old and sick of my brothers and sisters, you did the same for me," and the sheep were led into Heaven.

And the Lord did then turn to the goats, and in so many words said to them -- "what you did NOT do for the most poor, destitute, old and sick of my brothers and sisters, you did NOT do for me as well," and the goats were cast into Hell.

I ain't one to say who here are the sheep and who here are the goats, but I'll just close by asking the more religiously-minded of my Randian brothers and sisters, which path are you going to follow?

They call it "Class War"

They call it class war only when we fight back.



In the months since I last saw fit to open my yap on this here soapbox, the political landscape has been rocked by classic Republican over-reach. I've been poked and prodded by friend and enemy alike, urged to spew forth some wit and wisdom, some nugget of insight on what was happening, as if I had some expertise or inside scoop, instead of just rank speculation and opinion.

Anyhow, quite simply, the GOP, for years, have sold themselves as limited government types, which is popular in the boonies amongst the meth lab, dog- and cock-fighting, and copper-still types, who prefer to be left alone for obvious reasons.

Yet, in practice, they've proven to be as beholden to the leviathan as their Democractic colleagues to shove their ultra-extremist culture wars down our throats. With so many examples of their hypocritical, fascist behavior coming to the fore, it has simply been quite hard for this here redneck to concentrate on just one case when there were so many examples to point out.

So, I leave it to a New York liberal named Rachel Maddow (whom I crush on despite the obvious barriers) to come up with a perfect 11-minute dissection of the Republican "small government" myth:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I don't blame my teabagging brothers and sisters for falling prey to this myth -- they've been sold a raw deal based on a lifetime of fear and uncertainty.

Whether they be manipulated to fear shadows after 9/11, or to mistrust an American-born President with a foreign-sounding name (in a country built by immigrants, we're all kinda foreign-sounding!), they've been expertly duped by billionaires and their proxies -- it keeps the poor saps distracted, keeps them fearing their neighbors more than the corporate executive who is the REAL danger to their lives and livelihoods.

And, let's take a moment to remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which claimed the lives of 146 garment workers -- 129 women and 17 men -- who died from the fire or jumped to their deaths on 25 March 1911, just 100 years ago.

Weeks before, many of the workers -- mostly young, mostly recently-immigrated -- had tried to organise for better working conditions in the factory, and had been beaten and arrested by the cops, who, like now, served to protect the rich from the poor. The factory owners -- captains of industry who made millions off the labor of these poor women -- refused to provide a safe working environment in favor of more profits, and 146 people lost their lives to greed as a result.

The tragedy inflamed public passions and jump-started the American labor movement. Industry, unwilling to provide labor with a sliver of the wealth it had created, was forced to reluctantly bend slightly, giving workers the barest crumbs of benefits, benefits they've sought to take back piece by piece over the years.

And just 100 years later, the Republicans in Congress and in statehouses across the country seek to destroy organised labor -- which would have died an inglorious death on its own if left to its own devices -- at the behest of billionaires. And just as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire jump-started the American labor movement, so to the Republican/Corporate fascist over-reach will revive the American labor movement.

To that, I gotta give thanks to them short-sighted sumbeaches who done more for organised labor in a few short months than 100 years of shop-floor organising.

Some call it sedition...

At various times as I politically matured, I've been called a seditious traitor by those less class conscious than myself for being a "little-c" communist, particularly for being one who strongly believes the capitalist class will not relinquish control peacefully, and will in fact react violently to any movement or prophet who advocates a redistribution of wealth, from the hands of nebulous investors to those working class grunts responsible for that wealth in the first place.

That redistribution will not be anything other than violent, and as I see it, the existence and level of violence will be decided by the capitalist class itself, and how hard and fast they send out their armed wing known as the police and military. I accept that as my political truth.

In a short-sighted display of liberal delusion, those seeking a just and better society often ignore labor history and have long eskewed violence, better able to be both infiltrated and smashed before their very simple demands are made. Their simple demands? In the words of James Connolly, "our demands are very simple - we only want the earth."

Face it -- if you advocate a just and better society, you WILL be smashed violently, regardless of whether yer weapon is a gun or a pen, a molotov or a megaphone.

So that being said, my ears perked up when Stephen Broden, a GOP candidate for Congress, in my home state no less, adopted AND mainstreamed my belief that the violent overthrow of the government is on the table.

A quick google search defines sedition thusly: "an illegal action inciting resistance to lawful authority and tending to cause the disruption or overthrow of the government; or conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of a state."

Let's take another look at what Broden, the GOP's candidate for Tx-30, said again -- "The violent overthrow of the government is on the table."

Now, had a so-called liberal Democrat uttered such a seditious phrase, the reichwing echo chamber would have quickly jumped into action, and succeeded in forcing their resignation and a life-time of political exile. But in this day and age, when up is down and teabaggers are right, GOP candidates for Congress are free to advocate violent overthrow of the American government.

It may seen nutty on the surface, but I embrace this mainstreaming of such a radical idea, especially by agents of the reichwing, because this mainstreaming protects myself and others of my ilk who have long faced political persecution.

Saying thusly, Thomas Jefferson earned his own political exile from the Texas educational system (even as the GOP-packed School Board of Education and the GOP'ers themselves incorporate his message into their "revolutionary" programme) -- "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive."

Hell, driving it home, teabagging GOP'ers have taken Jefferson's 1787 quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" as their call to arms in their faux-revolution against the brutal reign of democratically-elected and broadly-supported President Obama.

Now, I'd argue that revolution is indeed as American as apple pie. However, reichwing luminaries like Henry Kissinger and his NeoCon spawn typically only practice that policy abroad, toppling democratically-elected governments and enacting "regime change" so that American corporate interests are preserved, protected, and run supreme. These teabagging fascists have adopted the "regime change starts at home" rhetoric of the Left, and plan on doing violently of democracy stands in the way of their reactionary plans.

The reichwingers should take careful note of their actions and their rhetoric, and pay special mind to another founding father, John Adams, who cautiously, if not prophetically, said: "Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either [aristocracy or monarchy]. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide."

As for this redneck revolutionary who embraces a healthy dose of misanthropic nihilism, I wouldn't mind seeing this corporatist vision of democracy die a flaming death at its own hand so a new, and better, society can take its place. I suspect, however, that I'm in the distinct minority on this, but I am heartened that some of my fellow travellers as I rage against the system now include some of the most powerful, strongest and well-connected actors on the political stage.

So come on in, compadres, sit down, grab a beer, make yerself at home, and embrace yer violent, revolutionary impulses. Unless, as I suspect, yer faux-outrage is pure bluster, yer anti-government rhetoric dies the instant yer side once again steals power back and you go back to yer unAmerican, anti-democratic thievery in service to the oligarchs who really run this joint. Yeah, you are revolutionary posers who will gleefully lock away me and mine for uttering the same sentence Stephen Broden shouts from the campaign trail.

Purple is revolutionary.....

The tide is turning, and the forces of hate and bigotry that have gripped our nation for decades -- selling us fear and suspicion about our neighbors -- are losing their hold on us dumb hicks thanks to tons of hard work and dedication by the forces of love and tolerance.

In a country where dogs and cats can be married without protest, when those who argue about the sanctity of marriage believe in it so much they divorce and marry multiple times and have multiple mistresses (Newt, I'm speaking to you!), a marriage between two loving gay adults is a revolutionary act.

Much has been said for and against gay marriage. That ain't my focus here, I take a dim view towards that racket run by church and state -- my interest is acceptance, not merely tolerance, of yer fellow man and woman. Who and how they love should be secondary to the fact that, indeed, they DO love. The forces of intolerance preach love, but taints that message with hate towards my friends, my brothers, my co-workers, that loving couple down the street who don't match a narrow definition of who is "real" and "valid".

The time for dividing us on gender issues is past, because it allows the class war to continue unabated -- being a straight ally, and wearing purple are both revolutionary acts, because it tells you I don't give a damn who yer consenting adult partner is, it tells you I don't give a damn who and how you love, but that you love.

And that love drives the right wing -- our common enemy -- nuts. Join me as I join you.

In closing, the prophet-comic Bill Hicks closed his shows with this song by Rage Against the Machine. The lyrics still remain relevant nearly 20 years later. When the reichwingers tell you to hate yer neighbor, yer children, yer brothers and sisters, yer coworkers, or anybody else because of who and how they love, do yer best Zach de la Rocha impression and yell "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Motherfucker!" And then embrace them, shower them with love, and tell them hatred based on who others love is so 20th Century.

The First 16 Words....

Had a brief discussion a short time ago with an associate who likes to feel me out every now and then about hot-button issues like "health care reform" (universal health care now!) and "illegal immigrants" (borders are extensions of gang warfare, large scale, and we're all sons and daughters of immigrants anyway) and gays (I self-identify as a straight ally, and I use the old hack joke that gays should be allowed to marry -- let them be as miserable as everybody else, nyuk nyuk!).

Today, it was the issue of mosque protests, and how we should be worried because the people who flew airplanes into buildings were Muslim, and it's possible that sleeper cells may use mosques to plan future attacks at some point in time. So we need to ban 'em, protest 'em.

No doubt he's getting this message from Fox "News", that TV version of the Weekly World News, which breathlessly tells us that having a mosque built within walking distance of "ground zero" is unAmerican.

UnAmerican? A religious group wants to build a worship and cultural center, and the American response is to hold protests against it?

Now, as a leftist, as a commie, I take a dim view of organised religion. Most days I'm tolerant and accepting of people of faith, whatever faith that is -- if more people lived like Christ, like Buddha, like Mohammad, like any other font of faith, the world would perhaps be a better place. I try to take an ecumenical approach to religion and society, though I'm definitely in the school of "less is better" which in comes to religion in society.

But one of the fabrics of American society, like it or not, is freedom of religion, and it shouldn't take a commie to point that out. It's a constitutionally guaranteed right given to us in the First Amendment that can't be bartered or legislated away.

It doesn't specify which religion, and you'll hear scores of rightwing bible-thumpers arguing we're a Christian nation, but no, Thomas Jefferson advocated the concept of separation of church and state, which protects people like me from people like those religious bigots who decry the Taliban and sharia law but not-so-secretly wish to impose it on America.

And it's that concept that got TJ thrown out of Texas history books this year!

Point being, all these latter-day constitutional fetishists forget the First Amendment, which is rather clear in its message --

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Now, look at the placement of that phrase in question -- the first amendment out of the original ten, the first 16 words -- it couldn't be any more clear. The so-called constitutionalists make a mockery of the very document by proclaiming America a "Christian nation" and by saying mosques should be banned.

That's a rather simple conclusion to a complex issue. If the RW are successful in prohibiting the free exercise of a religion in America, the very fabric of our country starts to fray.

Granted, as a commie, any time the fabric of society starts to fray, any time the rightwing gets froggy and starts showing their fascist tendencies, I see it as one more click towards revolution -- be done with the illusion of free society, be done with the empty, hollow rhetoric, and let's get it on. The more groups they piss off, the more groups they alienate, the more chance we'll see another roosting of the proverbial returning chickens.

Battle of Ardoyne....

Every year, it's the same old story -- "marching season" where the original LOLs, the Loyal Orange Lodges, celebrate the defeat of the Catholic James II by Protestant William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

I think we're all for parades and marches. They're fun, they're a great way for communities to get out and enjoy pomp and circumstance, buy a t-shirt, eat some street food. Who can argue?

The Orange Order argues it's a part of Northern Irish history, it's about culture (their culture), it's a way to celebrate their heritage. All good and fine if you ignore the historical component -- one which exposes the discriminatory nature of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland.

When these marches occur in Protestant/unionist/loyalist areas, it can be argued it is indeed about community, about celebrating history and heritage. The problem arises when they are forced down Catholic/nationalist/republican neighborhoods, where it is less about community and more about intimidation, less about a celebration of culture and more about a triumphalist display.

To draw the old, tired comparison, having an Orange Order parade forced down Garvaghy Road in Portadown or the Ardoyne is akin to having the Ku Klux Klan march in East Austin, Harlem, Compton, rural Mississippi -- there is only one purpose, and that is to remind "the natives" who is in charge -- lie down, croppy, don't get uppity, know yer place.

Years ago, comrades and I set up a website called "Orange Watch" to track Orange Order activity during marching seasons. The International Orange Watch Committee has since gone defunct, but you can still check out a short overview of Orange Order myths and facts that the IOWC came up with. As we showed, there are literally thousands of marches throughout Northern Ireland during marching season. Only a few are contentious, and those are where they are forced down Catholic/nationalist neighborhoods.

So, this year, as every year, the residents of Ardoyne have once again stood up to the bigoted Orange Order and have resisted their fascist march. Dismissing the riots as "youths vs police" demeans the core issue here, which is a triumphalist march by a bigoted fascist organisation being forced through a nationalist neighborhood, with the full force of the partitionist state siding with the bigots. It's not about culture, unless exclusion and discrimination are part of culture. And if it is, props to the defenders of Ardoyne who, each year, stand up and say "no!"....

You can view pictures of this year's riots in Ardoyne here.

piracy on the high seas

Lemme paint you a picture: a flotilla of ships carrying first aid equipment, building supplies, food and other humanitarian cargo -- to be delivered to a civilian population under siege -- is sailing in international waters when the lead ship is attacked and boarded by gun-wielding pirates. A struggle ensues between the pirates and those on board the ship, resulting in 9 dead passengers, the kidnapping of everyone else on board, and the theft of the cargo and all video and audio recordings of the attack.

If this happened anywhere else in the world, US reaction and condemnation would be swift. And for much of the world, reaction and condemnation HAS been swift.

But in the world of Middle East politics, it's more problematic, more fuzzy, because the pirates were Israeli Defense Force commandos, the hostages were activists seeking to end the inhumane blockade of Gaza, and of course, the civilian population under siege are Palestinians.

Never mind that one of those killed by the IDF commandos was an American (like the others killed, he too was shot multiple times in the head -- summarily executed by the IDF), and the best the Dems can come up with is that the victims of Israel's piracy brought it on themselves.

The GOP's position is not surprising -- this humanitarian mission gave aid and comfort to Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, and as such, those on board are terrorists, and Israel had every right to blow their heads off -- even the American shot and killed.

More disturbing than the massive kidnapping that occurred on the high seas was the theft of video of the attack by the IDF, allowing them to control the message, allowing them to paint the activists as something other than they way. If the attack was legal and above board, why steal all the video? What's to hide?

Never mind the international condemnation of the inhumane blockade that serves as a collective punishment. Never mind the calibre of people aboard the flotilla -- ranging from human rights activists to Nobel peace laureates to former ambassadors and European parliamentarians -- now being accused of supporting terrorism. The rest of the world condemns the actions undertaken by Israel against a Turkish vessel -- Israel's closest Muslim ally -- and our government's knee-jerk reaction is to come to the defense of the indefensible, giving Israel another free pass, a myopic display of foreign policy in the region.

And this is where we get into sticky areas of discourse -- the rightwing fascist teabagger types scream and bellyache about being called "racist" every time they say something racist. They scream and bellyache about being called "sexist" every time they say something sexist. They say pointing out issues of race and sex is just part of honest discourse, and they shouldn't be painted with the broad brush of "racist" or "sexist" if their views offend liberals.

Fair enough. But say one thing about Israel's brutal policies and you are instantly tagged as "anti-Semitic". And that is usually where the discussion ends. Everything else is drowned out, everything else is ignored. Once the charge is leveled, the discussion is over.

That is unfortunate for Israel, and unfortunate for Palestine, and unfortunate for honest discourse in the United States.

In a society where being "politically correct" is a sign of weakness and sure sign of being liberal, it is quite odd to see conservatives and rightwing fascist types embrace the PC notion of shutting down honest discourse by charging "anti-Semitism".

I won't get into the whole Christian Zionist/Apocalypse Movement angle of why Israel receives so much support from Christian fundamentalists. I won't even bring up the fact that a broad segment of Israeli citizens and a broad segment of the Israeli military disagrees with official Israeli policy in Palestine. All that is readily found online -- don't just take my word for it.

And that's just it -- we are being asked to forget what we saw -- a flotilla of human rights activists being attacked by the Israeli military in international waters -- and take the word of the Israeli government that what they did was protect their citizens from a rowdy band of terrorists. The evidence suggests otherwise.

21st century nativism, or, Arizona, find yourself another country to be part of....

A lot to be said about SB1070, the anti-minority law passed in Arizona. If it was just a simple matter of a rogue state testing the limits of states rights versus primacy of federal law, it would be a simple matter of striking down the law as unconstitutional and telling Arizona, a la Phil Ochs, that it needed to find itself another country to be part of.

But it's not just about Arizona -- the old spectre of nativism has once again risen its ugly head from restless slumber and has spread across the nation like a cancer. Arizona is not the cause of this, it is (and I hate being cliche, but...) just the symptom.

21st century nativism isn't any nicer, or any less racist, or more refined than 19th century nativism, and the whelps of immigrants long dead should be ashamed at becoming the ugly hateful xenophobes that kept our immigrant ancestors "in their place," forcing assimilation as a "benefit" of living and working at reduced wages than their native-born neighbors, which further bred resentment and division amongst the working class, deflecting attention from what should have been the true target of working class resentment.

I don't really need to spend a lot of time detailing the racist agenda of the authors and supporters of SB1070 -- those racist roots are indisputable. The law was conceived of by far-right organisations, meant to specifically target poor Latinos, the leadership of the Arizona GOP has actively supported -- and been supported by -- openly-racist white separatists and supremacists. This is fact. The evidence is there from multiple sources. And more troubling is that direction and support wasn't just anchored in Arizona, but also in Washington, where the intent is to spread this fascism to other states.

So when you hear xenophobic supporters of the law insist it is not racist, they are either lying or willfully ignorant. They may wax philosophical about the basis of SB1070, they may try to put an intellectual spin on their racism, but there is no way around it -- the law they support was specifically intended to target Arizona's minority community.

The first victims of this law -- even before it officially goes into effect -- have been American-born Hispanics, caught without birth certificates, detained, handcuffed, and arrested for being unable to prove, on the spot, their country of origin. Fellow Americans are being asked for "papers, please" -- that old bogeyman we were warned about when criticising Nazi Germany, Soviet Europe, and Apartheid South Africa -- and true to form, 21st-century nativists in positions of power have now adopted these tactics.

The issue in Arizona isn't about so-called "illegal" immigrants, it goes back to working class resentment towards cheaper labor, and xenophobia, and the old school nativism rearing its ugly head once again is unbecoming the mutts of America, and a betrayal of our roots as a nation, where we welcomed -- with open arms, and frankly with ulterior economic motives -- those coming to America to make a better life. It's the image we've projected as a nation, and we can't credibly turn that back now that we're "all filled up".

My ancestors came from Ireland and Poland. The Irish and Polish experience in America was one of forced and dehumanizing assimilation. But at least outwardly we fit in, so long as we behaved like little croppies and lay down. That experience isn't specific to the Irish and Polish immigrants, of course -- Italians had their own period of forced assimilation, the Chinese brought in to build California had their own period, and so on.

I embrace the promise and privilege of immigration to the United States -- the promise of new-found religious, social and political freedom, the privilege of living in arguably the best (ideally, if not realistically) country in the world.

I also embrace the notion that no person is illegal, and borders are artificial man-made socio-political constructs, nothing more than gang warfare writ large on national scales, with each gang "protecting" their turf. In that context, "legal" immigration is simply a matter of getting permission from a gang to live and work in their territory, on their terms and conditions.

An early exchange I had with someone about SB1070 had the other person mentioning the so-called "social contract" that "we have agreed to." It was argued that we do not get to go to a buffet of laws and cherry-pick which ones we agree to and which ones to ignore -- it is an all-or-nothing deal. Examples of immigrant myths were given -- double-dipping of unemployment insurance and benefiting from infrastructure upkeep, all while being allowed to immigrate illegally.

Now, if you are going to bring up this "social contract" which "we all have agreed to," let's apply it absolutely and universally. Let's not exempt the ruling class and their lapdog allies and target the working class when it is convenient, "buffet style." I never signed or agreed to this social contract, and I don't know anybody else who did. Frankly, if we're living under the provisions of this mythical contract, I want a do-over, because it absolutely is not applied fairly, or absolutely, or universally, and most of the inequitable application is done according to class and race.

America benefits from the presence of immigrants, illegal or otherwise. The work and services they provide (hard work for lower pay, with little to no safeguards), the taxes they pay (sales tax, for instance), the money they pump into local economies (from rent, purchases, etc), would absolutely be missed if they suddenly and magically vanished and we woke up to a whiter shade of America tomorrow.

But this isn't meant as a defense of illegal immigrants. It is an attack on 21st century nativism, born and bred in racist xenophobia. That is more of a threat to America than the spectre of hard-working, law-abiding immigrants. As a nation of immigrants, we are obligated to be better than that, collectively.

The working class -- our class -- must not give aid and comfort to the ruling class, the sole beneficiary of artificial divisions within the working class. Fascism must burn. It must not be given respite in attacks from progressive elements. This IS class warfare, masked in racism. The ruling class really isn't worried about illegal immigration -- their primary concern is fear that the working class -- our class -- will unite against them, rise up against them, and break our chains of wage slavery that keep us in their bondage. THAT is why false divisions are created and fostered, and why we must work hard to break down those walls that divide us.

Is it all bleak? Widespread outrage at this law, within Arizona and from most other states, at least gives us hope that correct-thinking people recognise the futility of an America based on exclusion and discrimination, and hopefully serves as a warning to other 21st century nativists that we are not going to peacefully go back to the America of the 1800s. It remains to be seen if Arizona is really a lost cause, but hopefully it is at least a fire-break against similar cancerous legislation worming its way through other states.

Vigilance!

A Video Interlude: Victor Jara

I hate letting a day go by without at least a simple entry about current events, but so much is happening it's hard to focus on just one item of interest -- I'm working on longer pieces on teabaggers, the war presidency, reclamation of leftist symbols, and other areas of personal interest.



But, in the interest of not letting too much time go between posts, here's another video interlude, this time focusing on one of my personal heroes, Chilean guitarist, singer/songwriter, labor activist, and communist Victor Jara, who was assassinated on 15 September 1973 by the fascist junta -- led by Augusto Pinochet -- that overthrew -- with CIA involvement -- the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende during the "original" 9/11.

Before Jara was killed, they broke his hands, and mockingly threw his guitar at him and told him to "play now" -- such was the power of his words and his songs and the threat they meant to the fascist regime.

Victor Jara knew then -- as did his killers -- what Woody Guthrie knew years earlier -- "this machine kills fascists."

While many of Jara's songs were about the obvious things like love, he also sang songs of revolution. This song honors Che Guevara, the Argentinean doctor who helped overthrow the fascist and corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, and who then went on to foment revolutions in Africa and other parts of Latin America:



And, taking the internationalist angle a little bit further, Christy Moore, legendary Irish musician, sings a song about Victor Jara: