A real-life Toxic Avenger

If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed whether by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem. — Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring”

One might think running across a 78-year-old woman living in a cabin on 20 acres near Five Rivers is not unusual. Add to the biography: this activist’s menagerie of a Patagonia parrot; Archie the cockatiel; Patience, a blue-footed Amazon; two Sicilian donkeys, one of which is named Oakie; 25 chickens; two crippled pigeons; her double-barrel shotgun; and a large vegetable garden . . . and you get Carol Van Strum.

I’m talking with Carol in Debra Fant’s Waldport dining room while she puts away two dozen free range eggs Carol sold her and while I am leafing through Carol’s two penned books that she’s giving me — “my interrogator,” as she jokingly calls me.

At a glance from a typical visitor to our coast, Carol’s appearance (and life) might seem to embody “just one of those quirky (kooky) California transplants who is all into that back-to-the-land philosophy, living out in the boonies to get away from civilization, progress.”

This statement is both true and false as applied to Carol Van Strum.

One book written by Carol is a fictional novel, “The Oreo File,” concerning protagonist Molly Matthissen, who has been arrested for murdering an FBI agent. The thriller is set in the Pacific Northwest, and there are penguins involved (climate refugees) and small-town justice played out.

However, the real meat and potatoes of this profile is Carol’s other book, a nonfiction gem: “A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights,” written in 1983 (updated in 2014), which follows the case of Carol, her husband, four children, neighbors and residents of Lincoln County and their battle with the state of Oregon, chemical companies, the EPA and the Forest Service.

The stories Carol unfolds are dynamic as they cascade through many labyrinths. She has been in the Siuslaw Forest for 45 years, but her origins start in 1940, the start of World War II. Her roots were first set down in Port Chester, Westchester, New York, with a father who went to Cornell and a mother who supported the whims and avocations of their five daughters.

“My mom grew up as ‘Shanty Irish.’ She never went to college. When women at cocktail parties from Smith, Radcliff and Bernard colleges asked her where she went to college, my mom said, ‘Barnum and Bailey university.’” Carol laughs loudly like a native of County Cork, Ireland.

Her mother trusted her daughters so much that she loaned the family car the summer of 1957 and let three of the girls embark on a road trip across the USA. “We went everywhere. We went camping. Oh, we did our hell raising, but our parents had absolute trust in us.”

Imagine a life well lived, and then jump to 1974 when she, her then husband Steve, their three sons and daughter, and a menagerie of animals moved from the Mendocino area of California to a homestead in Lincoln County — Five Rivers, specifically.

Her presence here, precipitated by what happened in 1975, has literally changed the narrative around the toxic herbicides timber companies, tree farms and road crews spray both by air and land.

Early in “A Bitter Fog:”

Where the road skirted the riverbank, overhanging shore and water, they directed their hoses into the water, inadvertently spraying the four children fishing down below. The truck moved on, leaving the children gasping in a wet mist that clung to their skin and clothing. With smarting skin, tearing eyes, burning mouths, throats and noses, they stumbled home. By nightfall, all four were sick.

Carol is clear and unyielding when she recalls the beginning of an uphill battle to fight the Forest Service spraying chemicals akin to the Agent Orange infamously used during the Vietnam conflict.

The garden plants died, “their leaves twisting and wilting in grotesque configurations.” Weeks following the herbicide spraying, chicks, geese and ducklings were born deformed. Some were hatched with misshapen wings, clubfeet, crossed beaks. Their family dog developed oozing sores, and his hind legs became paralyzed.

Readers might have a tough time imagining living through that first spraying of 2, 4-D and 2, 4, 5-T on their own children with noses bleeding and guts hemorrhaging. However, the mettle and inspirational fortitude of locals who have lived here for decades embody the power of democratic principles at both a local and global level.

The very idea of individuals and communities having a right to security from poisons and pollutants is being played out daily in this county and state, as well as worldwide. What Carol Van Strum, her neighbors and the citizens of the Oregon Central Coast and Coast Range have had to battle is the very foundation of existence — the right of informed consent.

Reality is Fighting for Survival Every Step of the Way in USA Capitalism Gone Toxic!

I am confronting Carol with the proposition that we have always been Guinea pigs — that no real scientific studies have been done (or can be realistically accomplished) to ferret out the harms any individual chemical/toxin can do to us as humans because so many other Post-Industrial Revolution chemicals are working synergistically in our industrialized bodies.

Carol agrees, and what unfolds is hour upon hour of recalling the vagaries of life during and before Lincoln County — starting college, a marriage and family in California after growing up in New York State. She says she picked the University of California-Berkley “because that was the only university that had a five-dollar application fee . . . I didn’t have the money for all the other schools’ fees.”

That was in the early 1960s. Soon, the FBI is surveilling their house because she is involved in an underground railroad for returning Vietnam vets who want to go AWOL in Canada and because she is writing articles for a newsletter under the auspices of the Port Chicago Vigil. This anti-war group — started August 7, 1966 by peace activists — gathered at the main gate of the Naval Weapons Station in an attempt to block trucks carrying napalm bombs for shipment to US pilots flying incineration missions over Vietnam.

Carol has all sorts of asides to flavor her narrative — she lived at 2608 Derby Street in Berkeleywhile the W.E.B. Du Bois Society was located at 2806 Darby. The FBI got the address wrong, and instead of staking out the members of the politically active Du Bois Society, they watched Carol and her family.

Here, history intersects with Carol Van Strum — Du Bois (1869-1963) was an African-American writer, teacher, sociologist and activist whose work transformed the way that the lives of black citizens were seen in American society. Du Bois was an early champion of using data to solve social issues for the black community, and his writing — including his groundbreaking “The Souls of Black Folk” — became essential reading in African-American studies.

She tells me how she wrestled an alligator at the Steinhart Aquarium to assist a veterinarian with the sick reptile. She talks about Twiggy the Toucan, who she rescued as an emaciated dying bird but was brought back to life with Carol’s recipe of “rich pound cake and blueberries mashed up.” Even the vet at the aquarium asked her secret when one of the zoo’s toucans was suffering.

She co-owned Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley. They had moved a few times in California in attempt “to get away from city life,” but finally they answered a for-sale ad in the San Francisco Chronicle for a 160-acre homestead in Oregon. Steve, Carol and the four children had never been out here on the Oregon Coastal Range, but the family bought the forested farm sight unseen.

“It was part of the original Homestead Act. There at the spring in concrete I found his name, Elihu Buck, crudely written with a finger. It had the first telephone line in the valley. The old posts were still there.”

This is an idyllic life until the four children are sprayed. Then the court battles, the scientific investigations (and backtracking and cover-ups) of the real effects of these herbicides. We are talking about neighbors throughout the area, up to a mile away from each other, collectively having multiple miscarriages, children born with genetic defects, adults suffering cancers and other ailments.

The dedication in her non-fiction book is emblematic of the struggle Carol has undergone: “For my children, Daphne, Alexey, Jarvis and Benjamin Van Strum.”

I asked her what gives her hope. “The death of our children left me with what they loved — this farm, this dirt, these trees, this river, these birds, fish, newts, deer, and fishers — to protect and hold dear. These became my anchor to windward, keeping me from just drifting away with every wind that blows.”

Even that tragic story isn’t simple — there is evidence the four children, old enough to babysit each other, perished in a house while Carol was next door at a neighbor’s house. The fire marshal indicated it was suspicious, potentially the result of arson. Carol has her suspects.

“All the legal wranglings have reinforced my chronic intolerance of lies. Ditto the never-ending battle against poisons — that is an industry that could not exist without lying about its products; therefore, it should not exist.”

Carol’s life on many levels, including her work to prevent chemicals entering into our watershed, as well as her personal physical and spiritual peaks and valleys, could be made into a movie. I asked Carol what she gathers from these trials and tribulations.

“One person can’t save the world, or even see the other side of it,” she said. “When I was four years old, I set out to see the world — thinking it was a special place like the World’s Fair with carousels and Ferris wheels. After the cops found me asleep in a pile of leaves by the street, my mom asked why I had run away. I told her I didn’t run, I walked, because I wanted to see the world, and she laughed and said, ‘It’s been right here all the time — the world begins at home.’ Lessons you never forget. I can’t save the world but I’ll fight tooth and nail to save this little corner of it.”

Readers of my column might be surprised at the level of inquiry and seriousness of some of the stories I write, especially in a magazine dedicated to people enjoying our coast’s amenities and landscape. However, it does take a village to raise a family, and it also takes individuals and groups in a community to make it safe for everyone.

Carol might be impugned as being a “character,” but residents and tourists alike must respect that we in small rural and coast communities make up the fabric of how the place ticks and where the history is both created and memorialized.

Finally, finishing off where this essay stared — the following words from President James Madison make a fine book mark for Carol Van Strum’s life:

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. — James Madison, 1822, cited by William Douglas in EPA v. Mink, 1974

End Note — find original story here!

Various citizen groups and environmental coalitions are working to have soil, water and human and animal blood tested for dioxins and other chemicals that are components of the herbicides and pesticides used to kill noxious plants and animal life.

(FERNS) Forest Activity Electronic Reporting and Notification System through the Oregon Department of Forestry is a registry/tracking system for industry to notify of spraying and citizens to get informed of the who, what, when, where and why of the spraying. More information about these life and death issues can be found at Lincoln County Community Rights, Pesticide Action Network North America, Beyond Pesticides, Oregon Wild and Mid-Coast Watersheds Council.

It Goes Without Saying — Those in Power are without Melanin

“the worst
thing that ever happened
to
the world
was
the white man coming across gun powder.
–– the end of the world | the beginning of white supremacy”

― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

It would take a million blogs just to get through the millions of millionaires (36,000,000) and the billionaires (2,700) who are fleshy faced and melanin challenged. Amazing, though, the lefties and the righties go on and on about “people of color” and those “Hispanics” and “Africans” and “Middle Eastern” that make up 99 percent of the fodder used for journalism and “journalism” (in quote marks), and for all the if-it-bleeds-it-leads stories broadcast on nightly news and plastered in headlines, wherever there still are newspapers.

Black Americans, and black men in particular, are overrepresented as perpetrators of crime in U.S. news media. This is especially true when looking at the incidence of violent crime. For example, one study of late-night news outlets in New York City in 2014 found that the media reported on murder, theft, and assault cases in which black people were suspects at a rate that far outpaced their actual arrest rates for these crimes. The news media also vilifies black people by presenting black crime suspects as more threatening than their white counterparts. It does this in several ways, such as by showing the mug shots of black suspects more frequently than those of white suspects; depicting black suspects in police custody more often; and paying greater attention to cases where the victim is a stranger.

[or. . . .]

NBC reported recently that at a meeting last year with the Congressional Black Caucus a member told President Donald Trump that his planned welfare cuts would hurt her constituents, “not all of whom were black”. Mr Trump is reported to have replied: “Really? Then what are they?” If the president had not realized that most welfare recipients are white, he is not alone. And the media are partly to blame, for black Americans are overwhelmingly over-represented in media portrayals of poverty.

Do we dare talk about the power of the ever-shrinking humanity of the white race, the power of this race to bring death and destruction to almost every single system in the universe — from space, to the heavens; from food, to travel; from education, to judiciaries; from diplomacy, to Hollywood; from literature, to media; from engineering, to the sciences; from the land, air sea, rivers.

So, this evangelical insanity runs the country, really, no matter how hard a radical, socialist, Marxist, communitarian, democracy fighter like me huff and huff hoping there might be a crack in the myopic and colonized minds of “Americans.”

The rallygoers, he said, told him that Trump’s era “is spiritually driven.” When I asked whether he meant by this that Trump’s supporters believe God’s hand is on Trump, this moment and at the election—that Donald Trump is God’s man, in effect—he told me, “Yes—a number of people said they believe there is no other way to explain his victories. Starting with the election and continuing with the conclusion of the Mueller report. Many said God has chosen him and is protecting him.”

Ralph Reed and Trump

You know, I am on the Oregon Coast, where timber companies are clear cutting and their side-job is spraying vats and vats worth of 2-4-D, atrazine and a mixture of other Agent Orange chemicals, such as glysophate. These are programs run by white people, and the heads of those bureaucracies and chemical and timber companies, they too are melanin-challenged. Decision after decision, life and death, determined hands down by 99.99 percent melanin-challenged people.

America and Transnational Business is the Round-Up Ready Death Squad, all mostly sowed within and then turned reapers by and for the white race. From fracking to  coal trains; from the bottled arsenic water at Whole Foods to the no-stick cancer pans of mother and father’s kitchens; from war tools of all those white companies and countries*, to self-driving vehicles; from facial recognition tools, to Oxi epidemic; from the psychology of torture, to the torture of PK12 education. Need we list more? All promulgated and carried out by the legions of melanin-challenged folk.

*Note, of the top 10 arms exporters — Italy, Netherlands, Israel, UK, Spain, USA, Germany, France, Russia — China ranks 5, and we have to wonder why China is in the arms business?

Each step into the madness we have to take, well, designed by the mad men, the propagandists, the movers and shakers who are born charlatans and thieves and natural born killers, again, armies of melanin-challenged people sooting up the world, and in many cases, teaching/dictating, with the carrot and stick, melanin-rich despots and graduates of the Milton Friedman School of Economic Torture.

This is the way of the white man, Jew, Christian, what have you!

And both varieties, eat each other, Jew or Christian:

Israeli Sephardic leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef in his weekly Saturday night sermon said that non-Jews exist to serve Jews.

“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel,” he said during a public discussion of what kind of work non-Jews are allowed to perform on Shabbat.

“Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat,” he said to some laughter.

Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas Party and the former chief Sephardi rabbi of Israel, also said that the lives of non-Jews are protected in order to prevent financial loss to Jews.

[or . . . .]

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.

If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.

The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it.

— Joseph Goebbels, November 26th, 1937

This is it, the epitome of the white clans and klans and kibbutz’s. As she said, the white race is a cancer on humanity (Susan Sontag). Dare we say more?

Think hard about the power of those white people in charge of Facebook, Google, Raytheon, X-Y-Z drug/energy/law/medical/ education/chemical/ agriculture/lobbying/IT/AI/banking/ insurance/media/entertainment/ architectural/STEM  enterprise in the world. Think of the graft, the lies, the bilking, the externalities of pain-pollution-penury-politicking-policing foisted onto us, the majority, and onto the world, a majority of which is made up of P.O.C.’s — people of color.

You’ve got these Holly-Dirt pigs and media midgets and all those DAs and DHS honchos (and you name the bureaucracy or agency, you’ll see the melanin-challenged brigades), and it’s mostly always whites running the show, and the victims are their own race, and P.O.C.’s.

Below, just a few faces that are destroying the world as we know it — but again, a million mug shots of the heads and administrators of those Fortune 1000 Companies and those denizens capturing the Stock Exchange still would not do justice to the thesis — “the white race is a cancer upon the world,” as Susan Sontag stated..

Yet, the conversation by Trumpies is the white race is threatened; or by all the social commentators, who are mostly white, who say  P.O.C.’s are in need of levying, arresting, managing, policing, financing, tolling, taxing, fining, controlling, flailing, shorting, jailing, trolling, doctoring, deploying, corralling, and, well, you get the picture. The Great White Man’s Burden!

Every single moment on the WWW we have to hear this dichotomy of the whites and the white leaders and white controllers having some say about or suggestions for series of actions against P.O.C.

Again, whites do not fear subjugating their own race to the same oppression and culling they do against P.O.C.’s. The sucker born every minute and a mark made every nanosecond is the white man’s world, spread like a virus around and around the world!

Again, a nutshell and a photo are worth a thousand allusions and descriptive words:

[or . . . .]

These Nonprofits and Businesses Are Making Millions From Detaining Immigrant Children — Dozens of nonprofit shelter groups and several for-profit companies have made enormous amounts of money from detaining and transporting migrant kids

A Sludge review of contract data as of June 30 has found that the federal government has spent nearly $3.8 billion on ongoing grants and on contracts initiated since Donald Trump became president related to “unaccompanied alien children” (UACs), or undocumented immigrant kids who crossed into the U.S. alone or were separated from adults—family or otherwise—after entering the country.

The majority of the grants for UACs came from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which houses the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the division that manages the UAC program. Much of the grant money went to nonprofit shelter organizations, while some contracts from HHS and from the DHS’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid for-profit businesses for transportation, health care, tent construction, and other services.

There are a million moments in the media or which are captured in the Zeitgeist or in countless research vessels demonstrating the above sort of lack of humanity and corruption of the white race upon the human race and all other races of animals and plants.

Here, You Tube employee calling the cops on a Black man who this idiot white guy deemed a Bad Guy Wanting to Sneak into Condos. This white guy’s son is bawling asking old white daddy to stop it.

The Master Race, The Chosen People, The Pure of Bloods? This continuing embarrassing collective of CEOs or people with too much money just never ends, never ends.

White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action. Mass media then brings us the news of this in a newspeak manner that sounds almost jocular and celebratory, as though no tragedy has happened, as though the sacrifice of a young life was necessary to uphold property values and white patriarchal honor. Viewers are encouraged feel sympathy for the white male home owner who made a mistake. The fact that this mistake led to the violent death of an innocent young man does not register; the narrative is worded in a manner that encourages viewers to identify with the one who made the mistake by doing what we are led to feel we might all do to “protect our property at all costs from any sense of perceived threat. ” This is what the worship of death looks like.”

― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

From backdrafts to blowholes

Former fire chief turned naturalist is whale defender

Gray Whale Spy Hopping at Sea Wall Depoe Bay

I spent 30 years dealing with people on the worst day of their lives, and now I get to be with people on the best day of their lives . . . visiting the Oregon Coast to relax, recreate and learn about our marine life. It’s the best job ever. – Era Horton, 30-year firefighter

The probability of a visitor to our stretch of the Pacific running into Era Horton at one of the ocean side parks is pretty high. For more than five years, he has made weekly trips from his home in Salem to all of the marine reserve waysides, parks and whale watching locations like Boiler Bay and Depoe Bay to marvel at the mighty family of cetacean.

It has been a passion of his setting up his books, maps, marine mammal stuff and displays at one of the many viewpoints along our coast. He is an encyclopedia of whale, porpoise and dolphin facts.

Like a migrating Gray whale, 70-year-old Era has followed a path of trials and tribulations, as well as successes, to have reached the Central Coast of Oregon and revel in its natural wonders.

“The best thing I like about this job is that I have met people from 35 countries and every state in the country,” he said. “I impart a lot of information about our marine and bird life, but I also get to learn about where some of them come from.”

While the reader will get under Era Horton’s narrative skin soon enough, and learn of his whale and dolphin certifications and his own photography capturing such iconic mammals like Gray, humpback and killer whales, we first need a broader palette of his life.

Era and his wife, Toni, might see themselves as Oregonians, but Era’s roots go to the deep South – Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana.

His love of biology, the natural world and animals, he says, unfolded like a Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer chapter as he was catching alligators, snapping turtles and rafting down the Red River in Central Louisiana by age 10. Barely in 3rd grade, Era and his buddies had much leeway to explore the semi-tropical ecosystems that make this state one of the more ecologically-diverse ones.

His father (and later a stepfather) was a military vet. One year, his family moved to three states because of his father’s air force duties — Salina, Kansas; Mountain Home, Idaho; and Great Falls, Montana. He spent a year in El Paso, Texas. However, Vanden, California, is where he went to high school, eventually meeting his sweetheart who became his wife.

In 1962, when Era was 12 years old, his biological father’s refueling tanker exploded 29,000 feet in the air near Bermuda. Three days after the accident, none of the crew’s remains were recovered.

Era tells me his life as a youth wasn’t riveting, but he did have an early dream of being a firefighter.

“I remember telling a sophomore English class that what I wanted to be when I grew up was a fireman,” he said. “I remember kids snickering when I said that.”

Before realizing the dream of firefighting and this iteration of his life in Oregon, the 19-year-old Era ends up enlisting in the marines, ready to be shipped out to Vietnam with his company. Ironically, getting beaned hard by a baseball before being inducted into the military, Era found himself facing a medical discharge six months into the corps.

“I had planned the next four years of my life for the marines.” That included the infantry as an aviation tactical electronic weapons specialist.

Instead, he ended in odd jobs in Fairfield, California – stocking store shelves, making pizzas, pumping gas. “Once a marine, always a marine” was one lingering motto.

He went to airline school, in Chicago, learning how to become a ticket and ground agent.

“I hated Chicago,” he said. “It was in the summer, too. It didn’t take me much time to figure out I was a West Coast guy. Being near an ocean – I knew I needed to be living by the ocean.”

While the typical dream of a young boy in the 1950s was becoming a baseball player, cop or going into the military, after the corps he starting a science degree at a Vajello Junior College.

“It was around that time I read Jacques Cousteau’s book “Silent World,” he said. “That started my interest in marine life.”

He never missed an episode of the ABC series “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” narrated by Rod Serling.

That dream of being a fire-fighter sputtered out in 1970, when he took the test for the Fairfield Fire Department.

“You had to be at least five foot eight, a hundred and fifty-five pounds and 21 years old,” he said. “I wasn’t heavy enough.”

He was 10 pounds shy. One of his buddies on the department asked him why he hadn’t drunk a sink-full of water to make the weight and then throw it up to get past the agility part.

Presciently, it was a four-year-old Era who was rescued from an apartment fire by a firefighter on an aerial ladder. “I can still smell the odor of his coat to this day.” That was in 1953 at his aunt’s in Memphis.

From backdrafts to blowholes, part II

Whales are humanity’s canary in the coal mine, … As ocean pollution levels increase, marine mammals like whales will be among the first to go. – whale expert Roger Payne

Era Horton can talk on and on about the behavioral habits of dolphins, whales, porpoises and pinnipeds. He laughs when explaining what the humpback whale’s bubble nets are, and he’s beaming showing the class of naturalist students in Newport the photographs he has taken of baleen whales lunge feeding.

Era balances good with the bad.

“There are many concerns we should have about the state of our oceans. For me, it’s the microplastics ending up in the shellfish, the food that these animals eat.”

He and his wife, Toni, have grandchildren, and Era tells me he is “concerned about the whole direction the world is going. How much more can the Earth take?” It’s a rhetorical question. He thinks the carrying capacities of the Gray whale and other mammals have peaked. Food webs are depleting and moving away, largely caused by climate change.

We discuss the recent scientific concern about the high number of Gray whales (all dead or dying) washing up on shores — from California, up through our coastline northward to Alaska. Many are emaciated, sick, smaller than normal, while others are riddled with plastic in their guts.

His mantra is “reuse and recycle,” but we broach the concept of refusing to buy or use, too – no more conspicuous consumption.

“It takes small steps to get things done, for sure,” he said. “But I am really concerned about the plastics in the oceans.”

We know that net and line entanglements is a big issue as well, one that garners more media attention. Last year, estimates put the number at 333,000 whales, dolphins and other marine mammals caught and killed in fishing gear.

Killer Whales, Killer Talks

We’re at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, as part of the American Cetacean Society’s efforts to provide outreach for World Orca Day as part of World Orca Awareness Month. I harken back a few months, during a training in Newport where I was one of 20 students getting our “flukes” as Certified Whale Watch Naturalists. I take copious notes, many of the sheets of paper filled up when Era shares the podium.

“Orcas are apex predators and are the largest of the dolphin family and can weigh over 20,000 pounds and grow to nearly 32 feet in length. Other than humans, they are the most widely distributed mammal on the planet ranging from the Arctic to the Antarctic.”

He continues, “They are highly social and live in pods of up to 40 members and hunt in packs. Females stay within their pods for life.”

The variety of ecotypes for the killer whale species is enlightening and complex, but Era and his cohort, Joy Primrose, help the students see the big picture — Pacific Orcas are grouped into three ecotypes: residents, transients, offshores.

Ironically, Orcas like other apex marine predators are struggling because of two types of pollution – PCBs, dioxins and noise pollution. Plus, their food sources also are dwindling.

Here is Era Horton, firefighter of 30 years, telling me that he has “a 125 percent greater chance of developing eight specific cancers” from chemicals similar in nature to the polychlorinated biphenyls killing marine mammals.

The chemical composition of the firefighting gear and spray-on flame retardants Era has used and the chemicals released during fires he has fought have had their effects studied within the firefighting community.

How did his firefighting career begin, I ask him? He and his wife ended up in Fairfield, Toni working for Bank of America, Era working as a technician for a veterinarian. He spent three years testing to get onto many fire departments, but luckily that Fairfield test he failed in 1970 turned into a passing grade in 1981.

“I was 31 years old and had never been so happy in my life,” he said. “I was doing what I always wanted to do.”

He logged nine years with Fairfield fire department, and moved across the Bay to the Rodeo-Hercules department as chief of operations and training. Then, in 1993, California was hit with a major fiscal crisis, and 16 fire stations closed and 150 firefighters were let go. His last day as an acting captain in California was Dec. 31, 1993. On Jan 1, 1994, Era landed the assistant chief position in La Pine, Oregon. He also worked as the fire chief of Sun River.

As department administrator, however, he still went out on calls and drove engines.

He was in La Pine for 13 years, and in 2006 he retired, and ending up in Colorado Springs where his wife’s parents lived. “Within a month we knew it was a mistake.” He was a security supervisor at a mall; usher at a Triple-A ballpark; worked as a conductor for the Pikes Peak Railroad. He drove his body hard on the off season for the railroad, tearing down engines in a cold shop. He tried stocking shelves at a Walmart, but ended up taking a job in 2009 with the Fire Fighting Academy in Salem as a driver program coordinator. It was then when he also started whale watching with a passion.

So here is the black sheep of his family — because he was the only one to have left the South — living his dream of firefighter, and after hitting 65, he began to take on the passion of whales seriously.

As we fast-forward six decades from his birth, Era takes Whale Watch Spoken Here naturalist training with his wife. He also becomes a certified naturalist with the American Cetacean Society. He has presented whale talks for a senior studies programs in Portland and did one recently as part of Cannon Beach’s Twelve Days for the Ocean.

He tells me he is a born trainer/teacher. “Once you set up tables or start talking to somebody about whales, a crowd gathers,” he said. “People are interested in the marine life especially gray whales, that populate our coast.”

From then on, the stories exponentially grow, until Era states: “I tell people that 63 million square miles of ocean is the most fragile environment on Earth. It doesn’t take much to tip it over.”

As a book end, Era says he has almost perished six times fighting fires in various locations. As a highlight to the retired chief’s life, he says his son Cliff won the state of Oregon’s highest award for firefights — Medal of Honor.

“Usually, a firefighter gets awarded that dying in the line of duty,” he said. “Cliff pulled out an injured lady in a blaze . . . I’m really proud of him. The woman is doing fine.”

His son — logger for 20 years — is alive and well working for South Lane County Fire & Rescue. Era’s proud of his lawyer son in California and daughter who is a jail deputy in Oregon.

For many of us, Era is a hero, promoting plastic straw bans and teaching hundreds of Central Coast visitors about stewardship of the Earth and oceans right here in Lincoln County.

Paul Haeder is a writer living and working in Lincoln County. He has two books coming out, one a short story collection, “Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam,” and a non-fiction book, “No More Messing Around: The Good, Bad and Ugly of America’s Education System.”

Here, imagine any of the candidates for 2020 in the Demon Party having this man’s intellect, licks, history. Forget about the Big Daddy in the Sky flat-earth society Republi-Rats .

Howie Hawkins — Watch it. Compared to this orange thing: Trump on his Fourth of Me Celebration: “Airports the Continental Army took over.”

Man, dinosaurs and Adam and Eve living side by side.

Sen. Kamala Harris said Wednesday that busing students should be considered by school districts trying to desegregate their locations — not the federal mandate she appeared to support in pointedly criticizing rival Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden last week.

The Intercept has just published a piece by Lee Fang on the 2003 contest between Kamala and Kayo, headlined “IN HER FIRST RACE, KAMALA HARRIS CAMPAIGNED AS TOUGH ON CRIME — AND UNSEATED THE COUNTRY’S MOST PROGRESSIVE PROSECUTOR.”

 At one point in her adult life, Gabbard viewed both  Palestinians  and  homosexuals as sub-human. No wonder she was so excited to lead a Military Police unit in Iraq, five years after the sadism at Abu Ghraib had been exposed.

Nick Estes: “Watching AOC get shouted down outside a literal concentration camp to hide the crimes of this country sums up the challenge of Indigenous history—a cacophony and perpetuation of erasure atop a literal, ongoing crime scene.”

I worked with Kshama a while back, when Occupy Seattle mattered:

This is typical of American Corporations in Politics and Us:

The Chamber of Commerce’s mammoth corporate PAC has unleashed its first wave of spending for the 2019 Seattle City Council elections, and campaign finance disclosures confirm exactly what we’ve been warning: the PAC has already spent over $100,000 against Kshama Sawant, spending more on District 3’s race than on any other in the city.

Let’s follow the money. The CASE PAC’s war chest of over $850,000 consists of:

💰💰💰 $250,000 from Amazon, the world’s biggest retail corporation, with $200,000 of that coming in this Spring. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the entire world, with over $100 billion and growing, while Seattle has the highest rate of homelessness of any city in the country. Bezos has already given a live demonstration of how far he’s prepared to go to stop the fight for affordable housing in Seattle with his bullying tactics to force through last year’s Amazon Tax repeal. Kshama Sawant was one of only two votes to stand up against him.

💰💰 $155,000 from Vulcan, the huge for-profit luxury housing development firm, with $80,000 coming just last week. Vulcan has repeatedly flexed its weight against progressive movements. They were another of the big donors who pressured City Council to repeal the progressive Amazon Tax, which could have funded thousands of affordable homes. Vulcan is deeply afraid of our movement for rent control.

💰$30,000 from Comcast, which has fought hard to maintain their virtual monopoly on internet in Seattle with their overpriced and slow services, even using illegal schemes to scam millions in profits. Comcast is afraid of our call for Municipal Broadband in Seattle and wants to pull the plug on our movement.

💰30,000 from Puget Sound Energy (PSE) corporation, which has opposed even modest initiatives to curb fossil fuel emissions at the state level and is currently constructing a controversial liquid natural gas (fracking) export terminal in Tacoma on ancestral lands for the Puyallup tribe. PSE doesn’t like the sound of a Green New Deal for working people and wants to stop Kshama Sawant, the socialist who makes things happen, from being re-elected.

This year, Comcast, PSE, Vulcan, and Amazon are all hellbent on driving out the socialist who is organizing for municipal broadband, a Green New Deal, a tax on Amazon and big business to fund a massive expansion of affordable housing, and universal rent control. These big business bullies have deep pockets, and they are used to getting their way. It’s clear that they are deeply threatened by Kshama Sawant, one of the most effective fighters for working people to ever to sit in City Hall.

Former fire chief turned naturalist is whale defender

This is the latest piece in Oregon Coast Today. But, alas, respect those people who do not see this day, July 4th, much more than a day of idiocy! Ron Jacobs:

Tanks driving up Pennsylvania Avenue is not the definition of freedom. Overpriced death planes doing tricks in the sky above the Reflecting Pool is not justice for all. Donald Trump talking trash on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is not the Gettysburg Address. However, it is this nation’s bottom line, its ugly truth. Its history of genocide and greed, war and lynching, slavery and racism. The trumpists have exposed what really makes this country unique—its unadulterated greed, its arrogant lies and brutal treatment of those in the way of its greedy pursuit of gold. The trumpists have also exposed the myth of a liberal opposition—an opposition defined by Pelosis, Clintons and Schumers who know their interests lie with the trumpists and their legions of hate much more than with their pledges to justice for all.

America, go fuck yourself with your fireworks.

July 4th: Return to Sender, No Guarantees, Broken Treaties, Shafted!

What’s much ado about this wild-eyed belief this Un-United States is superior to all others?

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

― Frederick Douglass

This two-bit country will cheer the idiotic, overpriced, absurd “tanks” on the White House Mall as this other two-bit in chief can pull on his polyester orange locks and ogle over his daughter Ivanka!

According to report published by USA Today on 7 March 2006, Trump made the comment during an appearance on the daytime talk show The View while discussing the possibility of Ivanka’s posing for Playboy magazine: “It would be really disappointing — not really — but it would depend on what’s inside the magazine. I don’t think Ivanka would do that, although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

Why would I bring up that bit of perversion on July 4th, 2019? Values, man, and ethics. What a world that in 2019, this non-military veteran slathers his mouth with Big Mac juice while watching tanks sink into the tarmac and overpriced death machines do tricks in the air. This is the “pussy grabber in chief.”

Fact — On July 4, 2019: In 2018, there were 159.41 million men in the United States, compared to 165.92 million women. By 2024, it is projected that there will be 167.08 million men and 173.9 million women in the U.S.

So, this Cadet Bone Spurs has so many rape and sexual assault allegations against him, and he states this creepy stuff about his daughter, well, that’s what — in his mind and in his July 4th bang-bang-bang followers’ noggins — Makes America Great Again.  The USA has a slightly higher number of women to men, yet this is it for the apotheosis of POTUS? Does he represent my 23-year-old daughter’s needs and values? Any woman’s values? Come on!

What more has to be said about this country’s schizophrenia, political bankruptcy, failing education systems (PK12 and college) and deplorable people who allow child abuse after child abuse on all levels, but also in those internment camps on the border?

Headline — Doctor compares conditions for unaccompanied children at immigrant holding centers to ‘torture facilities‘

According to Basic Facts about Low-Income Children, the center’s annual profiles on child poverty in America, some 41 percent (29.8 million) of America’s children were living on the brink of poverty in 2016 — including more than 5 million infants and toddlers under age three.

I’m dealing with a burn ban in my county on the Oregon Coast, and then all these pop-up tents selling ballistics and rockets red glaring for the big days leading up to the big lie — God Bless America!

We have a plastic bag ban in the county, and the state of Oregon, but bozos can take out their Roman Candles and big ass rockets — One Bad Mother, Excalibur Artillery Shells, America’s Glory, Chasing Booty!

I even argue with so-called environmentalists how we should be tabling all around the waysides and Marine Reserves to not only point out the magnificent gray whales and orcas, but to inform people “to can” their fireworks since they are toxic, belly-choking, neck-strangling, PTSD-inducing examples of the mindlessness of USA. Article here, pretty benign!

Depending on the effect sought, fireworks produce smoke and dust that contain various heavy metals, sulfur-coal compounds, and other noxious chemicals. Barium, for instance, is used to produce brilliant green colors in fireworks displays, despite being poisonous and radioactive. Copper compounds are used to produce blue colors, even though they contain dioxin, which has been linked to cancer. Cadmium, lithium, antimony, rubidium, strontium, lead, and potassium nitrate are also commonly used to produce different effects, even though they can cause a host of respiratory and other health problems.

Just the soot and dust from fireworks alone is enough to lead to respiratory problems like asthma. A study examined air quality at 300 monitoring stations across the United States and found that fine particulate matter spiked by 42% on the Fourth of July, compared to the days before and after.

Physical particles — colored paper, metal wires, plastics, etc. Think of all those murres and fish and seals mucking about the ocean with volumes of this shit floating nearshore and on beaches?

Of course, TerraPass has s scheme to buy off (carbon offset double speak) the pollution, the embedded, transportation and packaging energy used to produce, package and move the products to those pop-up fireworks tents here in Lincoln City.

Environmentalists, using their “capitalism needs fixing” mentality, will never cross that line, especially now when these greenie weenies are afraid to even engage in simple rhetorical debates with fellow citizens of the deplorable Trump-David Duke-Nazi-Racist kind. I have had a million conversations on how these animal lovers will never have a verbal debate with a in-the-round live Trumpy.

These are the failings of America, from day one, really — to not engage the Indian-Killers, Women-Rapers, Baby-Beheaders, Nature-Razing pigs of the pulpit and penury.

So these racists, these Joe Arpaio-loving Arizonans want that Betsy Ross White Supremacist Shoe Sold in Phoenix? While their state engages in mass arrest, mass child abuse, mass concentration camp policies!

This entire show — cult of celebrity — is yet another chink in the rusting armor of the mythological madness of American might. Schizophrenia, maybe! WSWS:

On Tuesday evening, the San Francisco Unified School Board voted unanimously to destroy or cover over the historic 1936 “Life of George Washington Murals” at a district high school. The vote is a reactionary decision that marks a new stage in the censorship drive that began last December.

The 13 murals created by left-wing artist Victor Arnautoff were products of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal arts program for unemployed artists during the Great Depression. The murals at George Washington High School (GWHS) depict the contradictory character of early American history, portraying many of the progressive aspects of the American Revolution and also depicting slave labor and the genocide of Native Americans.

At the crowded meeting, supporters and opponents of the murals were each allocated 30 minutes, one minute maximum per person, to state their reasons for or against the preservation of the murals. Speakers from the George Washington High School Alumni Association, California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, United Public Workers for Action and many others offered statements in support of the murals.

Alas, July Fourth — what the hell does it mean to the rest of the world, or the few brave people in my cadre who have taken the blinders off at age 12. I recall the fights –physical ones and administrative ones, too — for not standing at football games, assemblies or the Pledge of Allegiance. I’m 62, so this is pre-Celebrity Colin K’s “take a knee” protestations. I was 12, a white boy, sure, in Arizona of all places!

I teach, write about education, and am around youth — big time. We are destroying youth from the inside out, for sure, and we are giving them what is a common but true refrain — they are what they are taught; they are what they read (and never read); they are what they see in museums, concerts, performances, readings, art shows (and what they don’t see); they are what they are taught, mistaught, never taught; they are what they are encouraged to be, not encouraged to be, forced to be; they are what their options give them, offer them, force them to take; they are what they self-profess, never-profess, forced to profess.

Forget about the chronic illnesses and the gut diseases, and the effects of Round-up, Atrazine, plastic polymers, and a Rachel “Silent Spring” Carson laundry list of toxins, from gestation to through adulthood. This is what is killing revolutionaries like me —

A mural depicting George Washington’s life at a San Francisco high school is fueling an emotional debate.

The board of educators is considering covering the historic new deal mural that greets students at George Washington High School.

Senior Kai Anderson-Lawson said seeing dead Native Americans and African American slaves working the fields for Washington sets a demeaning tone and it’s time for a change.

“It’s a lot of emotional stress,” Anderson-Lawson said.

“One of the reasons it’s hard to go to school sometimes is because of the mural in the lobby.”

Others however, said it provides an important history lesson and should remain.

“In San Francisco we should be teaching about the mural and what it means,” said Donna Parker. “I, as half Native American Indian see no problem with the mural.”

A tale of two upbringings, perspectives and for me, on of these children are being coached and cajoled and forced to not see the crimes of this country.

That’s $600,000 to paint over a radical’s art work — welcome bombs bursting  in air, July 4.

This is the painter Victor Arnautoff,  born in 1896 in a small village in present-day Ukraine and then emigrating to San Francisco in 1925. He was part of a leftist art collective. Imagine these faux teachers and poor nanny society children being part of any collective in capitalism, where they can individualize their fake hurt, and then gather together and strike down a radical artist’s work.

Happy July 4th!

Arnautoff was an ardent a supporter of workers’ strikes during the “great” depression” and then became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in 1937. He was even drawn and quartered by one of Trump’s mentors, or both, Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, the year before I was borne, 1956 — for drawing a “Communist Conspiracy” cartoon that caricatured then-Vice President Nixon.

Get this — with this blasphemy of destroying art, we have youth who will get to the tenth level of hell’s cluelessness. In “The Life of Washington,” the artist put Native Americans, African Americans and working-class revolutionaries front and center in the four largest panels, pushing Washington to the margins as a way to honor the real people and denigrate in artistic fashion the mythological Washington, Father of the Nation . . . Birth of a Nation!

Can anyone imagine those school board members, the teachers and the students and parents who support destroying radical history in this artwork even having the guts to really support those causes of the people that count?

Happy July 4th!

It seems that everywhere I turn and go full force into, I end up back to the linchpin of my life — exposing the lies of a faulty education system that has quite elegantly transformed the collective consciousness and cognition of generation after generation. Anyone want to paint over the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Seattle offices? Well, that would never happen with these kids, and for those of us who have protested Gates in Seattle, we ended up locked up by the Seattle Nazi Police.

Fresh off his successful efforts to transform K-12 education through a combination of investment and support of policy initiatives such as the Common Core State Standards, Bill Gates has turned his eye toward higher education.

His move is the establishment of the Postsecondary Value Commission, which promises to develop methods to measure the “value” of a post-secondary degree or certificate, essentially answering the question “What is college worth?”

They want to know definitively about the “return on investment”[1]of college.

To ease the path towards achieving this goal, Bill and Melinda Gates have started the Gates Policy Initiative, a lobbying group tasked with further the preferred Gates solutions on issues of “global health, global development, U.S. education and outcomes for black, Latino and rural students specifically, and efforts to move people from poverty to employment.”

I would like to take a moment to speak directly to Bill and Melinda Gates.

Please, please, please, please, pretty please don’t do this. I am certain you mean well, but honestly, please just stay away from education. You’ve done enough already.

I’m back.

That opening paragraph several inches above is what in the writing business we call, irony, a.k.a., a joke. Bill Gates has not had success transforming K-12 education. His ideas backed by his wealth have had a tremendous, largely deleterious effect on our systems and schools.

Alas, I will be writing soon about a young fellow — 37-years-old — for my bi-weekly column for the trendy Oregon Coast Today. He’s a product of Lincoln City’s PK12 schools (dropped out at 10th grade) and he is his own man, a carpenter, and he questions his own lack of male role models in his life, and now his significant other has four children, three of which are struggling: 13 and 16 year old boys; 18-year-old young woman.

Justin wants to know what can be done with more and more youth missing almost everything, including ethics, work values, and the ability to use their hands and learn hands-on math, science, reading, writing, history.

And this fellow is working class, blue collar, and not some liberal limp wrist or intellectualized union guy.

Gates is Satan, sure, a bumper sticker in Seattle. Bezos is  Beelzebul also in Seattle.

We can read or listen to Anand Giridharadas as he hawks his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Sure, this young Turk tells us that these shameful ploys — philanthropic efforts undertaken by billionaires like Gates — are really premised on keeping not only the status quo but to in order to cement their position atop the social order. These guys (and gals) are eugenicists and social engineers who need their billions recirculated into society!

Thanks to Frederick Douglass —

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.-The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fa thers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

[…]

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Finally, a Happy Birthday America goes out to the people we are proud to accept as our own concentration camp “citizens” and “non-citizens” alike:

Japanese concentration camp, Manzanar, Independence, California, circa December 1942  . . . but Rohwer, Arkansas (former Japanese concentration camp) is being considered now for Mexican and Central American immigrants rounded up by CBP and ICE and Trump and Company!

Canadian Japanese internment camp, circa March 1942–

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

“Immigration along with nonwhite birthrates will make white people a minority totally vulnerable to the political, social, and economic will of blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Orientals. A social upheaval is now beginning to occur that will be the funeral dirge of the America we love. I shudder to contemplate the future under nonwhite occupation; rapes, murders, robberies multiplied a hundred fold, illiteracy such as in Haiti, medicine such as in Mexico, and tyranny such as in Togoland.”

—David Duke

David Duke, the former KKK grand wizard, is unambiguous about what Saturday’s alt-right and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, means to him: “It’s the fulfillment of President Donald Trump’s vision for America.”

“We are determined to take our country back,” Duke said from the rally, calling it a “turning point.” “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”

–David Felon Duke

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The man and his 23-month-old daughter lay face down in shallow water along the bank of the Rio Grande, his black shirt hiked up to his chest with the girl tucked inside. Her arm was draped around his neck suggesting she clung to him in her final moments.

The searing photograph of the sad discovery of their bodies on Monday, captured by journalist Julia Le Duc and published by Mexican newspaper La Jornada, highlights the perils faced by mostly Central American migrants fleeing violence and poverty and hoping for asylum in the United States.

According to Le Duc’s reporting for La Jornada, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, frustrated because the family from El Salvador was unable to present themselves to U.S. authorities and request asylum, swam across the river on Sunday with his daughter, Valeria.

This is the new image of America, from Reagan through to the Bushes, Clinton, Obama and Trump. Not one moment of silence in the minds of those pathetic boring people in the 2020 Demon-crat debates. Smirks and snickers from Trump and Company, and laughs from Tea Party goons all the way through the elite Evangelical class. The strange fruit of a new era of killing people seeking justice, humanity, love and peace.

For Americans — the brown-red-yellow-back people are not even people, less than a bunch of dogs.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

This is it, really, the death image of America — 2019 and beyond, forever. This strikes at the soul of caring people: people coming here to find something better, in the lands occupied by the first illegal aliens. Those Puritans, Those Trappers, Those Vikings, Those Conquistadors, Those Plantation Owners, Those Colonists, Those Hudson Bay Companymen, Those Thieves and Witch Burners and Those Blanket Seeders.

I wrote this article below, years ago, when I was working in El Paso, in Mexico, and doing what any real journalist might do: reporting on the death campaign of militarized borders, guns for drugs, despots for-by-with-because of North America . . . and then at night, helping refugees get into the USA without papers and without Border Agency legitimacy and into Canada (then, a “safe” harbor of sorts for refugees from Central America, like Salvador and Guatemala). When my editors found out, I was sacked! Fellow reporters called it crossing lines.

Nothing has changed, and the killers of capitalism and leaders of racism and war mongers and structural violence perps and the human-killing sanctions adherents and the taxing-fining-bail bonding-tolling-interest rate-mortgaging Little Eichmanns will continue to maximize profits through deaths, destruction, despair! Media are the Monsters, now, was, always has been in Yellow Journalism America. Trump is Eisenhower is Teddy is Woodward Wilson is Reagan is Andrew Jackson is Bill Clinton is Deporter in Chief Obama. The very idea of a US presidency in a white supremacist USA society is that person is the bidder for Wall Street and Banks and Militarists, all racists through and through. We are what we say, think, do, eat, believe, pray for, hope for, drink, consume, read, watch, follow, purport. We are what we pay taxes for. We are what we don’t know. We are what we turn to when we see-hear-speak no evil!

This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens 

April 7, 2006

“We are all illegal aliens.” It’s a bumper sticker many of us on the front lines of the fight against the United States’ government’s assault on Central Americans plastered on our car bumpers down El Paso way.

That was in the 1980s.

You know, when Reagan was running amok ordering his captains Ollie North, McFarland, Casper Weinberger, the whole lot of them, to send bombs, CIA-torture manuals and US agents in order to aid terrorist contras and other despotic sorts in killing hundreds of thousands of innocents in civil wars in Salvador and Guatemala and El Salvador.

We worked with women and children who had witnessed fathers, uncles and husbands eviscerated by US-backed military monsters. Victims of torture, in Texas illegally. You know, what those brave Smith and Wesson-brandishing, chaise lounge Minutemen of today would call aliens.

We worked with people in faith-based communities, mainstream churches, and non-profits throughout El Paso, Juarez and the general area known as La Frontera. Everyone I met working with in this refugee assistance stint had humanitarian blood coursing through their veins. We were proud of our law-breaking work — we gave refuge to terrorized and sometimes half-dead civilians.

We were called lawbreakers by the Reaganites and the Minutemen of that time. Communists. Pinko-fags. Those were the good old days of low-tech surveillance and simple FBI lists.

But what we did was human and humane, in the tradition of that very universal (with roots in Quakerism) belief in bearing witness and acting upon that which has been judged as unjust and inhumane.

Of course, we were up against the laws of this land and coarse politically driven judges who denied victim after victim permanent or temporary status while seeking asylum in the US.

We have so many stories of people sent back who were at best imprisoned, and in the worse cases, mutilated, disappeared, and murdered.

Guatemalan and Salvadorans, that is. Your readers don’t want to hear the narratives and visualize the descriptions of photos of those victims of torture. Ghastly things happened to teachers, nuns, medical workers and farmers, more heinous than what we’ve heard happened in the cells of Abu Ghraib.

We were there to assist, but more importantly to bear witness to our country’s terror campaign. Some of us got so riled up that later in our lives — me included — we hoofed it to Central America. Kicked around. Wrote articles for the few newspapers in this country that even cared about poor, misbegotten, displaced people of Latin America.

But no matter how hard-nosed we became, or how much we could withstand the photographs of women’s sliced backs and beheaded fetuses, we couldn’t shake the images of the children of torture at this two-story refugee house, Annunciation House. It was full of scruffy looking East Coast volunteers who had hooked up with Ruben Garcia, the House’s director, through Catholic services organizations. It was their stint with public service, their spiritual duty calling. Part of their degree plans. But most were converted and slammed hard by the violence their charges had suffered under.

Those PTSD-induced cartoons those children drew sucked the air out of even the hard-ass border patrol guys who used to “dump” the Central Americans at Ruben’s door at all hours of the night. Who can believe it now, that once upon a time official INS and border patrol officers knowingly let their perps go — knew that Ruben and his volunteers could salve emotional and physical wounds  of these tortured crossers.

Their chance at freedom. Except for the piss-ant judges. And the memories of pregnant aunties being raped, their fetuses cut out alive, speared, and the laughing Reagan-loved military punks in the highlands and jungle.

Annunciation House was bulging at 100 people — disheveled lives jammed in. Beans always cooking. Songs. Mattresses and piles of donated clothes. Guitars strumming.  “We are all illegal aliens.” It’s a bumper sticker many of us on the front lines of the fight against the United States’ government’s assault on Central Americans plastered on our car bumpers down El Paso way. , the white ones, and the Chicanos would help with in-takes — asylum transcripts, translation, dotting all the i’s and t’s. Help with getting jobs. Odd jobs in the community. Help with making sure the refugees didn’t get caught again.

But it was always those by-the-letter-of-the-law jurists helping confound the torture. More than 70 percent of our brothers and sisters seeking asylum in the US were denied entry by some fat cat, cocaine-sniffing immigration judge who usually had a friend in the back pocket of some Bush or buddy of Bush somewhere.

Then it was trying to get the denied victims off to Canada without being caught. You remember, the Canada back then which used to open its borders to refugees.

The judges and politicians and Minutemen all professed, “Send them back. Those aliens broke our immigration laws.”

But “we are all illegal aliens” as a rejoinder went much further than USA’s mayhem in Mesoamerica. We worked in solidarity with the housekeepers, bricklayers, agricultural workers and so many other worthy Mexicans who worked their butts off in the US for little pay and much less respect.

These were workers who crossed the Rio Grande to find low-paying jobs with American families and businesses — working for mayors, bigwigs, even on government contracts. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, elsewhere. With a wink and a smile by the American exploiters.

Mojado — wetback. Squatter. Beaner. Illegal alien. These were the more tame epithets.

But let’s not kid ourselves about the genesis of this new round of empowered Latinos fighting against racist laws put forward by the dispassionate conservatives running the ship of fools in DC.

This is not a country of legal immigrants. It’s a country based on colonialists, undocumented white people who helped displace native tribes through broken laws and genocide.

It’s a country based on illegal occupation of native lands and on Mexico’s lands, pure and simple. Colonialists protected by Federal laws that deemed free white people as the only ones who had the right to be fully-fledged citizens.

Manifest destiny was a violent racist act to seize lands illegally. Everything this country’s current anti-Mexican and pro-Apartheid border war proponents stand upon — all that doctrine and those so-called laws — is based on illegally seizing lands of Native tribes.

And worse — laws that “removed” natives. Laws that starved natives. Laws that approved of eradicating native families, entire tribes.

The current massive turnout of students and workers alike in this country’s major cities is a testament to these Americans’ backbone to fight this new exclusionary law — HR4377 — a Washington, DC-inspired racist act that has its roots in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Many Americans do express a certain humanity and dignity for the people many deem aliens, but it’s not awe-inspiring that some citizens of Denmark or Limerick, Ireland, obey the so-called immigration laws of this country during their initial years as landed immigrants.

Let’s make no bones about the motives of Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of this racist House bill: He sees those brown-skinned south-of-the-border lettuce pickers, linen washers, house framers, and their US-borne children as, what? “Alien gang members terrorizing communities.”

Anyone spouting that we are a nation of immigrants and laws has a disease, what George Orwell called the illness of double-think.

And until those many white Americans stop spewing that this is their land, a land of their laws, and a land made for Christians, the racist Minutemen will ramp up their gun brandishing on the southern and northern borders. And racist politicians will continue to play on the fears of uniformed constituents and try and pass the 21st Century’s racist exclusionary laws.

I wonder what these modern-day Nazis would say about those children’s cartoons — images of bodies floating in rivers. Blood-soaked church walls. Military men with their M-16s trained on men while others were in their rape hunch. Beautiful jungle birds flying in the sky next to US-paid-for helicopter gun ships spraying the corn fields below. Dead mommies cradling dead babies.

Yeah, I’m an illegal alien. We all are illegal aliens, under the laws of these creeps in high office. Humanity and caring and simple benedictions for suffering so much, those are alien traits only held by a minority in this country of exclusion. Yeah, those creeps on hate-radio and in the newspaper columns and on Capitol Hill, sure, they recognize all of us who see the lies and fight the injustice as aliens.

And the children whose post-traumatic cartoons brought tears to men and women who had been in Vietnam. Simple Crayola colorings brought tears to a county sheriff who had survived drug runners shooting up his town and unearthed bodies.

Yeah, we are all illegal aliens. Except them.

Paul Haeder worked in Central America and Mexico writing for newspapers during the 1980s and early 1990s. He’s currently in Spokane, Washington, as an instructor of writing at Spokane Falls Community College and writes sustainability-energy-environmental pieces for the towns weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander.  

Over the weekend, Trump’s [white supremacist for decades] purported indifference to support from white supremacists and fascists became an inescapable problem. He had retweeted a Mussolini quote from @ilduce2016 (which, it turned out, was an account created by Gawker to trap Trump)— “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep”—and, when asked, on NBC, if he wanted to associate himself with Mussolini, he said that he wanted “to be associated with interesting quotes.”

He added, “Mussolini was Mussolini. . . . What difference does it make?”

On CNN, Jake Tapper pressed him about David Duke, and Trump, seeming to forget that he had given a one-line disavowal, reverted to a position of theatrical incomprehension: “Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, O.K.?”

Tapper asked three times if Trump would denounce the Klan’s support, and each time Trump declined. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists,” he said. “So I don’t know. I don’t know—did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists.”

You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three

by Paul Haeder / June 27th, 2019

The central argument of Amusing Ourselves [Neil Postman] is simple: there were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble).

— Andrew Postman

So what would Neil Postman say about this fellow [note title of this essay, referencing Jeff Bezos’ proclamation on what work should mean to every breathing American], or the many fellows like Bezos who have zero patience for a world without disrupting economies tied to their authoritarian business plan of more billionaires deserving (sic) more power. Disruptive and destructive, and not just economies in the book sense, but structural violence and community disintegration, murdering people with debt, lack of housing, no medical care, suicide, that’s Bezos, et al looking to capitalize on every penny gathered from every nanosecond in our individual human lives.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has seen his company grow into one of the world’s biggest companies.

Back in 1997, Bezos told shareholders that employees at other companies “can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com, you can’t choose two out of three.”

Bezos acknowledges his high standards for employees every year, telling shareholders that “it’s not easy to work here.”

In the 24 years since Amazon was founded, CEO Jeff Bezos has seen his company grow from a modest online bookshop to one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Back in 1997, Bezos was already expecting big things out of his young company. In his annual letter to Amazon shareholders, Bezos described how much effort he expected from his employees.

“When I interview people I tell them, ‘You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Bezos wrote in the 1997 letter.

“Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.”

The New York Times reported in 2015 exactly how bruising the work environment at Amazon could be. Employees were reportedly expected to routinely work late, were encouraged to criticize coworkers‘ ideas at meetings, and were often found crying at their desks. Amazon disputed many of the claims in the Times investigation, though the newspaper defended its reporting.

God forbid we call Amazon Boss Bezos a plantation owner of a different mother, for sure. That Americans — living in small and large cities, far and wide — depend on the Amazon way as if Amazon is sutured into all aspects of American culture (sic) and hardwired into every new born’s head. Same day delivery. A shopping cart that would be the envy of any Rothschild or Leona Mindy Roberts Helmsley.

This essay, first, was going to address those other masters of the Universe — Google Guys and Algorithm Titans. I barely criticized a billionaire in a DV article —   Household Income, or Higher Planes of Consciousness?*

I criticized Nick Hanauer for his false balance, contrived bifurcation, and his new wind as a billionaire fighting what he calls the educationalism mindset that says that a good, grounded, deep and holistic education might be the thing of kings, whereas Nick says education backing and financial support ain’t worth diddly squat in capitalism until more people make more money to buy more things, or just to survive in his nihilistic world.

Taken with this story line, I embraced education as both a philanthropic cause and a civic mission. I co-founded the League of Education Voters, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public education. I joined Bill Gates, Alice Walton, and Paul Allen in giving more than $1 million each to an effort to pass a ballot measure that established Washington State’s first charter schools. All told, I have devoted countless hours and millions of dollars to the simple idea that if we improved our schools—if we modernized our curricula and our teaching methods, substantially increased school funding, rooted out bad teachers, and opened enough charter schools—American children, especially those in low-income and working-class communities, would start learning again. Graduation rates and wages would increase, poverty and inequality would decrease, and public commitment to democracy would be restored.

— Nick Hanauer

In my email box, Google of course, I get an unsolicited email from an organization for which I have never associated with or even pursued. It’s the old surveillance state of Google and the internet Stasi, for sure —

Alas, Neil Postman was correct, in so far as what we say and do as writers really does not count — we are only as smart and deep and truthful as our masters will allow:

In my college economics class, we were taught that wages depend on productivity. The more productive or skilled workers are, my professors used to argue, the more they will be worth on the labor market and, therefore, the higher their wages will be. That’s bunk.

Under this logic, the way to cure our economic woes – whether poverty, inequality, underemployment, or unemployment – is through education. By educating our citizens, we increase their human capital, making them more productive and, therefore, increasing their expected income.

It sounds good, right?

This seductive myth – of education as an economic cure-all – is something Civic Action founder Nick Hanauer calls “educationism.” As Nick writes in a recent article for The Atlantic, it’s a myth he used to believe, and it’s a myth many wealthy elites still propagate. It’s what leads philanthropists to donate billions of dollars to public schools and educational institutions.

There’s just one problem: Educationism doesn’t work. If it did, our middle class would be much better off.

In the last 40 years, while the real incomes of most Americans have been stuck, we’ve gotten a lot more educated. Almost everyone has a high school diploma and the share of Americans with a college degree has more than tripled since 1970.”

But all that education hasn’t translated into higher wages. In fact, if our incomes had done what my college profs told me – gone up with productivity – the average family today would be earning $29,000 more a year. An average of $105,000!

Of course, it’s true that getting an education is likely to increase your own income. But that’s not the same as raising incomes throughout the economy. Not when four out of five of the fastest growing jobs pay very low wages – jobs like cashiers and health care assistants. Meanwhile, the pay of most people who do have a college education barely keeps up with inflation.

What we do need to do is raise incomes for working families and the middle class throughout the economy. That’s how we build an economy that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few. As Nick writes:

“In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it.”

—  Stephen Paolini, Civic Action, email with an ask for $ support

But then, this essay takes a twist, as they always seem to do when I deploy some ground-truthing. You see, most of us in the USA, the 80 percent of the population — many of which are on the skids, on the near skids, or those of us barely scraping by, and those of us who are unseen but are many short steps away from working for one of those sweatshops like we see with Amazon (there are so many warehouse jobs, forklift gigs, sorting careers) and finding down time in the back seat of our cars) –so-so tire of , really, the prognosticators writing away hard in semi-secure status —  even the smartish ones on leftish magazines like The Nation, or digital forums like Truthout or Truthdig or TheIntercept.

They have NO idea of what is real in the world, and that rarefied realm of citing this study or making this or that prediction, well, it is bombast at best, propaganda at worst, denuded of humanity in many cases.

Case in point — tens of millions of men and women wandering the land (US), in some warped version of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, really, in a society that eats-sleeps-dreams-believes the crap that Huxley warned of, and that which Neil Postman discussed. Oh the irony, those, that billionaire book salesman, Bezos, dead to the world, dead to us, the 80 percent, living barely (sic) in the middle of their hellish barbecue.

I was with three fellows — two literally are sleeping in campgrounds, and one fellow living with his parents. A million miles away from what any social worker or Sheryl Sandberg or Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren or any of the scions of Holly-dirt or anyone in the Trump Loony Bin Show, or those clamoring around an Obama or Oprah or Rachel Maddow. It’s a triple sick experience even thinking about how vapid that so-called debate was yesterday with half of the half-wits of the Democratic Party wanting to play president.

So, a life of men truly on the extinction block, in several demographics. These fellows I hired on to help my spouse and I move from a rental to a house we had the temerity to purchase in a Time of Climate Heating, Oceans Rising, Food Wilting, Water Draining, Economies Imploding, Saber Rattling, and ICBM Immolating.

Their lives, broken down, seem to hold the familiar life story of many people I have worked with as a non-traditional social worker for the homeless, the just-out-of-prison returnees, and chronically physically and mentally ill. They work jobs, stacking halibut,  packing shrimp, pounding two-by-fours, hauling goods, sorting things, cutting trees, landscaping, roofing. Both of these fellows are 50, living in campgrounds, one with false teeth, the other with nubs and rotting teeth.

Child support for children they have never seen, or can’t see now. Felonies for this or that charge keeping them from even getting to first base on an apartment application. Vagabonds harassed by cops, and living life in a constant move. For my other helper, Brian, he’s a former marine, working as a social services provider, has a wonderful child on the spectrum (autism) and is currently living with aging and sickly parents. All three fit the bill for zero tolerance in this society. Never reflected in the news stories, in the Mass Murdering Media, never on the minds of the One Percent, Point Zero Zero One Percent. I know for a fact, though, that those Little Eichmanns who populate the other 19 percent of the 20 Percenters, well, many of them have one degree of separation when it comes to family members with substance abuse issues, chronic mental or physical illness, depression, suicidal, schizophrenic, and homeless.

You get both barrels of human pain and human survival and some human triumphs when talking with real people, albeit, denigrated folk, disenfranchised humans.

They are really rough around the edges, but these fellows, Tommy and Devon, they are examples of struggle and defeat and some triumph, as Brian and I note and agree. They are so far from any of the discourse going on around the world — the complete irrelevance of all the trolling, all the internet crap, all the stuff that makes for an echo chamber that sucks humanity and human connection from the ether.

You look at Tommy, and you see a man on the skids. Big laughing screwed up face, almost Dickensian, crazy might be one moniker. Hustling and wanting to have people know that there was once a time when he had some normalcy, some sense of being a man in society — not on the skids. Though, Tommy would not see himself on the skids.

Brain injury 23 years ago when a van hit him head on as a pedestrian. And he still works, moves heavy furniture, and hammers roofs.

Devon, a former truck driver, someone who has a few years in the Marines, and as Brian states — people are only awakened to the level of how they have been able to access those tools necessary to be woken up. Yet, Brian states that he’d much rather be in the company of these men than the MSWs and other graduate-level punishers he’s worked with, as I have also worked with, in the non-profit arenas as supposed social services workers.

They probably know nothing about this movement, which could affect Tommy and Devon:

When reporters for the International Amazon WorkersVoice interviewed part-time Amazon “associates” (a cheap euphemism for “employees” used to disguise the exploitative relationship between workers and management at the company) in Baltimore to discuss their attitude toward Bezos’ fortune, they were met with a torrent of disgust, calls for sharing the wealth, and social anger.

“Tell Mr. Bezos and the rest of management to come out of their offices and get on the shop floor” said one worker who identified herself as a single mother of two. “At the end of the day, they never feel what we go through in a day for $12 an hour. They get to sit down in their offices and get paid more than we will see in a year,” she said.

Bezos’ wealth typifies the way an increasingly small number of multi-billionaire CEOs and finance operatives extract ever more obscene sums from the international workforce. This process of ever-increasing wealth for the few and exploitation for the majority is reaching a political breaking point.

Explaining her work environment during the holidays, the working mother said, “they just had us move 100,000 packages in 5 hours, and at the end we aren’t even paid enough to take care of our kids. I’m a single mother, I don’t receive food stamps. My rent is $850 a month. I have to pay for gas, electricity, bus passes, plus raise two kids.

“If we decided to quit, who would move these packages out of the door?” she said, noting the social power of the workers employed by the company. “We are the ones making you rich.”

Brian and I talk about Amazon, and the nefarious nature of how the guy at the Washington Post attacks the fourth grader Trump and others, while he is part of the Military Industrial Complex. From The Intercept:

Amazon’s extensive relationship with the NSA, FBI, Pentagon and other surveillance agencies in the west is multi-faceted, highly lucrative and rapidly growing. Last March, the Intercept reported on a new app that Amazon developers and British police forces have jointly developed to use on the public in police work, just “the latest example of third parties aiding, automating, and in some cases, replacing, the functions of law enforcement agencies — and raises privacy questions about Amazon’s role as an intermediary.”

Then there’s the patent Amazon obtained last October, as reported by the Intercept, “that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice.” In particular, it would enable anyone using the product to determine a person’s accent and likely place of origin: “The algorithm would also consider a customer’s physical location — based on their IP address, primary shipping address, and browser settings — to help determine their accent.”

All of this is taking place as Amazon vies for, and is the favorite to win, one of the largest Pentagon contracts yet: a $10 billion agreement to provide exclusive cloud services to the world’s largest military. CNN reported just last week that the company is now enmeshed in scandal over that effort, specifically a formal investigation into “whether Amazon improperly hired a former Defense Department worker who was involved with a $10 billion government contract for which the tech company iscompeting.”

Bezos’ relationship with the military and spying agencies of the U.S. Government, and law enforcement agencies around the world, predates his purchase of the Washington Post and has become a central prong of Amazon’s business growth. Back in 2014, Amazon secured a massive contract with the CIA when the spy agency agreed to pay it $600 million for computing cloud software. As the Atlantic noted at the time, Amazon’s software “will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community.”

Given how vital the military and spy agencies now are to Amazon’s business, it’s unsurprising that the amount Amazon pays to lobbyists to serve its interests in Washington has exploded: quadrupling since 2013 from $3 million to almost $15 million last year, according to Open Secrets.

What would the house-less Tommy and Devon say about this Byzantine world of hyper billions of dollars and hyper trillions of human hours wasted on the things of capitalism, of power and control, consumption?

I know many friends who wonder why we — people like me — still live in the US? Many wonder what it will take young people to stand down the systems of oppression. Some believe the young people have it, as in Greta the Carbon Dioxide Robin Hood, or AOC, the new face (sic) of American politics.

This system we have now is one where a few voices count (get read, heard, published, followed), and the majority of voices are just bursts of yelling in the woods, in campgrounds, in one’s lovely home in the old sedan, in our own bedlam. People travelling from one insane place to another, but in that realm, a sanity sets in for guys like Tommy and Devon. The world is pretty clear-cut, and on many levels, these people have positive outlooks — toothless, no real estate or swelling investment accounts. Just that hard way forward. Cigarettes and bicycling miles a day. Places to shower. Places to get out of the rain without the bulldozers of misanthropy pushing them further and further into ditches or out on the periphery until they stare us all down, face to face, the coming of a New Brave World. Is it the entertaining ourselves to death cycle, or a little bit of the other — big brother, watching our every move, holding every syllable mouthed in a cloud server, every speck of mole cataloged, and every word penned or typed, collected to hold us at bay, hold us as prisoners of our own faulty beliefs?

Needless to say, Charles Dickens grew to hate the system and rail against it in his works. In his seminal novella “A Christmas Carol,” Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by two portly men raising money for the poor.

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the [one of the gentlemen], taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

— Charles Dickens, 1843, A Christmas Carol 

Or, updated for 2020, as illustrated by a commenator on an article about Portland, OR, once the Rose City, now The City of Rocks:

To disrupt illegal camp sites set up by homeless in Portland, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is moving boulders onto the roadsides. The project will eventually cost about a million dollars, but ODOT argues this cost is less than the cost of dealing with existing campsites.

Many have pointed out that this policy does nothing to address the underlying problem or help the people in the camp, but only forces them to move somewhere else.

KGW8

---

“[We] should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts,
sir.”

“Are there no prisons?”

“Plenty of prisons…”

“And the Union workhouses.” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“Both very busy, sir…”

“Those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

—Scrooge/Marley, Edward Sullivan, Planetizen

A debtor’s prison in London.

Household Income, or Higher Planes of Consciousness?*

capitalists never talk about collectivism, communitarianism, cooperatives, intentional communities, and the citizens’ right to free health, safety, transportation, free of the crime of military spending!

by Paul Haeder / June 11th, 2019

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

—Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909

The hubris, the lack of ground truthing, the faux academic natures, the overlord mentality, the star chamber blathering, and the oh so tight with capitalism persuasions of elites like Nick Hanauer, Founder of the public-policy incubator Civic Ventures, billionaire, Charter School aficionado, and one of those not-so-rare money grubbers who has so much to say about how we, the 80 percent, should live our lives in their strangling economic hell.

Allen, Gates, Bezos, Buffet, Walton, Nick, and on and on, the number of elites who are lecturing governors, policy makers, citizens, and business opportunists on what we, their poor trickled down subjects, should do to survive in their sacrifice zones of hellish capitalism.

Here’s Nick’s piece in that faux magazine, The Atlantic — Better Schools Won’t Fix America  — “Like many rich Americans, I used to think educational investment could heal the country’s ills—but I was wrong. Fighting inequality must come first.”

Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.

This belief system, which I have come to think of as “educationism,” is grounded in a familiar story about cause and effect: Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America’s public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself.

Taken with this story line, I embraced education as both a philanthropic cause and a civic mission. I co-founded the League of Education Voters, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public education. I joined Bill Gates, Alice Walton, and Paul Allen in giving more than $1 million each to an effort to pass a ballot measure that established Washington State’s first charter schools. All told, I have devoted countless hours and millions of dollars to the simple idea that if we improved our schools—if we modernized our curricula and our teaching methods, substantially increased school funding, rooted out bad teachers, and opened enough charter schools—American children, especially those in low-income and working-class communities, would start learning again. Graduation rates and wages would increase, poverty and inequality would decrease, and public commitment to democracy would be restored.

— Nick Hanauer

It goes downhill from there, which one would expect as the magazine gives this fellow broadsheet exposure as he lumbers along in an attempt to revamp his earlier theses about how education is the salvation for our society, our economy (sic) and in bringing people out of poverty.

You see, these billionaires play with words and ideas, and he comes off as all anti-trickle down, pro-bridging the gap in this New Gilded Age.

He sounds like a duck, quacks like a quack, though. No mention of taking capitalism down to its knees, at least. No mention of a decent single payer health care bill, no mention of a social security system paid for through the rich and not-so-rich paying above their $120,000 cap on wages that currently sets as the gold (rust) standard for taking out SS on wages. No discussion of ending the war economy, stopping rich entrepreneurs from moving technology from its current state of extinction event after extinction event into the isolation bunkers we put nuclear energy’s waste stream.

Like all good capitalists, Nick’s invested in making money from the “middle class” as it’s forced into a frantic hamster wheel services-goods-consumer-unnecessary-and-polluting-junk which is a race to the bottom society designed by these overlords. Ramping up riderless cars, 200 mph exclusive trains, drone-delivered crap, and I am sure people-killing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning devices — — that’s their MOS. Starbucks on Mars. Netflix on the Moon. That’s their wet dreams.

Here’s his many times repeated foundation tooted throughout his piece:

By distracting us from these truths, educationism is part of the problem.

Whenever I talk with my wealthy friends about the dangers of rising economic inequality, those who don’t stare down at their shoes invariably push back with something about the woeful state of our public schools. This belief is so entrenched among the philanthropic elite that of America’s 50 largest family foundations—a clique that manages $144 billion in tax-exempt charitable assets—40 declare education as a key issue. Only one mentions anything about the plight of working people, economic inequality, or wages. And because the richest Americans are so politically powerful, the consequences of their beliefs go far beyond philanthropy.

A major theme in the educationist narrative involves the “skills gap”—the notion that decades of wage stagnation are largely a consequence of workers not having the education and skills to fill new high-wage jobs. If we improve our public schools, the thinking goes, and we increase the percentage of students attaining higher levels of education, particularly in the STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math—the skills gap will shrink, wages will rise, and income inequality will fall.

Oh, god, so all  my decades teaching in so many venues, even now, PK12, are worthless since I am a journeyman, ground truther, not in some academic elite group of book writers, or in the know with these elites who are the rich and the famous and the leeches who will spin multi-billions of our hard-earned money to play with educational curriculum.

Fact is, the jobs are pure crap, the unemployment rate is higher than the economists and their followers say, the type of jobs we have in the USA are asinine and foolishly tied to hyper consumption and hyper eating and hyper entertaining and hyper disposable (not) income based.

Old Nick goes on and on about how we need to bring people out of poverty and to pay more for those Walmart and Burger King jobs. He talks about the big job growth in low-wage jobs (low wage because we do not value bedpan cleaners, home health care workers, people that pick up the trash, do the social work, aid the teachers, teach, and do the work of paving roads, building day care centers, staffing day care centers, and on and on).

Our infrastructure in the USA is D- from the civil and other engineering societies’ POVs. We have people paying 250K dollars to be a doctor or veterinarian. We have student loan debt in the $1.5 trillion category. We have students who are homeless, part-time faculty who sleep in their cars (houseless) and millions upon millions of people with degrees from college making squat. Nick thinks the schools are great, that we are turning out highly educated folk from the colleges yet, however, we have so many jobs now that demand zero college but can’t be filled to assist the billionaires making more billions.

You know, warehouse jobs, food processing, delivery, etc. A true capitalist like Nick would never ever say we need BETTER schools, PK12, where the youth get real history on the crimes of the wealthy, the crimes of capitalism, the crimes of their own country. Never give young people ways to monkey wrench the oppressive systems that capitalism naturally invents and props up and hires militaries for to keep workers down and the rich up.

Our schools are crap, and the Chromebooks and standardized curriculum and the flat earth people around the South who hold sway on what is taught and what is read, well, we are an embarrassment. The students are losing their IQs every five years, and what is done in schools is an assault of the senses, antithetical to learning, and contrary to what we need to be teaching and having youth embrace so they can have the tools and collective wisdom and force to take Mr. Nick’s billions and take his messed up ideas and put themselves in the driver’s seat.

This addictive screen society, and the meaningless content delivered on line, and the anorexic history, and the childish stuff even in college, all of that, and more, demonstrate a true skills gap.  We need a moratorium on student debt, a jubilee, and we need major moratoriums on the power of capital and their Gilded Age masters.

He’s shocked that over the past 40 years there has been such a huge gap in the wealth of middle class people and the rich. Hmm, nothing about millions in investments making exponentially more than what most Americans consider big bucks with a few thousand in the bank. Interest rates down in the toilet for the investor class. Fee after fine after levy after penalty after tax after toll after add-on after compounded interest rate, sure, try that on $50 k a year. The cost of insurance on the vehicles, all that money stolen buying a house with more scum scoopers in the Real Estate Mafia, all those municipal and county and state government agencies adding more and more onto fees to pay for the business of democracy.

Because guys like Nick sound like a liberal, sound like a benefactor of the middle class, well, they get play in the Mainstream Mass Suicide Media like a rag such as the Atlantic. But get under the skin of this guy’s article and we find a plastic world of not-very-original ideas that are so divorced from what it takes to be a teacher and a staff and a student and a parent and a citizen of the public school system.

The teachers do not cross pollinate, and to be honest, so teachers never co-teach or cover a variety of subjects as a team. I’d say 70 percent of the people I teach with should not be teachers, though that might be hard to ferret out since I believe all PK12 education should be hands on, experiential, tied to community projects, with tons of book reading, outdoor gardening, real science in the fields and heavens, raising animals, doing arts and crafts that sell to the community, building, thinking entering the community as parachutists for day care, elderly care, animal care, park care.

School should be the end all for a community, and with national health care, a decent chance at some income at 62, with safety nets built in for illness, accident, mental health breakdown, and with housing that is built by the community, and affordable beyond affordable, tied to public transportation, tied to community farms, community civics, community art and music and democracy schools, all wrapped up in a big fat bow of retooling people to think like a tribe but act like a 21st century survivor of climate catastrophe.

Imagine taking all the additives and chemicals and toxins out of food, water, air and activities of daily living for our youth, from inception to college, and we’d be saving trillions on health care and worker depression and crime and suicide.

Yes, taking technology away, sending it to the dustbin of the waste storage facilities of the nuclear age, the chemical age, the bio-toxin age.

Nick can never ever criticize the War Machine, the Fossil Energy Machine, the Pharma Machine, the AI Machine, the Legal Machine, the Real Estate Machine, the Retail Machine, the Prison Machine, the Health Care Machine, and the other Machines that keep capitalism going strong like those gas chambers we have so much read about tied to WWII.

The Age of Dumb has morphed into the Age of Stupid, into the Age of Distraction and morphed further into the Age of Passionless Existence . . .  and then into the Age of Screen . . . and then further into the Age of I Wanna Be a You Tuber Star to this juncture,  into the Age of Fascism.

Old Nick, I am sure, loves them all — Boeing, Whole Foods, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and a thousand other enterprises of the sick and famous.

Yes, we have a huge skills gap. The skills necessary to defend a community from toxins and Air B & B’s. A skills set to stop the cops murdering, and stop the school to prison pipeline. We lack the Pk12 skills to teach youth to question ALL authority, question ALL big businesses, question ALL governments, question ALL of the so-called Nick’s of the world.

The entire systems created by the cancer of capitalism need to be scrapped, or chemo-therapied out of existence.

Here, John Steppling:

But…Mark Morford, a columnist for the S.F. Gate, talked to a high school teacher friend of his in Oakland….

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens’ decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words “agriculture,” or even “democracy.” Not a single student could do it. It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he’s taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph.

— Mark Morford, S.F. Gate, 2018

So this is not about measuring intelligence. IQ tests are, as I say, biased in dozens of ways. But I don’t think you can find a high school or university teacher who would not agree with the general decline in reading and writing skills. And I have noted, personally, a horrifying decline in curiosity. I rarely ever have found students curious enough to go look things up for themselves. The reasons for this are complex and beyond the scope of this article. (I have written about the evolution of visual processing and the creation of an ideal observer, on my blog. Jonathan Crary and Jonathan Beller both have profound books out on subjects inextricably linked to media and cognitive development, or lack thereof). The point here is that this loss of curiosity and literacy is not the result of a single simple thing. Nor is it a moral argument about values or some shit that Bill Bennett might have come up with. It is about a system of hegemonic control that has encouraged a surplus populace to a life spent on screens, distracted and stupified. And how this is tied into western capital and its insistence on social control and domination.

Yes, John brings in the “heavyweights” with their tomes and bibliographies and data-driven theses about media and cognitive slippage; however, again, the ground truthers have it, know it, say it, but we never are brought to the table to illuminate the elite and the powerhouse writers and thinkers to give them a real sense of the problem and the causation and the deeper issues tied to mental health slippage, physical deterioration, learning disabilities increasing, lower and lower bars for ethics, family ties, mentoring, love and respectfulness.

The bottom line is too few people have too much money, too much power, too much authority, too much control, too much say, too much ability to shape and reshape our communities. And just because everyone is doing it — oh, damn, that could be one of a thousand things consumer citizens and consumer workers and consumer neighbors are doing, but the bottom line is that many would be doing things so differently if we had agency and no overlords dictating every waking, sleeping, working, recreating, fornicating, eating, shitting, dying second — doesn’t mean it’s right or even what we want.

If Nick could just walk away from the Atlantic. If the Atlantic would just begin real journalism and real ground truthers writing vigorously and profanely and profoundly, each and every issue.

*The Six Planes of Higher Consciousness

1. Transcendence
2. Serene Knowledge
3. Universal Abundance
4. Your Vast Self
5. Integration
6. Creative Mind

Your journey through the stages of the heart, as it grows from the dark state to the clean, has been described in Stages of Mental/Emotional Awakening. It’s very important to keep these stages of mental/emotional awakening in mind as reliable guideposts of your voyage. However, it’s also very important to know the following levels of awareness which you will likely experience as you come home to your higher consciousness and become enabled to live in it as a new person.

Signing off with John Taylor Gatto:

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Achikha in Hebrew, ‘your brother,’ but where is he now?

on the anniversary of USS Liberty and the news of the Dancing Israelis near the crumbling World Trade Towers

by Paul Haeder / June 8th, 2019

Oh, yeah, it was all planned —

I’d write about the 52nd anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty by Israel, the subsequent cover-up, and alas, half a century of Israel and the Jewish state of Mind holding sway over much of the Western world, certainly here in the USA and Canada. Big impetus to analyze other false flags, yet, life gets in the way. Teaching youth in special education — kids with interventions, behavior plans, learning and retention plans. If only the elites and not so elite knew what is going on in America, in the classrooms, with overtaxed teachers, parents that are checked out and famished for their own self-agency and self-worth.

Kids in high school, needing mentors, and then, bam, first graders with all sorts of learning blocks. More and more kids with physical ailments. And, well, the beat doesn’t go on, if you know what I mean. High school kids who don’t know the history of Israel, Nakba, and certainly nothing about the Vietnam War, Korea, WWI & II, and, the USS Liberty?

Emancipation from stupidity, though, is not the purview of the poor and misbegotten and hick and small-town worker. It goes to the top, elite (sic) folk in media, education, board rooms. You won’t hear anything about the murders of those sailors by Israel. No eye for an eye by Yankees or rebels.

Fifty two years, on June 8, 1967, Israel attacked the American naval vessel USS Liberty in international waters, and tried to sink it.

After checking the Liberty out for 8 hours – and making 9 overflights with Israeli jets, within 200 feet … close enough for the pilots and the sunbathing Liberty sailors on deck to waive at each other.

Yet the Israelis attacked it with Mirage fighter jets, torpedoes and napalm. The USS Liberty suffered 70% casualties, with 34 killed and 174 wounded.

The Israeli attack spanned two hours … as long as the attack on Pearl Harbor. The air attack alone lasted approximately 25 minutes: consisting of more than 30 sorties by approximately 12 separate planes using napalm, cannon, and rockets which left 821 holes in the ship. The Israelis fired 30mm cannons and rockets into the boat.

Oh, and the media, oh the media, covering up so much about the attack. And a commission, launched in 2003, yet there is nary a word in the Mainstream Media, and we wonder why?

Capitol Hill, October 2003. It is a historic occasion. An independent, blue-ribbon commission is to release its findings from an investigation into an internationally significant 36-year-old attack on a US Navy ship that left more than 200 American sailors killed or wounded.

The commission consists of:

• A former ambassador to one of the US’s most important allies
• A US Navy rear admiral and former head of the Navy’s legal division
• A Marine general, America’s highest ranking recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor and the former Assistant Commandant of Marines
• A US Navy four-star admiral, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the highest military position in the country), former Chief of Naval Operations, a World War II hero, and the only Naval admiral to have commanded both the Pacific and the Atlantic fleets

The excellent group, If Americans Knew, largely spearheaded by Alison Weir, covers this abomination:

This extraordinarily high-ranking commission was reporting on the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. Many analysts believe that the Liberty attack could be Israel’s undoing – at least as far as US support is concerned – if Americans knew the facts about it.

But they don’t. Here’s why:

A search of hundreds of the largest news media in this country indexed by Lexis-Nexis does not turn up a single US newspaper that mentioned this commission, a single US television station, a single US radio station, a single US magazine. While it was mentioned in an Associated Press report focusing on one of the commission’s most dramatic revelations, Lexis reveals only a sprinkling of news media printed information from this AP report, and those few that that did failed to mention this commission itself, its extremely star-studded composition, and the entirety of its findings.

Apart from a few members of the alternative press and the excellent Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (not indexed by Lexis), this commission might as well not have existed as far as most of the US media is concerned – and therefore, the American public.

For two documentaries on the Israeli illegal attack and murders of US sailors,  go here, and here!

Then, I was going to riff with some “new” FBI documents released, on the Dancing Israelis, and I am not talking about “I wish I was a rich man” Zero Mostel.

Newly Released FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks, by Whitney Webb

New information released by the FBI has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The USS Liberty all over again, but this time, more than 3,000 killed in the so called Sept 11, 2001 “attacks,” and then countless millions killed, maimed, imprisoned, starved, renditioned, and sickened through the coalition of the killing, err, willing. Here, read on for this unrecognized commemoration of the death of all those sailors!

Yet, in either scenario, Sivan Kurzberg had simulated the burning of the World Trade Center the day before the attacks took place. That the FBI concluded that Kurzberg was party to a Mossad surveillance operation at the time of his arrest would then suggest that Israeli intelligence also had foreknowledge of the attacks.

Notably, the relevant section of the FBI report that asks “1. Did the Israeli nationals have foreknowledge of the events at WTC and were they filming the events prior to and in anticipation of the explosion?” is redacted in its entirety, suggesting that the FBI did not determine the answer to that question to be an emphatic “no.”

And, Benjamin Netanyahu, knew what would happen ahead of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. What an ally, what a great Israel First Nation this place has become the past 70 plus years!

One of the detained “Dancing Israelis,” Omer Marmari, told police the following about why he viewed the September 11 attacks in a positive light: ” Israel now has hope that the world will now understand us. Americans are naïve and America is easy to get inside. There are not a lot of checks in America. And now America will be tougher about who gets into their country.”

Then, I got derailed watching the dramatization of what happened during, around, and in the case of the Central Park Jogger and the railroading of 5 innocent youth of color who were tried, prosecuted and found guilty (slammed into prison) through the New York media, through the pigs in the police force, with the assistance of the bigger pigs in the DA’s office, all aided and abetted by the New York Post, dozens of other newspapers, and the biggest pig of them all, Donald Delirium Tremens Trump.

It’s just disgusting,” sighs Ava DuVernay.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker and TV showrunner is discussing the role of President Donald Trump in the Central Park Five case, wherein five teenage boys of color—Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana—were falsely convicted of the 1989 rape and vicious assault of Trisha Meili, a white investment banker, and subsequently spent up to 14 years in prison.

At the time Trump, then a PR-hungry NYC real estate baron who occasionally served as his own publicist, sensed an opportunity for some headlines and inserted himself into the case, inflaming racial tensions with frequent comments to news programs along with newspaper ads, purchased for $85,000, calling the boys “crazed misfits” and urging the state of New York to “bring back to the death penalty,” essentially calling for their pre-trial execution. He concluded: “Maybe hate is what we need if we’re gonna get something done.”

More shenanigans with elite New York white Jewish culture, the prosecutor in that lying case, Linda Fairstein, who writes trashy crime novels and continues today, like the fourth grade mentally challenge Trump, to say the boys (now men) are guilty:

And it’s another felon who plays this felonious crime creator:

And then, the other elite Jewish white woman who also prosecuted the case, Elizabeth Lederer.

As The Times noted, Lederer has a lengthy legal history of unchallenged cases, despite the fact that she’s largely known for her involvement in the Central Park Five’s case. Lederer is no longer discussing the case in public; she did not comment on the petition in 2013.

Though Lederer has made virtually no public comments on her role in the case since the trial ended, archived articles show the trial was an emotionally charged affair, for obvious reasons. The Los Angeles Times notes that Korey Wise, one of the Five, said to Lederer after he was given his sentence, “You’re going to pay for this. Jesus is going to get you. You made this . . . up.”

I guess I am on a roll, here, since someone sent me this about another Jewish white elite female, this time with the US Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She first sent me a month ago the Netflix info tag on Ginsberg’s life vis-a-vis a CNN documentary, RBG and then the film, On the Basis of Sex.

But no amount of swag or hagiography can obscure the fact that, while Ginsburg is responsible for a great number of landmark legal decisions, her legacy may be sorely tarnished by one truly terrible one: refusing to retire when President Barack Obama could have named her replacement. That decision came into stark relief this month when Ginsburg fell and broke three ribs—and half of the nation took a collective gasp. Women took to Twitter to offer the justice a rib.

The broken ribs must have mushed her hear, for sure, as this old lady just put a few million feet in her mouth:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg praised Justice Brett Kavanaugh in her prepared remarks at Friday’s Second Circuit Judicial Conference. She noted that after Kavanaugh was confirmed the number of female Supreme Court clerks reached an all-time high, given his staffing choices.

Quote: “Justice Kavanaugh made history by bringing on board an all-female law clerk crew. Thanks to his selections, the Court has this Term, for the first time ever, more women than men serving as law clerks. Women did not fare nearly as well as advocate. Only about 21-percent of the attorneys presenting oral argument this Term were female; of the 34 attorneys who appeared more than once, only six were women.”

Amazing, the death star of American elites, east coast Ivy League Lepers —

Ginsburg, what a work of nothing! And the sad sack demon-crats march her out as some hero!

MANY OF US who watched Thursday’s Senate hearing spent much of the time cataloguing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s lies. After hours of testimony, during which Christine Blasey Ford answered questions about her alleged sexual assault, the financing behind her lie detector test, and whether she was really afraid of flying, viewers were treated to more hours of testimony from Kavanaugh, a federal judge who struggled to give a single straight answer.

Kavanaugh strained credulity when he argued before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the “Devil’s Triangle” — a phrase that appeared on his high school yearbook page — referred to a drinking game, a definition which, before Thursday, you’d have a hard time finding anywhere. (It actually refers to a sex act involving two men and a woman). He also unabashedly claimed that the term “boof” is a reference to “flatulence,” rather than other butt stuff, and that “ralph,” which means to vomit —implicitly from the overconsumption of alcohol — was a reference to Kavanaugh’s weak stomach.

I guess all of this speaks to a bit of sensitivity around white patriarchy/ matriarchy and white dominance, eating away at the soul of us, the 80 percent. I guess I have to square how it is that an elite super minority and so many in that tribe are superior to anyone else on the planet, in their own minds at that, has held sway over much of my own life in education, social services, journalism, and publishing.

This is observation, but in today’s Stephen Miller-Alan Dershowitz  world, with all the backing of the ADL, anyone who dares points out the elitism and the tribalism and the power clique that defines American Judaism, well, the old canard, anti-Semite, comes popping out of clicking tongues.

Something raw, now that I am working to help a veteran who ended up renting an apartment in Wilsonville, Oregon, at age 70, with an amputation from the knee down, and using a wheelchair. He has major eye problems, which have led to vision and pain in his eyes. He is in an apartment that has two steps that prevent him from using a flat surface to go in and out of the abode. He’s fallen twice on sod, trying to maneuver the wheelchair to the parking lot. He lives alone, doesn’t drive and knows no one at the apartment complex. I got him services while working as his social worker in that nefarious place, the Starvation Army.

He is virtually at the whim of people to come and help him get out of his apartment landing onto cement. He has medical appointments several times a week, a long trip from Wilsonville to the VA in Portland.

The apartment complex is being run by the largest multi-family property management company in the USA (self advertised) called Pinnacle Property Management. I have sent letters and emails to upper management, but to no avail. So has he. The discussion about accommodations — putting down a flat walkway from his sliding back door, about 20 feet — has turned into a case of this multi-billion dollar outfit telling him they will do it but at a charge of $5,300. We are being talked down to by the Portland office, some lower ranking person who has zero empathy for the situation, but is clear to cite in reverse logic the state of Oregon’s fair housing laws, which she uses to protect her asinine attitudes.

He’s on a fixed income and was homeless. The idea that the apartment complex is now managed by this outfit, so the owner(s) can hide behind their skirts, is typical of the American Penury Society. They’ve cited fair housing laws in an Orwellian way — “If we put in the walkway at our expense for your client, that would be unfair to other tenants . . . . Then everyone asking for us to pay for an accommodation we’d have to oblige.”

I’ve advocated for the veteran since this veteran is non-confrontational and is traumatized at having to be apartment-bound for more than two months with no end in site. I have told these nefarious folk that, a, a new concrete pathway for the only ground floor apartment with a two-step situation would be an enhancement to THEIR property in perpetuity. Then, b, I explained the obvious: Anyone renting the apartment in the future, when my veteran leaves, would have the advantage of having some handicapped accommodation in the case of a wheelchair bound tenant, or an injured tenant or someone in need of a walker or crutch or cane, or even a family with a newborn in a carriage.

Since I was already stewing around the Dancing Israelis and the Jewish State of Israel’s attack on our own people, sailors; and since the Central Park Five were prosecuted by two Jewish women, well, I was traumatized a bit. I looked up the management of Pinnacle, and alas, the higher ups — many of them — are self-proclaimed practicing Jews:

Eric Schwabe, Executive Vice President – Western Division

Woody Stone, Executive Vice President – Eastern Division

Jason Straub, Systems Training Manager

Deb Kopolow, Regional Vice President

Avery Solomon, Vice President – Client Services

Seth Kaplan, Regional Marketing Director

You know, none of the above people have replied to my respectful and clear emails or letters asking them to be both ethical and community orientated when thinking about my former client and now my friend.

I have looked at their internal documents, Propaganda videos and marketing web pages, and hands down, these people parade out a litany of BS about how humane and resident focused they are!

Pinnacle is a privately held organization that manages multifamily properties nationwide. Established in 1980, we are one of the largest multifamily management companies in the United States with a portfolio of over 172,000 units and 4,300 team members. Our clients include pension funds, private partnerships, international investors, insurance companies, lenders, special servicers, syndicators, government agencies and high net worth individuals.

I have come to my wits end, in this emotionally and economically cursing society, with the One Percent and the Point Zero One Percent having for too many centuries controlled the destinies of the masses. Having studied some of the Jewish tradition with radical Jewish friends 45 years ago, I am always T-boned by the unfeeling and usury-based prevailing attitudes of the rich, both gentile (goyim) and Jew or Arab Prince!

Here, some contradictions to the idea that money is the lifeblood of so many, especially the millionaires and billionaires — Mammon was an ancient god who used to be worshiped by pagans for riches, money and wealthy. Counterpoint to that:

The overarching Jewish attitude toward the poor is best summed up by a single word of the biblical text: achikha (your brother). With this word, the Torah  insists on the dignity of the poor, and it commands us to resist any temptation to view the poor as somehow different from ourselves.

The concept of human dignity is well-ingrained in Judaism. The book of Genesis describes human beings as created “b’tzelem elokim” in the image of God (1:26). At least one early Rabbi considers one of the verses expressing this idea to be the most important verse in the Torah (Sifra K’dosbim 2:4). The insistence that human beings are creations in the divine image implies that any insult to an individual, by extension, is an affront to God. In reminding us that the poor person is our sibling, the Torah emphasizes that, like us, this person is a manifestation of the divine image and should be treated as such.

A rabbinic story tells about a group of people traveling in a boat. One passenger takes out a drill and begins drilling a hole under his seat. The other passengers, quite understandably, complain that this action may cause the boat to sink. “Why should this bother you?” this man responds, I am only drilling under my own seat.” The others retort, “But the water will rise up and flood the ship for all of us!” (Vayikra Rabbah 4:6). The moral of this story is clear: one person’s destructive action may literally drown the entire community. But we might add that the inverse is also true: a single positive change may transform an entire community. Thus, the alleviation of poverty, even in the smallest detail, may help the community as a whole to flourish.

Yet Pinnacle or the Dancing Israelis or the New York prosecutors or any number of thousands of elites and money-grubbing individuals and corporations have zero understanding of the foundation of the golden rule or Gandhi’s sins —

In 590 AD, Pope Gregory I unveiled a list of the Seven Deadly Sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – as a way to keep the flock from straying into the thorny fields of ungodliness. These days though, for all but the most devout, Pope Gregory’s list seems less like a means to moral behavior than a description of cable TV programming.

So instead, let’s look to one of the saints of the 20th Century — Mahatma Gandhi. On October 22, 1925, Gandhi published a list he called the Seven Social Sins in his weekly newspaper Young India.

Politics without principles.
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.

The list sprung from a correspondence that Gandhi had with someone only identified as a “fair friend.” He published the list without commentary save for the following line: “Naturally, the friend does not want the readers to know these things merely through the intellect but to know them through the heart so as to avoid them.”

Unlike the Catholic Church’s list, Gandhi’s list is expressly focused on the conduct of the individual in society. Gandhi preached non-violence and interdependence and every single one of these sins are examples of selfishness winning out over the common good.

It’s also a list that, if fully absorbed, will make the folks over at the US Chamber of Commerce and Ayn Rand Institute itch. After all, “Wealth without work,” is a pretty accurate description of America’s 1%. (Investments ain’t work. Ask Thomas Piketty.) “Commerce without morality” sounds a lot like every single oil company out there and “knowledge without character” describes half the hacks on cable news. “Politics without principles” describes the other half.