the frig blig

The mission of the Secret Service, l learned in grade school, is protecting the President of the U.S. from bodily harm. Lately I’ve been wondering if the agency might have another hidden mission: protecting the President from non-vetted communications from the public (the ‘unwashed masses’). Keep him insulated, as it were, from contact with ordinary people.

Yesterday’s news that President Obama and Russian President Medvedev jointly agreed to reductions in nuclear weapons deployed by both countries (BBC) seems like good news. However, note that neither country’s leader is denouncing war, or even scaling back in the slightest their respective country’s international ambitions. They found an opportunity for mutual PR while implicitly recognizing that future wars will use more modern technologies.

What the world’s people really need is for countries to renounce war and reinvest the billions of dollars spent by their respective economies on military programs into education and employment programs for their citizens.

Soaking up the beautiful spring sunshine in Ballard Saturday, I ran across these LaRouche-istas with their amusing ‘Impeach Barack Obama’ poster (wherein the President sports a Hitler-style mustache). One of them asked me if I thought Obama was a socialist.

Not wanting to get involved in a discussion of fascism vs socialism, I merely remarked that if Obama was a socialist, everyone would have a fucking job.

Have a good day.

I’ve lived in this here Murica my whole entire life and am embarrassed to admit I don’t know how to instigate a proposal for federal legislation other than asking a congresscritter to sponsor it. Just to complicate matters, there are two different legislative bodies which must pass any bill, and it’s usually modified in the process. Am I daunted? Maybe a little. Will I try to find a legislative sponsor for my idea? How hard can it be to ask?

OK I suppose I’ll ask my reps and report their replies in a future blig post. Do this thing right.

Frog out.

As this article in The Register reports today.

The following guest commentary is reprinted from Eat The State:

We Could Each Be Dr. King

by Geov Parrish

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 81 this year. He has now been dead for longer than he was alive. As his living memory fades, replaced by a feel-good “I have a dream” whitewash that ignores much of what he stood for and fought against, it’s more important than ever to recapture the true history of Dr. King–because much of what he fought against is resurfacing or is still with us today.

Last year, our annual, facile third-Monday celebration of King was inextricably linked with the improbable yet true inauguration the next day of Barack Obama as the United States’ first African-American president. Pundits (mostly white) sucked up a lot of air, ink, and pixels comparing the achievements of the two.

It was a gross disservice to both. Obama is a politician who happens to be a groundbreaker; his race is, to be sure, a key part of his identity, but racial issues are not what propelled him to power. (Maybe, just maybe, by 2012 his performance, not his skin color, will be the primary consideration in voters’ appetite for him.) Dr. King, by contrast, was a groundbreaker who became an (unelected) politician. Obama inspired billions through who he is and through his gift for inspiring rhetoric, but he is, at the end of the day, a politician trying to get and stay elected. King was not about elections; he was about liberation. Dr. King spoke truth to power; Obama is power. Obama is not King. King was not an Obama. We need to remember the difference, and remember that King was far more than a dream that Obama (supposedly) became the culmination of.

King, the man, was, along with Mohandas Gandhi, one of the two most internationally revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his too-brief adult life defying authority and convention, citing a higher moral authority, and gave hope and inspiration for the liberation of people of color on six continents. King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks to his own life (and eventually lost it) fighting for a higher cause. King is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals, and the extraordinary social strength of the black Southern churches behind him. And because he died before he had a chance to be widely believed a relic or buffoon.

What little history TV will give us around King’s holiday this year will be at least as much about forgetting as about remembering, as much about self-congratulatory patriotism that King was American as self-examination that American racism made him necessary and that government, at every level, sought to destroy him. We hear “I have a dream”; we don’t hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. We see Bull Connor in Birmingham; we don’t see arrests for fighting segregated housing in Chicago, or the years of beatings and busts before he won the Nobel Peace Prize. We don’t hear about the mainstream American contempt at the time for King, even after that Peace Prize, nor the FBI harassment or his reputation among conservatives as a Commie dupe.

We don’t see retrospectives on King’s linkage of civil rights with Third World liberation. We forget that he died in Memphis lending support for a union (the garbage workers’ strike), while organizing a multi-racial Poor Peoples’ Campaign that demanded affordable housing and decent-paying jobs as basic civil rights transcending skin color. We forget that many of King’s fellow leaders weren’t nearly so polite. Cities were burning. We remember Selma instead.

And we forget that of those many dreams King had, only one–equal access for non-whites–is significantly realized today. More than a half-century after the Montgomery bus boycott catapulted a 26-year-old King into prominence, even that is only partly achieved. Blacks are being systematically disenfranchised in our elections, and affirmative action and school desegregation are all but dead. Urban school districts across the country these days are as segregated and unequal as ever, and a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court has helped usher in a new era where possible redress for discrimination is steadily whittled away.

Sure, gifted African-Americans like Obama can achieve at a level unthinkable in King’s day. But the better test of a society’s colorblindness (or gender equity) is not how the most talented of each race or gender fare, but how the mediocre do. A black mediocrity on the level of George W. Bush could still never, ever become President of the United States.

An even bigger problem with how we celebrate King’s legacy, as a generation dies off and the historical memory fades, is that he has become an icon, not a historical figure (distorted or otherwise). History requires context; icons don’t. The racism King challenged four and five decades ago in Georgia and Alabama was also dominant throughout the country. Here in Seattle, few whites know that history: the housing and school segregation, laws barring Asians from owning land (overturned only in the ’60s), the marches downtown from predominantly black Garfield High School, police harassment of both radical and mainstream black activists, the still-unsolved assassination of a local NAACP leader.

Every city in America has such histories. We don’t know the stories of the people, many still with us, who led those struggles. And we rarely acknowledge that the overt racism of Montgomery 1955 is no longer so overt, but still part of America in 2010. It shows up in our geography, in our jails, in our schools, in our voting booths, in our shelters and food banks, in our economy, and in the very earnest and extremely white activist groups that often carry the banner on these issues.

If our cities were serious about his legacy, Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. would run through downtowns, and there would be MLK Elementary Schools in the suburbs. Instead, in just about every big city in the US, school districts and city councils put King back in the ghetto, along with both the legions of people who worked with him and the many more who’ve taken up his work since.

Opponents of affirmative action and racial equality can claim King’s mantle and, “if he were alive today,” approval only because in 2010, pop culture’s MLK has no politics. And, for that matter, no faith. For white America, King’s soft-focus image often reinforces white supremacism. “See? We’re not so bad. We honor him now. Why don’t those black people just get over it, anyway? We did.”

All that is a lie. Dr. King’s vision is today as urgent as ever. While Jim Crow and the cruelties of overt segregation are now largely unimaginable, much remains to be done. And the moral outrage of Americans, that made King’s work so politically effective? We don’t do that anymore. We can torture thousands of mostly innocent Iraqis and Afghans, in plain sight, and nobody is held accountable. It’d take a whole lot more than Bull Connor’s police dogs to make the news today.

The saddest loss in the modern narrative of Dr. King’s career is the story of who he was: a man without wealth, without elected office, who managed as a single individual to change the world simply through the strength of his moral convictions. His power came from his faith, and his willingness to act on what he knew to be right. That story could inspire many millions to similar action–if only it were told. We could each be Dr. King.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., nonviolent martyr to reconciliation and justice, has become a Hallmark Card, a warm, fuzzy, feel-good invocation of neighborliness, a literally whitewashed file photo for sneakers or soda commercials, a reprieve for post-holiday shoppers, an excuse for a three-day weekend, a cardboard cutout used for photo ops by dissembling politicians of all colors.

Dr. King deserves better. We all do.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court granted corporations the right to unlimited spending on federal campaign contributions as reported in the Huffington Post.

As has been noted ad nauseum, corporations primary interests do not usually match up with the best interests of human beings. In that light, this is a bad decision which leads one to forecast a tilt toward corporate interests in the federal political sphere (or more accurately, a greater tilt toward corporate interests).

As long as we’re granting corporations more of the rights originally granted to citizens in this country, why not just go ahead and grant corporations the right to run for public office directly? This would eliminate the middleman, the humble politician, who could save face by not having to apologize for passing legislation pushed by his corporate bosses. The corporations could just write their own laws, and pass them directly. The biggest debates would result from the conflicting interests of various corporations. Although with bigger and bigger monopolies, that might be less frequent than would occur in a “free market”.

Current events have got me thinking:

Re: providing post-earthquake aid to Haiti — what role is the Dominican Republic playing? I’d expect them to be first responders since they share the island. But I never hear mention of them in news reports.

Re: Google’s publicized decision to quit censoring searches on their system in China — what censorship does Google perform for other countries’ governments? I’d like to see a comprehensive list of the countries Google serves and their respective government censorship and/or snooping requests, but haven’t noticed any reporters asking that question.

Senators John McCain and Maria Cantwell, of all people, are sponsoring legislation to prohibit banks from acting like Wall Street speculators, or “bar commercial banks from undertaking brokerage activities” as reported in The Seattle Times this morning.

Needless to say this is a good idea, restoring the regulation (formerly known as the Glass-Steagall Act) enacted during the Great Depression.

What’s puzzling me is the nature of the sponsors — prominent republicans. Of course they know their party, being financed almost completely by big business, is totally opposed to this idea. These are the same interests who arranged it’s repeal under the Clinton administration.

One can be cynical and speculate that McCain and Cantwell are pushing the bill with the expectation that it will be voted down, leaving them looking like good guys. Do senators ever do stuff like this? Is there such a thing as a clean and/or honest Washington politician?

President Obama today accepted the Nobel Peace prize, a mere nine days after ordering 30,000 more U.S. troops into battle in Afghanistan.

What the heck are the Nobel committee members thinking?

In recognition of this contradiction, Obama delivered an impassioned defense of war in his acceptance speech, tempered with the need to fight war according to “rules of conduct” that reject torture.

Certainly he must be aware of the torture performed by his own administration at formerly secret locations in Poland, Romania and Lithuania. If Obama is so opposed to torture, why did he personally sign a directive to stop public disclosure of photographs of brave Americans torturing prisoners in those spots just a few weeks ago?

This recalls the day when the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. How many Cambodians and Vietnamese died for Kissinger’s vision of “peace”?

And how many more Americans will die pursuing Obama’s vision of Afghanistan and who knows where else?