Quaking

The response to the Chinese earthquake makes for an interesting comparison with cyclone-devastated Burmese. Authoritarian states are supposed to be good at this sort of thing, making the trains run on time and being in control, but as we saw with the Bush non-response to New Orleans’ destruction, there’s a direct connection between democracy/citizenship and responsibility, including the state’s caring for the people it represents. China’s doing a relatively good job, even loosening their grip on their pravadamedia, but they realize they have little choice; the magnitude of the disaster, which reveals the ruling military-based kleptocracy in a most unfavorable light, means they really have to deliver to tamp down any dissatisfaction among the people. China in recent years has been bursting with little rebellions, mostly from the brutalized peasantry, who see all the talk of happy-happy shop-shop from their masters and spit in disgust. Nationalism is an excellent crutch, but it only goes so far. Their masters fear them terribly and know they can’t let them down here

Meanwhile, the murderous myrmidons of Myanmar are only too happy to see the Karen people of the Irrawaddy delta killed off. Naomi Klein calls it “laissez-faire ethnic cleansing.” As clients of China, who are hungry for Burman’s hydrocarbons, the generals don’t fear their own people. The big panda is on their side. And so is, shamefully, India, a democracy that should know better.

But it takes more than democracy, doesn’t it? The Italians, back under capo di capo Berlusconi, are whipping up for some internal ethnic cleansing of their own. Last week there was a petit (bloodless) pogrom against a Roma encampment in Napoli (a bitter pun) and a roundup of undesirables. And many Italians, suffering under near universal Camorra-ization, another version of the kleptocracy, are only too happy to find a scapegoat in migrant workers.

people have the power

Mark Kurlansky’s Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea is a brief, intense, and invigorating book I’d recommend to all. In a culture that glorifies violence -- indeed, our entertainment system is largely predicated on violence (particularly against women) – and fetishizes militarism (about half the federal budget pays for past, present, and future wars), it’s good to be reminded of the Anabaptists, Quakers, and other non-conformists, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, AJ Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation, Bayard Rustin and CORE, King, SANE and the anti-nuclear movement, women’s liberation, gay liberation, Solidarity, the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union and it’s “bloc” (hideous appellation!), People Power in the Philippines, the defeat of the PRI in Mexico, the examples do pile up even though those invested in power do not want us to think about them.

civil fairness

California’s Supreme Court’s decision on “gay marriage” is a no-brainer. It’s an issue of civil rights and fairness, plain and simple. The haters and fear-mongers confuse civil unions with religious ones, which are completely different. Personally, I think the state has no place in regulating adult sexuality, nor in defining who gets the economic benefits, which is very much what marriage is about in civil society, but as long as it does, then there must be equity.

Now the Right, led by such liars and hypocrites as Vito Fossella, Larry Craig, and a cascade of whore-mongering preachers, is going to use this legal decision to gin up fundamentalist votes in November. They are already gathering signatures for a state-wide referendum to overturn the CA Court’s decision.

The American taliban must be fought. Unenlightened heterosexuals are pretty clueless how fundamentalism is ultimately very much a threat to us, as well, for their agenda includes banning all birth control and making women nothing more than incubators.

Sinking feeling

Thomas Powers is none too optimistic on the continuing wars, regardless of who our next President is:

"At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment somewhere between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going."

Powers also reminds us how Afganistan has been the ruin of Empires: the British, twice, the Russians, and now the US.

Veto Vito

Last week, Republican Congressman Vito Fossella, one of the Biggest Little Bushes in the region, was revealed as a drunkard, luckily pulled off the road before he maimed or killed someone. This week, he was revealed as an adulterer, fathering another mouth to feed by a woman not his wife. Next week, will it be complaints from alter boys?

The Staten Island/Brooklyn Congressman has yet to go down in flames, but there’s plenty of kindling. And I’m bringing the popcorn. How sweet it is! This, after all, is the sleazebag who charged his opponent in 2004, Frank Barbaro, with being a communist and a pedophile. I know, I was stuffing mailboxes in Bay Ridge (Barbaro handily won the Brooklyn side of the 13th CD) when I found one of Fossella’s glossy campaign fliers. Not a word about Vito’s good work as a tool of the Bush/Cheney agenda, needless to say; it was all about smearing his opponent with vague connections, associations, and lies. Classy work, Vito, you little shitball.