Rand Paul's White Privilege

I am white and I admit that I have experienced privilege.

I say this because not enough white people say it. Not enough whites want to learn from the advantages that they have had and at least attempt to peer into the shoes of some one whose great-grandparents may have been slaves, or whose grandparents were banned from immigrating to the US, or who is mistakenly or not-so-mistakenly branded as something less than human and merely illegal.

My ancestors were "pig-in-the-parlor" Irish, dissident Alsatians, poor Southern Whites with Cherokee aunts, and other square pegs to eighteenth century America's round wholes. They did not have it easy in the least. But they did not have to deal with the sheer amount of discrimination, hostility, and overt inequality, which for millions of others were daily reminders of their irreversible identity as people of color. For them, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a breath of fresh air, which has since been stifled by the right wing's return to coded talk of states' rights and increasingly overt returns to Jim Crow policies, if Arizona's SB 1070 is any indication.

Now, a challenger to the Republican Party Machine in Kentucky, thinks he is leading us into a new era of freedom by "questioning" the impacts of the Civil Rights Act and similar legislation. Dr. Rand Paul has never had to think about how life would be if he lived under the provisions he envisions as expansive and libertarian - for people of color and to a lesser extent all other minorities this constitutes a massive loss. If the private sphere no longer must serve all Americans, then mobility becomes a nightmare, since there's no guarantee that a restaurant will serve you or that a store will let you use its facilities. Confined much more tightly to present neighborhoods, ghettos, and self-segregated areas, minorities could easily be reduced to much lower living standards. There's no guarantee that a bank will give any of them a loan, or that business associations will allow them into their little clubs.

Ironically, Paul's answer to these questions is that the public institutions, meanwhile, under this ideal version of the Civil Rights Act, would have been integrated and filled the role of sustaining the economic strength and social incorporation of minority communities. No should trust him in saying this, because, as his libertarian background suggests, he cannot even commit to support of basic universal measures that guarantee such egalitarianism - such as a minimum wage.

This is becoming the new face of the right in American politics as Republicans are purged from the Republican party - a new front for the reinstatement of Jim Crow.

The "Bloodless" Coup

When the Zelaya Administration of Honduras fell to a corporate junta, the newly installed neo-liberal Obama Administration gently condemned the perpetrators and as no violence (allegedly) occurred or continued, the issue quietly disappeared from public concern.

Looking back, nothing could have been further from the truth.

Scattered reports surfaced at the time of violence by the military and police, suggesting that political murders happened before brief return of ousted President Zelaya and have continued in growing numbers since his second exile. While the vast majority of the violence has taken the more overt route in targeting anti-brutality activists, anti-neo-colonial and environmental protesters were among some of targets, including one of the most horrendous murders yet:

Dora Alicia was a member of the Cabañas Environmental Committee, and had been active in opposing the mine. She was eight months pregnant when she was shot dead, and her two year old son was also wounded in the attack.

If we have any decency, we would be on the street protesting.

Supreme Court Insanity

For years now, the nationalist right has approached political issues surrounding the Supreme Court with an utter detachment from sanity, which has only grown worse with time. Because the court appointees essentially serve for life, maintaining a degree of control over the court is central to any political movement. During the Great Depression, the Supreme Court was packed with appointees from various earlier presidents, whose efforts reduced the efficacy of the New Deal. Similar limitations have been placed on the Obama Presidency's reforms by the Bush-appointee Chief Justice, John Roberts. Lasting change in the United States requires a prevention of any strategies to undermine Obama's placements to the court or limit his options in that regard.

The people who want to change this country with the President, to usher in an age of responsibility, compassion, and justice (in other words, precisely what was lacking under our previous President) need to take on a hateful subculture which prayed for sitting justices in a still recent court to die and continues to use bigoted tactics in its "war" for America.

Given the speculation that President Obama might attempt to nominate a lesbian or gay justice to fill the coming vacancy, the American Family Association immediately stepped up an offensive against the potential nomination of the first sexual minority to the court. Earlier this week an AFA correspondent wrote:

Sen. John Cornyn has regrettably opened the door to the possibility of an openly gay Supreme Court justice, saying he'd "have to think about" it, and adding, "As long as it doesn't interfere with their job, it's not a particular issue."

The problem with Cornyn's position is that a gay judge's sexual preference will, without any question whatsoever, "interfere with their job." It's not possible for it to be otherwise.

The commentary in the second paragraph is surprisingly insightful. This AFA correspondent is so insulated (from the larger, secular, sexually-pluralistic culture that has come to dominate the United States in the past two decades) that he cannot conceive of a gay or lesbian or bisexual or otherwise sexually atypical judge having a political career and ideology outside of their sexuality and the perceived cultural trappings of it. He thinks that any of us Americans who register as less than a Kinsey one live entire lives oriented around that sexual difference. This is a degree of "othering" so profound that it's patently ridiculous.

Even more shocking is the emphasis placed on sexuality as an ultimate litmus test for a nomination to the Supreme Court. This religious arm of the larger surge of American nationalism has made a name for itself as moral arbiters who seek to return America to a purer, safer, better time. But this reveals that this branch of the nationalists unsurprisingly thinks of morality in exclusively sexual terms. Thus, the actual job (according to the AFA) of any Supreme Court Justice is not to rule on constitutionality and illegality but morality. "Immoral" laws are to be struck down. "Moral" provisions are to be prescribed. All of this pseudo-theocratic judgment occurs only regarding the issues the AFA concerns itself with (the rights of historical scapegoats of theocracies, women and sexual minorities) making a natural alignment between anti-populist economic groups (the Republican Party donors) and one-issue socially conservative voters (the Republican base).

The article continues on past this revealing bit of hopeful wishing for theocracy to the dreadful idea of retroactively reinstalling Sodomy bans:

If we elevate an open homosexual to the Supreme Court, we will be elevating someone who freely admits that he (generic use) engages routinely in behavior that was still a felony in every state in the Union as recently as 1962 and a felony in the other 49 states until 1972.

Or, if we're playing a numbers game, 14 states in 2002. Funny how it going for more recent data suddenly makes the AFA look like it's out of touch with the majority of state laws.

Meanwhile the article plugs onward into oblivion:

Sodomy is still a felony in the criminal code of about a dozen states. The Lawrence decision of 2003, an egregious act of judicial activism, prohibited enforcement of these laws, but the fact remains that 25% of the states in the Union still regard it as criminal behavior.

Those laws are still in the criminal code in the same sense that Jim Crow is still on the books where it was struck down by Brown v. Board of Education. Similarly, womens' suffrage is not extended in all states. The proponent of this argument either does understand how federalism works, or actively seeks to undermine how it works.

The rest of the article (about the remaining half) dumps these previous arguments in favor of a bitter argument in favor of

A fundamental requirement of a judge is impartiality. He is to be as impartial as an umpire or a referee. His responsibility is to take rules written by others (including and above all the Constitution) and faithfully and neutrally apply them without bias or favoritism, and without changing the rules in the middle of the game to give the advantage to the team he happens to like best.

Tim Donaghy, an experienced NBA referee, was recently banned for life when it was revealed that he placed bets on games he himself officiated. He eventually plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges and is in prison as we speak. You just can't have a referee - or a judge - who has a built-in bias towards one team or the other.

In short, straight people have no biases, unlike those gays.

Targeting Weapons Not Ideas

The unsurprising reaction to the Christmas Day (attempted) bombing has been more restrictions on travel, more troops in a relatively innocent Middle Eastern country, and generally more of the same. Obama, how you've failed us.

Since this marks now the third attempted terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11 which managed to only be thwarted by passengers, people are asking once again how can the TSA prevent would-be terrorists from bringing various explosives on board. There's quite a precedent for this sort of recoiling in the face of an utter failure of a terrorist act - the Shoe Bomber nearly caused matches and lighters to be more strictly controlled, and the London-based cell that attempted to create a lethal chemicals in the lavatory famously caused the ban on liquids (with varying forms, from either all liquids being banned as in parts of Europe, to the lighter American ban that restricts passengers to only three ounce containers). So what exactly are the recommended changes this time around? Well, according to one expert:

There are two machines that might -- and I say might -- have revealed the old bomb in the underwear ploy. One is the machine, which we encountered in the airport in Paris and is in a few airports in the US, that puffs air at you and analyzes the atmosphere for chemical residue. The other one is the X-ray machine, which was very controversial in the US for the prudish reason that it showed the faint outline of genitalia.

Are we honestly reaching the point where essentially strip-searching people is being debated? Both are fairly invasive procedures, and yes I've been subjected to both while flying in the United States. The ultimate irony is that the paragraph a few lines above this intense search for methods to prevent terrorist suspects from bringing dangerous chemicals or devices onto planes, the same expert mentioned that:

And yet, what we have so far is incredibly expensive and cumbersome security procedures that can be easily circumvented by your average Joe Terrorist. I have always wondered, for example, how metal detectors would respond to explosives made of plastic. Answer? They don't. I have also wondered why, since it is well known that one must remove one's shoes at airport, any terrorist would put explosives in his or her shoe. Answer? They don't: they sew the bomb in their underwear.

Truly what we have here is a failure of the imagination with this expert specifically and on almost every party in this debate generally - humans solve puzzles naturally, what we need to target is the motivation, not the ultimate action. That isn't to suggest that we resort to criminalizing the idea of terrorism (to an extent that's already happened, it seems), but that we should attempt preventative measures that start before people board planes - that start with addressing why such a large percentage of the Muslim world is so angry at Americans and the West. This isn't, as that expert says, "cooperation and meekness in the face of jihadi fanaticism," this is actually addressing the problem instead of ignoring the conflict and preventing it from affecting Americans outside of airport security.

Obama's landmark speech earlier this year to the Islamic world seemed to be the end of a long violent campaign against Muslim nations, and the beginning of a dialogue and a constructive solution. Hopefully this single failed attack won't break the nascent reconciliation and boost the chances of a war in Yemen.

Inflated Sense of Self-Importance?

Since the tea party protests the entire conservative wing of the American political a clear sense of entitlement has become not just a common theme in rightist circles, but the predominant basis of post-tea-party politics. In fact, the tea parties, often seen as a massive tantrum of sorts against the victory of the emerging Democratic coalition, Obama, the rise of a leftwing voting generation replacing a conservative base, in short a society-wide rejection the conservative ideology which had dominated for the past several decades.

The largest symptom of this is a vicious denial of their nature as a minority, and violent assertions that they are "fighting" for a populist cause, not a shrinking section of the population motivated primarily by bigotry. In spite of all electoral trends, polling data, and other evidence that suggests a slow but steady decline of the current Republican alliance between social conservatives, libertarian neo-liberals, and imperialist neo-conservatives, the emerging new right wing order imagines itself as the champion of the people. Why else do conservatives feel empowered to threaten centrist Blue Dogs? As the New York Times has printed:

So Michael Steele, Republican Party chairman, and Dick Armey, former House Republican majority leader, have already shifted their focus to the 2010 mid-term elections and beyond, hoping to use the health bill to galvanize their base and fill campaign coffers.

An admirable strategy, if they hadn't pulled out every last gimmick in the last election trying to stem the tide of the anti-Republican backlash. They have drained every iota of the potentially-republican-voting angry conservative base, and in the process decimated the political landscape in much of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains - all of the conservative third parties have disappeared into a reliable Republican fold already. Beyond having mined their ideological base to exhaustion, they have become so reliant on reactionaries that they have alienated a huge section of the centrist vote and irreparably lost an entire generation. Roughly two thirds of the voters my age support same-sex marriage, and that's not including those that support or prefer a watered down civil union compromise. Beyond even more entrenched openness that Republicans shy away from on issues of race, gender, or sexuality, the coming political battle over the legal definition of marriage shows a Republican policy that will lose any significant support from the growing "millennial" demographic.

Beyond all of these more detailed concerns over how such an electoral strategy is doomed to abysmal failure, the majority of Americans want health care. Every poll in the past ten years has shown this issue as a growing concern, and now, with a majority supporting a public option and the Obama administration leading congressional Republicans by 15% (and growing) on this issue, the Republicans think they can claim exclusive rights to a popular movement.

Moreover, this older ideological frame the Republicans have returned to embracing, that of a persecuted minority against the liberal establishment, loses all its credibility with this newer argument - that Republicans are the true Americans. Republicans are casting themselves as the majority and sole legitimate heir apparent of American political thought, and at the same time, a hated group hunted by the dark shadowy liberal conspiracy (as if we were that organized). It harkens back to the same inconsistency slacktivist points out time and time again - that America is the shining (Christian) city on a hill and yet also Babylon, only instead of the religious dualism of America as Christian example to all and fallen nation, it occupies a nationalistic frame of mind, where America is righteous and courageous against the evils of the world and yet poisoned from within by traitors of various stripes, false Americans all.

While the Republicans are clearly burning their bridges now, they still have considerable power - enough to disrupt almost any legislation in the Senate, a nearly packed Supreme Court, a surprisingly passive Democratic counterbalance in the White House and to a lesser extent the Congress, and a shocking hold on the media. This is the Republican party at its most dangerous, because they have just begun their fall from power, and they still have the potential to strike back. The perfect motives have arisen just as a palingenic and ultranationalist strain (read: pseudo-fascist) ideology has moved from the background into the forefront of their dreams of an American future. The next few years are going to be the hardest and most dangerous, and while the Republicans are down and are losing face, this may be their dangerous, for that precise reason.

EDIT: Yes, I know, this. Is any one really surprised that the Dixiecrats are angry at the Democrats? Angry enough to not vote with them on anything of consequence? Angry enough to leave the party? This is just the last of the fallout of the party realignment started with the Southern Strategy during the Nixon administration. As in, nearly forty years ago.

Additionally, the data about popular support for a public option is from here.

Alternate Reality

In the wake of the tragedy at Fort Hood, the right in America has spent hours deconstructing the event, largely because it both undermines their assumptions about the world and also confirms their fantasies about Islamic Extremism. How it operates in the latter fashion is clear - a Muslim man shot several soldiers in an army camp in Texas, killing many of them. And yet, there's a clear element of disbelief and incomprehension, strewn amidst the calls for mandatory debriefings of Muslim soldiers and the increasingly too familiar demands for identification and surveillance of the entire Muslim American community.

Major Nadil Malik Hasan was a native-born American citizen. Fox News returned to that point several times, unable to reconcile it with his actions. Why can't they accept that an American who had faced relatively constant attacks on his character because of his religion become angry with this country? Why can't they accept that though his course of action was truly disgusting and deserving all the reprimand in the world, that his politics had a basis in an utterly human response to their cultural bigotry?

This goes beyond their forced blindness to their enemies' perception of the United States and resultant political opposition. To its core, islamophobic reaction to 9/11 in America has built its base over nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment, casting undocumented immigrants, even non-Muslims from Haïti, as security threats. Within a matter of weeks of that terrorist attack, the legal immigration status of the actual perpetrators of that attack was forgotten, and hundreds of undocumented Muslims were being rounded up because of their religion.

The status of terrorist and Muslim becoming the same fit into a larger narrative of both being foreign. The Bush era undermining of attempts to study domestic terrorism and explanation of the Iraq War as a fight against "them" over there so "they" don't fight us here all contributed to a perception of Islamism as not only an ideology introduced from far away countries, but tied to foreigners and outsiders, never members of American society. This reconciled with an equation of terrorism and Islam by an overarching xenophobia, casting all of these weakly related ideologies and statuses as inherently linked and inherently outside of the American experience.

Already, however, the far right has continued to build up this illusion of utter foreignness of Islamism. Leading Republicans have pronounced this a sign of how thoroughly the American military has been "infiltrated", infected with Muslims as the subtext to this statement. Considering Hasan joined the army in 1995, long before the War on Terror, and was a native-born American, this talk of ideological contamination rings false. He didn't arrive from a distant shore bringing harsh words for the American military. He found himself rejected and trapped within the military and turned to violence as a solution.

In response to the various parts of the case which contradict a narrative of Islamism in favor of a more complex interaction between anti-military sentiment, instability, and a religious justification, various pundits have labeled this as an act purely driven by religion. Retired General Barry McCaffrey has already claimed that murders as a response to an unwilling redeployment. In spite of serving in the Vietnam War, the killing of fellow military servicemen as a desperate attempt to avoid deployment seems a completely foreign attitude for him.

As per usual, the right wing perception of the event has a limited basis in reality and largely ignores evidence contradictory to a larger worldview with xenophobia as a central pillar of their understanding of the universe. They're living in an alternate reality, where the political correctness of the American military is making them too nice to Muslims.

The 2010 Census: Watershed of Neo-Nativism

The census is a natural outlet for nativist fears and related anxiety over the cultural and racial identity of the United States – it quite literally is the federal government’s analysis of who Americans are and what that information means. Those complex issues have overwhelmingly dominated the political environment following Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in the midst of one of the strongest rightwing radicalizations in American history. Like the unstoppable force and immovable object, the most symbolic affront to any ideology invested in White leadership of the United States ever has coincided with the culmination of a backlash brewing since the Civil Rights Movement. Floating in and out of the debate, the 2010 census has the potential to be the flashpoint which ignites any number of powder kegs of ethnic identity politics in America.

As the tide of anti-tax and anti-government protests began to rise over the summer of 2009, one of the early voices of alleged warning that sparked this populist explosion was Michelle Bachmann, a Representative of Minnesota. Already famous for dramatically conservative positions, Bachmann had previously become relatively well-known for her statements that a committee should be formed to evaluate the patriotism of every member of Congress. On June 17, her comments during an interview with the Washington Times, however, crossed the line from blatant partisan demagoguery into a clear attempt to transform present paranoia into potentially violent action. This interview combined the various conservative fears surrounding the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN), particularly highlighting Obama’s connections with that organization (referring to him as “a former employee of ACORN now occupying the White House”), but furthermore suggesting that ACORN and related groups (and the infiltrated federal government) intended to gather large amounts of information using the census – presumably for nefarious ends. The congresswoman then advised her interviewers and the audience to follow her supposed example and refuse to answer any of the questions on the census except the number of people in the residence – an act alone that is considered a federal crime.

The paranoia in that encounter is tangible, but pales in comparison to her statements eight days later. On Fox News, she argued that her worries about the 2010 Census have historical precedent in that:

“between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps […] I'm not saying that that's what the Administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up, in a violation of their constitutional rights, and put the Japanese in internment camps”

No longer ending with a vague fear of loss of privacy, Bachmann’s train of thought abruptly jumps from typical census data in the modern day to Gestapo-esque utter violations of any sort of due process. The four months following that and similar comments from the various heads of the Republican Party seemed an almost unthinkable acceptance of this paranoia by the right and a bizarre fascination with this strange pseudo-populist movement by the left. This continues into the very current political situation, visible for instance in a newly produced survivalist strategy game involving militias (the role the player takes) killing the remains of the Obama Administration and ACORN “shock troops” following a coup.

At this immediate time, however, the transmission of fears surrounding the census from the libertarian far right to the authoritarian cultural conservatives has radically altered the right’s overall perception of the census, transforming it from utter paranoia to attempted manipulation of the program. To a limited extent, this was clear even during the earliest roots of the census paranoia. Bachmann suggests that her followers fill out one specific question only on the census – that concerning the number of residents. Often, racial minorities are dramatically undercounted while the census frequently overestimates the number of Whites – giving states with less diversity a subtle advantage, as the census determines the number of Representatives and thereby electoral votes a state should have. It remains unclear what motivated Bachmann’s various claims about the census, but her clarity that residents should respond question which directly determines the strength of a location’s political voice suggests that she attempted a nuanced position, which discredited the would-be reformers of the census (ACORN, Obama), legitimized the views of her base (that the Obama Administration was intent on tyrannical government), but left her base’s geographic standing intact (by filling in their answers to that particular question).

That stance has fallen away, as the Republican Party has realized the extent to which it can still legislate policy. Bachmann’s radical tone, the political equivalent of a scorched-earth retreat, has yielded to a new consensus among Republican congressmen to mold the census into a political arm for their current objective – revenge against the demographic widely considered the cause of their downfall and through the silencing of this group the potential of preventing further losses. They hope to use the census to target the Latino community.

The desire for revenge against, or failing that, structural undermining of the politicized Latino community has been the Republican response to the 2008 Presidential Election, which conservatives overwhelmingly perceived as being the decisive transition of the Latino voting bloc from an independent group to a member of the Democratic coalition. As Newsweek reported in the aftermath of Obama’s stunning election:

“Hispanic voters didn't just leave their mark on this year's presidential election. They decided it. Four states with sizable Hispanic populations that went for Bush in 2004—Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada—all turned blue this time around, adding 46 crucial electoral votes to the Democratic candidate's winning tally”

The transition from treating the census as inherently suspect to viewing it as a tool for systematically undermining Latino vote, however, was shockingly sudden. As the summer of 2009 came to an end, the paranoia surrounding the census had reached a fever pitch, resulting in the brutal murder of a volunteer census working in Kentucky. Found in late September, “hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery had the word ‘fed’ scrawled on his chest,” the death of Bill Sparkman seemed an ominous warning of impending violence towards census workers until the completion of the census in 2010. A matter of weeks later on October 7th, however, "Republican [Senators] David Vitter of Louisiana and Bob Bennett of Utah" had proposed an “amendment [which] would exclude illegal immigrants from the population count used to allocate congressional seats [using] the 2010 Census". Senator Vitter explained his reasoning arguing “[i]llegal aliens should not be included for the purposes of determining representation in Congress, and that's the bottom line here”. Unfortunately ignored by the Senators, the impact of this proposal on the political system would not be a glowing restitution of American democracy, but rather a variety a change from one unpalatable choice to another. Instead of illegal aliens’ presence increasing the count of individuals to be represented in a given area or state (the current situation), under the provisions envisioned as stemming from this addition to the census, the concept of one-man-one-vote would be restored at the price of a completely politically voiceless class being created. This amendment brings to the surface the unsavory realities of illegal immigration: at its core the fact that without amnesty and naturalization, undocumented immigrants represent a group inherently deprived either in part or in total of true political representation.

Beyond these more abstract political concerns a variety of more concrete issues seem largely ignored by this Republican amendment. In pragmatic terms, “[a]bout 425 million forms have already been printed” without any questions on citizenship, a new requirement to receive any further funds. In addition to cancelling the current ad campaign based on the ten questions on those millions of forms, adding “questions would require designing new forms” which is “operationally impossible” according to the director of the program. Furthermore, the idea that individuals would willingly reveal their legal status in the country, especially to a state clearly influenced by a growing neo-nativist movement, is quite laughable. Fearing an undesirable response to census questions on residency could be part of the recent trend of more dramatic anti-immigrant policy, “some [Arizonan] immigration advocates are threatening to tell undocumented immigrants to boycott the census”. Appearing to be almost a last act of desperation, such a protest would harm immigrants as much or more than others, as the data from the census not only determines (distant seeming) political districting, but also “would deny recession-starved cities and towns much-needed federal tax dollars, which are allocated based on population” as determined by the census. States like Arizona with strong immigrant communities “could lose millions of dollars in federal funding for roads, schools, redevelopment and other projects if large numbers of people are overlooked”. Even in states traditionally off the beaten path of immigrants, like North Carolina, have realized that the “challenge looms large for census [workers]” interested in accurately counting a community subjected to “raids in which people were taken from their homes at night” by the state conducting the census. Moreover, the constitutionality of the proposed restructuring of the census is quite questionable, as existing law overwhelmingly uses citizenship-neutral language, calling for a counting of “inhabitants” or “persons”. Plagued by so many practical obstacles, it seems unrealistic to expect many to support the Republican amendment.

In spite of its general detachment from reality, the far right, originally terrified of the alleged potential abuse of the census, has primarily rallied around a remodeling of the census as an instrument for excluding certain individuals from the country on an even deeper institutional level. Glenn Beck, a rightwing pundit who used the nationalistic mood of the summer of 2009 to amass a disturbing amount of political power, very quickly endorsed the Republican amendment. On October 11th, a few days after the initial introduction of the change, Beck devoted a section of his broadcast to a nationalistic skewering of opponents to the proposed addition – comparing them repeatedly to those who advocated the three fifths compromise. Beck opines,

“When it comes to immigration laws are we getting best what’s for America [sic] or what’s best for SEIU [a medical workers’ union] who has more immigrant workers than any other union and funded the May Day rallies […] wasn’t that a communist thing?”.

Having fused resurgent neo-McCarthyism, neo-Nativism, and anti-union populism, Beck then hides this repugnant intolerance in an alleged stance of opposition to the modern slavery of undocumented immigrants, declaring in a strange fashion, that his opposition to the irregular political position of all non-citizen residents equates to liberation of undocumented aliens from substandard labor. In short, Beck has claimed that ignoring the problem is the same as solving it. If Glenn Beck is any indication, the populist neo-nativist conservatives of America have quickly forgotten their qualms about Obama’s census and seized a political opportunity, not only regardless of the cost to immigrant communities, but in part because of it.

Moving the Goal Posts (p 49 - 51)

Starting the first chapter of her book to deal with something more specific than the general functions of her theory, Amy Chua seems to be trying to kill two birds with one stone - hushing her critics as naysayers ignoring a coming revolution and fleshing out her theory with specific examples.

She starts with Bolivia:

In the fall of 1999 a graduate student from Bolivia named Augusto Delgado raised his hand in my Law and Development seminar. Always frank and incisive, and one of the best students I have ever had, Augusto said: "I believe, Professor Chua, that my country is a perfect counterexample to your thesis. In Bolivia, we have all of the conditions you mention. A very small light-skinned minority dominates the economy, while 65 percent of the population are impoverished Aymara and Quechua Indians. But in Bolivia today there would never be an ethnic movement against the market-dominant minority. The reason for this is because ethnicity has no appeal in Bolivia. No Indian would ever want to identify himself as an Indian. They are willing to think of themselves as campesinos, or peasants, but as indios - no."

Predictably, a poor ethnic majority which has been fed racist propaganda vilifying their own culture which has finally reached a point where identification with their own group has become an almost unthinkable admission of worthlessness is in fact not an easily pacified group and revolts against these terms the wealthy minority has set for them (that is, being peasantry and ashamed of your own ethnicity and cultural traditions).

Less than two years later, when Augusto was back in La Paz working as a corporate lawyer, he contacted me by e-mail. He explained that he was writing to take back his earlier words. At that very moment, angry indigenous coca peasants were marching on La Paz, protesting the government's decision to eradicate coca - for Bolivians, a "sacred plant"widely used in legal, nonaddictive forms; for the U.S.-sponsored anti-drug campaign, the source of cocaine. Calling for a constitutional assembly to organize a new "majority-based" government, the peasants had set up roadblocks, paralyzing the country's major cities.

If we return to the 65 percent figure that Chua was ready to accept a mere page earlier, even if only 8 out of every ten indigenous Bolivians opposed a ban, a low number for a sacred rite, that would be a majority of the population. Her tone seems diplomatic, but clearly suggests her opinion is that these actions were not acceptable, especially the scare quotes around "majority-based" since that's a perfectly reasonable description of what they were protesting in the name of.

She goes on to describe Felipe Quispe, an Aymara "terrorist", quoting a Bolivian minister who attacks Quispe and other indigenous rights activists as operating under a mindset triggered 400 years ago. If their people face a society run for the benefit of a select few who are radically opposed to any sort of victory for the indigenous population, such attitudes aren't antiquated and it's remarkable that Evo Morales's peaceful reform party easily defeated Felipe Quispe's more radical party. Tellingly, Chua omits any references to Evo Morales, although it is unclear whether she wished to ignore a pro-reform pro-indigenous politician who refused to use violence because it failed to fit into her narrow dichotomy of angry poor majorities and blissfully unaware wealthy minorities, or because he wasn't quite the name he was when she originally wrote this book. I will say nothing except that she wrote this book originally in 2003 and Morales's victory in 2002 triggered the crisis her student wrote to her about.

She begins the next section with a description of La Paz: "Despite its stark beauty, La Pax attracts relatively few tourists, in part because its eleven-thousand-foot altitude leaves the unaccustomed with headaches and even the locals with low energy".

One of the most common uses of the coca leaf is to reduce the effects of altitude sickness.

A War Against Itself

In the wake of the First World War, Europe was a mess. Millions had died both directly from the war and indirectly from the Spanish Flu which had massacred the civilian population and the military alike, their resistance weakened by food and supply shortages.

What truly left Europe so devastated, however, was the shift from "traditional" means of warfare that had slowly accumulated over centuries into modern warfare, complete with machines that could kill with the press of a cliché button. Death had become automated and that had destabilized the complex power balances that had kept things running slowly before the war.

Something similar has happened in the American Media.

Instead of "traditional" censorship, where governments would flood the media with propaganda, out-competing alternative viewpoints, and threaten often at gunpoint those who had broken through the government's control.

Now we have something more automated. A censorship based on quiet omissions and a slow choking off of information, leaving what little information seeps through undecipherable, without context. While the mechanization of war roared into a European continent which had enjoyed a previously quite peaceful century and became inescapable as the horrors of the Great War embedded themselves in the politics and arts of the twenties, the subtle gaining of these means of censorship have gone largely unnoticed.

We are in the worst kind of danger. The kind you cannot see coming.

We should have known when it was England the reported more heavily on our own 2000 election and the following controversy. We should have realized what was happening when our media differed so radically from the rest of the world's total lack of the steady drumbeat into the Iraq War. We should have acted when the Pentagon irradiated entire Iraqi cities and the Gap bought members of congress to keep it's caged workers on Saipan working for scarily low wages.

What happens when the media starts refusing to cover bombs being built here, instead of just them going off over there?

(World on Fire coming by Friday, I swear!)

Third Parties

In short, the more things change the more they stay the same. We now have confirmed the link between the School of the Americas specifically and the US generally, and the coup in Honduras.

The left wing in the US has been ignored in favor of corporatist (and more recently, growing right wing populist) policy. Obama has no reason to change, and has shown no indication of movement on this subject, in spite of unusually strong complaints from the usually grateful left-center base.



The instability in Honduras at this point, buried by the American media, is the direct consequence of the complete isolation of the left from the American political scene. The entire country of Honduras has been functionally shut down by our actions and inability to correct our failed policies. Our broken system is breaking their system.

If the American Public wants to take a stand against our legitimizing and financing of military coups and resultant dictatorships, we need a protest vote we can turn to. Buchanan, Barr, and Nader have wrecked havoc transforming the Reform, Libertarian, and Green parties into organizations primarily focused on advancing their leaders careers, not actual reform.

There seems to be no avenue to actually repairing our system. For decades now, millions of Americans haven't voted, and tellingly, no mainstream attempts have been made to correct this. Dissatisfaction producing apathy is in the interest of those who don't want the United States to have a democracy, or at least a democracy that actually represents popular opinion.

Japan has given us hope, however.

Where a coalition of centrist, corporatist parties ruled for decades on end, financed by wealthy backers both foreign and domestic, a populist democratic seed took root and seems committed to rebuilding the nation.

Let's hope that they don't get another false promise, another Obama.