Category: Politics

Jonathan Capehart may only be pretty, dumb and clueless, but his popularity with the media as a safe right-wing gay spokesperson, exceeded only by another establishment lacky, Andrew Sullivan, is more than just an embarassment to thinking and caring queers everywhere; it’s a very real threat to our survival, especially the survival of those who are most vulnerable.
In a column appearing today in the NY Daily News, he tells us that Tom Duane is “potentially standing in the way of gay rights.” Capehart simply cannot understand why Duane, a privileged young urban professional like himself, someone who is already protected where he lives by New York City’s human rights law, would be so interested in protecting people supposedly very unlike himself, the transgendered, by insisting that they be included in New York State’s own incredibly-long-overdue Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA).

And let’s be honest: Transgender issues are difficult for most people to understand. Even in Albany – where they have no problem passing complex budget bills with only a few minutes’ review – the notion of extending protection to men and women who feel they were born the wrong gender would be hard to grasp.

Could the answer be that the honorable Mr. Duane can actually see, and smell, beyond his nose, that he knows and understands the people who most need the protection which would be provided by SONDA, and that they are not newspaper columnists and state senators? Could it also be that he understands that he serves an entire community, and that he believes that such service demands courage and not merely professional calculation? Unless he realy believes the stuff he writes, Mr. Capehart should be asking himself about courage and calculation.
Employing the wisdom he reveals in his columns some forty years later, would Mr. Capehart have suggested to Martin Luther King, Jr., in the sixties that the stuggle for civil rights could collapse if King did not limit his initial objective to securing protections for those blacks who were most white?

The UN is dead!
The organization operates as an arm of our de facto executive in Washington or not at all, and this week it physically, if not formally, handed over its responsibilities to the White House when it gave its occupants the only copy of Iraq’s response to the Security Council declaration. Huh? The world will never see that full text again, especially since much of what it contains is obviously such an embarassment, and not just to the U.S.
The League of Nations was done in by the fascists in the twenties and thirties, its successor by American corporate imperialists in the aughts. I’m actually surprised we took so long.
Long live the EU!
Is it impossible to imagine replacing the concept of a League of, or a United, Nations with a world society formed voluntarily by emulation of, if not a real lust for physical intimacy with, the mature, very attractive and successful culture, polity and economy represented by the European Union? I can imagine that, as an alternative to the U.S. alone, we might eventually see the concept of “Europe” erase its association with geography and history and become a model, if not a magnet, for diverse peoples around the world. It’s not perfect, but the European federal approach currently has no real competition in a world which resists American imperialism.
As a nation, if not as a society, the U.S. doesn’t seem to be able to anything very well just now (except weaponry and the commercial marketing of popular culture), and this isn’t hard to see if you take a serious look around. We’re living off capital at the moment. But regardless of how good or bad we may think we look to ourselves, we just don’t look that good any more to people on the outside, and we’re looking worse every day. Most alarming is the fact that even Americans who see this clearly, just don’t give a damn, or they are convinced that nothing can change it. I think the world sees this.
Damn! It should have worked. We had it all, and it looks like we really fucked it up. It’s all very sad.

(the American radicals, that is)

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

–Seamus Heaney

A son of the Weathermen, son of four of them, as it turned out, has been named as one of 32 American winners of this year’s Rhodes scholarships.
He is now 22, and since his birth parents have been in prison since he was fourteen months old, he was raised by two other weathermen leaders [one of whom had a memoir published, fatefully, on September 11, 2001].

As with the other triumphs of his young life, Chesa Boudin was unable to celebrate with his parents on Saturday afternoon when he was named a Rhodes scholar. He could not even share the good news.
As maximum-security inmates in the New York State prison system, Katherine Boudin and David Gilbert are barred from receiving telephone calls or e-mail messages. Though Mr. Boudin has rigged his dorm room at Yale University to override the block on collect calls, neither parent was able to connect with him today. They will read of their son’s accomplishment in the newspaper, instead, and it may be days before they can congratulate him.

While he has spoken widely and intelligently about all four of his parents’ experiences, Chesa Boudin prefers to talk about his own world right now.

“We have a different name for the war we’re fighting now — now we call it the war on terrorism, then they called it the war on communism,” Mr. Boudin said. “My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world. I’m dedicated to the same thing.”
“I don’t know that much about my parents’ tactics; I’ll talk about my tactics,” he added. “The historical moment we find ourselves in determines what is most appropriate for social change.”

Incidently, does anyone else reading this NYTimes account find the terms of Boudin’s birth-parents incarceration, restricting communication with their only child, worthy of a culture which pretends to worship family values and which denies it has political prisoners?

only welfare programs for corporations are moral in the American political ethos
Could they make the nexus any more clear?
A special government board earlier this week rejected a $1.8 billion loan guarantee request by troubled United Airlines. On friday, House Speaker Dennis Hastert blasted the move to deny a federal bailout of a major employer in his home state of Illinois.

“This is clearly a wrongheaded decision for our nation’s economy on so many grounds,” Hastert said in an usually strongly worded statement.
Hastert, a Republican, led a high-profile lobbying campaign on behalf of Chicago-based United, which employs 83,000 people and could be headed for bankruptcy court in the coming days.
He discussed the matter with President Bush and his senior economic advisers, including ousted Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, in the weeks before Wednesday’s decision by the Air Transportation Stabilization Board.

The only surprise is the government’s initial rejection of the request, especially in the face of such pressures. Yes, the issues are complex, the good guys are not facing off neatly against the bad guys, and the story isn’t over yet. We can be certain however that the big money will make the decision in the end, and most of the messiness will not be visible to us.

–that the man sometimes described as the President of The United States is capable of awesome profundity. To wit:

“Sometimes, Washington is one of these towns where the person—people who think they’ve got the sharp elbow is the most effective person.” —New Orleans, Dec. 3, 2002
“These people don’t have tanks. They don’t have ships. They hide in caves. They send suiciders out.”—Speaking about terrorists, Portsmouth, N.H., Nov. 1, 2002
“If you don’t have any ambitions, the minimum-wage job isn’t going to get you to where you want to get, for example. In other words, what is your ambitions? And oh, by the way, if that is your ambition, here’s what it’s going to take to achieve it.”—Speech to students in Little Rock, Ark., Aug. 29, 2002
“Nothing he [Saddam Hussein] has done has convinced me—I’m confident the Secretary of Defense—that he is the kind of fellow that is willing to forgo weapons of mass destruction, is willing to be a peaceful neighbor, that is—will honor the people—the Iraqi people of all stripes, will—values human life. He hasn’t convinced me, nor has he convinced my administration.”—Crawford, Texas, Aug. 21, 2002

Sleep tight.

Fortunately we have already seen an enormous number of articulate essays expressing outrage that Henry Kisssinger has been appointed to head the outrageously tardy formation of a commission charged with investigating the terrorist attacks of Sept.11. Here‘s another.
Unfortunately, nothing will come of this outrage and we will remain saddled with what the world will see as a cover-up constructed by political insiders and presided over by a man who has managed to ensure that most of his own sordid career remains a closed book, a man, incidently, who currently cannot travel outside this country without risking subpoena or arrest in connection with war crimes for which he is alleged to be responsible. Nice start for reassuring the world of our virtue and innocence.

The “war crime” charge against Kissinger became something of a scare in London earlier this year. During Kissinger’s visit to Royal Albert Hall, human rights activists staged a protest, some banging drums and chanting “evil war criminal” outside. Peter Tatchell had just lost a court fight to have Kissinger jailed for the “killing, injuring and displacement” of some 3 million Vietnamese and Cambodians during America’s military involvement in Indochina. Earlier, the Spanish judge who prosecuted Gen. Augusto Pinochet for crimes against humanity had tried to get permission to question Kissinger in the case. Specifically, the judge was interested in Kissinger’s possible knowledge or involvement in a plan Latin America’s military regimes had employed to get rid of their opposition. The British Home Office denied the judge permission to question Kissinger during his visit to London.

By golly, it had just never occurred to me that following through with a promised statutory pay raise would undermine the “war on terrorism.” Still, our leaders must certainly know what they’re doing, seeing that they’re not against all effective pay raises, notably the virtual elimination of taxes for the very very very rich and the generous removal of the estate tax which so burdens the future security of the spawn of America’s multi-millionaires. The argument seems to be that we will win the war only if those famously patriotic folks get more dough, while the rest of us pay with our huge reserves of savings, freedom and blood.

Citing a state of national emergency brought on by last year’s attacks, President Bush on Friday slashed the pay raises most civilian federal workers were to receive starting in January.
Under a law passed in 1990, federal employees covered by the government’s general schedule pay system would receive a two-part pay increase: a 3.1 percent increase, plus an increase based on private-sector wage changes in the areas where they work.
Bush said Friday the latter type of increase [about 18.6 percent in the D.C. area] will not be given.

This ukase is only among the first of an endless number we can expect in coming years, “because the terrorist threat continues.”

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s aide has finally been forced to resign over her calling George W. Bush a “moron.”

Mr. Chrétien comes from the left wing of Canada’s governing Liberals and is uncomfortable with Mr. Bush’s stance on many issues, including the threats to attack Iraq.
Mr. Chrétien, 68, developed a close friendship with President Clinton during his presidency and often golfed with him. But he is one of the few leaders of a close United States ally yet to be invited to spend time at Mr. Bush’s private ranch in Texas.

Wow. I think Chrétien probably knows how lucky he’s been.

Ah, the beautiful logic of money and power.
I’ve been wanting for some time to post an item on the fascinating Bush health and insurance care plans and to reference a compelling dichotomy, but Ted Rall‘s take is superb this week, as seen in the Village Voice and elsewhere.
Today was certainly the day for some of us to try to make a small fuss.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — President Bush signed legislation today to help the insurance industry against terrorist attacks, describing it as a measure that would help Americans on Main Street and Wall Street, boiler room to board room. [and said with a straight face, I presume]

The more immediate, political evil of “family values” affects all of us, whether our own families are “valued” or not. In Florida, the Bush family has been helped by the Rehnquist family, even as each family helps itself.

At the request of Gov. Jeb Bush’s office, the inspector general of the Health and Human Services Department ordered delays in a federal audit of Florida’s pension fund that ensured that the review would not be completed before Governor Bush won re-election, officials said today.
Congress is investigating the delays sought by the inspector general, Janet Rehnquist, daughter of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

I’m not making this up.