ah hah!

Their cover is finally blown. It’s now in the NYTimes – an explanation for the idiocy of the Bush administration’s economic policy, one which is dominated by an $800-billion-plus tax cut delivered to the super-rich in the midst of soaring budgets. The truth should already have been obvious, but the political opposition and the (American) media hasn’t put it forward.
The secret? The cost of the tax bill is so large that the nation won’t be able to fulfill its obligations to essential, popular programs which have been with us for up to seventy years, and that is precisely the idea behind the policy.

The Financial Times [which Paul Krugman’s Times piece describes accurately as “traditionally the voice of solid British business opinion”] suggests that “more extreme Republicans” actually want a fiscal train wreck: “Proposing to slash federal spending, particularly on social programs, is a tricky electoral proposition, but a fiscal crisis offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing such cuts through the back door.”
Good for The Financial Times. It seems that stating the obvious has now, finally, become respectable.
It’s no secret that right-wing ideologues want to abolish programs Americans take for granted. But not long ago, to suggest that the Bush administration’s policies might actually be driven by those ideologues — that the administration was deliberately setting the country up for a fiscal crisis in which popular social programs could be sharply cut — was to be accused of spouting conspiracy theories.
Yet by pushing through another huge tax cut in the face of record deficits, the administration clearly demonstrates either that it is completely feckless, or that it actually wants a fiscal crisis. (Or maybe both.)

Krugman cautions Americans not to continue to underestimate the fiscal and political dangers.

But the people now running America aren’t conservatives: they’re radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need. The Financial Times, it seems, now understands what’s going on, but when will the public wake up?

Bush himself may indeed be “feckless,” as I’ve always argued, but I believe there are interests in the White House which know exactly what they are doing.

Pepper’s gone

And the paper of record remembers her.

Pepper [LaBeija] was the last of the four great queens of the modern Harlem balls; Angie Xtravaganza, Dorian Corey and Avis Pendavis all died in recent years. These four exuded a sort of wild expressionism that might make Las Vegas showgirls seem tame.

LaBeija was the last name used by all members of the House of LaBeija, the group of performers Pepper led.

When Pepper LaBeija was not onstage, she was William Jackson of the Bronx, who sometimes dressed as a man.

But to the younger members of the house, for whom there was no other family, she was “mother;” the others were the “children.”

Miss LaBeija had diabetes, which had led to the amputation of both feet, and had been bedridden for most of the last decade. She last performed at a ball in 2001, when 30 attendants delivered her on a litter to the crowd’s jubilation.
“Her specialty was the Egyptian effect,” Marcel LaBeija said.
Pepper LaBeija was a legend to the members and patrons of the Harlem ball scene, a world of extravagant make-believe that crosses sexual boundaries and that was chronicled in “Paris Is Burning,” directed by Jennie Livingston. In an interview, Ms. Livingston spoke of Pepper’s “glamorous bravado” that stood out in a flock of Marilyn Monroes.
The public also glimpsed the ball scene in a Madonna video that featured voguing, a highly stylized and posed dance form used in the balls. Voguing was also featured at the Love Balls, which were held at Roseland in 1989 and 1990 and drew top fashion industry figures.
Though men have long dressed as women for many reasons, the modern institution of the Harlem ball began around 1960, said Marcel LaBeija, who is writing a book on the subject. The idea was to give gay blacks and Hispanics a place to dress up and perform. An earlier circuit for drag performers had been geared to white people, and black performers had sometimes whitened their faces to fit in.

The Times does it very right sometimes.

For most of her life, Miss LaBeija’s world was the balls. Marcel said that Pepper supported herself by producing them and by teaching modeling.
In an interview with The Village Voice in 2000, Miss LaBeija said her life had grown more ordinary, and called herself an “old-way legend in recovery.” Without mentioning her disabled status, she volunteered that she had even given up shoplifting designer clothes, called “mopping” by performers who rely on the practice.
“You mop, you get locked,” she explained.

Pepper is survived by her mother, a son and a daughter.

Sharon’s “reservations”

The Israeli government has a “road map” of its own.

After 11 months of work, Israel is close to completing a first phase of a barrier to wall off most of the West Bank. Israel’s government says the barrier – which includes fences, walls, barbed wire, patrol roads and a deep ditch – is meant to stop Palestinian militants from attacking Israel.
But the fence does not follow the “Green Line,” the internationally recognized frontier between Israel and the West Bank lands it occupied in the 1967 war. Rather, the barrier slices through Palestinian villages and farms, cutting off about 10 percent of the West Bank. A World Bank report this month said a finished barrier could leave 95,000 Palestinians trapped in walled enclaves.
While Israeli officials defend the route of the fence, saying it is defined solely by security needs, they also acknowledge that it sometimes veers off the Green Line to incorporate Jewish settlements on what is generally considered Palestinian land.
The United States is pushing a “road map” to peace that envisions settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with security for Israel and a viable state for the Palestinians. The Israeli cabinet approved the plan, with reservations, yesterday, and the Palestinians have already backed it.
But the far more effective and concrete step toward resolving the conflict – on Israeli terms – is the fence, many Palestinians, Israelis and scholars say. Palestinians say it is a step toward seizing more West Bank land and thus preventing a viable Palestinian state. The fence will separate Palestinian border communities from their lands, work and relatives, residents say, and thus tend to drive them farther east into the West Bank.

Of course these horrible fences, walls, barbed wire, patrol roads and deep ditches, have already been seen for months in news photos widely-distributed around the world. The images are rarely seen in the U.S., but the constructions are represented in today’s Newsday [print edition only] sketches, and it all looks exactly like a concentration camp perimeter. Yes, Sharon has reservations.
Oh, and the ghetto, er, camp, er, reservation or dog-run is to be only .07392 of the territory belonging to the Palestinians in 1947. See Jonathan Cook’s, “A Cage For Palestinians.”

Israel is also preparing a second, similarly tortuous wall near the eastern border of the West Bank, which it shares with Jordan, that will steal even more land from the Palestinians and offers no obvious security benefits.
.
After the wall is finished, at a cost of more than $2 billion, the Palestinians will live in two minuscule states behind concrete and electrified fencing, restricted to their main population centers. Thousands of rural Palestinians will live outside the West Bank cage in military controlled zones, denied rights as citizens of either Palestine or Israel. The rest will live inside the prison. Palestine will finally be born from 42 percent of 80 percent of 22 percent of the historic Palestinian homeland.

Update, May 31: I’ve now located some decent photo images of the wall where it is nearly complete. See this post.

memorials

Shouldn’t we ask, “why?” each time there is a call for war?
The Vietnam War continues today for many. Some of its service victims lived for decades with major physical injuries to accompany the psychological pain. Some live still. Neither they and other, luckier, survivors nor those who stayed at home have ever gotten answers. Some couldn’t have heard them anyway.

Specialist Rogers was 20 years old, almost through his one-year tour, on Dec. 14, 1968. That day, while on a patrol near the Cambodian border, his unit came under fire and he was struck in the head by several pieces of shrapnel.
“Death would have been a blessing,” his brother Joseph of Waynesville said this week. But instead of dying, James Rogers lived on in twilight for almost 22 more years.
“He was helpless,” his brother said. “There wasn’t anything he could do.”
James Rogers was hospitalized for a year before their parents, Joseph and Flora Rogers, brought him home. Sometimes, he seemed to recognize his parents and four siblings. He might hold up a finger in response to a question.
But as for how much he really understood and felt, “nobody knows for sure,” his brother said.
James’s wife divorced him, and the Rogers family did not blame her. James could not eat or drink without help. His food was blended. He had to be propped up on the toilet. “If you could envision a 180-pound infant,” his brother said, voice trailing away.
Despite heavy doses of tranquilizers, James had frequent seizures, so violent that his thrashings once broke a wheelchair. “He suffered unbelievably,” his brother said. “I can’t describe what he went through.”
His end, at least, was peaceful. James Rogers died in his sleep on Nov. 14, 1990. He was 42.

And this and the other stories in the this NYTimes article are only those of guys on “our” side.
Why do we let our old men tell us that using boys and young men to kill other boys and young men is the only way to stop the evil done by other old men?
Look at the small slideshow on the site linked above.

loving neither peace nor freedom

It’s Memorial Day weekend in America, and we should be remembering the people who have died in over 200 wars we have fought since 1776.
Today however we read that the Bush regime is about to begin another one (it’s fourth, if we include the “war on terrorism,” which will be eternal).

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Bush administration has cut off contact with Iran, and Pentagon officials are pushing for action they believe could destabilize the government of the Islamic republic, The Washington Post reported in its Sunday edition.

Still think this is a peace-loving nation?
What about our boast that we are a freedom-loving nation? A week ago a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter returned to his alma mater, Rockford College, a mid-western liberal arts school with a progresive history, to deliver the commencement speech.

[Chris] Hedges, a war correspondent, criticized military heroic ideals that grow during war. The fervor sacrifices individual thought for temporarily belonging to something larger, he said.
Hedges sympathized with U.S. soldiers. He characterized them as boys from places such as Mississippi and Arkansas who joined the military because there were no job opportunities.
“War in the end is always about betrayal. Betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians and idealists by cynics,” Hedges said in lecture fashion as jeers and “God Bless Americas” could be heard in the background.

His microphone was unplugged twice, he was booed and jeered, fog horns drowned his words, and the college president told him to wrap it up.
Go here for the full text of the speech, at least as delivered.
Hedges is the author of “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” This is from a review in Publishers Weekly:

In [his book] Hedges draws on his experiences covering conflicts in Bosnia, El Salvador and Israel as well as works of literature from the Iliad to Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism to look at what makes war so intoxicating for soldiers, politicians and ordinary citizens. He discusses outbreaks of nationalism, the wartime silencing of intellectuals and artists, the ways in which even a supposedly skeptical press glorifies the battlefield and other universal features of war, arguing not for pacifism but for responsibility and humility on the part of those who wage war.

another way to security?

Jonathan Schell’s new work, “The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People,” proposes a “revolution against violence” in world politics, but he doesn’t explain how we are to get there given the current realities of power and opinion in America. Otherwise, judging from the account of the NYTImes review, by Richard Falk, Schell is not merely an idealist. He doesn’t depend upon a moral argument to challenge “the strong linkage between national security and war that has dominated both political consciousness and international relations for centuries.” His argument seems to be pragmatic.

The book mounts perhaps the most impressive argument ever made that there exists a viable and desirable alternative to a continued reliance on war and that the failure to seize this opportunity will bring catastrophic results to America and the world [my italics].

Schell neither begins nor ends his argument as a pacifist.

The book is infused with the Gandhian ethos of nonviolence as theory and practice, and yet Mr. Schell tells us that although he had wondered whether the process of writing this book had turned him into a pacifist, he decides not: “The difficulty of the creed for me was not the root of the word, pax, but its suffix, ist, — suggesting that one rule was applicable to all imaginable situations.”
But more significantly, he adds, a preoccupation with an unconditional renunciation of violence is not integral to his argument, which is to insist that there exists a growing presence, “fostered by historical events, of an alternative” to war, and he explicates and persuasively links his inquiry with his greatest forebear, William James, and his advocacy of “the moral equivalent of war.”
Warning of the spread of weapons of mass destruction, “The Unconquerable World,” offers a suggestive blend of hope and despair. In Mr. Schell’s words, “Arms and man have both changed in ways that, even as they imperil the world as never before, have created a chance for peace that is greater than ever before.”

But only if we find a real press and a regime change, at home – soon.

the new Downtown

A wild turkey on the 28th-floor balcony of an apartment on West 70th Street? The healthy-looking female has now taken up residence in the more interesting environs of Chelsea and the Village, and we hope she’s happy. Unlike most Downtowners however, she may find it difficult to find friends.
A National Audubon Society ornithologist says that turkeys have not been known to fly as high as the 28th floor.

“They are not vertical fliers,” said [Greg Butcher]. “You will see them maybe 20 feet up in trees, but not 100 feet. I’d say that turkey went up an elevator.”
Mr. Lindenauer [the Upper West Side guy] insisted that the turkey was not planted on his balcony. [E.J. McAdams, a director of New York City Audubon] said she could have made her way to the 28th floor by flying up from balcony to balcony, like an elevator making all the stops.

Where is the turkey now? After making some stops in our own neighborhood, she headed further downtown to the Village, where she was last sighted this past monday, on top of a garage on Barrow Street.

“I have 50 guys who will kiss me like that”

No wonder New York is such a goldmine for Hollywood! You don’t have to know Brooklyn or Italians in Brooklyn, and you don’t have to know about Marlon Brando, but maybe it’s better if you do. Now, if only the large and small screen stories could read as well as Chris Hedges’ story on Sabasto F. Catucci, an incredibly successful businessman who began as a trucker on the Brooklyn docks.
The best “scenes” are these:

He is a rich man now. He has a big house in Westchester and seven Mercedeses, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a summer house in Spring Lake, N.J. He and his second wife, Lorraine, make their own wine. He employs more than two dozen of his relatives among his 1,000 or so employees. He has the rounded, bulky build of a man who has spent a lifetime lifting weights. He has the flashy diamond pinky ring, with his initials in diamonds, that speaks of success. And he is proud: of his company, of America, of the largely Italian-American neighborhood around the docks and of a new treatment he is undergoing for baldness.
. . . .
He grew up in a world in which bravado and fists often resolved disputes. He was thrown out of his Roman Catholic high school for hitting one of the brothers who taught him. And he did not make it through public high school because of “the same thing.”
“I had a run-in with a teacher,” he said, taking a drag on a slim cigarillo. “I picked him up by his throat.”
. . . .
Later, seated in a small Italian restaurant where he goes to eat three days a week with several of his employees, he announced over a glass of red wine that he could take on anyone at the table. No one disagreed. As he spoke, Guy D’Anna, 36, a waiter who also works for him as a longshoreman, came up and kissed him.
“Without Sal,” he said, using Mr. Catucci’s nickname, “we would all be out on the street.”
Mr. Catucci beamed.
“I run my company like a family,” he said, as he sat with his arm around Mr. D’Anna’s waist. “They got a problem, I got a problem.”
. . . .
He does not want to take his companies public. He likes to make decisions with speed, without going to committees and boards that can stymie decisions for months. And he trusts his three sons, his brother, his nephews, two brothers-in-law and his son-in-law to keep an eye on every aspect of the business.
. . . .
He could retire, he said. He has made enough money. He loves his home and said he had just put in 200 tomato plants.
“I have 20 animals,” he said. “I used to have 150. I had sheep, goats, cows, ducks, geese and chickens. Now I have 2 horses, 2 cats, one goat, 2 ducks and 15 geese. I love animals. I love looking out the picture window and watching them graze. It is like some people who like to look at the lights and people on 42nd Street.”
But he will never retire, he says.
“I have 50 guys who will kiss me like that,” he said, when Mr. D’Anna left. “It’s not the money. It’s the power trip.”

F.B.I.-run gay bordello in New York

In his obituary today in the NYTimes, we are reminded that C.A.Tripp’s ground-breaking 1975 book, “The Homosexual Matrix,” reported that during World War II the F.B.I. ran an all-male bordello in New York “staffed with homosexual agents charged with extracting information from foreign sailors.”
Sounds like a pretty posting for patriots, but wait, if this was during the war, why did the feds have to go to such trouble to get information from friendly navies? Was it just for fun? Since I couldn’t be there, I should read the book.

Ved Mehta

Ved Mehta, talking wistfully about the house he did not get:”Really, I wanted to buy an old house and adapt to it,” he said.

In America, everyone thinks he can build his own dream house. In the rest of the world, you adapt to the house. This country is so rich, everyone wants to dominate the world, not adapt to it.