A Little Revolution is a Good Thing

American Liberation (part 1)

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves
and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United
States of America.”

No greater farce has ever been pulled in the history of Democracy (a history which by far predates this document) or in the history of human affairs in general. The constitutional convention was a collaboration of a handful of rich white male protestants gathering together in one place at one time to decide amongst themselves what kind of constitution would best preserve the interests of rich white male protestants. Even the most noble among them -- Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for example -- were driven, despite it all, by this same enlightened self-interest. "We the people" was never meant to include blacks, Indians, non-Christians, poor whites or women. From the outset, every aspect of American heritage has been arranged around a closed circle of wealthy elites; in what few occasions power was grabbed from outside of that circle (as with Andrew Jackson and FDR) the entire system reorganized itself as if to prevent such an atrocity from ever happening again.

In that regard, little has changed since those immortal words were published. Pressure from the People has forced this Federal Government to recognize the rights—and also, humanity—of blacks, women, the poor and disadvantaged of all races and backgrounds. It has been forced to make concessions under pressure from groups outside of their private little clique, and forced to enact legislation against its own best interests just to pacify the rancor of the masses. These measures, progress to be sure, were made possible through the machinery of the System; in spite of itself, American democracy has given at least a partial voice to those who were originally disenfranchised at the Constitutional Convention.

You’ve probably read all about the Founding Fathers in your history books. In High School they fed us all the same pre-chewed “Great Man” nonsense about how a handful of post-enlightenment intellectuals got together and hammered out the blueprints for the Greatest Country Ever Made. You probably didn’t read about a guy named Daniel Shay, a pissed-off farmer who came back from the Revolutionary war to find his property and livelihood threatened by profiteering banks and landowners. You probably didn’t read that Shay wasn’t alone in his despair, that poor farmers all across western Massachusetts were loosing their land and their rights to a band of wealthy oligarchs who controlled both the banks and the government. In short, a strong centralized government in Massachusetts, designed to protect the interests of the wealthiest and most powerful businessmen in the state at the expense of blue collar, hard-working citizens.

Sound familiar?

To put it bluntly, Shays’ Rebellion scared the hell out of the young American government. And right they were to be afraid; Shays’ uprising generated popular support faster than Rudy Giuliani generates ex-wives. Despite its now-infamous name, Shays’ Rebellion was hardly Shays’ to control; his "followers" operated independently and collectively, organizing separate units with their own chain of command. The so-called "Regulators" saw themselves as guardians of a revolution betrayed by the greed and avarice of a wealthy elite. Down to the core, their political motivations -- if they had any -- were just a means to an end; all any of them wanted was to keep their property.

Shay’s Rebellion was eventually put down, but not before it put the fear of God into the Constitutional Convention and prompted them to scrap the Articles of Confederation and build a new government with far greater power and greater centralized authority. Alexander Hamilton famously remarked:

"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct and permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy..."

Hamilton is effectively prescribing the creation of a permanent ruling class, a defacto oligarchy under the guise of democracy where the interests of the "mass of the people" are preserved only insofar as they interests of the "Rich and well-born" are also preserved. To what extent Jefferson or Madison or the other founding fathers agreed may be debatable, but their actions certainly weren't, and two hundred years later, Hamilton's dream of a permanent ruling class is as real now as it always has been.

But if you're reading this blog on a computer that costs less than my car, chances are you're not part of that ruling elite. You're probably sitting in a living room somewhere on a laptop, or in a computer room in an apartment or a house you earned with your own hard work. You probably don't have stock options in a Fortune 500 company (unlike Dick Cheney), and you've probably never owned your own oil company. Like 99% of Americans you will never be a candidate for President of the United States or the U.S. Senate, lacking as you do the business or political connections to raise the million dollars necessary to finance a campaign. Probably, you're one of the three hundred million or so people in this country who would have agreed with the Regulators' beliefs, as explained less than accurately by Henry Knox:

"That the property of the United States has been protected from he confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and justice and ought to be swept off the face of the Earth."

Do you suppose there's any real difference between the Republican or Democratic parties? Whatever they stand for, in whatever ways they're different, the things they have in common mean their decisions will be always be based on the needs of a very small number of people with a very large amount of money.

Empire v. Democracy

Main Entry: de·moc·ra·cy
Pronunciation: di-'mä-kr&-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -cies
1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
2 : a political unit that has a democratic government —dem·o·crat·ic /"de-m&-'kra-tik/ adjective —dem·o·crat·i·cal·ly adverb

Democracy is what happens when a large group of people from all walks of life get together in a rational and intelligent matter and decide, amongst themselves, what course of action their society should take. The opposite of democracy is dictatorship; the father of democracy is reason; the child of democracy is progress, and the enemy of democracy is greed.

So what do you call an organization that takes extreme measures to suppress or compromise real democracy all over the world in order to further its own agenda? What do you call a political faction who, after watching their enemies win popular elections all over the world, intervene secretly to undermine the power of those enemies, drive them out of power and place their people under the rule of a "more moderate" faction? What do you call a group of political elites who ignore the wishes of their own people at every opportunity and force the creation of laws and military doctrines in and outside of their own borders that endanger and defame the dignity of those very same voters?

Organizations like this have existed under many names and labels: imperialists, fascists, juntas. Any of these three rightly applies to the Bush Administration, which has by and large proven itself one of the most anti-democratic governments in modern history. It's not hard to understand why either. The Bush Administration is full of people (Cheney et al) who are focused on so called "American global leadership" of the world. In short, it's a Neoconservative ethos that the United States has some sort of divine manifest destiny to dominate the rest of the world. The real obvious problem with that theory is that, frankly, most of the world has no desire to be dominated by the United States or anyone else; they have their own ideas about what's good for their society and their government, about how they want to live and what they want to believe, and their vision of an ideal society is considerably different from the vision of the Bushite Neocons.

That, you see, is where Democracy becomes a problem. You will not find any Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who haven't seen at least one family member arrested, beaten or blown up by the Israeli military. You'll find even fewer of them who have a particularly favorable opinion of the United States Government, whose spokescreatures say things like "Israel has a right to defend itself" or "A peaceful solution is available, but only if the Palestinians renounce violence." It's therefore not particularly hard to imagine why an organization like Hamas, who has a reputation for standing up to Israel and the United States, would be more popular among Palestinians. Add to that notorious corruption by the Fatah Party, plus (in the case of Abu Mazen) close diplomatic ties with--and even support from--Israel and the United states, then really, it shouldn't be at all surprising that Hamas swept the elections in 2006. The United States and Israel may be indifferent to Palestinian complaints; Hamas is not. The West may be in different to the disparity of power, resources and quality of life between the Palestinian territories and Israel; Hamas is not. Condi Rice may be indifferent to the fact that the Israeli military has killed more Palestinians in the last six years than all Palestinian groups combined in the last thirty; Hamas is not. People tend to be less supportive of a government that doesn't give a damn whether they live or die than they are of an organization that is fighting tooth and nail to keep them alive. The Palestinians know--or at least perceive--that their militant "fringe" will stand up for them no matter what Israel or even the Americans do. In short, since it has been American foreign policy for the past forty years to screw over the Palestinians whenever possible, Palestinians are not likely to vote for candidates who suck up to the West.

That's where Elliott Abrams comes in. Under the Reagan Administration, Abrams assembled a truly impressive résumé. During his tenure under Reagan, he helped to whitewash the depravity of Salvadoran Death Squads, who in fact were being funded, armed, trained and directed by the CIA. He denied the existence of the El Mozte Massacre which, it turned out, was a CIA-led operation designed to discredit the "communists." He later solicited money for the Nicaraguan Contras, who were also (illegally) being funded, armed, trained and directed by the CIA. When the State Department demanded Manuel Noriega to step down and create a "democratic government," there was Abrams again demanding a government free of corruption, maybe forgetting that Manuel Noriega had been installed in power by the CIA in the first place.

What would a man like Elliott Abrams do if he was appointed to a powerful and influential position like, say, Deputy National Security Advisor? I suppose, as soon as he realized that a large, well-armed political faction vehemently opposed to "U.S. Interests in the Region" was rapidly gaining popularity among the people, he would funnel huge amounts of money and weapons to U.S.-friendly "moderates" in the Palestinian camp--in this case, Fatah--and spearhead the creation of massive military organizations like the Preventive Security Force and the Presidential Guard. The Preventive Security Force, who just finished getting their asses handed to them in Gaza, are run by Mohammad Dahlan: head of the recently-appointed "Palestinian National Security Council" and has his own private militia trained by British and American "services". Unlike the Iran-Contra thing, these arms shipments to Fatah haven't been exactly secret, and really, neither has their purpose. The State Department's made no secret of the fact that it despises Hamas, that it wants to see Hamas destroyed by any neas neccesary, and that, despite being the democratically elected government of Palestine, it will not under any circumstances recognize its legitimacy unless it plays nice (like Fatah) and rolls over for the Israelis.

America's history of "Global Leadership" is a dismal one. The Contras failed to destroy the Sandinistas, the CIA-trained military death squads in El Salvador were finally destroyed by their moderate and leftist opponents. And as for Noriega, he wound up turning his back on American interests, which is the main reason why Bush Senior invaded Panama. Ngô Ðình Diệm--America's first puppet ruler of Vietnam--was assassinated by a military coup, and ten years later the replacement puppet, Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, was forced to resign just before the Communists took over South Vietnam. Now, apparently, history is repeating itself, and what every minute is looking more and more like America's puppet government in Palestine (under "moderate" President Abu Mazen) is about to get ousted by a popular uprising.

Speaking of Vietnam, it occurs to me all of a sudden that in the 1950s, it was pretty well understood that Ngô Ðình Diệm had about a snowball's chance in hell of beating Hồ Chí Minh in a free democratic election. Instead of reuniting Vietnam under a single leader, elected by the Vietnamese people, the United States kept the country divided into North and South and rigged the election in the south to keep Diệm in power. Twenty years later, the Communists took over the South anyway; what should have taken two months and a national election instead took twenty years and cost over seven million lives.

I could be misunderstanding something, but isn't that the whole reason democracy was invented in the first place? So that all the people in a particular nation can get together and come up with a solution that meets most of their needs? So that, when a particular government is doing things that are dangerous or stupid (or both), the people affected can simply choose a new leader who won't cause such problems? At least we can say that Bush's rhetoric is more or less correct: democracy is the answer to most of the problems in the Middle East and around the world. Unfortunately, the Bushites need to get it through their heads one of these days that Democracy means a hell of a lot more than "a political contest between two or more pro-American candidates on the CIA payroll." If you keep sabotaging genuine democratic movements all over the world, people are going to notice; if the elections don't bring change, then an armed uprising will.

Comprehensive Immigration Problem

So I'm new to the whole blogger thing. I don't know why I didn't do this ten years ago, it really couldn't be simpler. It's journalism in its most pure form: collect your facts, collect your thoughts, put them together where everyone else can see them. For damn loudmouth pink-commie-bastard like yours truly, that pretty much comes naturally. As for the latest facts I've collected: President Bush, in his infinite wisdom, has thrown what's left of his credibility behind "Comprehensive Immigration Reform." Critics on the right and the left have both complained that the new bill pretty much offers amnesty to every illegal immigrant who was in the country before January 1st, 2007. That's mostly based on their interpretation of the new Z visa the bill introduces. Basically, the CIR bill does three things: it (1) creates a guest worker program for immigrants who are, at this moment, outside the United States (2) ends Chain Immigration and streamlines the backlog on green cards and (3) provides a "fraud proof" Z visa to 12 million illegal immigrants who are then allowed to remain inside the United States pretty much indefinitely.

It's Number 3, actually, that's got everyone so up in arms. If the bill goes through, then twelve million illegal immigrants inside the United States before January 1st can stay exactly where they are, and they won't get sent out of the country just on the basis of being non-citizens. The Lou Dobbs crowd like to call this "Amnesty" for illegals. Every bill, measure and movement in American politics has some sort of buzz word that acts as a rallying cry for its opponents; in this case, the word is Amnesty.

But as the bill's supporters are quick to point out, the Z Visa wouldn't actually give them amnesty. And they're right, it most certainly doesn't. Amnesty is what happens when the government guarantees that a certain crime will not be prosecuted at any time in the future. The twelve million people who are guilty of entering the United States illegally will not have that guarantee. What the Z Visa actually provides--at least on paper--is probation. That means all twelve million illegals suddenly become slightly legal, provided they hold a steady job and stay on the right side of the law.

When the Lou Dobbs crowd complains about Amnesty (I'm a fan of Dobbs, to tell you the truth), they're missing this in the big picture. The Bush Administration and its corporate allies don't want amnesty either; if that were the case, those twelve million illegal immigrants would instantly become twelve million American Citizens, complete with voting rights, organization, and their own internal agenda driven by a common cultural background. The Bush Regime wants amnesty the way Jefferson Davis wanted the abolition of slavery, and all for most of the same reasons: illegal immigrants are a godsend to the "economy" (the politically correct term for "corporate profit"), not because they're taking jobs Americans won't do, but because they're taking pay cuts Americans won't accept and working in conditions Americans won't tolerate. The less Doll and Tropicana have to pay their workers, the more money they get to keep on a carton of orange juice. And no, lower wages does not mean cheaper orange juice; capitalism doesn't work that way.

Bush is all for the Z Visa because it provides his corporate sponsors with exactly what their fat wallets depend on: a cheap, desperate, controllable labor force. The bill would instantly create a brand new quasi-legal working class at the bottom of the economic ladder with no votes, no power, no constitutional rights to speak of. The "path to citizenship" offered by this bill puts them on the bottom of an already backlogged waiting list of legal immigrants waiting for their green cards.

As for what this will do to America, that depends on who you ask. The Bush Regime's economists and corporate sponsors have visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads: as wages (and therefore, production costs) plummet, corporate profits skyrocket, and the Invisible Hand squeezes out a few extra drops to trickle down to the Middle Class. The rich get richer, the poor get screwed, the mediocre remain irrelevant. We haven't had a socioeconomic strata layered so perfectly since the good-old-days when black people--slaves or otherwise--were doing all those jobs that White Americans wouldn't do. And maybe corporate America has the right idea reverting back to its old sharecropping, bullwhipping, human exploitative ways... in Bush terms, twelve million slaves picking cotton fourteen hours a day will always be better for the economy than twelve million unionized workers picking cotton eight hours a day at ten bucks an hour.

The good news is, Latinos aren't nearly as oblivious to class difference as your average WASP. As much respect as I have for the Lou Dobbses of the world, it's a painful fact that Middle Class isn't in the firing line of corporate America; the ruling elites of this country depend on the middle class to be their first line of defense against the working class, whom they've always been at war with, and always will be. After all, the corporate CEO with the eight-figure income never gets shot by a disgruntled employee; he's too busy hiding behind Bobby from IT.

There are already plenty of reasons to protest the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, besides the fact that Bush thinks it's a good idea, and even besides fact that the C.I.R. Act will immediately create a powerless labor caste ripe for corporate exploitation. One of the most pressing reasons--at least to me--is the reason from history: in over two hundred years since this country was founded, nothing positive or meaningful has ever come out of an act or a movement that promised "reform." American didn't fight a civil war over "slavery reform," the labor movements of the 1920s didn't shut down their factories demanding "corporate reform," women didn't fight for the right to vote on a platform of "suffrage reform," and the Civil Rights Movement didn't gain national support by demanding "social and legal reform." In America's peculiar history, "reform" is what happens when the Federal Government replaces a broken system that does a certain thing with a completely new system that does the exact same thing. We do have an immigration problem in America, but it's going to take alot more than some token reform legislation to fix it.