alias Bruce.

Foamy the Squirrel on Gay Marriage

Foamy the Squirrel shows Barack "now that I've thought about it..." Obama how to grow some, uh, nuts on the issue of gay marriage.

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist for sharing Jack Cluth's video. 

The chaos now surrounding the American "deal" to release dissident Chen Guangcheng to the Chinese government

is a surprise only to the willingly blind. The accounts in today's NYT, including this one and this one, help to show why. This latest from CNN, though, also shows that Chen refuses to go quietly, and he is determined to put Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the American government on the spot just when they thought they had sidestepped this inconvenient problem.

It is clear that the U.S. wanted to squirm out of the Chen situation as quickly as possible so as to protect its shaky relationship with its creditor and cheap-labor-supplier China. In America's China policy, human rights rank well below the needs of the corporate and financial players who underwrite and steer our foreign policy. We all know this, although polite corporate media will not explicitly say it. Moreover, this has been true for many years, despite current Republican rants about the Obama administration's cowardly rush for an excuse to ditch dissident Chen. You can bet that a Republican administration would have been equally or more eager to find a quick way to dump Chen in the interest of business and finance, since both the Dems and the G.O.P work for the same employers.

Only an American policy team desperate to avoid a business-unfriendly fight would have believed (or pretended to believe) China's lame assurances that Chen and his family would not suffer further retaliation after his release back into Chinese hands. Chen himself seems to have panicked into accepting the deal, and now that reality is setting in he is, rightly, afraid and angry. Yes, he reportedly went along with it at first. But his current claim that Americans pressured him and failed to tell him all the facts appears to have some veracity. And in any case, when a panicked, injured, persecuted dissident shows up at an American embassy after a car chase, cooler heads have an obligation to assess the situation in the interest of justice.

To give you an idea of just how bad things had gotten for Chen by the time he reached the U.S. embassy, here is a short excerpt from one of the NYT pieces:

Although there were no legal charges pending against the couple, local officials had decided to turn their home into a makeshift prison with high walls, well-paid guards and sheets of metal to cover their windows.  The local government’s goal was twofold: to prevent Mr. Chen from engaging in his legal work against coercive family-planning policies and to keep the couple cut off from the outside world. When the Chens broke the rules — by trying to sneak out messages or secretly detailing their mistreatment in a homemade video — they were viciously beaten.

For the U.S. to then turn around and concoct a flimsy deal to drop Chen like a hot potato is, tragically, business as usual. In the aftermath of the dirty deal, we see handily-choreographed stances on both sides: China demands an American apology for its temporary sheltering of Chen. And the U.S. grandly refuses to say it is sorry. Everybody gets to protect their own flank. Except Chen, that is, whose ability to generate international outrage and pressure may determine his fate.

Meanwhile, the bloody economic gears keep turning.

Racial torture, libraries, and poems.

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the downtown public library in my town of Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till, as I've mentioned, was not only brutally beaten but tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. As it happens, a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

Photo: Robert Waxman

At a time when today's American brown shirts want for government's sole job to be the killing of infidels and the punishing of scapegoats, it's good to see a public library acting like a public library. My thanks to my friend Rachel for pointing this out.

There's a false rumor going around that the infamous Koch Bros are paying George Zimmerman's legal fees.

There are plenty of reasons to boycott Koch Industries, but not this bogus claim, which gives ammunition to those who want to trash liberal credibility. What is true is that Koch supported an organization that supported the creation of Stand Your Ground laws, although there is no direct link between Koch and the Florida law. See Snopes on this.

The Tulsa shootings. And a little deep background.

The Tulsa shootings have "hate crime" written all over them. This has yet to be established legally, but circumstantially it is generally agreed, for obvious reasons, that it's likely.

Two suspects are in custody and are expected to be indicted for murder and shooting with intent to kill. Local authorities, and black citizens, have so far been notably restrained in their public statements about two white men going on a murder rampage in a black community, which is interesting when you consider the likely public explosion if two black men were to drive through a white community and shoot five white strangers within a matter of minutes on Easter weekend.

Showing restraint under brutality, of course, is a learned trait in black communities that goes back to slavery and Jim Crow.

Tulsa, in fact, has a spectacularly bloody history when it comes to white attacks on black communities. Neither the CNN story nor the NYT account mentions this -- which is interesting in itself -- but Tulsa was the scene of one of the deadliest white-on-black racial mob massacres in American history in 1921. From Wiki:

The Tulsa Race Riot was a large-scale racially motivated conflict, May 31 - June 1, 1921, between the white and black communities of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which the wealthiest African-American community in the United States, the Greenwood District also known as 'The Negro Wall St' [1] was burned to the ground. Aerial fire bombing of black residential neighborhoods was reported. During the 16 hours of the assault, over 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, more than 6,000 Greenwood residents were arrested and detained at three local facilities.[2] An estimated 10,000 were left homeless, and 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire. The official count of the dead by the Oklahoma Department of Vital Statistics was 36, but other estimates of black fatalities have been up to about 300.[2]

The events of the riot were omitted from local and state history; "The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place." [3] In 1996, the state legislature commissioned a report, completed in 2001, to establish the historical record. It has approved some compensatory actions, such as scholarships for descendants of survivors, economic development of Greenwood, and a memorial park, dedicated in 2010, to the victims in Tulsa.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that today's horrible news about the shootings is just about Tulsa. The Tulsa murders draw together things that are going on at multiple levels in neighborhoods nationwide: White-panic Florida gun laws and the killings and hatred they let loose (see the armed neo-Nazis from Detroit who recently decided to patrol Sanford, Florida in proclaimed defense of white citizens); a corporate monarchy and its recession pummeling the brains of many whites into a paste of blind rage; a reactionary and fascist white "restore the homeland" movement (aka the Tea Party), with theocracy and vicious racism just beneath its surface, now being treated as a mainstream political force.

More soon.

Update on the Trayvon Martin killing:

CNN reports that George Zimmerman's attorney has now declared that the Florida stand your ground law doesn't figure in the case, and that his client will argue straight-up self-defense. The stand your ground law, the lawyer says, applies primarily to people being threatened in their homes, while Zimmerman, he claims, has a broader case for self-defense.

This seems a curious stance, since all the readings of the law I have seen, such as this one, clearly describe it as applying anywhere a person has a right to be, whether a public or private place. As such, stand your ground appears to offer Zimmerman's best chance at avoiding or beating prosecution. If a burly adult who actively chases a slender unarmed 17-year-old and then shoots him can't claim self-defense under the Swiss-cheese stand your ground law, how in the world is he going to make that claim under the traditionally more stringent standards of conventional self-defense?

It may be that Zimmerman's lawyer is retreating from the sheer public odiousness of a stand-your-ground defense, now that even the two Republican sponsors of the infamous Florida law are saying that the law doesn't protect Zimmerman and are calling for his arrest.

So, just as the law's authors are distancing themselves from him, perhaps Zimmerman's attorney is trying to distance his client from this now globally-detested law. Especially since Zimmerman is already a widely reviled figure, with public outrage spreading and unfavorable media coverage everywhere.

You could think of it as a lawyer in a rickety house hustling his client into the next room as the ceiling collapses.

At any rate, it looks like a desperate move by the attorney, and it may not be his last.

Not that there isn't a feasible chance that Zimmerman will get off, with or without a trial. But if he does, it may make the Rodney King riots look like a Sunday parade.

BTW, here is an interesting piece detailing a variety of cases in which Florida's stand your ground law has been used to fend off criminal charges for homicides in which the killers would otherwise likely have been indicted.

And here is a fact you personally need to know: although Florida was the first to enact a stand your ground law, similar laws have since been adopted by at least 25 states – that's half of America – including Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. Think about that the next time some stranger pushes a confrontation with you.

Dissecting the killing of Trayvon Martin.

On the night of February 26, Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old walking back to the home of his father's fiancé in a gated community in Sanford, Florida after having bought Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea at a nearby convenience store, was shot to death by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman, who is a white Hispanic, claims self-defense, despite a 911 recording in which Zimmerman apparently chases Martin on foot against the instructions of the 911 dispatcher, and another 911 recording in which a voice later identified as that of the unarmed Martin repeatedly screams for help before being silenced by a gunshot. The Sanford Police Department has filed no charges against Zimmerman.

All hell has since broken loose. The Sanford City Commissioners passed a no-confidence vote on the local chief of police, and he has subsequently taken a temporary leave after a (white) constituent reportedly sent an email telling him he "deserve[d] to be shot down like a dog" for neglecting the killing of Martin. Activists from Al Sharpton to the NAACP's Ben Jealous have descended upon Sanford. The U.S. Justice Department has opened an investigation into the shooting. Protest demonstrations are roaring, and growing, nationwide. More than 1.6 million people, as of this writing, have signed a Change.org petition calling for the arrest of Zimmerman. President Obama and every major Republican presidential contender have spoken about the case. Corporate media – in their single-sensational-event-driven way – are on a feeding frenzy. Outrage is approaching what a friend of mine calls a potential "Emmett Till moment" -- a possible tipping point in awareness and rage over blacks being killed with impunity.

Let's take a quick look at the two ingredients of the Trayvon Martin case: race and guns.

RACE
A central defense offered by George Zimmerman's family and his lawyer is that he is not a racist because 1.) he is a Hispanic who knows the meaning of discrimination, 2.) he has mentored black youths, and 3.) he welcomed and befriended a black female newcomer to his neighborhood. All of this, if true, tells us exactly nothing about how Zimmerman would regard an unknown young black male on the street. We do have some other clues, though: A Miami Herald reporter who reviewed Zimmerman's history of neighborhood watch 911 calls said, "What you see there is a pattern where every time George Zimmerman sees an African American who he doesn't recognize, he calls the police." Racism has a funny way of exempting some from its fears – non-threatening women and clearly needy students, for example – while leaping to fight-or-flight mode in the presence of an unknown young black male in a hoodie. Racial prejudice is also an equal-opportunity illness: today's police and vigilante cultures have plenty of participants of color – blacks, Hispanics, Asians – who are ready and eager to profile by race. Ask me, or any of millions of other law-abiding black American males, about our experiences with police of all colors.

Whether or not George Zimmerman is a conscious racist in his heart means nothing. What matters is what he did. Which leads to the second issue in the Trayvon Martin case.

GUNS
Florida's so-called "stand your ground" gun laws – recently-passed legislation that allows ordinary folks to carry concealed firearms and to use them, without retreating, whenever they feel threatened -– are what made it possible for Zimmerman to feel empowered as a civilian to kill the unarmed Martin with a semi-automatic handgun. The Sanford Police Department's explanation for its lack of action on the case, in fact, has been that without a witness they have no evidence to contradict Zimmerman's claim that his killing Martin complies with the stand your ground law. Without this law, a neighborhood volunteer of questionable judgment, like Zimmerman, would not be legally carrying a handgun with which to lethally judge when he felt "threatened." Without this law, the Martin case would have been, at worst, a fistfight culminating in a lawsuit -- instead of a killing.

Even proponents of Florida's stand your ground law, though, are distancing themselves from Zimmerman. That is because, against the instructions of a telephone dispatcher, Zimmerman reportedly got out of his car and pursued and confronted Martin. His breathless chase, in fact, can be heard on one of the 911 recordings. One of the stand your ground bill's co-sponsors told CNN after the Martin shooting, "Quite frankly, anyone who steps out in a pursuit in a confrontational mode with a firearm? That's not a self-protection act. You've initiated something."

But the law is what put the gun in the hands of an amateur like Zimmerman and made him feel free to use it. Such laws are among the latest symptoms of an American firearms fetish whereby panicked citizens can suckle at the nipple of a warm gun. The United States is becoming the laughingstock of the industrialized world for its reckless embrace of access to firearms. What, after all, is some heavy-breathing neighborhood watch schlump doing with a gun in his possession while he roams the streets? Like Alabama's recent draconian anti-illegal-immigrant law, which now has many of that state's businesses in open revolt as their crops rot in the fields and their Hispanic former employees go into hiding, Florida's wild-west gun law is revealing its consequences.

Trayvon Martin paid for this law, and for the public paranoia and police collusion it enables, with his life. Others have as well; the number of Florida homicides ruled "justifiable" has almost tripled since the law took effect. The bodies continue to stack up.

We'll see where this goes. One thing is clear: As has happened so often before in so many places, it will take a concerted and ferocious national shove for Florida lawmakers to awaken to reality.

Update re: the case of Mark Byron, who a judge punished for bad-mouthing his estranged wife on Facebook:

Byron emailed me yesterday in response to my recent post, in which I criticized his judgment in trash-talking his soon-to-be ex-wife on his Facebook page while I also pointed to the real freedom-of-speech questions his case raises. His email to me was polite and reasonable, and so I am reprinting it here (minus his contact information), followed by my own take on what he says.

MARK BYRON'S EMAIL:

Bruce,

Thanks for taking the time to write about me on your blog.  I'd like to encourage you to take a second look at my story, along with the facts of my case.  You make some great points-  that this is in fact a very interesting case to everyone.  Some of your statements about me are a little unfair, though.  I encourage you to take a look at the now public posts on my Facebook wall, for starters.  www.facebook.com/byronphoto - there, you'll see the confession email from the fellow who 'gave' my soon-to-be ex-wife his login credentials to Facebook which allowed her to see my private posting.  I agree with you that the site is not as public as some think that it is - however, I have more than 12 years in IT background.  I am an MCSE for example - and understand a great deal about privacy and security on computers as well as on Facebook.  I utilize groups on Facebook and used every bit of available security that Facebook has to offer.  Please consider writing a follow up once you've had a chance to take a closer look at my story.  Feel free to call me or write me with any questions you may have.

Sincerely,

Mark Byron

MY TAKE:

Byron, a New York photographer, is clearly staying on top of his story online, and I commend him for that. As I wrote previously, there is no way for we bystanders to know how right Byron may or may not be in having called his wife evil and vindictive, or how right she may or may not be in having filed for a protective order and claimed that the comments on his Facebook page frightened her. That is between the two of them and the court. What is clear, though, is that Byron badly overestimated the privacy that Facebook allegedly affords him and his FB "friends." Whatever his IT background, it appears that he still holds this mistaken belief, as shown in his statement in his email about "the fellow who 'gave' my soon-to-be ex-wife his login credentials to Facebook which allowed her to see my private posting." Truth is, in real terms there is no such thing as a "private posting" on Facebook. Facebook is so hackable that, with or without someone's willingly handing over a person's login info, anything posted there is at the mercy of anyone who has sufficient skills and ill intent. Posting anything on Facebook in the belief that it will be seen "only" by your "friends" is excruciatingly naive at best. It is a mistake that I hope and trust Byron will not repeat. Meanwhile, the issue of what a person has the free-speech right to say and not say on Facebook remains a legal football. With users' erratic learning curve on the limitations of social media privacy, the technical reality that all Facebook speech is de facto public doesn't necessarily mean that FB users who post provocative things intend for them to have meaning beyond their "friends" circle. But right now judges have tons of room to interpret, and make, law on this. Which is why the smart thing for we users to do is to treat such media as if they are entirely public.

The Jim Crow side of "cosmopolitan" Europe is showing more than ever these days,

as reflected, for instance, in an exchange of comments (including one by yours truly) in response to Steve Hynd's post at Agonist.org about the motivation underlying European treatment of North African boat people.

Many Europeans are showing their true colors about "those people" in a manner similar to that of the many white Americans for whom a Rick Santorum's hateful preachings offer self-destructive solace.

What goes unnoticed in both Europe and the United States – in addition to the sheer distractive value of demonizing poor brown people instead of CEOs and their hired political representatives – is the actual origin of the wave of northward immigration from Africa and Mexico: the dysfunction of neocolonial economies that starve their citizens for the benefit of European- and American-based commerce. Europe likes to forget that its colonial carving up of previously stable African nations and economies is the direct precursor to their current states of disaster. And the U.S. conveniently ignores the key role of dire Mexican poverty and political chaos in enabling American banks' benefits from the American-bound drug trade and American commerce's pleasing profits from Mexican maquiladoras and cheap illegal immigrant farm and service labor.

It's the same scheme on both sides of the Atlantic: diverting the anger of the working classes by encouraging them to kick the goose that lays the golden egg for the rich.

Here is the exchange from The Agonist, in which I have substituted the word "Person" for all names except my own: 

Germany When I lived in Munich in the 60s and 70s the Germans were extremely xenophobic. Munich had about a 15% Turkish population. They did all the grunt jobs the Germans wouldn't do - sound familiar? The Germans/Bavarians hated the Turks. I'm sure they would have sent them all back except they didn't want to do the shit jobs they did. Of course they could never become citizens of Germany but then neither could Americans. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:00pm

Probably still similar. I have a friend who recently moved to Germany. She is American, of German extraction, and speaks German. Blue eyes, blonde hair. She was still treated as an outsider at her first job in the countryside. She reports it's better in Munich. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:05pm

OK I too have blond hair and blue eyes and spoke German. I was treated very well in Munich. Of course I worked with the Bavarian State Police and many of them were friends so that might have had something to do with it. It was strange but the Bavarians had a fascination with black GIs and frequently befriended them. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:30pm

Anecdotally... To be African-American in Europe (France / Germany) is not the same as being African-American here. –Person March 14, 2012 - 7:35pm

Damn straight. Ask Jack Johnson, Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, the Tuskegee Airmen (of whom my Dad was one), the entire generation of post-bop black jazz musicians, or virtually any black American artist who has spent time there. In my travels as an African American in France, Germany, and Italy some years ago, I found some fascination with me (one night when I walked into an arty Berlin bar an entire line of young hipster women stood and invited me to light their cigarettes for them, and it wasn't because I'm some irresistible hunk). I also found, though, that my American-ness counted (often negatively) more than my skin color. And, most tellingly, I saw an entirely different set of wickedly racist rules applying to Turks and North Africans. In Germany Turks were the niggers of the culture -- persecuted, abused, and ridiculed (it's the first place where I ever heard "Turk jokes"), and in France North Africans were widely hated and sometimes even killed by mobs. This was years ago, mind you, but if anything it appears that Europe's post-colonial race hate is showing more than ever now that the recession is slamming The Motherland. –Bruce A Jacobs March 14, 2012 - 10:01pm

The problem with the Catholic Church isn't Catholics. It's the Catholic Church.

ITEM: At her mother's funeral last week, in front of all of the mourners in the cathedral, the daughter stood before the priest to take communion. The priest looked at her, covered the wafers with his hand, and told he could not give her the body and blood of Christ because her lifestyle is a sin in the eyes of God. See, her partner of 20 years, who was standing beside her, is a woman. They're lesbians. So this bigot dressed up as a man of God devastated her and her entire family in their hour of deepest grief. And he then, without warning, skipped the burial. His name, because he deserves for it to be printed here, is Rev. Marcel Guarnizo of St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, MD. If there is any justice in the Universe, he will come back in the next life as a gay man. Not that we have any way of knowing his orientation now.

ITEM: After a years-long struggle, Maryland finally legalized gay marriage this week. Amid the battle, a top public figure declared that churches should never have to grant marriage rights to gays. Who was this? Why, Edwin O'Brien, the former Archbishop of Baltimore, who was recently promoted to The Vatican.

ITEM: In one of the largest Catholic churches in my hometown of Rochester, NY, a large number of parishioners broke away when the established parish, backed by threats from the Archdiocese bosses, forbade recognition of gay unions or of women taking charge in the pulpit. The breakaway church is now a large and thriving Catholic congregation – Spiritus Christi Church – that celebrates gay unions, has a strong woman reverend in the pulpit, and runs a slew of health and service programs in neighborhoods and in prisons. (Pop quiz: which church – the Archdiocese-approved sanctuary of bigotry or the rebel house of open-hearted love – do you think Jesus would prefer?)

I have an old friend who was raised Catholic and whose mother was devout in her faith and her dedication to her congregation. One of the things I learned from watching her, as I have also observed in every other religion I have personally witnessed, is that the most corrupt, destructive, and amoral force in religion is generally the bosses and the operatives, not the parishioners. Name the issue affecting Catholicism, for example – divorce, contraception, gay rights, abortion – and polls show that rank-and-file Catholics are light-years ahead of the robed and brutally hypocritical executives who run the corporation. Which is why ordinary Catholics are among those supporting the gay rights law that Baltimore's Catholic CEO promises to torpedo.

Like leaders of other global enterprises, church rulers are resolutely bringing up the rear when it comes to matters of societal morality.