alias Bruce.

Watch this video "mockumentary" in which child actors portray adult roles in the rampant violence, corruption, and suffering that is sweeping Mexico.

The video was produced by an assemblage of groups who want to shake things up in Mexico's public discourse. From the stormy response to the vid, they appear to be succeeding.

In its final scene, a young girl faces the camera and, speaking to candidates in Mexico's upcoming presidential election, says: "If this is the future that awaits me, I don't want it. Enough of working for your political parties instead of for us. Enough of cosmetic changes."

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist.

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.

If you use Facebook, the case of the guy who hate-posted about his estranged wife

shouldn't apply to you. But it should interest you.

It shouldn't apply to you because the behavior of the Facebook user, Mark Byron, was astonishingly stupid as well as belligerently venomous. According to the Huffington Post, Byron – who is in the midst of a nasty divorce in which his wife filed for a protective order – posted a comment to his "friends" on his FB page saying, in part, "If you are an evil, vindictive woman who wants to ruin your husband's life and take your son's father away from him completely — all you need to do is say you're scared of your husband or domestic partner and they'll take him away." You don't need to know anything about the actual facts of this marital war to know that the post was an unbelievably dumb move on Byron's part. Posting that statement to be read by an untold number of online "friends" on a notoriously-hackable site is nothing at all like telling real friends over drinks that your wife is an evil, dishonest person. Facebook, even when posts are supposedly visible only to your "friends," is a dangerously public place devoid of any real privacy. Anyone with more than two brain cells should know better than to do what Byron did. He paid for this by being required by a judge to post daily Facebook apologies to his wife in order to avoid jail time and fines. (Unseemly details here.)

But, in spite of the idiocy, Byron's case should interest you because it raises real questions about what "privacy" and "free speech" mean on Facebook – and, implicitly, on Twitter and whatever other electronic shout-out realms are soon to come. The judge, in response to a complaint by Byron's wife, ruled that Byron's FB post and resultant sympathetically angry posts by his "friends" were sufficiently abusive to cause his wife to feel intimidated and threatened. There is no way for you or me to know if this is true. Her attorney says it is. Some civil rights attorneys say it looks as if it's not. The larger issue, though, is that at this point nobody knows how to legally judge what the Constitution allows a FB user to post to his or her "friends." I think a good place to start is with existing standards for libel and threats of violence. But the reality is that, in the legal Wild West of online speech, judges are going to rule on what you post based on what they personally think, or on what they guess the government is going to think, or on what police or prosecutors prod them to do. That's not very comforting.

The lesson: treat every entry you make on Facebook, Twitter, and all other forums as if it is a transmission to every electronically-connected person on the planet. It may very well be.

Thanks to Laurie.

Part of what captivates me about the mob

is that it is tribal. It has clans. Members have codes and taboos that cannot be bared in public. And they take on street names drawn from a more natural and gutturally symbolic world than tags like "Michael" and "Jerome" -- say, for example, "Big Tuna" and "Joe Bananas," both of whom were real-life mob figures. Or my all-time favorite, which actually comes from a film: "Jimmy the Cheese Man" from The Pope of Greenwich Village.

Youth gangs, similarly, dig into symbolism for identities that mean something beyond the often-disposable sound-gaming of American naming. Kids caught in a void of violent nihilism take on vividly personal handles for themselves and others: "Teeth," "Big Eye," "Snapper," "Sleepy." Names that say something about the bearer. The way that, say, some West African names do.

I think one of the most eloquent movie scenes ever is from the film Pulp Fiction, when Bruce Willis's fugitive boxer character tells a cab driver who remarks on his name, "I'm an American. My name doesn't mean shit."

Part of what mobs and gangs do is fill this selfhood void -- but with reactionary, racist, misogynist, fake "outlaw" outlets for American males, especially angry young males, for whom the vanilla concoction of shrink-wrapped American male identity means exactly nothing. Patriarchal capitalism has succeeded in alienating them from essence. Their substitute version of rawness, a kind of kamikaze fraternity, is their attempt at medicine for their ailment. It's a sick manifestation of a real desire.

None of that is the least bit funny. Still, there is something about the following rendition of Sesame Street's Ernie and Bert doing the classic Joe Pesci/Robert DeNiro desert scene from the Martin Scorsese film Casino that paints a perfect, hilariously absurd picture of this kind of cartoon barbarity:

 

(The trolls at YouTube have blocked direct embedding, but when "watch on YouTube" pops up, click it and you can watch it.)

Excellent Maureen Dowd piece about Herman Cain's sexual harassment denials

and G.O.P theatrics in general. It will take you less than 5 minutes to read it, which is my recommended lifetime limit for attention spent on this clown.

One of the most revealing results of the "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" civil disobedience in NYC last Friday

was that Mayor Michael Bloomberg felt forced to publicly defend the New York Police Department's policy rather than blithely ignore the protest -- and that when pressed, he had no coherent defense to offer.

Stop & Frisk, as you may know, is the NYPD policy of stopping and frisking any person at any time without any probable cause except an officer's feeling that s/he wants to. It's a civil liberties and crime-fighting disaster as well as a human rights obscenity. As I've mentioned earlier in citing New York Civil Liberties Union and NYPD data, nearly 9 in 10 of the stopped and frisked persons are entirely innocent and are not arrested, more than 8 in 10 are black or Latino, and by the current trend more than 700,000 New Yorkers will be arbitrarily stopped and frisked in 2011.

In a protest against the Stop & Frisk policy last Friday in front of the 28th Police Precinct station in Harlem, Princeton professor Cornel West, Revolutionary Communist Party co-founder Carl Dix, Riverside Church Pastor Rev. Stephen Phelps, and dozens of others, including Occupy Wall Street participants from Zuccotti Park, either underwent or risked arrest. The march and standoff in front of the station received widespread media coverage, including stories in the New York Times, New York Daily News, Black Entertainment Television, New York Post, Daily Kos, and elsewhere.

All of this denied Mayor Bloomberg the luxury of ignoring the protest. And his response showed how little defense he could muster. This from an October 21 NYT story:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended the [stop & frisk] tactic on his Friday morning radio show on WOR.

“It’s used in communities where we have lots of guns and lots of murder victims,” he said. “And we’ve brought crime down 35 percent in the last 10 years. We have — I don’t know — I don’t think we’re going to set a record for low murders, but we’ll have the second best year in the history of the city this year, and there’s a reason for those things, and this is one of the tactics.

“People say, ‘Oh, you can do it without that’; well, you know you have — nobody is ever going to — some people don’t want you to do anything,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

The result of doing nothing, he said, would be “a society you can’t live in.”

So Hizzoner, caught embracing a policy that is 90% ineffective and 80% racially targeted, could come up with nothing better to say than, in effect, Well, an unconstitutional policy is better than nothing, especially if it saves lives. As if the only alternative to doing nothing is to create a police state in the City of New York. As if a street sweep with a 90% failure rate is any kind of step toward public safety. As if a viciously racist police protocol is the best we can ask of a city where the rich have more money than they can ever spend and the poor have nothing.

One of the interesting things about the NYT story is that reader comments showed an overwhelming outrage about the injustice of Stop & Frisk. I've said it before and I'm going to keep saying it: We are entering a moment of critical mass in which the dishonest bleatings of corporate politicians and the evasive narratives of corporate journalists are, for most Americans, butting up against the inescapably brutal realities of plutocracy. This is why more than 70% of Americans favor a Millionaires Tax; why the Occupy Wall Street movement has caught fire; and why most Americans mistrust their government, not because they dislike government per se but because they viscerally understand that this government works for the rich and not for us. This raw reality, in spite of the contrived wedges of Tea Party racism and Educated Liberal contempt for "rednecks," is the thread that connects the American left with the right. And with the innately deaf and blind hubris of Washington's monied masters, it is a thread of awareness that will only strengthen with time.

So let's conclude with a comment posted to the NYT story on Friday by "Jrcnyc," whose only error is in thinking that Cornel West is "leading" a movement when, in fact, West simply enjoys the conspicuousness of celebrity in expressing this collaborative (and widely-shared) train of thought. Jrcncy writes:

The mayor's defense of Stop and Frisk is so muddled and unclear that it's almost laughable - except for the fact that hundreds of thousands of New York citizens have their civil rights violated every year because of it. The fact that he's so off-message on such a divisive and unconstitutional policy reveals an underlying fact: that his administration is racist.

If the police were frisking and stopping white, wealthy New Yorkers for any reason -- any reason -- his office would have to regularly justify that policy with coordinated PR campaigns, with press conferences, and with sound-bytes purchased from high-price consultants. The fact that they can evade an obviously common-sense protest by Dr. West with stuttering reasons and no hard evidence is extremely revealing. For an office obsessed with proving all matters of policy with numbers, the only ones he points to are murder numbers. Murders? This policy isn't preventing murders. Prove it.

The anti-stop and frisk chants and signs hovering within the Occupy Wall Street movement are part of a new trend that holds people in power accountable for their abuses. Dr. West is leading a spear of logic and passion that's going to blow a hole open in this issue, and more people will pour through it. For people living in stop and frisk communities, this issue has festered long enough on the margins of public discourse. It's time to act.

Let the Mayor be warned: the protest is a warm-up exercise. If the policy isn't changed, the London-style riots Bloomberg evoked are going to get set off soon enough. The NYPD has no more symbolic good-will left after 9-11. It's a different country and a different city now. His third term will either be marked by a legacy of justice or one of social explosion. So far, he's chosen to bury his head in the sand, muttering about policies he can't explain.

It's never too late to look in the mirror. New York needs to do so tonight.

"Occupy Wall Street" and "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" are two things happening in New York City that you

need to know about:

1.) The occupation of Wall Street over the past 11 days by protesters, some of whom have camped out in an echo of the protests in Egypt and Yemen (and have endured police abuse in the process), is bigger news than you may have gathered from TV and newspaper accounts. For one thing, similar actions are either taking place or being organized in more than 50 cities, according to OccupyWallStreet.org, the organization behind the New York protest. (Michael Moore spoke at the NYC protest Monday; Cornel West spoke Tuesday.) Further, such protests are bound to grow both in frequency and in size as corporate-dictated economic and political policies -- enforced by both the Christofascist right and the increasingly irrelevant speechifier Barack Obama -- leave more and more frantic Americans with nowhere to take their anger but the streets. Just as my parents' generation of striving black Americans was politicized by the simple refusal of mid-20th-century America to grant them access to a better life, so are millions of today's Americans of all colors being quietly radicalized by the simple refusal of today's corporate regime to grant them any measure of economic security. Close off all of a dam's outflows but one, and you'll get a violent rush at that single aperture -- and eventually a burst dam. Yesterday's so-called "far left" will soon be today's angry center because yesterday's meager mainstream social safety valves are, today, plugged and padlocked.

Add to this the grim prospects for American and European stock markets, thanks in part to the congenitally stubborn refusal of the world's boss financiers to entertain anything like meaningful change in their industry. For a dose of fiscal insider candor about this that will drop your jaw to your knees, watch this BBC interview with a trader about the outlook for the European economy.

It all adds up to more stonewalling in Washington and on Wall Street on behalf of the wealthiest, and more angry gathering at the stone gates in the coming months and years by folks who would never have dreamed of hitting the streets in protest: the hardening ranks of broke, jobless, hungry, sick, and otherwise enraged folks who constitute the majority of the nation.

Call it impossible if you want to. But the Wall Street occupations are just the beginning. You can quote me on that.

2.) The "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" initiative is a call by Carl Dix and Cornel West for citizens to resist the clearly unconstitutional practice of police officers in New York City stopping and frisking anyone who they want to at any time -- with a hugely disproportionate number of those stopped and frisked being black, Latino, and innocent.

How large is the problem? Better sit down before you read these stats from the New York Civil Liberties Union:

The NYPD stopped and interrogated more than 161,000 completely innocent New Yorkers in the first quarter of 2011, the highest number over a three-month period since the Police Department began reporting data on its troubling stop-and-frisk program. About 88 percent of the 183,326 stop-and-frisk encounters recorded from January through March resulted in neither an arrest nor a summons, according to figures the NYPD released quietly over the holiday weekend. About 84 percent of those stopped by police were black or Latino.

In other words, at the rate at which NYPD's use of this tactic is increasing over last year, NYC police will stop and frisk more than 700,000 citizens this year (last year's figure was 601,000). Nearly 90 percent of those stopped will be innocent of any wrongdoing. And more than 8 in 10 will be black or Latino.

Longtime activist and organizer Carl Dix (he served two years in Leavenworth Prison for refusing to join the Vietnam War, and is co-founder of the Revolutionary Communist Party) and Princeton professor and advocate Cornel West have issued a joint call for an October 22nd day of nonviolent civil disobedience in protest and defiance of Stop & Frisk. The event dovetails with that day's National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality.

If police officers' accosting hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians -- and zeroing in on people of color for such abuse -- isn't your idea of law enforcement or justice, you'll find more about "Stop 'Stop & Frisk'" at stopmassincarceration.tumblr.com.

What country do you live in?

Are you okay with this?

This was posted on the American Progressive Party's Facebook page here.

Thanks to Sandy.