Sunday Sermon [An Open Letter to Moral Conformists]

Hola mi gente,
Enough is enough. Every day, my social media streams are inundated by posts by cowed, fearful, and at times positively rabid Hillary Clinton supporters. To paraphrase a meme I saw today: pointing out Trump’s faults does not make a case for Hillary. 

The following is for those who profess to be liberals or progressives and who are voting the conservative candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Pathologizing Dissent

 

“Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
 -- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Almost every day I have to suffer through yet another post appearing on my stream by the Working Families Party of New York (WFP). Having first endorsed Bernie Sanders, the WFP now wants people to vote on their line. Their presidential pick? Hillary Clinton. 

A little bit of self-disclosure: during the early days of the WFP, I was an organizer for them. I spent many nights in NYC’s gulag, Far Rockaway, going door-to-door in the projects there and I spent a few months organizing in my old Brooklyn neighborhood, Bushwick. Ironically, I also assisted with organizing a huge accountability session that included Hillary Clinton who, at the time, was running for the New York State senate seat. At the time, I thought the WFP was a great idea. 

The WFP took a grassroots guerilla warfare approach to local elections. Basically, we presented a slate of policies and asked local politicians if they would commit to publicly endorsing them. The effective part was being able to demonstrate to politicians that we could get a few thousand people to vote. That usually put the fear into them. It was a very effective approach, and I have to admit that the WFP did some good work in those early years.

However, today’s WFP is not the WFP of yesteryear and has, in my opinion, made some very suspect decisions, culminating with the decision to endorse Cuomo in the last gubernatorial race. It was a decision that threatened to rip apart of the coalition. I left the WFP for several reasons, one being that while it used a grassroots model of organizing, its decision-making process was very hierarchical (not grassroots). We did the organizing, but the ultimate decisions about direction and strategy were made by a few people.

And this is why it bothers me that the WFP is endorsing Hillary Clinton. I see that decision, as with the Cuomo endorsement, as a way to garner more votes on their line. The more votes a political party garners, the better access it has to power. So, a political entity with the words “working families” in its title, is endorsing a candidate who used racial stereotypes to pass legislation that gutted social safety nets for the most vulnerable in our society and advocated for a trade treaty (NAFTA) that erased millions of jobs for working families. This is the same candidate that that is on record as saying that the TPP -- NAFTA on steroids -- set the gold standard on trade treaties.

Think about that.

I have previously written about why I could never vote for Hillary Clinton. Others have also written why Black and Latinx people should not vote for Clinton. Therefore, reiterating a case against a Clinton administration will not be the purpose of this post. Let me put it this way, the last time the Clintons were confronted with a recalcitrant GOP congressional majority, they turned tail and helped pass some of the most pernicious, ultra-conservative policies.

But point this out to a Hillary supporter and after reflexively barking out “Trump,” it only elicits contempt. I am not realistic, they say. I am too idealistic. They are proud “pragmatic progressives” -- the adults in the room -- they sneer. The thing I find particularly disturbing is how an empirical observation such as that a ruling elite, primarily corporate in character, exists and exists for its interests and not the interests of the people, is stigmatized by so-called lefties as the ravings of unhinged misogynists. I am embarrassed -- no offended -- that there are people advocating for a strategy that discourages people from using their vote to organize and support viable alternative voices, and instead encourages people to give up their power to a right wing, neoliberal, corporate-controlled politician with the hopes that they will somehow push her to the left once she ascends into power.

Hope, my friends, is not a strategy. At least it is not a winning strategy.

Hillary is the poster child of everything that’s wrong with the Democratic Party and what the faux liberal Hillary supporters don’t seem to understand is that this election is really about disgust with the current status quo. This is the main reason why Hillary is barely beating out a childish narcissist who can’t even run a coherent campaign. People don’t trust her with good reason. People don’t like her, not because she is a woman, but because she hasn’t earned that trust. We on the left should see this election as a clarion call to organize, to support progressive third parties, to speak out against a dystopian status quo in which people find themselves barely keeping their head above water. People are drowning. The time for short-term fixes is long past. It is time for change and it seems that the reason Hillary Clinton has some of the lowest favorability and trust numbers is that the Democratic Party holds no attraction presenting itself as a bullshit “Republican Lite” alternative. In fact, I would submit that Hillary has nothing but contempt for the common people -- the unwashed masses.

We should be encouraging people to vote strategically, lending their franchise to progressive third parties. For example, people dismiss the Green Party because it can’t win. But if the Green Party could garner at least 5% of the popular vote, it would qualify for millions in federal funds. Shit, 15% would have compelled the duopoly to allow a candidate like Jill Stein at the debates and there would have been discussions about climate change, inequality, poverty, and an economic structure that benefits the majority, not just those lucky enough to be born rich. Instead we got a series of bad reality shows that were obsessed with grabbing pussy and Benghazi.

But instead of calls to organize, or the will for marginalized communities to take power, what I’m hearing from so-called progressives is that we must vote for war, privatization, inequality, mass incarceration, and corporate dominance in order to achieve goals that are exactly the opposite. What we will get is a more right-wing version of Obama -- quite possibly eight years of it. Can we afford it?

It. Makes. No. Sense. 

What do you honestly expect to achieve if the candidate in office, regardless of who they are, has nothing to fear? The DNC has nothing but contempt for progressive ideals and knows you will vote for them out of fear regardless of their record.

Those advocating for Hillary are the living example of the definition of insanity: committing the same acts and expecting different results. I’m not trying to convince people on how they should vote, but don’t fuckin' tell me that voting for Hillary is a road to anything amounting to change. The historical record refutes anything you say. But instead of looking at the evidence, some want to practice a form of magical thinking they have the nerve to call “pragmatic.”

The time to fight is now. If not now, when. If not you, then who?

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Politics and Resistance in Puerto Rican Poetry [Julia de Burgos]

Hola mi gente,

These are hard times of the people of Puerto Rican diaspora. First a SCOTUS ruling have effectively destroyed what little autonomy the island can claim. Secondly, PresidentObama recently signed a Republican drafted, bipartisan bill, known as “PROMESA” (English translation: Promise). The bill’s endorsers claim it will help Puerto Rico through its debt crisis. What it actually does is quite different: it imposes an unelected seven-member Fiscal Board who will wield powers far greater than the actual government of Puerto Rico. This junta has the authority to sell off all property and land (beaches, nature reserves, etc.), close schools, cut minimum wages, and pensions, and subpoena and prosecute anyone (including the governor, the highest political official in the country) who fails to comply with their requests.

Simply out, this is colonialism. The debt is U.S. made (30billion of it is illegal) and this bill will be used to destroy what's left of PR and force the people out of their country. This level of U.S. colonialism has not been seen since the invasion of 1898. For all intents and purposes, Puerto Rico is now in a fight for its life. The lives of Puerto Ricans back home, and in our communities here is going to become extremely difficult.

What many don’t understand is that once the Puerto Rican people come to realize and feel its pernicious effects, there will be rioting and blood on the streets. I will guarantee you that once the ramifications of this law become known and its consequences felt, there will social unrest on the island, the likes we have never seen before.

¡Que viva Puerto Rico libre!

Today, I offer a poem from one of the great Latina poets, Julia de Burgos… 

Julia de Burgos

Julia de Burgos is one of the greatest Puerto Rican writers. In fact, she’s one of the giants of Latinx literature, period. While much of the study of de Burgos has centered on her prototypical feminism (she was ahead of her time) and her more lyrical works, she wrote political works grounded in her leftist radial leanings. She was one of the many Puerto Rican writers of her time who actively participated in the Puerto Rican liberation movement. She was a member of the Nationalist Party, which denounced U.S. political and economic control and advocated armed revolution in the name of Puerto Rican independence. Burgos’ themes of liberation, rebellion, and justice in her poetry both reflected and advocated the ideologies of the Nationalist Party, while at the same time preserving her own feminist struggle for independence. 

Her best-known work, “Río Grande de Loíza,” pays tribute to the “great” river that flows through her hometown in Carolina. Critical interpretations of this piece note how the poem functions as a journey through the life cycles and also demonstrate a yearning for sexual freedom. However, it also functions as a source of cultural and historical memory. In the ninth stanza she writes: 

Rio Grande de Loiza!...Blue. Brown. Red.

Blue mirror, fallen piece of blue sky;

naked white

flesh that turns black

each time the night enters your bed;

red stripe of blood, when the rain falls

in torrents and the hills vomit their mud.

Just as Puerto Ricans represent a mixture of Taino, Indian, African, and Spanish as a result of colonization, so the river combines “Blue. Brown. [and] Red,” and carries the nation’s history of conflict within it. The color red, associated with the word “blood” can be seen to allude to those who have shed blood fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence in the hillside towns of Lares and Utuado, not far from this “Great river.” When Burgos’ desires become one with the river, whom she implores, “confuse yourself in the flight of my bird fantasy,” she seeks to connect on the most intimate level possible with her fellow Puerto Ricans. 

While the river serves as a source of inspiration in her early life and poetry, it becomes emblematic of the Puerto Rican people’s suffering under colonialism as she matures and as the poem progresses.

In the last stanza, the river becomes a 

Great flood of tears. the greatest of all our island’s tears

save those greater that come from the eyes

of my soul for my enslaved people.

Here, Burgos physically shares in the suffering and “tears” of her fellow Puerto Ricans, and also confronts their ongoing oppression.  Thus, her poem also serves as a denunciation of the injustices the “enslaved people” of Puerto Rico endure under colonial rule… 

Rio Grande de Loiza

Rio Grande de Loiza! … Undulate into my spirit
And let my soul founder in your rivulets.
To seek the fountain that stole you as a child
And in mad haste returned you to the path.

Wind into your lips and let me drink you,
To feel you mine for a brief moment,
And hide you from the world in myself
And hear voices of fear in the mouth of the wind.

Come down for an instant from the spine of the earth,
And seek the intimate secret of my longing;
Confounded in the sweep of my bird fantasies,
Drop a water rose in my dreams.

Rio Grande de Loiza! … My source, my river,
After the mother petal raised me into the world
With you went down from the rough hills
To seek new furrow, my pale desires,
And all my childhood was like a poem in the river,
And a river was the poem of my first dreams.

Then came adolescence. Life surprised me
Fastening to the broadest part of your eternal voyage;
And I was yours a thousand times, and in a beautiful romance,
You woke my soul and kissed my body.

Where did you carry the waters that bathed
My form, in a spike of the newly open sun?
Who knows in what remote Mediterranean land
Some faun on the beach will possess me!

Who knows in what rainstorms of what far lands
I will be pouring to open new furrows;
Or if, perhaps, tired of biting hearts
I will be frozen in crystals of ice!

Rio Grande de Loiza! … Blue. Dark. Red.
Blue mirror, fallen blue fragment of sky;
Nude white flesh that turns you black
Every time night goes to bed with you;
Red band of blood, when under the rain
The hills vomit torrents of mud.

Man river, but man with river purity
Because when you give your blue kiss you give your blue soul.

My fear Mister River. Man river. The only man
Who has kissed my soul when the he kissed my body.
Rio Grande de Loiza! … Great river. Great tear.

The greatest of all our island tears,
But for the tars that flow out of me
Through the eyes of my soul for my enslaved people.

– Translated by Grace Schulman

* * *

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Make it Personal

Hola mi Gente,

I find occasionally reposting the following worthwhile… 

Politics

Contrary to what you may believe, politics is not something you sometimes watch on TV in between the tons of garbage reality shows you consume weekly. Politics affects your personal life more than any dumb twat that gets the date or the chance to debase him or herself for your cynical pleasure. Therefore, if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to implement policies that harm you or those you love, take it personally.

Get Angry. 

The “Machinery of Justice” will not serve you here -- it is slow and unfeeling, and it is theirs -- all of it. Only those without access to power suffer at the hand of Justice; the creatures of the power elite slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want Justice, or even fairness, you will have to snatch it from them.

Make it personal.

Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time -- of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, makes the difference -- the only difference in their eyes -- between players and the “little people.” They don't give a damn about respect -- respect has no value for them. You have to make them fear and loathe you.

Players they will make their deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again, they will justify your liquidation, your displacement, your suffering, and the brutality of it all with the ultimate insult that it’s the way of the world, it’s politics, it’s a tough life, it’s “just business,” and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck that...

Make it personal.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Cuckoos and Neoliberals

Hola mi Gente,

The HillBilly campaign is anything but progressive. They’re a lot like the cuckoo birds… LOL

* * *

Of Cuckoos & Neoliberals

Facts are stupid things.

-- Ronald Reagan, 1988

Poor Ronnie, I believe he meant to quote Mark Twain’s, “Facts are stubborn things,” but he slipped up. I guess his whole presidency was a slip. 

The best analogy I’ve heard regarding the neoliberalism, an ideology that emphasizes the value of free market competition over human interests¹, is the one using the nesting habits of the cuckoo bird comparison. Cuckoos employ a rather interesting reproductive strategy involving what is known as “nest parasitism.” Briefly, the female cuckoo lays an egg in the nest of another species of bird (after first removing an egg from the host’s nest). Upon hatching, the baby cuckoo goes on to banish the remaining eggs and hatchlings of the host, at which point it becomes the sole focus of the host parent’s interest.

By now you’re probably asking why the host parents don’t push out the alien egg before the troubles begin, or at the very least abandon the parasitic baby cuckoo once it has grown to a size far larger than host parents themselves. The problem, of course, is that birds lack the critical thinking skills necessary to recognize the parasite. They take note of the eggs, of the sight of a baby bird’s features and cries, and follow a “care for egg/hatchling in nest” instinctual pattern. It does not demand much of a masquerade on the part of the cuckoo to abuse the host’s instincts. All that is necessary is the initial neural imprinting by the parent host on the baby parasite’s signals.

One cannot help but be struck by the remarkable parallels between the nesting line of attack of the cuckoo and the infiltration of the democratic party beginning in the 1980s by neoliberals.

Just as the parasitical cuckoo bird ingratiates itself into the nest of an unsuspecting host, eventually driving out the rightful offspring, so did the neoliberals come to dominate, to the point of exclusion, what passes today for “progressivism.”

Intelligent men and women assure me that there are reasonable neoliberals capable of logic, so this will be the only point I will cede on their behalf. During the last 30 years, however, like my cuckoo birds, neoliberals have systematically dumped progressives from office, replacing them with right-wing, laissez-faire parasites. The neoliberal, who first began appearing during the Reagan years, but really took hold with the ascendency of the Clintons in the 1990s, is a warped mutation of true progressive ideals. Furthermore, neoliberalism grew out of racist and classist ideology. Neoliberalism is characterized by a resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality; and some of the common psychological factors linked to it include fear and aggression, dogmatism, and an intolerance of ambiguity.

First, I have to begin with the Biggest Lie -- the myth of the Clintons. I have had it up to here with the constant idolization of what was in fact an incompetent (and very likely predatory) president. In the pantheon of the neoliberal iconography, Bill Clinton is only slightly lower than white Jesus.

 

Even Bill Clinton himself has been selectively telling media outlets that he made some mistakes as president and might have acted otherwise. He's even tried to recast actual events and been taken to task by fact-checkers who recall his leading role in what became major crises, such as the 2008 global financial implosion.

Some of the more disastrous policies of the Clinton administration include mass incarceration, increasing poverty and deregulating the finance sector. Clinton is the president most responsible for the mass incarceration of Americans on an epic scale. The gung-ho crime fighter-in-chief passed the single most damaging law with his omnibus federal crime bill in 1994. The consequences of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform bill have been devastating for millions of American families, with the number of poor families with children rising 17 percent since. 

Financially, The Columbia Journalism Review concluded that, “The bottom line is: Bill Clinton was responsible for more damaging financial deregulation -- and thus, for the [2008] financial crisis -- than any other president.” Clinton expanded the death penalty and the war on drugs, both of which were hugely detrimental to black and people and other people of color. Bill Clinton helped gut America’s manufacturing base by promoting and passing the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. And Hillary Clinton, an active FLOTUS, fought tooth and nail alongside her husband to get these policies through congress.

The list of draconian Clinton policies both past and present is vast but what concerns me most is that the Clintons are somehow perceived as “progressives.” And it seems that they have many people, especially African Americans and Latinxs, convinced.

Hopefully, historians will prove less easily convinced, I dunno.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Note:

The main points of neoliberalism include:

1. THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating “free” enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the state) no matter how much social damage this causes. Greater openness to international trade and investment, as in NAFTA. Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers' rights that had been won over many years of struggle. No more price controls. All in all, total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services. To convince us this is good for us, they say “an unregulated market is the best way to increase economic growth, which will ultimately benefit everyone.” It's like Reagan's “supply-side” and “trickle-down” economics -- but somehow the wealth didn't trickle down very much.
2. CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care. REDUCING THE SAFETY-NET FOR THE POOR, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply -- again in the name of reducing government's role. Of course, they don't oppose government subsidies and tax benefits for business.
3. DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminish profits, including protecting the environment and safety on the job.
4. PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water. Although usually done in the name of greater efficiency, which is often needed, privatization has mainly had the effect of concentrating wealth even more in a few hands and making the public pay even more for its needs.
5. ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF “THE PUBLIC GOOD” or “COMMUNITY” and replacing it with “individual responsibility.” Pressuring the poorest people in a society to find solutions to their lack of health care, education and social security all by themselves -- then blaming them, if they fail, as “lazy.”