Newt Gingrich and Andrew Jackson’s Clear-cut Ideas

It was a win, win, win for Newt! proclaim the people who are paid to proclaim. A GOP debate, where the white-haired man was on fire, the debater, with a holy vitriol tempered by hard-browed realism. Cut to the camera on the crowd watching, and their ecstatic gasps, hands clapping above their heads.

Some of these are the humans who booed down Ron Paul when he suggested the Golden Rule as a good mindset for foreign policy decisions. And they cheered instead, some even getting on their feet in excitement, when Newt said “Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies–kill them.” Mitt Romney, eager to share in the love sent Newt-wards for this, agreed: “Speaker Gingrich is right. Of course, you take out our enemies, wherever they are.”

I live in Nashville, Tennessee, home stomping-grounds of Old Hickory. And so I have learned about some of Andrew Jackson’s clear-cut ideas, and some of his killings.

Andrew Jackson’s story is complex and nuanced, and even heroic at moments. I don’t intend to deny that when I suggest that the name Andrew Jackson should first conjure up a wealthy slave-owner and poster boy for genocide. Whatever else he did, over the course of his life Jackson profited off of the coerced labor of nearly 300 human beings who were held in his ownership. Whatever else he did, Jackson was responsible for forcing the original occupants of the southeastern US off of their landbases.

Torture, Belmont Law School, and the Banality of Evil

This morning, five of us went to a class of Constitutional Law at Belmont University. We are not Belmont Law students, and we hadn’t done our reading.

We had done some different homework, though, spurred by news that Belmont had just hired Alberto Gonzales as its “Distinguished Chair of Law.” We researched what this man did as one of the chief architects of the Bush Administrations’ torture policies, authorizing waterboarding and other physical abuse of fellow human beings in US custody. That from his position of power, he argued that the protections of prisoners called for in the Geneva Convention were outdated and “quaint.” That he never expressed remorse for any of this.

And this person who gave a green light to torture was now teaching Constitutional Law.

The class was small, around twenty students, and as soon as the Distinguished Professor Gonzales entered, he knew instantly we weren’t supposed to be there. “I don’t allow visitors,” he said.

How the People Got Their Groove Back: What a Bunch of Farmers Can Teach a Bunch of Occupiers About How to Keep on Going

Ashley Sanders wrote the following zine for and about the Occupy Movement.  Go here for the booklet form to print and distribute!

Not so long ago, Americans witnessed the beginning of a mass democratic uprising. Thousands of average people, disgusted by greedy elites and corporate control of government, launched a movement that spread to almost every state in the nation. They did it to reject debt. They did it to fight foreclosures. They did it to topple a world where the 1 percent determined life for the other 99. And they did all of it against incredible odds, with a self-respect that stymied critics.

The year? 1877. The people? Dirt-poor farmers who would come to be known as Populists.

Now it’s 2011, and the People are stirring again. It’s been over two months since a few hundred dreamers pitched their tents in Zuccotti Park and stayed.

These people weren’t Populists, but they had the same complaints. They couldn’t make rent. They had no future. They lived in a nation with one price for the rich and another for the poor. And they knew that whatever anyone said that they didn’t have real democracy.

Okay, and so what? What do a bunch of century-dead farmers have to do with the Occupy movement? Well, quite a lot, actually.

Tim Wise: We Twisted King’s Dream, So We Live With His Nightmare

Reposted from ColorLines

It’s been a rough year for Martin Luther King, Jr., and for his legacy.

First, as has become an annual ritual, politicians went to church or some other civic gathering for last year’s King Day celebration, even as they continued to support public policies that he found abhorrent. Whether continuing to prosecute a seemingly endless and most definitely murderous war, or by supporting cuts to vital social programs, there is no shortage of hypocrisy when it comes to proclaiming fealty to King’s vision in words, while besmirching it in deeds, all at once.

Then of course came the venal cooptation of King’s crowning public moment—the 1963 March on Washington—by Glenn Beck, this past August. Insisting that it was time to “reclaim the civil rights movement,” because conservatives were the ones who “did it in the first place”—an inversion of history so grotesque as to confound the imagination—Beck inspired a gathering of tens of thousands of disaffected (mostly white) reactionaries, likely none of whom had been involved with the civil rights movement, but who now would be encouraged to see themselves as the inheritors of King’s “dream.” This, even as they clamored for more tax cuts for wealthy folks and the repeal of health care reform, all at the behest of a guy who once said he would like to kill Rep. Charlie Rangel with a shovel. I will leave it to others far more creative than myself to determine how one might square any of that with the teachings or beliefs of Dr. King. Then again, given the recent statement by a Defense Department spokesperson who asserted that King would have supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, anything is possible.

US-funded Biodiesel Colonialism

“As corrupt corporations and politicians shift wealthy nations to greater ethanol and biodiesel use, the US government believes that harvests of ancestral q’eqchi’ lands should be exported to fill the cars of US citizens and not the stomachs of q’eqchi’ families.”

Miravalle: community under attack.

Please read the article below (and take action!) about a Q’eqchi’ community in Guatemala that is being evicted from their land by a US-financed biodeisel (African palm) grower.  At the same time, children in the region are suffering from severe malnutrition.  This story is becoming common-place in Latin America.

Questions which come to my mind include: What does this say about ‘environmentalist’ solutions which do not consider (and don’t actively work against) current relations of domination?  How can we–as citizens, consumers, activists–support food- and material-sovereignty of oppressed communities?  I look forward to your answers.

From www.guatemalasolidarityproject.org:

Jan 9 Guatemala Siege Alert: US, Colombian Officials to Help “Restructure the Social Fabric Through New Model Police Precinct”

Announcement comes as Human Rights Ombudsman Denounces Increasing Number of Children Dying from Hunger

GSP Denounces Continued US Support of the Siege and its Impact on Increased Hunger in the Region – Over 100,000 Q’eqchi’ Children in High Risk

Action Needed – Details at Bottom

January 9, 2011

The GSP urgently denounces US support of the continuing state of siege in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, and calls for action in solidarity with q’eqchi peasant communities in the region. Under the siege, police and soldiers can arrest anyone without warrant, as well as control the press and prohibit assembly and possession of arms. We call for the immediate release of political prisoner Pablo Sacrab Pop, kidnapped by wealthy land owner Benjamin Soto and handed to police on December 28, 2010.

Gorgon Stare: turning the living to stone

The Air Force has a new super-surveillance drone plane which it will be using in Afghanistan.  This floating panopticon, which is named Gorgon Stare, will record data from entire cities and beam it back to the empire.  In the Washington Post article on the subject, Maj. Gen. James O. Poss croons that “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.”

The article continues to explain that “officials” envision the Gorgon Stare could have ‘civilian’ uses as well, such as “securing borders.”

I’ve often been astonished at the brutal honesty of the name-givers in the weapon-tech industry (as an example, the article also mentions that the video footage the military gathers is termed “Death TV”).  But these perverse new Adams were particularly insightful in using the term “Gorgon Stare.”

This is because the Gorgon turns the one she stares at to stone.  No other mythology could so aptly explain our visual military technology: to transform human bodies and lives and stories into unfeeling objects, into simple matter-blobs that can be shot down in a long-distance video game.

Thanksgiving and Jail

“But this is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them snared in holes, and they are hid in prison houses: they are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore.”

-Isaiah 42:22

This last weekend I spent a day and a half in the Muscogee County Jail in Georgia. Soon I will write about the School of the Americas Watch Vigil, its fight and its power. Soon I will write about the fragility of First Amendment rights and how quickly I saw them disappear. But first I want to write about this:

I am out of jail. 2.5 million others in this country tonight are not. Maybe some got canned turkey on their plastic trays today, to celebrate.

Our country has the highest incarceration rate of any country—one in 31 adults—and the highest number of people locked up in cages.

More black men are currently in prison in the U.S. than were slaves in 1850.

7.2 million of us are in jail, in prison, on probation or on parole.

But these were all facts that I already knew.

What I didn’t know is that the vitamin-depleted food tastes and smells like Purina Cat Chow, served with some slimy iceburg lettuce and “milk” with seven ingredients.

I didn’t know about the weight of those slit-windowed rooms, the sense of being buried deep even though we were on the fourth-floor cell block, of being so easy to forget, which is the real horror of a dungeon. I didn’t know “outdoor recreation” meant a rare moment in a high-walled, concrete courtyard.

I didn’t know books would be contraband, a near impossibility. When I saw how much these women loved to read, I told them I’d mail them some books, only to discover that to give these women books I would have to come in person during visiting hours and give one at a time. There is, of course, no library in the jail. The aim of the place is to punish, shame, and deprive.

I didn’t know about Gwen, with the worn face and quiet patience of an Appalachian farmer, who is sitting in a cage because her boyfriend left marijuana at her house.

I didn’t know that 19-year-old Katie has been waiting for a trial date for six months now so the State can figure out if she actually stole that Wii or not. Katie was going to nursing school and caring for her two-year-old daughter when she was arrested, and because her parents now have this little girl to care for they can’t afford bail. It’s like a debtor’s prison: the longer you’re in there, the less likely you’ll be able to afford to get out. Katie, who seems tough, capable, stoic, cries when she speaks of her daughter. She told me she thought she’d be fine when she learned her mother and daughter could visit her twice a week, but she fell apart when she instead was only allowed to speak through a telephone to their images on a television screen. This is the case for all of them in Muscogee County Jail.

In sum, I didn’t know is that “innocent until proven guilty” was such an outrageous lie. If a cop brings you in, you’re guilty. It doesn’t matter what any facts say, you will be punished. If you’re poor, your guilt is heavier, your punishment more severe. For my own convictions for “picketing” and “demonstration without a permit,” I was sentenced to forty days in jail or $300 fines. If I hadn’t had that $300, I would be there until 2011. Forty days or $300—clearly, the punishment for one who can’t pay is far higher. In this reckoning, each day’s worth of freedom, of being with loved ones and feeling the sun and breeze and earth, is worth $7.50.

There is a payment plan for those who can only pay by installments—but I was told this would cost an extra $50 per month, making the option ridiculously cost-prohibitive.

What’s more, I was also charged with “unlawful assembly,” which is a state charge—if I didn’t have $1,300 for bail, I would be in there for weeks or months waiting for that trial.

And waiting for trials is what people in jail do. The women told me they expected to wait four to twelve months before they got a day in court. At that point some of them will be judged to be innocent, but by then they will already have paid heavily for the guilt of poverty.

And so this Thanksgiving I want to send out a call for the old Christian ideal of visiting those in prison, of learning the stories of our society’s most vulnerable. Though the prison figures large in sacred stories from both the Bible and Book of Mormon, we treat wrongful imprisonment as a thing of the past, something we have overcome in our enlightened democracy. We should instead learn that the well-spring of Right Living has always been a kind of steady unruliness, a wilfulness which no Empire can abide.

Also, for Thanksgiving I need to say I’m thankful for the women of the fourth-floor cell block of Muscogee County Jail. For Keisha’s polite explanations of what to do when I came in wide-eyed, dragging my mattress, and for letting me read her Bible and her copy of Twilight all night. For Bama’s kind sass and smile, and for dancing with me in the common area. For Mally and Toi and Miss Margie and Christine and all the others whose names I’ve forgotten because I had no pen and paper to write them down. All of them still laughing easily, still aware of their stories and their dignity after months of being treated with mechanized, organized violence.

A fearful and narrow-eyed State—the same sort of bullies that beheaded the non-conforming John the Baptist—has stripped them of the people and places they love. It acts with brutal efficiency when it comes to capturing them and putting them behind bars, and plods along tortuously when asked to figure out if anyone actually disobeyed its rules.  It encourages a culture where being behind bars is taken as proof of shameful behavior: at worst, we condemn them, and at best, we ignore them.

In resistance, the women dance and make a home out of nothing.

Accompanying the Peasant Movement Part 2: Conquistador with a Briefcase

Saquimo Setaña is a community in northern Guatemala facing eviction by a local plantation owner. Three community members—Jesus Yat, Oscar Manuel Xol, and his son Alvaro Barahona Xol Pop—are in jail, while five others have arrest warrants. The community claims that the plantation owner is bringing false charges against them, with the expectation that they don’t have the resources to represent themselves fairly in court. We (Katy Savage and Tristan Call) are working with the Guatemala Solidarity Project to help coordinate international support for political prisoners of the Guatemalan peasant movement.

After a bumpy bus-ride north from Cobán to the Canguinic River, we stuffed an unsteady canoe with baggage and foreign observers for the last leg of the journey to Saquimo Setaña. We were finally in the forest, where epiphytic orchids and cicadas, blue kingfishers and milpa and long-eared cows could stitch up our wounds from the cities, highways,and prisons we had come from. The sounds and smells were like splashes of water on dried brine shrimp: all this time we had been alive!

We were met at the riverbank by a group of kids and adults, including Ana Maria, a Saquimo resident who, apart from translating Q’eqchi to Spanish for international human rights activists, is a regional coordinator for CUC (Comité de la Unidad Campesina). They took us to the town’s school, where a crowd of kids in ripped t-shirts were waiting to shake hands and wish us buenos días. Just outside waved the red flag of the peasant movement. One wall of the dirt-floor school were hand-made posters for teaching the Q’eqchi alphabet; on another were crayon-colored drawings made by the children in honor of mothers’ day; on a third were locally-produced posters illustrating government soldiers massacring Q’eqchi villagers, images from the genocidal war that had ravaged the area surrounding Saquimo during the 1980’s –a war whose tactics of kidnapping, assassination and eviction are eerily repeated even in this “post-war” era.  A spokesman apologized that not every member in the community was there to greet us—a few had journeyed to another town to get vaccines. They immediately uncovered the wooden marimba in the corner and struck up a song, bringing us plate after plate of food to eat by candlelight.