More of the Usual Bastards….

Right—so plunking down a serious amount of money yesterday to buy an apartment may have triggered my interest in the subject. Or perhaps it was spending an hour yesterday in the bank, getting the money. But whatever the cause, I’ve got finance on the brain today.

Most people have a strange relationship with money; they want it, of course, they’re afraid of it, oddly, and they don’t understand it. Which is too bad, because if they did, they’d be better off.

Full confession—I don’t understand it either. But it’s also the case—as we saw in the 2007 economic collapse that is still reverberating, in many parts of the world—that many of the experts got it monumentally wrong as well.

What happened to tilt us all onto the brink of disaster? We had a housing boom combined with too easy credit. Everybody who had a pulse “qualified” for a mortgage, which the bank bundled up with a large group of similarly bad mortgages and then sold them all off as a security. And there was lots of money out there because we don’t make anything anymore—we import it. So China bought and bought these securities and that allowed for the banks to help homeowners refinance their mortgages, which they had to do to keep sustaining a large amount of household debt, because of course we had to have more and more stuff, all made in China. See?

(Note to economist Readers—I know this is a simplification, but it’s also (sort of) understandable. Now, find me one of you who can write anything less soporific than valium!)

In short, it was a bubble, the lifecycle of which is—splat!

Or perhaps bubble is too gentle an image. It was a time bomb exploding in a hurricane. And now, five or six or seven years later?

Things are no better.

Speaking structurally, the system is just as weak, just a prone to implosion as it ever was. Wait, you say—didn’t we pass Dodd / Frank? Wasn’t that supposed to reform the banking industry?

Certainly was—but a bill is one thing. You need regulations to implement it, so what has the banking industry been doing? Sitting in Washington, and shooting loopholes through the Dodd / Frank bill.

And that’s a shame, because it could really be very simple. The United States has broken up megaliths before—anybody remember Ma Bell? Why can’t we tell the five biggest banks that they have to divest?

Or, argues Dean Baker, a co-director for Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, we could just bring back Glass-Steagall.

Glass-Steagall?

Right—I didn’t know about it, either, but that’s why we now have Google. Glass-Steagall, named after two senators, was passed in 1933 in response to the multiple bank failures. Here’s Wikipedia’s summation of the matter:

The term Glass–Steagall Act, however, is most often used to refer to four provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 that limited commercial bank securities activities and affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms.[2] This article deals with that limited meaning of the Glass–Steagall Act. A separate article describes the entire Banking Act of 1933.

You want to buy a house—you go to the bank. In the old days, the bank asked logical questions like, “do you have a job?” Or they might inquire; do you have something of value—a Monet haystack or two passed down from your great aunt? They requested a letter from your boss. In the truly old days, everybody knew everybody—which meant it was no secret who dipped into the sauce and who beat his wife.

You get your mortgage, you make your payments, and you assume that that money goes right into the basement vault, to be pulled out for the next guy with a mortgage. Or a car loan. Anyway, a loan of some kind.

Wrong.

The bank has a securities company—which you don’t understand because it’s not a house or a car but stocks and bonds and you don’t get that stuff. OK—you do, but what’s an EFT? What’s an asset-derived derivative? What’s all this stuff about futures and shorts and longs?

Don’t look at me—beyond the stocks and bonds stuff, I haven’t the faintest idea.

But guess what? My bank has a security company, and they are taking all my money and sticking it into all this stuff I don’t understand. I got the money-in-the-vault-waiting-for-the-next-borrower idea—that’s easy. But essentially, I am playing the stock market unwittingly, at second hand. Because what happens when the market crashes, and the security company that I didn’t even know about goes broke? Does it drag my bank with it, and do I lose all my money?

No—we have the FDIC, which will insure you up to a million bucks (hint for the many wealthy Readers of this blog—once you have a penny over a million, open a second account…added value, with a nod to my Wal-Mart days!) So individually, you’re safe. But as a society, as we saw, the havoc is enormous.

And what did Glass-Steagall do?

It created a strict division between commercial banks and security companies. Wikipedia couldn’t put it better:

The Banking Act of 1935 clarified the 1933 legislation and resolved inconsistencies in it. Together, they prevented many or most deposit institutions [Sic.] national from:

•  dealing in securities for customers

•  investing in most securities themselves

•  underwriting or distributing most securities

•  affiliating with companies involved in such similar activities

•  sharing employees with organizations involved in such similar activities

Wait, you’re saying, so we had that law in place? So how did we get into this mess?

Because first we chipped away at it, and then we repealed it by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, when most people thought Glass-Steagall was already dead.

In short, if you want to play the stock market, do it. Your bank, however, cannot do it for you, often without your knowledge, and never with your getting the profit.

It was simple, it worked for sixty years. Five years after we gutted Glass-Steagall, the economy imploded.

And now we have a problem—because it was easy to enact Glass-Steagall in 1933. Why? Because people were in the streets, shouting—the banks were going broke, people were losing everything they had, huge and unruly lines formed around banks, things were quickly devolving into an uprising. And now?

Uncle Sam has allowed the banks to keep screwing around—and they are—AND has agreed to bail them out when they fall flat on their face. So that means nobody is pounding on the doors and demanding change. Oh, and by the way, has anyone noticed that the banks always soar the highest, when times are good, and dip the least when times are bad?

By sheer coincidence, I live three blocks away from the president of my bank. However, I frequently withdraw money from the automated teller machines of my bank in New York City—a branch of Banco Popular being just up the street from my brother’s apartment. Oh, and the bank has branches in Florida and Chicago.

And though I live quite close to the president of the bank, I don’t know him, though I have seen him. We’ll probably never get back to the days when the president of the bank knew everybody in town. But can’t we at least stop a bunch of greedy security brokers from putting the entire world’s economy at risk?

Right, Dammit….

Well, well—the Alien Tort Statute rears its lovely head again!

Yesterday’s post was on the struggle of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) to bring an American evangelical minister, Scott Lively, to justice for the crime of going to Uganda and creating a climate of sufficient hate that a law was very nearly passed with the death penalty for some types of homosexual behavior. A federal judge ruled last week that the case could proceed.

And today?

According to Yes!, an online magazine, an attorney, D. Inder Comar, representing a single Iraqi mother has filed a class action suit against George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz; she alleges that they committed a “crime of aggression” under international law. Why? Because the war was not in self defense, nor was it approved by the United Nations.

Sundus Shaker Saleh, the single mother behind the suit, was living peacefully in Iraq before the invasion, and the picture she paints, if not idyllic, is certainly much better than now. People, she said, slept with their doors unlocked, there were no militias or patrols, the infrastructure was intact. After the invasion?

Well, we’ve seen what happened. Saleh no longer felt safe in her home, so she fled to Jordan. Nor was she alone in leaving the country, according to the United Nations High Commissioner, two million other people did as well, and 2.7 million people were internally displaced. That’s over 15% of the population, which was estimated at 31 million in 2009.

The case is based on several claims. First, six decades ago, we walked into the Nuremburg Trials and made some bold assertions; here, from the lawsuit Saleh vs Bush filed in the district of Northern California, is what was said at that trial:

16. In his opening statement to the Tribunal, Chief Counsel for the United States Robert H. Jackson stated “This Tribunal . . . represents the practical effort of four of the most mighty of nations, with the support of 17 more, to utilize international law to meet the greatest menace of our times – aggressive war.”           

17. Chief Prosecutor Jackson argued, “The Charter of this Tribunal evidences a faith that the law is not only to govern the conduct of little men, but that even rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, ‘under God  and the law.’” (Id.) (emphasis added).

18. Chief Prosecutor Jackson argued, “Any resort to war – to any kind of a war – is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property.” (Emphasis added).

19. He continued, “The very minimum legal consequence of the  treaties making aggressive wars illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defense the law ever gave, and to leave war-makers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes.” (emphasis added).

20. Chief Prosecutor Jackson recognized that the crime of aggression applied to the United States. He argued, “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.” (Id.)

In the suit, Comar also alleged that the planning for the Iraq war was planned by what would be Bush administration officials as far back as 1998, or five years before the actual invasion.

Here’s another copy and paste from the suit:

26. On January 26, 1998, Defendants RUMSFELD and      WOLFOWITZ signed a letter4 to then President William J. Clinton, requesting that the United States implement a “strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power,” which included a “willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing.” Removing Saddam from power had to “become the aim of American foreign policy.” (Emphasis added).

27. From 1997 to 2000, PNAC produced several documents advocating the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.5

28. On May 29, 1998, Defendants RUMSFELD and WOLFOWITZ signed a letter to then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott in which they advocated that “U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein’s regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place,” which included the use of “U.S. and allied military power . . . to help remove Saddam from power.”

So, the question becomes—can this work? Comar argues yes; my gut tells me no, despite wishing deeply that it could. And there is some legal ground—the Westfall Act of 1988—that protects government officials when they are acting within their “scope of employment.”

That’s the first argument that Paul Stephan, a professor at the University of Virginia, brings forth. The second? The crime didn’t take place on U.S. ground. And lastly, the courts are reluctant to get into political issues.

Comar travelled to Jordan, where Saleh had fled with her four children, to meet her; he is now representing her pro bono. But he needs help to meet expenses, to apply pressure on the court, and to raise awareness. Here’s what he writes in the Peope to People blog:

Please join me to make this trial a reality. You can help by supporting our fundraising campaign at indiegogo, by spreading the word about the lawsuits, and by reaching out to me if you want to get involved.

Look, screw the legal aspect of all of this. The damage done by George W. Bush and his government has been incalculable. More, there was no good reason to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction—Hans Blix, the UN inspector, had told both Rice and Tony Blair that in the weeks before. And the Bush administration deliberately lied to the American people—and the congress—in the weeks before the invasion.

In the weeks leading up to the invasion, I kept reading, reading—trying to find something that I had missed in the debate. The argument for the invasion of Iraq appeared the crassest, most errant display of greed, stupidity, and arrogance; surely there must be something I couldn’t see? Could any man be so depraved? Could any country allow a leader to commit such atrocity? I had to be wrong.

I was right.

That Old Devil Agenda....

It’s an old tune, a very old tune, perhaps a hymn tune. And the host of Focal Point crooned it very well: we must choose, America, between freedom and the homosexual agenda. And Scott Lively agreed—he notes that Hutchinson, Kansas, a town he deems “sleepy,” is considering adopting an antidiscrimination law for gay people. And that’s the thin edge of the wedge, the first step down the slippery slope. It started off in the 80’s with San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin (yup, my hometown) and look what’s become of them!

I listened, dear Reader, because I wanted to know—how virulent is this man, who decided to run down to Uganda and tell politicians and cops and preachers the “truth” about the homosexual agenda? As you may remember, things got a little outta hand, and the Ugandans came up with a bill so draconian that the world had to face them down. There was that provision of death for “aggravated homosexuality.” In fact, even Lively himself was upset. As stated in the Wikipedia article on him, he wrote:

[M]y advice to the parliament was to go the other direction from what they did to actually go on a proactive positive message promoting the family, promoting marriage, etcetera, through the schools, and that if they were going to continue to criminalize homosexuality that they should focus on rehabilitation and not punishment. And I was very disappointed when the law came out as it is written now with such incredibly harsh punishments.

So how virulent was he? My initial reaction was, “not so bad,” but that may in fact make him more dangerous. He presents himself as a scholar—no one, he says, knows more about this topic than he. He poses as unbiased; some homosexuals, he asserts, don’t molest children, but many do. He distorts history; the very basis of homosexuality has traditionally been between an adult male and a youth or teenage boy.

He has a flip chart, on which he displays the varying types of homosexuals; in the case of women, there are the butches and the fems, occupying the middle of the line graph. In the case of men, there is the super effeminate male on the right. And on the left, one step past “super-macho?”

Monster.

Yes, these are they hyper masculine, no mercy homosexuals that were the secret power within the Third Reich. These were the homosexuals that killed the Jews, that released the gas.

History is a smorgasbord for Lively—he munches on the Ancient Greek tradition of man / boy relationships, he chomps down on the morsel that there were homosexuals in the early days of Nazism, but that they were rigorously suppressed later. Oh, and that half a million gay people died in the gas chambers.

No, he says, most gay people are miserably unhappy—we are drowning ourselves in alcohol and drugs. And we therefore have to drag everybody down to our level—to our pit of despair and degradation. And how do we do that? By recruiting youths, which is called pederasty.

Nor did Lively concern himself just with Uganda. He also went on a fifty city-tour through Russia, and guess what? Provinces and districts throughout the country began passing draconian laws, essentially similar to Uganda’s law. Here’s what Masha Gessen wrote:

The first time I heard about legislation banning "homosexual propaganda", I thought it was funny. Quaint. I thought the last time anyone had used those words in earnest I had been a kid and my girlfriend hadn't been born yet. Whatever they meant when they enacted laws against "homosexual propaganda" in the small towns of Ryazan or Kostroma, it could not have anything to do with reality, me or the present day. This was a bit less than two years ago.

Hate is a virulent message, true, but does anybody think that one man alone—little Scott Lively—is capable of jumping on a plane, spending a week or two, and getting such spectacular results?

Of course not—here’s what I wrote, citing Wikipedia, on January 22 of this year:

The Fellowship, through Representative Joe Pitts (R.-Pa.), redirected millions in US aid to Uganda from sex education programs to abstinence programs, thereby causing an evangelical revival, which included condom burnings.

In a November 2009 NPR interview, Sharlet alleged that Ugandan Fellowship associates David Bahati and Nsaba Buturo were behind the recent proposed bill in Uganda that called for the death penalty for gays.[75] Bahati cited a conversation with Fellowship members in 2008 as having inspired the legislation.[76]

And who is Sharlet? The author of The Family, which details the shadowy combination of religious fundamentalism, politics, and corporations. Yes, through Doug Coe and his “family,” American tax dollars have made life hell for Ugandan and Russian LGBT folk.

And here’s where—only very slightly—I begin to feel sorry for Lively. He’s been used, and he may have to pay, as he should. Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) paired with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to haul Lively into court for hate crimes. And on Wednesday, 14 August 13, federal judge Michael Ponsor ruled that yes, the case can proceed.

Good for the judge!

So yes, it’s certainly true that someone out there has an agenda, but is it the homosexuals?

You decide.

Those Disrespectful Nails...

It was disrespectful, Yelena Isinbayeva said, to the country, to the host what Emma Green-Tregaro did.

What did Emma Green-Tregaro do, and why did it upset Isinbayeva?

Take a look….

This is, apparently, unacceptable in Russia, where both athletes are competing, and where president Vladimir Putin makes it illegal to distribute “homosexual propaganda," as defined below.

…information that can harm the spiritual or physical health of a minor, including forming the erroneous impression of the social equality of traditional and non-traditional marital relations.

Read closely; this doesn’t mean distributing “homosexual propaganda” to minors, it means—look, can I just call it HP? It’s Saturday afternoon, I’m lazy, and besides, writing out this “homosexual propaganda” nonsense makes my stomach churn.

So—distributing any HP to anyone would be illegal, even to an adult. And what happens if you do? You can be fined up to $30,000.

Right, and what else can’t you do in Russia, or in this case, Moscow?

Have a gay pride march for the next one hundred years. The clip below quite clearly shows what happens when you do.

Of course, that’s better than what happened in St. Petersburg—be warned, the blood is flowing in this one….



The situation for gay people is deteriorating in Russia; here’s what one writer, Masha Gessen, has to say:

Two things happened to me the same month: I was beaten up in front of parliament for the first time and I realized that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am now a person with a pink triangle.

My family is moving to New York. We have the money and documents needed to do that with relative ease – unlike thousands of other LGBT families and individuals in Russia.

Gessen is a fighter, not a quitter. But she consulted a lawyer—could they go after her adopted son, since another law makes it illegal for gay people to adopt? The lawyer’s answer, “your answer is at the airport.”

Nor is that all. According to the Mother Jones magazine, a fake web site has been set up to lure gay men on “dates.” Here’s Mother Jones on the subject:

Led by notorious Russian neo-Nazi Maksim "Tesak" ("the Hatchet") Martsinkevich, the group has been using social media, primarily VKontakte (Russia's Facebook spinoff), to place fake dating ads to lure gay men. Once face-to-face with the men, group members interrogate and torture them, and a video of the encounter is put on YouTube. Here's one such video from late July. (Warning: The content of the video is disturbing.)

Disturbing? My word would be gut-wrenching.

Nor is it just in Russia—hate crimes are on the rise in New York City, where gangs are attacking gay people in broad daylight in places such as Madison Square Garden. Check out the video below.

What’s the worst thing?

Let me tell you a little secret. When I worked at Wal-Mart, there were two people who spent an hour or two reading the newspapers and listening to morning radio. It was called “corporate communications,” and the idea was simple—monitor the buzz and hit back when necessary.

If that was little Puerto Rico, do you think the international sponsors of this 50 billion dollar event being held in Sochi, Russia next year were unaware of this controversy? Here’s what one writer has to say:

"This piece of legislation worked its way up through the legislative system," Minky Worden, HRW's Director of Global Initiatives, told me in an interview (listen to the full interview below). "The International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, the so-called top corporate sponsors -- Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Procter & Gamble -- these companies all, as [HRW] did, tracked the progress of this law."

"And because it is so clearly in complete violation of the Olympic Charter," she continued, "it's also clear to us at Human Rights Watch that if any of the major Olympic stakeholders who have a hotline to the Kremlin -- because the Olympics are very important to Putin personally, he has a deputy prime minister, [Dmitry] Kozak, who is tasked with making them come off perfectly -- that if any of the Olympic stakeholders, the sponsors who are literally paying for the Games, or the International Olympic Committee, the U.S. Olympic Committee or the other Olympic committees, if they weighed in on this, I don't think this law would have been signed by Putin or passed by the Duma. If they had leaned on [Russia] before the law was signed, it would not have been signed. That is absolutely true." 

Let’s head back up to the top. A Swedish athlete is dissing all of Mother Russia by displaying her rainbow fingernails?

Screw that—move the damn games to Vancouver, and I’ll start eating Big Macs again….

Tengatenga—Homophobe or Not?

This morning’s question: was James Tengatenga really the head of the Malawi Council of Churches, and if so, what was his position on the enforcement of the country’s sodomy laws, which assign five years of prison for females, and fourteen for males?

Whoa—you’re saying. Malawi? Tengatenga? And what’s the thing about sodomy?

OK—I confess it, I didn’t know a thing about Malawi either, though my computer, for once, didn’t red squiggle the word. But in my defense…oops, there is no defense. The country gained independence in 1964, so I certainly should have studied it—or at least run into it—in my elementary school days.

But first, here’s the map of Africa—locate South Africa, and then travel northeast.

Malawi is small, as you can see, and landlocked. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject: 

Malawi is among the world's least-developed countries. The economy is heavily based in agriculture, with a largely rural population. The Malawian government depends heavily on outside aid to meet development needs, although this need (and the aid offered) has decreased since 2000. The Malawian government faces challenges in building and expanding the economy, improving education, health care, environmental protection, and becoming financially independent. Malawi has several programs developed since 2005 that focus on these issues, and the country's outlook appears to be improving, with improvements in economic growth, education and healthcare seen in 2007 and 2008.

Malawi was a single-party state whose ruler, Hastings Banda, stayed in power for thirty years. It’s currently a multi-party state, headed by Joyce Banda (no relation).

OK, you say, I’ve joined the rest of the group on geography—now fill me in on James Tengatenga.

He was, up until very recently, an Anglican bishop, and quite an important one. Here’s Reuters on the subject:

He served as diocesan bishop of Southern Malawi and chair of the Worldwide Anglican Communion's Anglican Consultative Council, a network of 44 churches.

According to some, Tengatenga’s views on LGBT issues are moderate, at least by sub-Saharan standards; this is what Boston.com has to say:

Close observers of gay rights issues in Africa say Tengatenga has been an ally who has publicly opposed the most virulently anti-gay pronouncements of other African bishops, and that he played a crucial role in keeping the Anglican Communion from splitting apart in the aftermath of Robinson’s election.

He has other supporters as well; here’s the Boston Globe:

The Rev. Kapya John Kaoma, who has conducted extensive research on religion and sexuality in Malawi and other African countries for Political Research Associates, said Tengatenga is widely considered a friend to gay activists there. In 2010, Tengatenga organized bishops from Southern Africa to put out a statement countering an assertion by other African bishops encouraging governments to criminalize homosexuality, Kaoma said.

Why is all of this important?

Dartmouth College initially offered the position of dean of the William Jewett Tucker Foundation; one source said that the dean is the moral and spiritual head of the Dartmouth community.

And Tengatenga accepted the position; he then resigned from his position as bishop. At that point the news erupted, or the controversy started. The LGBT group at Dartmouth wanted to know—where, in a region that is among the most homophobic in the world, did Tengatenga stand?

And there was some reason to think that he stood, well, where the LGBT community didn’t want him to stand. Again, here’s boston.com:

Controversy erupted after word circulated that Tengatenga opposed the 2003 election of the Rev. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the Anglican Communion’s first openly gay bishop, and asserted in 2011 that Malawi’s Anglican provinces remained “totally against homosexuality.”

But, again from boston.com:

After accepting Dartmouth’s offer, the Rev. James Tengatenga last month resigned his post as bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Southern Malawi and publicly affirmed his support for marriage equality – a risky stance in Malawi, where homosexuality is punishable by up to 14 years in jail.

And was Tengatenga part of the Malawi Council of Churches? Because when the prime minister, Joyce Banda, tried to stop enforcement of the anti-homosexuality laws, she ran into a brick wall, mostly from the churches. The Independent says this:

Justice ministry sources said pressure from the Malawi Council of Churches, a group of 24 Protestant churches, forced the U-turn.

And from the website of the World Council of Churches, the Malawi Council of Churches has four Anglican Dioceses, including the Anglican Diocese of Southern Malawi, of which Tengatenga is bishop.

Oh, and that organization did speak out firmly. The Nyasa Times, curiously, won’t let me highlight in order to copy / paste (guys, you may be “Malawi breaking online news source” but even the New York Times, for God’s sake, lets me copy and paste….). But yup, they didn’t mince words, even going so far as to cite Leviticus 20:13. 

At the end, the new president of Dartmouth College rescinded the offer, at the urging of LGBT groups and the NAACP. Tengatenga offered a few stinging remarks.

The crux of the issue, to me, is stated here:

“You are asking the impossible of someone coming out of that African situation,” said the Rev. Nicholas Henderson, a parish priest in West London, an editor of Anglicanism.org, and a vice president of Modern Church, the oldest theological society in the Anglican Communion. “Just rescinding that [appointment] is to show a lamentable lack of understanding of circumstances that are outside the confines of privileged North America.”

There’s something a bit fishy here. It’s the old story, the story we were told in the seventies when the gay movement emerged. “Go slow, make alliances, change doesn’t come overnight, we need time to educate people,” went one chorus. The other chorus was singing, “out the politicians who are screwing boys in private and voting against gay rights in congress and state legislatures, picket the fundamentalist churches, get in people’s faces and scream for your rights.”

Oh, and this mention of “privileged North America?” No one is going to deny that Dartmouth is privileged; no one can deny that North America is privileged, though I wonder if Henderson is including—as he should—Mexico in North America. But it’s interesting—Malawi can have a female head of state; that’s wonderful. And quite progressive. So why can’t it at least decriminalize homosexuality?

And I’ve spent twenty minutes trying to find it on the Internet—the story of the shameless hounding out of a job and into a mental institution of a gay academic in the 1950’s. It was Smith College, but it could have been any Ivy League school.

Schools that have gone on to have gay studies programs, gay student organizations, gay student class presidents. Yes, we have different realities—but a fourteen-year prison sentence for consensual sex among adults? Does the reality of Southeastern Africa justify that? 

Tengatenga acknowledges that his views on homosexuality have been “evolving.” My first reaction? Bullshit. “Evolving” means holding back until there’s enough of a crowd; then you step in and claim your place at the head of the parade.

The old question—which chorus should you listen to, which chorus does the work?

Both. Nobody changes without a group making a radical demand for change, whereupon the conservatives turn to the group offering a moderate voice for change.

And Tengatenga?

As always—I don’t know. But that’s OK—questions are more important than answers.

Two Degrees of Separation

Until you’ve experienced it, it’s impossible to imagine how connected certain worlds are in Puerto Rico.

Consider—there are 3.7 million people in Puerto Rico; how can it be that everyone knows everyone else?

I exaggerate, of course, but not by much. And the first order of business of any two Puerto Ricans is to establish whom we both know in common, what high schools and universities we went to, anything that will make a bond, and assure us that we can cheerfully kiss and embrace at the end of trading reminisces about our friends in common. Six degrees of separation? Forget it—in Puerto Rico, it’s barely over two.

And when you get to the professional classes, it gets even lower.

“Tell Carlos Romero Barceló hello from Uncle Lemuel,” said Mr. Fernández, whom I had called from a party; I was using ex-governor Romero Barceló as bait to get Mr. Fernández to the party. Of course, Uncle Lemuel had been a law partner with Romero Barceló half a century ago; more to the point, Uncle Lemuel died before the turn of the century—but not a problem. He was still being social.

It was therefore no surprise that my friend Tony could tell me the whole story of the Sagardía family. They’re prominent on the island, and Antonio Sagardía is in the news, since he is expected to face charges of misuse of public funds, falsification of documents, and violation of government ethics. All this while he was in charge of the…

…Department of Justice.

I can hear the gasps of horror, of astonishment, out there. Yes, Horrified Readers, our top lawman, number three in the government, is going up against the very court system that he used to administer.

You’re wondering, perhaps, what the ex-Secretary of Justice did? Well, there was the little matter of the $7000 in credit card charges that the Comptroller deemed questionable.

“He whipped out a government credit card to pay $3.50 for two Tylenol for a headache he got while on a business trip,” Tony said.

“Well, was it an official headache?” I asked.

There are other charges as well. In May of 2009, Sagardía got into a shouting match with a legislator, when that legislator questioned why the Secretary of Justice was granting contracts to his former law firm, Aldaronda, López y Bras (Bras being a prominent family from Mayagüez, a member of which married Mr. Fernández’s sister—bijte?). Here’s the exchange, for which my mother—actually any mother—would have sent all parties to their rooms….

(My apologies for subjecting you to the infamous La Comay—but it was the only clip I could capture. Oh, and by the way, the fight begins at about minute 4….)

For those needing a bit of translation, the “gentleman” on the right is the legislator, Luis Vega Ramos, who has just asked why $25,000 this year, with an equal sum the following year, is going to Sagardía’s former law partner. “That’s my problem, not your problem,” replies Sagardía. Not so, retorts Vega Ramos, who points out that these are public funds.

You see how quickly it erupts—in five seconds, Sagardía is shouting at Vega Ramos not to point his finger at him. He then proceeds to call, in the words of Wikipedia, “a scoundrel, a chump lawyer, and an intellectual dwarf.”

What had provoked the response, and why was the Secretary so on edge?

Well, it had just been established that the Secretary had supported the release from prison of an ex-client of Sagardía’s former law partner. And not just a release—but Sagardía was arguing for a new trial. Ohh, and wanting the public to pay his old law firm to represent the ex-con….

It all gets down to a Latin thing—falta de respeto. It was one of the first phrases I learned in Spanish; I soon learned to invoke it in every discussion. Here’s how it works: at the first elevation of the emotional temperature, Puerto Rican men immediately raise the pitch of their voice by about a fifth—basses become tenors, tenors become altos. The hands are flying everywhere, and then something pisses off one or the other. In this case, was it the pointed finger? Was it the “my problem, not your problem?” It doesn’t matter—the term falta de respeto functions as the red cape in the bullring, with identical effects and consequences.

Well, Sagardía didn’t last long as Secretary of Justice; he resigned in October of 2009. And then guess what he did? He signed on as the lawyer for a woman, Ana Cacho, whose child was murdered 9 March 2010. But that wasn’t surprising, since Sagardía’s brother had represented Cacho’s primo hermano, literally a first brother, but actually a first cousin with whom you’ve grown up and whom you know like a brother.

Remember what I was saying about the degrees of connectivity in Puerto Rico?

Oh, and when did anybody ever hear about Ana Cacho’s primo hermano? In 2005, when he came to light in the investigation of the murder of Adam Anhang, the murdered rich Canadian whose widow was recently arrested in Spain, and is facing extradition. And what was the connection between Cacho and Anhang?

Business partners….

I rest my case.

Remeron 15 mg PO HS

Taí asks how I am doing.

Which person is she asking? For while most people have two personae, I have three: the waking, the sleeping, and the up-at-three-in-the-morning.

Up at three in the morning is nothing unusual, I know. Guys who worry about their mortgages, their jobs, their teenage kids—they all get up at three. And in this life, who’s not worrying about something?

My getting-up-at-three is slightly different. I take a pill, Remeron 15 mg PO HS, that is something like a date rape drug—it knocks me out, only to wake me up at three. And then, I am sacked with a craving for sweets. I’ve done coffee ice cream (Haagen-Dazs, $5.99 at CVS), jelly beans, (Jelly Belly, 30 flavors, $3.49 at CVS), mozzarella cheese (not a sweet, I know, but diabetes runs in the family, so I forced the change) and last night, pineapple chunks (so does high cholesterol, so I’m trying this).

The other unusual thing is that while up, I’m not in that three-in-the-morning worry state. I’ve done that, I know that; no, I’m quite happy, though I’d rather be back in bed, asleep. But I munch on, and sated, frequently fall asleep in my chair. I awaken (marginally) just enough to (usually) lurch back to bed.

This is not a problem—what is a problem is what this drug does remarkably well to avert. And that is depression, which is the worst disease possible in terms of the quality of life.

Nor is that me—that’s the word from an article I read years ago. It seems that you can have anything, diseases as terrible as Lou Gehrig’s Disease or Huntington’s Chorea and still have a better quality of life. Not having any major diseases to date, I can only trust the authorities.

But at three in the morning, I am frequently trawling the Internet, stumbling on interesting webpages, and emailing them to myself. This is my only clue, when I wake up four hours later, of who and what I am and have been doing. It’s my one glimpse into my shadow self.  And last night, apparently, I was listening to “Sure on this Shining Night,” by Samuel Barber.

It’s a song that is impossible not to love. And it comes with a story, which I must have read last night:

No doubt the popularity of "Sure on the Shining Night" was amplified by Barber's frequent retelling of an anecdote that directly involved the song. In 1979, Barber had just moved into a new apartment in New York City and needed to call home. He was trying to reach Gian Carlo Menotti, whom he knew was visiting the apartment. However, upon trying to dial the number from the telephone booth, Barber realized that he could not recall the newly established phone number. The composer contacted the operator for assistance who initially refused to provide Barber with the number, but confessed that she possessed a "weakness" for "Sure on this Shining Night" and requested that Barber sing the song's opening phrase to confirm his identity. Barber complied and was rewarded with his telephone number!

Right—a nice image, the composer singing his most famous song in a phone booth in New York.

Oh, and by the way, Gian Carlo Menotti was visiting? If so, Gian Carlo had been visiting for half a century, since the two met at Curtis as students, and they had been life companions ever since.

From Barber, I must have drifted off to Rockwell Kent, because I found that I had sent off the following illustration:

Nice, hunh? Then I sent on this:

Hmmm—pretty erotic; was Kent gay? Right, so I looked him up, and the answer is no—he had three wives, five kids, and was sexually promiscuous.

But his work must have reminded of another artist, Paul Cadmus, and boy, was he gay. Take a look at this:

Mmmmm. How about this:

All that and he can read, too! Now then, where’s that famous one, you know, the guy on the bicycle…. 

You talking about this?

Well, I must have been falling asleep. But why was I even up in the first place?

Because of this….