The Governor Hears the Door Slam

Right—I usually back away from this topic, which is not a hot potato but a burning and radioactive one instead.

If you’re a gringo, the word  “status” has no particular meaning for you. If you’re Puerto Rican, you tense—here it comes, the old but undiminished in its ferocity debate on whether Puerto Rico should be a state, independent, or continue as it is.

And what is that, you ask?

Depends on whom you ask. In Spanish, our status is something called Estado Libre Asociado, which puzzled me the first time I saw it, those decades ago.

“How can something be free and yet a state and yet associated,” I asked Mr. Fernández, those many years ago.

Little did I know…

“IT’S A LIE, IT’S A TRICK, IT’S A BASE AND FOUL CANARD….”

Hint—remove trajectables (it’s a word in Spanish, computer!) at the onset of any discussion of status.

Advocates of our current status have developed a capacity to smoke screen unparalleled by any other group of fanatics. We are a nation, goes the theory, a sovereign nation in “association” with the United States. We therefore hold US passports, receive federal benefits, pay no taxes, and don’t vote for president. In fact, Puerto Rico is one of the few places—the US Virgin Islands is another—in the world where an American citizen cannot vote for president, and has no voting representation in Congress. And for those of you who gnashed their teeth through the eight long years of George W. Bush, trust me—you would have been spared them had Puerto Rico been allowed to vote….

We got to be citizens back in 1917, with the passage of the Jones Act. And how convenient that was, because there was a little war going on—the first of the World Wars—and Puerto Ricans died, and have subsequently died in every other war, in disproportionate numbers.

 Which is what made me believe, fifteen years back, that our current status is heart-stoppingly simple, as well as cynical. Here’s the deal—the rich and empowered Puerto Ricans receive federal dollars in turn for the blood and lives of their poorer brothers.

Predictably, there are those who aren’t satisfied with that. So periodically we have plebiscites—usually when there is a statehood governor. And our last plebiscite, in November 2012, was a double decker—first we were asked if we were satisfied with our current territorial status; then we were asked to choose between statehood, independence, or a sovereign nation in association with the United States.

Also predictably, the Popular Democratic Party—which champions our current status—frothed at the mouth at the mention of the word “territorial.” The party has been trying for years to deny that we are an unincorporated territory. Instead, they hope to “improve” our current status, presumably by getting full parity of money with the states, not paying taxes, but being fully represented in Congress. The last time anyone expressed this idea to a puzzled congress, one congressman noted that if that idea were feasible, he’d have to go home and recommend that his constituents pursue the same option. And so last Wednesday the Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing, and the governor ran up to Washington to advocate for “enhanced” commonwealth.

He had a pretty rotten time of it.

Here’s what the chairman, Ron Wyden, had to say at the start of the session:

The “New Commonwealth” option continues to be advocated as a viable option by some. It is not.

Persistence in supporting this option after it has been rejected as inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution by the U.S. Justice Department, by the bipartisan leadership of this Committee, by the House, and by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations undermines resolution of Puerto Rico’s status question.

Well, ABC news reports that the governor was “frustrated” with the event. Here’s a sample of what he said:

In a meeting with reporters after the hearing he said he favors an "enhanced" commonwealth status that would give Puerto Rico "maximum autonomy" while cementing a permanent relationship with the United States. He'd like Congress and Puerto Rico to agree on which federal laws should apply to Puerto Rico and which should not. He would oppose laws that would be "harmful" to the island's development, he said, but didn't go into further detail.

Wyden, apparently, didn’t buy in. Here’s more of the opening statement:

Puerto Rico must either exercise full self-government as a sovereign nation, or achieve equality among the States of the Union.

The current relationship undermines the United States’ moral standing in the world. For a nation founded on the principles of democracy and the consent of the governed, how much longer can America allow a condition to persist in which nearly four million U.S. citizens do not have a vote in the government that makes the national laws which affect their daily lives? That is the question.

At last—a congressman got it….

The Plutocratic States of America

It may be that I’m thinking about money, lately, because I’m about to buy an apartment. Or it may be because I’m generally broke. Or it may be simply because that’s one of the two things—won’t specify the other—that guys think about.

At any rate, if you have half an hour or so, you might want to look at the three videos below. In the first, you’ll see how drastically unfairly the wealth is distributed in our country. In a nutshell, most people have no clue how radically rich the 1% is. But consider this lead from an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

4 out of 5 US adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

4 out of 5? 80%? Ummm, I hate to write incendiary words in an age of surveillance—but shouldn’t we have insurrection in the streets? Looting, riots, marches on Greenwich, Connecticut?

We have CEOs making hundreds of millions annually—and 80% of us are poor? Say whaaaa?

OK—consider the following facts, gleaned from a blog in the Washington Post:

·      Average pay for the CEOs of the top 350 firms, including the stock options they exercised, was $14.1 million in 2012–up 37.4 percent from 2009. 

·      That’s a bit higher than it would be if you just measured stock options granted. “Firms apparently pared back the value of new options granted because CEOs fared so well by cashing in options as stock prices grew,” the report’s authors write.

·      The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is 273-1, down from a high of 383-1 in 2000, but up from 20-1 in 1965.

·      CEO pay has increased faster than wages to high-skilled workers, suggesting that the salary market isn’t very efficient. “Consequently, if CEOs earned less or were taxed more, there would be no adverse impact on output or employment,” the report concludes.

·      CEO pay is now also closely tracking the S&P 500 index, which didn’t used to be the case.

OK—the first ingredient in the stew: we seriously screwed up who gets the cookies and who hopes for the crumbs in this society.

Now then, the second video. Caveat at the start: this was produced by the AFL CIO, which understandably has a hatchet or two to grind. But here’s the gist: what happens—even in a game, even when you know the game is rigged—when you get rich? Well, the video will tell you. You become entitled, you think you deserved it, you have no empathy for somebody who didn’t do it the way you did—by hard work and the sweat of your brow. Sure, your name is Rockefeller, but that didn’t mean you had it easy, that just meant you had to work harder to prove yourself! So fuck the poor!

I met twice the wife of Oscar Mayer—yes, of the bacon and hotdog fame. She was a nice lady, she adored my father, and she also completely stunned me by ordering Gunnar Johansen, a famed concert pianist, to sit down and play. After a bit, she told him to stop. Johansen was a gracious man, but was it just charm that made him get on and off the piano bench? Or did the fact that Mrs. Mayer had given him the piano (a rare double keyboard) enter into the equation?

Right—now we get to the last video. In which we hear, at about 9:30, that “capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathy.” And then, 10 seconds later, that capitalism at its most ruthless is a manifestation of psychopathy. And guess what? I’ve worked for one of the biggest SOBs in the business; from the reports I got from the upper levels, it’s true.

And consider—what is the rate of psychopathy in the general population? 1%. That should ring a bell—remember that the 1% of the richest people own over thirty percent of the wealth. And guess what those guys are? You got it—psychopaths.

Oh, and they own us, because they bought Congress, and the media as well, and-I-hate-to-sound-like-Edward-Snowden but the only people who are speaking out are nobodies like me.

When I lost my job—yes, I’m part of the 80%—I went down to get my unemployment insurance with Moisés, my brother-in-law. We got up at 4:30; we were making the line at 5AM. Nor were we the first—we were number thirty or so. There were perhaps a hundred people at 7AM, all mulishly lined up against plate glass windows in the Puerto Rican sun; we were waiting for the 150 bucks a week that we could get for a year. The office was on a street that has the water company, the housing department, the labor department—in short, every social service department in the government. Three blocks away, men in three-piece suits were strolling into the corporate offices of the largest banks on the island.

Why weren’t we storming them?

Requiem for the Judge's Wife

Well, the word is in. After an ordeal of three years, Aida de los Santos, the mucama or bedchamber maid, is free and innocent of all charges.

You may remember the case—Georgina Ortiz Ortiz, the wife of an ex-state supreme court judge, Carlos Irizarry Yunqué, was killed on 17 August 2010 in a fashionable area of San Juan.

And in what must have been the most cynical and depraved stunt of the year, the police decided to go after the maid, despite conflicting evidence of the husband, despite a witness who said that the photos of the scene didn’t match what he had seen, despite a bloodstained man’s shirt found in Irizarry’s hamper, despite the fact that the daughter of the victim had hired a private eye to follow her mother (so worried was she), despite the fact Irizarry had hired a detective as well to spy on his wife, despite the fact that DNA collected from under the nails of the victim was from more than one man….

Well, today’s banner headline in The New Day, our local paper, reads Sin justicia or No Justice, and there’s not much doubt—there was no justice done indeed. And the family of the victim came out and said it, yesterday—Irizarry was involved.

Well, if he was, wouldn’t you think there would be physical evidence? Oh, but there’s a problem—no one bothered to impound the judge’s car until two years after the murder of Ortiz.

Two factors—no, three—entered into this case.

Race—de los Santos is black;

Nationality—de los Santos is from the next island over, Dominican Republic. And yes, there’s a lot of prejudice against Dominicans here in Puerto Rico;

Do I need to tell you what the last factor is?

Minimally, it’s class; maximally, it’s the convergence of wealth, power, and politics. So for the last three years a woman had to take the rap for someone else—someone for whom she also had to clean his toilet. And for the last six weeks or so we’ve had to watch as a sham of a trial played out.

Justice has been served, said some—after all, de los Santos wasn’t convicted, right? In the end, it worked for her, didn’t it?

Don’t see that—at one point in the ordeal, de los Santos may have attempted to take her life (her version is that she woke up in the Witness Protection Center when somebody was slipping ropes around her neck). No matter how innocent you knew you were, how—especially coming from the Dominican Republic—could you trust that you’d get a fair trial?

Mind you, I don’t think the judge did it—he would have been about 88 at the time. But for the same reason, it was never very credible that de los Santos did it, either.

Just to intrude this bloody fact into your day, it takes a lot of butchery and strength to slit the throat, as somebody did that bad day in June of 2010 to Ortiz. You need strength and surprise, as well as the trust of the victim. And so de los Santos would have needed to be exceptionally strong or exceptionally enraged to have killed her boss in that way.

Throughout the day, I’ve been listening to the most amazing music—music by a composer whom I can’t believe isn’t much more well-known, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, born in Germany forty years before Johann Sebastian Bach. Here’s his Requiem `a 15, a stunning work.

To the memory of Georgina Ortiz Ortiz. May she rest in peace.  

May I Please, Please Protest Today?

For many Saturdays this year, a group of us have sat on a plaza and read names. People drift by, look puzzled, clutch their small children’s hands more tightly. Some gaze, some avert their eyes. Anyone who establishes eye contact gets a little flyer explaining what we are doing. The point is to engage in debate.

Among the people strolling through the plaza are a policeman or two, who stand by and look on. What don’t they do?

Put me in handcuffs and fine me 701 bucks.

That, unbelievably, is what happened yesterday in the capitol rotunda of Madison, Wisconsin.

Full disclosure—I got the figure of $701 from a friend; I’ve looked but been unable to verify it. However, I did come across the video of Will Williams, below. And Williams is a 70-year old veteran who got handcuffed and escorted down the stairs. Whereupon he tripped—or was he tripped?—on the first steps, and fell onto his handcuffed hands. Ouch. 

Nor was Williams the oldest person to be thrown into cuffs and led off. Check out Wednesday’s post—there’s a clip of an 80-year old woman being handcuffed. She’s singing away, the cops cuff her, and she trots off with them. At no point is she resisting—she’s just singing.

Let’s be clear. This is assault. And under what circumstances can a cop stick cuffs on a person? When I worked on inpatient psychiatry wards, the use of restraints was very clear. A patient had to have shown behavior that was a danger to himself or to others. And that behavior had to be documented. OK—so are cops operating on a different set of criteria? Here’s what one guy said:

Actually, there are several reasons a law enforcement officer can detain you without notifying you of the reason. They need not produce an arrest warrant if they have probable cause that you have committed a felony. Placing handcuffs on a person is not always the result of being arrested; an officer need not arrest you to detain you. If the officer feels you are a flight risk and that flight would compromise an ongoing investigation, or if he feels you are threat to him or another, he may take you into temporary custody. If there are other pressing matters to which he must attend to maintain public or personal safety, he need not speak to you at all.

Nor am I the only one to think so. Check this out….

Dane County Sheriff David Mahoney Thursday refused to retract remarks made Monday during a radio interview on his apparent condoning of the protest singing in great numbers, despite a federal judge's ruling only assemblies of twenty people or less could be staged without a permit.
"I'm here to join alongside the Solidarity Singers. This is an example of freedom of speech," Mahoney told Workers Independent News (WIN) Monday.


This is a monstrous attack on human dignity and on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. And despite the temporary order upholding the government’s “right” to require permits for demonstrations with over 20 people—no. If people want to get together and sing songs in the capitol, dammit, they have every right to do it.

Oh, and the legislator who had a meeting with the chief of capitol police and the secretary of administration? Here’s what she wrote after the aborted event.

"I was very shocked and disappointed today when you and Department of Administrative Assistant Gwendolyn Coomer walked out of a meeting scheduled in my office," she wrote in a sharply worded letter (PDF) that was hand-delivered to Erwin's office in the state Capitol. Taylor also took the police chief to task for being unable to identify the "specific conduct you believe to be unlawful."

Yes, it’s very clear that there are some people breaking the laws at noon in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol.

Very, very clear…..

For those who can help with the legal costs incurred by protesters, please donate via PayPal to the following fund: 
http://solidaritysingalong.org/

Hint—Don't Google Pressure Cookers!

She’s a writer with a 20-year old son and a husband. The son is a news junkie, and the husband is curious about things. So they’re all on the Internet a lot; she had looked up pressure cookers. Her husband had researched backpacks. And her son had followed a lot of links in the days surrounding the Boston bombing.

Wanna see what happened?

Yup, six armed guys from the Joint Terrorism Task Force had come to Michele Catalano’s house at nine in the morning. Her husband went out to greet them; they asked if they could enter the house. Here’s Catalano’s description of the event:

They asked if they could search the house, though it turned out to be just a cursory search. They walked around the living room, studied the books on the shelf (nope, no bomb making books, no Anarchist Cookbook), looked at all our pictures, glanced into our bedroom, pet our dogs. They asked if they could go in my son’s bedroom but when my husband said my son was sleeping in there, they let it be.

Meanwhile, they were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked.

Guys—do any of you feel significantly safer by having the federal government running around asking people if they have any bombs?

They got to equally tough questions—had he ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? Sure—said the husband, whom Catalano dubs, “ever the oppositional kind”—haven’t you? Two of the guys admitted they had.

The officers asked to do a cursory search—they missed two rooms (undoubtedly crammed with bombs, boys!) and never touched the computers. Oh, and they dropped the news that they do this a hundred times a week, and “99%” of the time, it turns out to be nothing. Catalano rightly wonders—what about the other 1%?

Well, the task force spent 45 minutes chatting with Catalano’s husband, and went pleasantly off to investigate the next terrorist. Here’s how Catalano concludes her piece:

This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.

All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online.

I’m scared. And not of the right things.

Well, the question is—since the government is not supposed to be reading anyone’s email, how did the Joint Terrorist Task Force know Catalano’s family had googled “suspicious” sites? Were they connected to suspected terrorists? If so, how?

The bad news is that almost all of us are connected to suspected terrorists; here’s Yahoo News on the subject….

It hinges on what's known as "hop" or "chain" analysis. When the NSA identifies a suspect, it can look not just at his phone records, but also the records of everyone he calls, everyone who calls those people and everyone who calls those people.

If the average person called 40 unique people, three-hop analysis would allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.

Right—so we have the Joint Terrorist Task Force investigating people who google pressure cookers, but not following up on Tamerlan Tsarnaev when the Russians go out of their way to tip off the FBI?

In the meantime, the head of NSA held up a placard stating that they had foiled 54 terrorist plots by using telephone and Internet data. Predictably, nobody in Congress trusts them. Who could?

Look, if it hadn’t been for Edward Snowden, they’d still be lying on their stack of Bibles. They were asked direct questions; they lied.

Which, by the way, is contempt of Congress. Anybody remember Rita Lavelle, the EPA official who lied to Congress in 1983? Here’s what she got, according to Wikipedia:

Indicted for lying to Congress; convicted; sentenced to 6 months in prison, 5 years probation thereafter, and a fine of $10,000

Throw the book at ‘em!

On Beleaguered Wisconsin

It started two years ago, when Republican governor Scott Walker decided to go after the unions in state government in Wisconsin.

And it’s still going on.

I followed it only remotely at the time, being in active anticipatory dread about the lay off I knew awaited me. But I remember seeing the protests on television, as I walked through the lunchroom before 7AM at the home office of Wal-Mart Puerto Rico in Caguas. There were, at its height, 100,000 people jammed into the Wisconsin state capitol, all protesting a bill aimed at lessening a 3.6 billion dollar state deficit. How was Walker proposing to do that? By eliminating the right of the state unions to bargain collectively.

Facts: Wisconsin became the first state to allow for unions in the public sector in 1959. While union membership was in the past higher in the private sector than in the public, that situation has now changed. Currently, about 36% of government workers are in unions, as compared to six or seven percent in the private sector.

When Walker announced his bill—called the Budget Repair Bill by those favoring Walker or the Union Busting Bill by those not—protesters took over the capitol. There were sleeping areas, a medic station, and food distribution areas. Signs were everywhere. And the capitol police, in general, acted professionally.

In the midst of the fracas, 14 state senators—all of the Democrats in the Senate—left the state and went to Chicago in order to prevent Republicans from having a quorum. That drew everybody’s attention, as well as did the massive crowds in and around the state capitol. And who were all those people? Fans of Walker said they were union organizers from out of state.

Government workers began calling in sick, and doctors were handing out notes excusing them; later, Walker would try and go after those doctors. And so the world watched as the drama in Wisconsin continued. Eventually, the Democrat senators came back. Here’s Wikipedia’s account of how the budget bill was passed:

On February 22, 2011 Assembly Republicans began procedures to move the bill to a vote on February 22 while Democrats submitted dozens of amendments and conducted speeches.[60] At 1:00 am on February 25, following sixty hours of debate,[61] the final amendments had been defeated and the Republican leadership of the Wisconsin State Assembly cut off debate as well as the public hearing and moved quickly to pass the budget repair bill in a sudden vote. The vote was 51 in favor and 17 opposed, with 28 representatives not voting.[61] The final vote took place without warning, and the time allowed for voting was so short (lasting only 5–15 s)[62] that fewer than half of the Democratic representatives were able to vote; many reportedly pushed the voting button as hard as possible but it did not register.[63] Four Republican representatives voted against the bill.[64]

In essence, Walker carried the day—though not without a fight. The budget bill was challenged in court, and upheld. Walker faced a recall election and won. But guess what?

The protests never entirely went away. People began gathering at noon to sing—songs like, “hit the road, Scott, and don’t you come back no more.” Or how about, “we’ll keep singing ‘til justice is done; we’re not going away, oh Scotty?”

OK—so what did Scott do?

He required groups of more than four people to have a permit to protest in the capitol.

Four people??!!

C’mon, Gov, if five secretaries leave for lunch together, is that a protest?

Apparently so. Here’s what Senate Majority Leader sent around to the legislative offices: 

“If you are in the vicinity of the illegal demonstrations that have been taking place over the noon hour in the rotunda, you will be considered part of the protests and are subject to being ticketed.”

Well, there was a problem. Here’s what the state constitution says about free speech and the right of assembly:

The right of the people peaceably to assemble, to consult for the common good, and to petition the government, or any department thereof, shall never be abridged.”

Not unreasonably—in fact, completely reasonably—protesters felt that requiring a permit was an abridgment of their right to peaceably assemble. And of course it is—what happens if the government says no? Are citizens just supposed to go home? It’s the old slippery slope—the next thing would be for groups to be forced to pay a bond for security, or insurance, or “interruption” to the workplace.

Wisconsin has a proud tradition of progressive, clean, transparent government. Scott Walker has severely tarnished that reputation with low-down, dirty tactics. This attack on the right to assemble is just another example of the politics of attack and polarization.

Well, the protesters went to court, and the court issued a temporary ruling stating that the state can require a permit for protesters of twenty or more people.

No deal, said the protesters. So in the last week or so, over 100 citations were issued. Yesterday, 30 were issued, as a group of 100 people sang and 50 watched.

And the police?

You be the judge—watch the videos below.

Update on an Old Villain

OK—if you want to read anything good about Barack Obama or Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, I wouldn’t suggest clicking on the YouTube video below.

Right—the name should have given it away: The Zionist Coverup. And the video is almost embarrassingly homemade; the music is awful and the text is at times unreadable. But if the facts are true, it’s chilling: we have an agriculture secretary who is in bed with the biotechnology giants who are providing us with genetically modified food.

Vilsack was a state senator and later governor of Iowa; as a lawyer, his firm represented Monsanto. As a state senator, he voted for a bill that stripped counties of the right to impose restrictions of genetically altered food. As governor, he was named “governor of the year” by the Biotechnology Industry Organization in 2001. And as you’ll see in the clip below, the biotechnology giants love him.

Confession—I had no idea who our secretary of agriculture was until this morning, when it got into my head: whatever happened to rogue wheat? You remember—an Oregon farmer found Roundup resistant wheat in his field, and went off to his local Ag representative. The wheat was found to be identical to a genetically modified wheat that Monsanto had tested in 2005, and subsequently withdrawn.

How did the wheat get there? The answer, it appears, is nobody knows, although Monsanto floated the idea that somebody had sabotaged the company by stealing the seed and planting it. But Japan and South Korea subsequently halted their purchase of wheat; the USDA is in talks with those countries. In the meantime, various farmers have taken Monsanto to court.

Now then—what genetically modified organisms have been approved under Obama’s watch? Here’s the list, according to naturalnews.com:

Monsanto GMO alfalfa.

Monsanto GMO sugar beets.

Monsanto GMO Bt soybean.

Coming soon: Monsanto's GMO sweet corn.

Syngenta GMO corn for ethanol.

Syngenta GMO stacked corn.

Pioneer GMO soybean.

Syngenta GMO Bt cotton.

Bayer GMO cotton.

ATryn, an anti-clotting agent from the milk of transgenic goats.

A GMO papaya strain.

In fact, the site claims that Obama is “the most GMO-dedicated politician in America.”

If true, we have a problem: according to a recent New York Times poll, 93% of Americans support mandatory labeling for genetically modified foods. So that means that Congress will pass the Genetically Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act, right?

Don’t count on it—the biotechnology industry spent 46 million dollars in California, defeating a similar measure. Can you imagine the millions that they will spend on the national level?

So it’s the old story—the unholy marriage of money and politics.

You're thinking I’m cynical? Remember the number of people who favored imposing universal background checks on firearms? And Monsanto is used to getting its way—it got Congress to pass the Monsanto Protection Act, which “allows Monsanto to override U.S. federal courts on the issue of planting experimental genetically engineered crops all across the country. Even if those experimental crops are found to be extremely dangerous or to cause a runaway crop plague, the U.S. government now has no judicial power to stop them from being planted and harvested.”

Think there’s anything genetically modified in Michelle Obama’s White House garden?

Vatican Airs

Well, as a gay man who is peculiarly fascinated by the Vatican, of course I had to read it. And I give it to you straight from The New York Times….

Striking a breathtakingly conciliatory approach to a hot-button issue that has divided Catholics, Pope Francis on Monday said that he would not judge priests for their sexual orientation. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis said, according to media reports.

“Breathtakingly conciliatory?” Well, maybe. Certainly it’s a step—but presumably the pope is still toeing the line about being gay—that’s no problem. Acting on it? A sin.

Actually, it may be that the real sin is coming out and saying, “yeah, I’m gay and yeah, I have sex with men.” Because we all know—minimally 30% of the priesthood is gay. Find me a gay Catholic who thinks it’s that low, in fact, and I’ll buy you dinner.

So it’s no surprise that the rumor swirling around the Vatican is that the director, Battista Ricca, of the guest house where Francis is hanging out is gay. And apparently gay with a past—when he was with the nunciature of Montevideo, Uruguay in 1999, he was living more or less openly with a Swiss army captain, Patrick Haari. Here’s what one writer had to say:

The intimacy of the relations between Ricca and Haari was so open as to scandalize numerous bishops, priests, and laity of that little South American country, not least the sisters who attended to the nunciature.

Nor was that all. The Telegraph reports that Ricca visited an area frequented by “known homosexuals,” got into a fight, or got jumped—at any rate, he had to call priests to come get him home. His face apparently was bloody or swollen.

Then there was the time he got stuck in the elevator in the middle of the night—now was he alone, but with a younger man. All this, according to the Telegraph, was sufficient to get him shipped off to Trinidad and Tobago in 2004, where he also “butted heads” with the nunciature. So he was sent back to the Vatican, and set to the task of running the Domus Sanctae Marthae—which is where Francis presumably bumped into him.

And now, Francis has appointed Ricca to be the pope’s eyes and ears in the Vatican Bank, or the Institute for the Works of Religion, its formal name. Well, if so—he could start by zeroing in on the interesting case of Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, who is accused of using his account at the bank to launder money. Here’s Catholic News Agency on the matter:

The investigation concerns transactions Msgr. Scarano made in 2009.

At that time, he took 560,000 euro in cash out of his personal Vatican bank account and carried it into Italy, to help pay off a mortgage on his Salerno home.

According to the Salerno public prosecutor, Msgr. Scarano asked 56 close friends to accept 10,000 euros in cash in exchange for writing a check of the same amount to deposit the money into an Italian bank account.


Nor is this the monsignor’s first brush with the law. You may remember, he was arrested in late June of this year for plotting to sneak in 26 million bucks in cash into Italy. And Ricca might also put his ears to any rumors regarding the source of Scarano’s wealth. Reports are that he is called “Monsignor 500” for the 500 euro notes that he reportedly carries on him at all times. Oh, and then there’s his penthouse, allegedly filled with fine art.

Well, it seems that Francis may choose to devote himself to the poor—a noble thing, indeed—but why about the spiritual needs of the rich? Scarano seems to concern himself not only with the spiritual but the temporal needs—and in particular the needs of the Agnelli family.

Nor is he alone; here’s what The Telegraph has to say:

According to officials at the Bank of Italy, the Institute for Works of Religion – the Vatican’s own offshore bank – has for years been allowing organized criminals, even terrorists, to launder money with impunity.

Well, all this brought down the director of the bank, Paolo Cipriani, as well as the assistant director, Massimo Tulli.

Well, the pope apparently is a vigorous guy, judging from his recent trip to Brazil. Great—he’s gonna have to be. Because in addition to it all, the UN has asked him to hand over files related to the sex abuse scandals. It seems that the Committee on the Rights of Children (CRC), a UN committee, has deemed this a human rights issue. Here’s what The Guardian says:

The information sought includes cases where priests were transferred to other parishes, "where instructions were given not to report such offences, and at which level of the clergy", and "where children were silenced in order to minimize the risk of public disclosure." The CRC has also asked for "the investigations and legal proceedings conducted under penal canon law against perpetrators of sexual crimes" and "the number of child victims who have been given assistance for recovery, including psychological support and social reintegration and have received financial compensation."

Oh, and did I mention Patrizio Poggio, an ex-priest who has served time for sex crimes, and who has (according to him) evidence that Roman priests had been buying the services of Romanian male prostitutes?

“Pray for me,” the pope says to everybody and his brother.

I begin to see why….

An Everyday Hero

It’s getting a little old: another African nation is going through a spate of virulent homophobia. Oh, and is it any coincidence that the presidential election is in five days?

Robert Mugabe, 89, has ruled Zimbabwe since it gained independence in 1980; he was most recently elected in 2008. The election was widely held to be fraudulent and was unquestionably violent; allegations appearing through Facebook are that Mugabe’s top aides are corrupt and very rich. This election is expected to be very close.

Sub-Saharan politicians have learned: stirring up hatred against LGBT folk means votes. So Mugabe is running—well, as much as an 89-year old can run—around the country saying things like this: “They are worse than dogs and pigs, yes worse than dogs and pigs,” he said. “I keep pigs and the male pig knows the female one.”

That’s actually mild; today’s El Nuevo Día had this to say:

Harare- El presidente de Zimbabue, Robert Mugabe, candidato a la reelección en las elecciones del próximo 31 de julio, consideró que los homosexuales "merecen ser castrados", informó hoy el diario estatal Chronicle.

Yup—castrados means just what you think it does….

Homosexuality, you see, is a Western thing—Mugabe refers to Great Britain as United Gay Kingdom, and that, in post-Colonial Africa, is deeply suspicious. But Mugabe has left the merely verbal and moved into the world of action. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

In 1996, former President Canaan Banana was arrested based on accusations made during the murder trial of his former bodyguard, Jefta Dube, and found guilty of eleven charges of sodomy, attempted sodomy and indecent assault in 1998. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, defrocked, and served 6 months in an open prison.

Oh, and he also changed the constitution. No longer is it enough to criminalize sodomy, not it’s illegal to perform any act—holding hands, kissing—that would be considered “indecent.”

Well, is it surprising that Wikipedia says this about LGBT folk in Zimbabwe?

Homosexuality is highly taboo in the socially conservative country and Mugabe's anti-gay stance resonates with many Zimbabweans.[16] Gays and lesbians in Zimbabwe are threatened by violence and suicide attempts are common among the gay community.

Well, into the picture steps Peter Tatchell, an Australian-born activist for LGBT issues. He’s apparently not afraid to get into a scrap—he was one of thirty people to create the group OutRage! Remember those guys? Here’s more Wikipedia on the subject:

Some OutRage! activities were highly controversial. In 1994, it unveiled placards inviting ten Church of England bishops to "tell the truth" about what Outrage! alleged was their homosexuality and accusing them of condemning homosexuality in public while leading secret gay lives. Shortly afterwards the group wrote to twenty UK MPs, condemning their alleged support for anti-gay laws and claiming they would out them if the MPs did not stop what they described as attacks on the gay community. The MP Sir James Kilfedder, one such opponent of gay equality,[45] who had received one of the letters,[46] died two months later of a sudden heart attack on the day one of the Belfast newspapers planned to out him.[47][48] In a comment in The Independent in October 2003, Tatchell claimed the OutRage! action against the bishops was his greatest mistake because he failed to anticipate that the media and the church would treat it as an invasion of privacy.

Peter Tatchell, being interviewed by Natalie Thorne, deputy editor of Fyne Times, at a 'First Sunday' event, November 2007

On 12 April 1998, Tatchell led an OutRage! protest, which disrupted the Easter sermon by George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with Tatchell mounting the pulpit to denounce what he claimed was Carey's opposition to legal equality for lesbian and gay people. The protest garnered media coverage and led to Tatchell's prosecution under the little-used Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act 1860 (formerly part of the Brawling Act 1551), which prohibits any form of disruption or protest in a church.[49][50] Tatchell failed in his attempt to summon Carey as a witness and was convicted. The judge fined him the trivial sum of £18.60, which commentators theorised was a wry allusion to the year of the statute used to convict him.[51][52]

Right—clearly a guy not afraid to get into a fight. Tatchell also went off to the first Moscow Pride march, and not surprising gotknocked unconscious for the trouble.

So what did Tatchell do about Mugabe?

He attempted a citizen’s arrest, not once but twice. Back to Wikipedia:

Tatchell became convinced that Mugabe had broken international human rights law during the attack, which is estimated to have involved the massacre of around 20,000 civilians. Then in 1999, journalists Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto were tortured by the Zimbabwe Army. The arrest in London of Augusto Pinochet seemed to him a precedent that human rights violations could be pursued against a head of state, thanks to the principle of universal jurisdiction. On 30 October 1999 Tatchell and three other OutRage! activists approached Mugabe's car in a London street and attempted to perform a citizen's arrest. Tatchell opened the car door and grabbed Mugabe. He then called the police. The four OutRage! activists were arrested, on charges including criminal damage, assault and breach of the peace; charges were dropped on the opening day of their trial. Mugabe responded by describing Tatchell and his OutRage! colleagues as "gay gangsters", a slogan frequently repeated by his supporters, and claimed they had been sent by the United Kingdom government.[64]

On 5 March 2001 Tatchell believed Mugabe was about to visit Brussels. He went there and attempted a second citizen's arrest. Mugabe's bodyguards were seen knocking him to the floor. Later that day, Tatchell was briefly knocked unconscious by Mugabe's bodyguards and was left with permanent damage to his right eye. The protest drew worldwide headlines, as Mugabe was highly unpopular in the Western world for his land redistribution policy. Tatchell's actions were praised by Zimbabwean activists and many of the newspapers that had previously denounced him.

Tatchell has other causes—he’s spoken out against China’s human rights record, fundamentalist Islam, and he’s spoken out for Gaza and the Palestinians and for better treatment of Australia’s aboriginal peoples.

Great job, Tatchell!