The Beatitudes Banned?

Every day, the same guy hits me up for food, and I have to confess. I’m annoyed with him.

Annoyed because he hits me up twice or three times in a day—shouldn’t once be enough? Annoyed because I give him three dollars—enough for bread, ham and orange juice, and he wants five dollars for “a hamburger at Burger King.” Annoyed because he now has taken to coming into the café where I “work” and asking for money while I’m busy writing. In short, he isn’t acting like a properly grateful beggar—I have become his bank. And so? I am not a cheerful giver, which I should be.

Right—so why don’t I tell him to go to hell?

Because he’s hungry, dammit.

How do I know? Well, he’s rail thin. And I see him “selling” parking spaces on the street, as well as pushing shopping carts with food for customers at the grocery store. In short, he’s struggling, and he’s just getting by.

I write this because Susan has sent a link to a church website in Raleigh, North Carolina, which has apparently banned churches from giving out food to the homeless. The church, Love Wins, had for 6 years given coffee and sandwiches to anybody who came by on Saturday and Sunday mornings. They were recently told this is illegal.

Second confession—I have not been able to access the link, and I suspect that everybody else in the country is having the same problem. I did read, however, news of the affair in The Daily Kos, and here’s the link.

In chasing down this improbable but seemingly true story, I came upon the interesting news that many major American cities have done the same. In Philadelphia, Mayor Nutter has prohibited groups from distributing food in city parks, saying the practice is unsanitary and lacking in dignity. (Hey—just the facts; that’s what he said…)

And it goes on and on—New York City, Orlando, Dallas, Las Vegas and Houston have all restricted feeding the poor in some ways. Here’s what one blogger wrote:

New York City has banned all food donations to government-run homeless shelters because the bureaucrats there are concerned that the donated food will not be "nutritious" enough.

Yes, this is really true.

The following is from a recent Fox News article....

The Bloomberg administration is now taking the term “food police” to new depths, blocking food donations to all government-run facilities that serve the city’s homeless.

In conjunction with a mayoral task force and the Health Department, the Department of Homeless Services recently started enforcing new nutritional rules for food served at city shelters. Since DHS can’t assess the nutritional content of donated food, shelters have to turn away good Samaritans.

You know, I’ve often believed that the internal combustion engine was the ruination of America. Why? Because too many of us wake up, leave our houses, drive to work, come home, eat, and go to sleep. Maybe it would be better to take the bus, as I do. Then people would see, as I once did, a whole family in a parked car at five in the morning. They were all asleep, all except the father, sitting in the driver’s seat. Nor will I forget his eyes, which plainly told me—“this is all we have, all we can do.”

Or people would see—as I do—the guy who routinely goes into the dumpster up the street, fishing out scraps of food. Oh, and the guy in Houston who did so in March of this year? Here’s what the Houston Chronicle said:

James Kelly was hungry and looking for something to eat. He tried to find it in a trash bin near Houston City Hall.

For that, the man, who said he spent about nine years in the Navy but fell on hard times, was ticketed by a Houston police officer.

According to his copy of the citation, Kelly, 44, was charged on Thursday with "disturbing the contents of a garbage can in (the) downtown business district."

"I was just basically looking for something to eat," Kelly said Monday night. "I wasn't in a real good mood."

Houston, by the way, passed an ordinance in 2012 requiring organizations to get a permit to distribute food, and socking any organization in violation with a $500 fine.

You know, there are days when I think the Victorians did it better. However bad the workhouse was, it provided shelter and food. I give it to you, which would you prefer, the streets or this?

Workhouse in Ripon, England

Hard to Do Good to....

There are days when the topic presents itself, when the island outdoes itself in some species of lunacy or illogic that the post virtually writes itself. Today?

Well, I started out trawling for an interesting story. I can therefore tell you that there is a guy, Patrick McConlogue, who observed a homeless person living down by the Hudson River in New York City. McConlogue thought there was something interesting about the guy—he didn’t seem crazy, he wasn’t talking to himself, he was reading and writing. So McConlogue, who is a software engineer, devised a test—he would approach the person and offer two alternatives. The first, he would give the guy $100. The second alternative was a laptop computer, three books on Java script writing, and lessons every morning for three months.

Guess what? Leo, the homeless guy, chose the second offer. And it developed that Leo is a sharp guy—he’s particularly passionate about the environment…but let McConlogue describe it:

It turns out Leo is a genius particularly concerned with environment issues. As I sat there becoming increasing stunned, he rattled off import/export prices on food, the importance of solar and green energy, and his approval for “efficient public transportation initiatives [referring to NY’s new Citibike]”. He is smart, logical, and articulate. Most importantly, he is serious. It’s up to him if dedication is also his gift.

So he returned the next day with the following stuff:

      Samsung Chromebook with 3G (access to code academy etc).

            Beginner: “JavaScript for Beginners”

            Intermediate: “Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja”

            Advanced: “Javascript the Good Parts”

            Solar charger for the laptop.

            Something to hide the laptop in. (Anyone have ideas? Email me: pmcconlogue[at]gmail.com)

McConlogue then went on to write a blog post entitled (infelicitously) “Finding the unjustly homeless, and teach them to code.”

Vitriol exploded across the Internet. Were there “justly” homeless people, critics demanded? Was McConlogue really suggesting….

One guy tweeted, “I hope the homeless guys takes the 100 bucks, just to mess with this condescending dick-face.

Guys? This guy is a software engineer, not a public relations expert. Of course he was suggesting that some people deserved to be homeless. Oh, and remind me again—what are you doing for the homeless?

“It’s so very hard to do good to people,” Margaret Mead once said. You want to help—but is that money you give some homeless person going for food or drugs? And will Leo—despite his brains—be able to stick to three months of learning Java script?

My gut tells me that Leo is very likely bipolar and is currently exhibiting no symptoms—but what do I know? At any rate, it’s an interesting experiment—and I hope it works.

So that got me thinking about The Soloist, Nathaniel Antonio Ayers, Jr.—the former student at Juilliard whom Steven López, an LA Times reporter, befriended. Ayers dropped out of Juilliard when he had a psychotic break—and he never quite got his life back again. So López got involved, got Ayers an apartment, contacted Ayers’ sister; he did a mammoth job of helping a person who…

…was not always easy to help.

What do you do when you convince a landlord to rent an apartment to a psychiatric patient, and then the tenants start complaining—why is that guy in 4D walking around outside the building all night?

He’s pacing because he’s hearing voices and he’s scared to be in his apartment. Or he attributes some magical power to a ritual in which he must walk nine times around the building, saying a talismanic series of phrases. And if he gets it wrong, he has to start all over again. Or maybe….

You get the picture.

OK—so Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey, Jr. made a film—also called The Soloist in 2009. And what’s up with Ayers now? Now that the book has been written, the movie filmed? Anyone still concerned about Ayers?

I’ve looked. Ayers’ sister has a foundation to help artistically gifted people who are suffering psychiatric illnesses, but there’s not much info on Ayers there. So the most recent info came from Pat LaMarche in Huffington Post from April of this year. Here’s part of what she wrote:

Ayers wants to change what people call him. He wants to be Tony Ocean. He has emblazoned the new name all over his violin case; his trumpet case hasn't yet been monogrammed.

Ocean says "his" reporter made him a household word: "I have a reporter. His name is Steve Lopez, from the LA Times. He made me famous. I went to the White House. I was in the China Room. I flew Alaska Air. They made a movie about me and about his book." It seems this fame is the reason Ocean has dumped his old name. "I threw the other one away. I want to be Tony because I like the food there." Ocean took the menu for Tony's lunch counter out of his trumpet case to emphasize the name change, "and because my mother liked to call me that. I picked Ocean because I like the sound of the ocean. I like the rolling sound as it comes and goes."

Ocean likes the sound of the music he hears on Skid Row too. "I was a Cleveland-born person. I decided to move here because the center of town has Beethoven. And you can get food. They have a pot full of beans and they will give you some," Ocean explains without mentioning exactly who "they" are. Then he referenced his audience as a reason to stay, "And Steve Lopez says, 'you were playing your violin for your friends.'" And that's reason enough for Ocean to stay on Skid Row.  

Well, most people make their choices in real estate based on something other than where Beethoven is. And those people who do, like Ayers?

Not easy to do good to….

A Gala and a Controversy

Moral dilemma, here—should I sign the online petition asking for the Metropolitan Opera to dedicate the season’s opening gala to the LGBT community?

Factors in the decision—the season opens this year with a performance of Eugene Onegin, by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Right, so would dedicating the gala to the LGBT be a sharp stick in the eye for Vladimir Putin and the 430 legislators of the Duma who passed a draconian law outlawing even talking about homosexuality, much less getting down and…well, getting down? Somehow I don’t see it.

Nor is the Met’s choice of a Russian opera an endorsement of Putin and his law, given that the law is three months old, and the Met undoubtedly scheduled this years ago. You don’t run out and ask Anna Netrebko, whom the Associated Press called “the reigning new diva of the early 21^st century,” if she’s up for singing next week.

However, there is the fact that Netrebko is Russian, as is the conductor, Valery Gergiev. However, Netrebko came out on Facebook—that’s how it’s done, these degenerate days—with this statement: “As an artist, it is my great joy to collaborate with all of my wonderful colleagues — regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. I have never and will never discriminate against anyone.”

Well, good to know! It may not be a ringing denunciation of Putin and the wretched law, but it’s something.

Both Gergiev and Netrebko supported Putin in the past, but there’s no indication that they support the antigay legislation.

OK—but consider the fact that Tchaikovsky was homosexual, despite a two-and-a-half-month attempt at marriage—which left him drained and unable to compose. And though the Russian government is trying to deny that fact, Tchaikovsky mentions the fact himself in his letters. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

In any case, Tchaikovsky chose not to neglect social convention and stayed conservative by nature.[100] His love life remained complicated. A combination of upbringing, timidity and deep commitment to relatives precluded his living openly with a male lover.[101] A similar blend of personal inclination and period decorum kept him from having sexual relations with those in his social circle.[102] He regularly sought out anonymous encounters, many of which he reported to Modest; at times, these brought feelings of remorse.[103] He also attempted to be discreet and adjust his tastes to the conventions of Russian society.[104] Nevertheless, many of his colleagues, especially those closest to him, may have either known or guessed his true sexual nature.[105] Tchaikovsky's decision to enter into a heterosexual union and try to lead a double life was prompted by several factors—the possibility of exposure, the willingness to please his father, his own desire for a permanent home and his love of children and family. There is no reason however to suppose that these personal travails impacted negatively on the quality of his musical inspiration or capacity.

Well, we have a sad story, here—a gay man living in a troubled time. Russia then, and perhaps now, ran on “understandings,” according to one writer. The laws were on the books, but were they enforced? Well, you came to an “understanding” with whatever authorities you needed to and you were OK—until the winds blew in an unpleasant direction.

Another factor in the decision: the Met is not going onto Russian soil to do this gala—it’s taking place, of course, right at home in Lincoln Center. So it’s not quite like the Olympics, which will be taking place in Sochi, and which is expected to cost 12 billion.

There’s also the question of politics in art. It’s all very well to say that politics and music don’t mix, but in the past they certainly have, at least in some cases. Casals wouldn’t play in Spain for years, in protest of Franco. No one dared to play Wagner in Israel, until Barenboim did it—and he barely got away with it. 

Well, the Met is in an uncomfortable position. Prepare to be stunned, Readers, but opera is to gay men what softball is to lesbians. The LBT community might safely be snubbed, but the G? Tread carefully.

The good news? I’ve decided, no, I won’t sign the petition. But I have listened to the opera, and it’s a knockout….

Foreign Shame

I would see them every morning at five o’clock, when I traveled first to Río Piedras on my way to work in Caguas. They were young, they were old, most of them appeared healthy—a few had canes or crutches, a few appeared ill. There was nothing particularly special or unusual about them.

The plaza del pueblo in Río Piedras was quite lovely, especially at that hour, with the sun just coming up. There were large mahogany trees, which have a tantalizing scent when they flower in May and June. There were always stray dogs and cats, banana kwits, and the Greater Caribbean Grackle, which in mating season has a call identical to the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. So I would sit, wait for the second bus to arrive, and observe the crowd.

There would be about fifty or a hundred, especially later, around six or seven, when the doors to the Social Security Administration offices would open; an employee would slip out and hand out the numbers of those who would be seen.

It was puzzling, but I was in no mood in those days to give it much thought; I had a job to get to, and an aging parent to attend to.

Well, now I know—I was witnessing the biggest case of Social Security fraud in the United States.

How big? Well, there were 75 people arrested yesterday—all of them perfectly capable of trotting into the processing area, and all of them—if The New Day is to be trusted—acting like star actors. Here’s ABC News:

Rodriguez said agents took videos of people that belied their claimed ailments. She said one who claimed back problems was a gym owner who posted a picture of himself on Facebook lifting a girl above his head.

Well, of course he had a back problem! Lifting girls above your head would give anybody a back problem! Anyone can see that!

Well, among the 75 people arrested were two shrinks (not, I’m happy to clarify, my own) and a fisiatra or a physiatrist (the island is full them, though I never met one in the States—the physiatrist is basically a rehab doctor…). Then there was also the ex-employee of the Social Security Administration, who very helpfully guided the abled to those doctors who could disable them. And then—hey, great customer service here—“facilitated” the process of getting that pesky paperwork attended to.

How well did they do?

Según la investigación, el principal gestor del fraude fue un exempleado del Seguro Social, identificado como Samuel Torres Crespo, quien recibió alrededor de $3.4 millones al gestionar solicitudes de seguro de incapacidad basadas en supuesta información falsa.

Yup, that’s The New Day reporting that Samuel Torres Crespo, an ex-employee of Social Security, got 3.4 million bucks for helping in the disabling process. His cut? 25% of the amount received. And the doctors? They took from $150 to $500 for their part in the scheme.

Well, it was good while it lasted. Some families were raking in $5000 monthly—that $60,000 annual salary buys a lot of bling-bling.

And the overall total? Upwards of 35 million dollars.

Nor is this over—the sub director of the federal district attorney states that this is the first of many.

In fact, disability seems to be winning in the race against ability, at least on the island. Caribbean Business, in an article tellingly titled “Disability Island”, reports that “Social Security data reveals that about four times as many working-age Puerto Rico residents receive disability income than those on the U.S. mainland.” We have 1 million working people on an island of 3.7 million. We also have over 200,000 disabled people not working—for a rate of 17.7% of disabled workers (some of the 200,000 disabled presumably being older or younger than working age). In the States, the rate is 10.3%.

Not all of these are frauds, of course, but the situation was so alarming that the Social Security Administration decided to move its review center from the island to Baltimore. Oh, and they’ve opened a special office to investigate fraud on the island. And of the top ten zip codes for SSA fraud? Nine of them are in Puerto Rico.

Well, I would see them, wonder about them, and then get on the bus, trot up the stairs and—quite frequently—help Leida up the stairs. She was tall and thin, and the first time I saw her, I couldn’t believe she could walk. Nor was it, truly, a walk—it was a lurching, swinging prelude to a fall. She may have had braces, those many years ago; she has never not had a walker. She arrived each morning in a special car: not having the use of her feet, she had to do everything with her hands. My “job,” when we coincided those mornings, was to open the trunk, get out the walker, and watch in never-diminished terror as Leida grabbed the railing of the six steps up to the lobby and hauled herself swaying up the stairs.

She was unfailingly cheerful; she had been dealt a rotten hand in life, and in the only remark that in a decade of knowing her she had ever made about her condition, she confided that a video shown at a meeting of disabled kids had made her cry. It made her remember her childhood, with its many hospitalizations and surgeries.

She had the nobility that a few people acquire through suffering. She knew very well that a supervisor’s annoyed look or an intemperate email didn’t deserve a place in her day, and she didn’t let them in, much less insert them into other people’s day. As much as she had struggled, she would have scorned to complain. And while the very substantial ladies of Human Resources took the elevator to the second floor, Leida took the stairs.

I consider myself Puerto Rican, though by adoption; I’m proud to be Puerto Rican, and the Puerto Ricans who work work harder than many other people in many other places. But in my classes at Wal-Mart, there was a sure theme that would revive any sputtering class: el mantengo.

It’s the philosophy of the kept, the entitled, the petty cheats who play the system, don’t work, and receive every benefit—from a free apartment to (almost) free electricity to free food to free…you get the picture. And the rest of us? Pendej…. (a very vulgar word that—wonderfully—actually means a hair on the human vulva. Meaning—somebody else is having all the fun, and you’re just standing around watching…)

No, I didn’t complete that pendej—though every Puerto Rican will know it. As they will the term that I can complete….

Vergüenza ajena.

On Becoming a Footnote

OK—it’s 11:22 in the morning and what have I done?

Well, it must have been the fatigue following the exertion of becoming, with Mr. Fernández, a footnote in the legal history of Puerto Rico—that must be what’s operating, here.

It was in 2008 that, on a cold December morning, Rafael and I walked into the Cambridge City Hall to get married. Had we made an appointment? Of course not. So the secretary sighed, and called the justice of the peace, Margaret Drury, down to marry us.

Every trip to the altar—even when there’s no altar—is a long one. In our case, it was physically a long trip; I had spent the early part of the week in Wisconsin with my mother, who was recovering from open-heart surgery. I had flown out of a huge snowstorm, missed a flight in Miami, gotten back home, confirmed our flights to Boston—and discovered that Expedia had botched one leg of the journey. We eventually flew to New York, and took the bus to Boston. And then the snow began—the storm I had flown out of from Wisconsin I had bussed in into Boston.

I was still on edge on the day of my marriage—it had seemed unreal, somehow. But I had told my boss, the director of Human Resources, that I was getting married—and to whom. She asked how long we had been together, and I told her: twenty five years. “It’s high time,” she said. Later, meeting her in the crowded lunchroom, she kissed me, wished me a good trip, and bustled off to wash her hands. Glancing over her shoulder, she called out, “and congratulations on…the other thing!”

And so we referred to our wedding as “the other thing,’ throughout the trip.

I had told her, because I knew perfectly well what I was going to do: ask the company to put Raf on the health plan. He was between jobs—and his Cobra payment was a couple hundred dollars easily over what I would pay to put him on my company’s health plan.

So I found myself, after we returned, with my boss and the president of the largest company on the island—Wal-Mart Puerto Rico—arguing that if we had a statement in the Employee Handbook stating that we didn’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, shouldn’t gay spouses be included in the benefits? “I think you should,” said the president.

It was the first time anybody had raised the issue to him.

Was it easy to do that? No—my hands were wet, my mouth was dry, I was in the classic fight or flight response.

I also knew that I would do it, that I was right, and that if I didn’t do it, I was letting the next generation down. Drag queens fought in Stonewall for me, and if they can fight cops with Billy clubs, I could talk to a Colombian man in a small office in Puerto Rico.

My request was denied, of course, on the grounds that my marriage was not legal in Puerto Rico. OK—so I wrote requesting reconsideration from Bentonville. Oh, and I wrote a letter to the executive vice president for Human Resources for the entire company.

This is called rattling the cage, and somebody has to do it.

Bentonville never replied, so I sent a certified letter. That got a response.

So it became a tradition, in those last years of my time there—I would formally petition to put Raf on the health plan, and present my marriage certificate.

“What do you want me to do with this?” my buddy Karen would ask.

“Oh, just send me the same letter you sent last year,” I’d say.

“Ay, Marc….”

If the Internet were working, I could tell you who said, “courage is a muscle that becomes stronger with exercise.” Recently, I came out to a room full of strangers, blurting out, “Sweetheart, I’m your husband, not your friend,” after Raf, about to read a poem of my mother’s, referred to me as a friend. The whole room laughed—look, how threatening is a roomful of poets?

So it was natural to me, to protest when a notary public, in preparing a deed for an apartment I bought, referred to me as soltero, or bachelor.

“No, I’m married in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” I said.

We went around about it; he explained that legally, I was a bachelor. We signed; I went home and had a drink. The lawyer went home and lost sleep.

In Puerto Rico, property sales are handled by a notary public, who must be as well a lawyer. So the notary public got it into his head—he knew he had to do something. The next day, he called the professional association that rules over the notaries, and asked them the question: what to do about a marriage legal in one state but not in Puerto Rico?

“It was great—they all took the question very seriously, and very respectfully,” said Tony, to give the notary his name.

Even the head of the association, with whom Tony finally ended up….

“Your job as a notary is to record the facts, not judge on the legality,” the director said. “You have to amend that deed, and state that Marc and Raf were married in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And they both have to sign it….” The director went on to speculate—what happens if Puerto Rico is obliged to recognize all marriages from other states, including same-sex marriages?

So we did, but not before asking Tony if they the notary association had ever had the question put to them.

“No,” he said, “they had been waiting for it, but it had never come up. They’re actually thinking of writing a memo to all the notaries on the island, directing them to do what we’re doing. So yours will be the first gay marriage recorded on a legal document in Puerto Rico.”

“You really should spread the word around,” said Johnny, when I called to tell him the news. “There could be other gay people who need to be aware that their marriages need to be recorded….”

So I have!

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.