Interesting article I randomly found - but what does it all mean?

Dark Bend
Replies: 6
Re: Dark Bend
karenjfink (View posts) Posted: 14 May 2008 2:19AM GMT
Classification: Query
Here is the article. Dark Bend is located in southeastern Jasper County, Illinois. Some of the Dark Bend is in Crawford County and perhaps some is in Richland County. I wish I had a date for the article, but it appears that I do not.

The HISTORY SHOWS DARK BEND LEGEND BASED ON FACT NOT FICTION
From the Robinson Daily News, by Doug Lawhead

In its day, “law abiding folks” avoided the Dark Bend. The Bend is generally recognized as the portion of the Embarrass River Bottoms north of the river in southwest Crawford County and southeast Jasper County.

Legend has it that in the early days of Crawford County, the Bend was a safe haven for thieves, murderers, counterfeiters, and moon shiners. In this case legend is backed up by fact, says Eldon Skaggs, 79, of Stoy who was born and raised in he bend.

Although Skaggs was born long after the last Bend gang broke up, he recalls that people still had to be careful about what they did, and who they “crossed” in the Bend when he was a child. “It was still Dark then, plenty dark,” he said.

In the book, It Happened in Southern Illinois, author John W. Allen said the area got its name from the dense swampy woodlands. The area was difficult to build in, and construction of roadways was impossible. Government surveyors neglected the area until after Illinois became a state.

Allen says the surveys were not completed until 1839 and none of the land was sold until the 1840s. Due to this squatters moved into the area. Most were criminals who used the area as a hideout. To protect themselves from the long arm of the law, the squatters developed a kind of mutual defense fraternity, writes Allen, that thwarted the arrest and conviction of its members.

“It was almost impossible to convict a Dark Bender,” Allen says. “These groups continued to be an annoyance for many years. One group about Chauncey remained active until after 1856. “The stories you heard were probably true,” Skaggs says. “They took care of themselves down there. Lawmen stayed away from the place.” He said the Dark Bend name came from the thick timber, the criminal element, and the lack of lights at night.

“We had a lot of horse thieves travel through,” he said. “You might buy a bay horse from one of them and next spring you’d have a gray horse. What they did was steal a horse from you neighbor, dye it, and sell it to you.”

Moon shiners liked the Bend, too. “We had moon shiners’ stills there, hither and yonder. I’d name some of them, but a lot of them still have relatives down there. There was one that sank his still in the dredge ditch to keep the Feds from finding it. When they left the country, he pulled it out and went back into business.”

Skaggs said occasionally a stranger would wander into the area and be seen fishing. The moon shiners would follow the stranger around to make sure he wasn’t a Fed looking for stills.

Any livestock that wandered off the farm into the Bend was assumed lost. Often, though, the thieves did not wait for the livestock to wander off the farm. “Once a guy tried to drive off Mom’s turkeys. She caught him and hit him in the head with a fence rail, and that took care of that,” Skaggs said.

“There was one woman down there, if she ran out of meat she’d go hunting. If she found a hog, she’d shoot it and take it home on her horse,” Skaggs said.

“Some of them didn’t farm or didn’t work. A lot of them didn’t even have a garden, but they’d have a horse and buggy and got along just fine. Some of them were spin-offs (of the squatters) and some would rather be outlaws than honest.”

Murder was common. Once, a young man disappeared. Several years later his bones were found in a well. “One other time, a boy disappeared and they found his body in a fodder shock,” Skaggs remembered. “Once at a baseball game in Pierceberg—they had a ballpark on the southwest corner of that intersection down there—a fight started and one man ended up killing another man with a knife.”

“You didn’t invade their territory. They played for keeps down there. They let you know who ran the place,” he said.

The end of the Bend began when Joseph Piquet from Alsace, France, founded what is now Ste. Marie. Picquet bought several thousand acres of land, which he in turn sold to his family and friends from France.

About 1850, German immigrants began to settle around the fringes of Dark Bend. Although their houses and barns frequently burned mysteriously, they stayed and eventually tamed the Bend, writes Allen.

“That was still pretty rugged country down there, when I was a kid,” Skaggs said. “You had to be rough or you didn’t exist.”

(A large part of the Dark Bend is in Jasper County. However, now law is in force there, but the river and mosquitoes are still there.)

If you're seeking a competent mental health listener

Here is what you must find:

A woman who,

from relatively early childhood and into adolescence and adulthood was raped, beaten, and brow-beaten, almost invariably by some combination of her father, her brothers, her grand-fathers, her uncles, her cousins, her minister, her teachers, her boy friends, her husbands, her bosses.

A woman who, almost invariably, abused narcotics and alcohol, lived on the edge of sanity pushing the pedal to the metal, was notoriously promiscuous, probably dropped out of school, got horrendous grades, got fired from the first few dozen of so jobs that she ever held, and who has spent time in prison, and who probably came very close to successfully ending her life on multiple occasions.

A woman, who, NOW, finally, has found an anchor of loving support, be it with a man, a woman, a community of faith, an organization that does outreach to help those who cannot help themselves;

A woman who pays her own rent, buys her own food, gets dressed up for special occasions, has an earthy sense of humor, is not shy to be a sexual creature, who is gentle, kind, loving, giving, sharing, caring, empathizing (all the long, all the while she was being treated so horribly, these were characteristics that emerged - which was probably why others tried so diligently to rape, beat, or brow beat the humanity out of her - they could not bear that she would not break to their torture - they hated it that she "let them" give it to her, because she "wanted it." And thus had to punish her all the more cruelly.

This woman, this human being, this beloved child of God, this transcendent, incandessent, spirit of agape love, is one of God's truest messengers on earth. She clung to life when there was not one thing in her known worlds that could possibly be worth living for; and, yet, she clung.

Find this woman. Be honest, fear not intimacy; nothing you ever tell her will she reveal to another living soul. She will hear the worst of it (her own stories are far more painful, far more sorrowful), and she will weep, "oh, how you've suffered," she will weep for you, will weep for things you did not even notice, like, how so many of your closest friends, even relatives, marginalized you, feared you, called you names, abandoned you, were willfully ignorant of the things they themselves did to create such ambivalence in your world.

Find this women (their numbers are legion).

Save your soul. She is your Joan of Lorraine. She will, literally, march through the fires of hell to protect you and defend you; she will even, if need be, die for you, in order that you may be saved.

Some might say, "wait, just come to Jesus."

I say, "who in the world do you think IS Jesus, anyway?"

Reflecting on my conversation with the candle maker.

Took a break just now, tossed a broken pair of scissors in the trash, plus to half-filled water bottles from the fridge that I finished off, easing the parchedness of my throat. If we only threw out stuff around here that doesn't work, the house would be a LOT neater. Went to the hut for a smoke, but for the first time, and you will appreciate this: Lit the small round candle, about 1/2" high that sits on the candle holder that is attached to the piece of iron work that also holds a velvet glass circular piece. The flame shown so brightly on my side (west side) of the hut, so I just had to see what it looked like looking in from the East. The flame was barely visible, and thus, my anonymity was maintained. Started watching the flame, so strong, so upright, and then, it hit something, candle wax, most likely, and started to sputter, and almost went out. But, it recovered and grew up straight and tall again, except, all of a sudden, it started to bend in the breeze, a north western breeze, and this is so odd, because the hut is well sheltered from the West, and not badly sheltered from the North. Eventually the candle flame started to burn upright again. There may be an analogy for our lives in this, and I am certain that you have watched candle flames, mesmerized, for almost all of your waking life.

And then I thought some more about our conversations this evening, and had this vision of you crying yourself to sleep. Tears of joy, hopefully, but not all joy.

How could you have been so stupid? How could you have been so ignorant? Well, we are all stupid, and utterly so at various points in our lives, and too, we are all ignorant, and utterly so at various points in our lives.

But stupidity can be overcome and anyway, it is rarely fatal. Same goes for ignorance. HOWEVER, the deadly cocktail mixed combination of stupidity AND ignarance, well, that can kill you, or permanently main your soul.

And when I say "you," I really mean "us," and perhaps this is a more accurate reflection of the generaliztion: HOWEVER, the deadly cocktail mixed combination of stupidity AND ignarance, well, that can kill one so enthralled, or permanently main one's soul, and I remembered again, Tinkerbelle, whom I so desperately wanted to love me, (and for all the wrong reasons - just because she was from the same town as my Uncle Jim, who was mortally wounded and died near Trey Ninh, Vietnam, 22 Sept, 1968, the same town as his wife, my beloved Aunt Louise, having her love me would never bring Jim back from the grave.

And thus, I loved her for all the wrong reasons. Although, she was a light, sailing vessel, and a good-time gal (not in any sexual way, no, those urges in her would not be awakened until long after she had left me with her cats, who hated me, and then feared me the night I couldn't take them anymore, and took them from the apartment to return to her, the feckless Tinkerbelle.

No, me, she would never love; nor any of the other men she always dated whenever she and I were together, and there were always at least two others, guess she needed to devour one for every meal of the day.

We were play things to her, and although I was smarter (by far, except for my stupidity) and more talented by far (in ways too that she never glimmered) than all the others, we were simply not meant to be.

So how did it come about that my son is almost the spitting image of her? His milky white smooth skin, that turned up nose, that auburn colored hair, those engaging blue eyes, that joy of laughter and silliness, that not so endearing trait of non-loyalty, of enjoying folks for the moment, but pretty much discarding them as one would a paper napkin from a fast food joint, after having blown one's nose in it.

They are two of a kind, and I am so much better off without either one of them in my life.

Thank you Lord. AMEN.

Quick note to an artist I adore - the sculptress Raja Graal

So happy am I to have found you again ... hadn't seen you post anything for a while, but I remember, you are traveling and will be exhibiting soon, if not already in Canada! I hope your tour is a smashing success, especially financially, as I well understand that

keeping fed,
keeping sheltered,
keeping safe,
keeping warm

are very helpful to the artist when creating their art, which is frequently inspired

by having been hungry,
by having been homeless,
by having lived in precarious circumstances,
by having almost been frozen to death by hypo-thermia.

Scenes From the Life of Chet Baker (Part One) The Junkie Beat

Scenes From the Life of Chet Baker (Part One)
The Junkie Beat

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

“I’m running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money.”

–William Burroughs

Chet Baker was a no show. The trumpeter and singer was slated to perform at a concert in Laren, Holland, which was being broadcast live across Europe.

Baker was meant to share the billing that night with the tenor player Archie Shepp. It was an odd pairing to say the least. Shepp was an incendiary performer, pushing the outer boundaries of free jazz. Baker, once the epitome of the cool west coast sound, had scarcely changed his playing style in 30 years. Two hours before the show, the producer went to Baker’s hotel room to collect the musician and drive him to the venue. Baker wasn’t there.

A frantic search ensued. There was no trace of Baker in his usual haunts. Even his dealers in the Zeedijk shooting galleries hadn’t seen him.

Baker rarely missed a gig. He was too desperate for the money. His habit had grown to an almost surreal level. In that spring of 1988, Chet was shooting six grams of high-grade heroin a day. He had run out of veins to shoot in, so he had taken to injecting himself in his scrotum. He backed his heroin fixes with long lines of cocaine. His days had been fueled by one big speedball after another.

Finally, Baker’s Alfa Romeo pulled up at the concert hall. But Baker wasn’t in the sports car. It was driven by one of his dealers, Bob Holland. Holland had been looking to score some drugs for Baker, but he hadn’t seen the trumpeter in two days. Holland said Baker had been “out of his mind” the last time he saw him, tormented by the fact that his girlfriend, Diane Vavra, after one too many beatings, had left him for good.

“Bob, I’m 58 years old,” the cadaverous Baker, preparing to inject himself in his crotch, told Holland a few days before he died. “I’ve used this stuff for thirty years. You can’t help me. I’m too far out.”

* * *

Chet Baker was laying in a fetal position on the sidewalk outside a cheap hotel near Amsterdam’s Central Train Station when police found his body. Blood covered his face and coated his blue-striped pants. His skull was crushed. It was 3:30 in the morning. The moon was full.

At the scene, the police made a judgment that the dead man had jumped out of a window in the Prins Hendrik Hotel, hitting his head on a concrete street post. There was no identification on the body, which was duly wrapped in a white cloth and sent to the morgue.

The next morning Dutch police returned to the Prins Hendrick Hotel to investigate. They soon determined that a room about 30 feet above where the body had been found had been rented by a Chet Baker. The name was not familiar to the police detectives.

The small room was locked from the inside. After entering, police found two glasses: one with a hypodermic needle containing a gram of heroin and another with a mixture of heroin and cocaine. They also discovered a small satchel containing a trumpet, a bracelet, a lighter and a few coins.

The Dutch police assumed that the anonymous corpse was just another junkie suicide. The small window only opened a few inches wide, just enough to permit the spectrally thin Baker to slither through for the final plunge.

Even though conspiracy theories would soon begin to take root, the cops were almost certainly right—though this was no ordinary addict. Give or take William Burroughs, Chet Baker was at the time of his death the world’s most notorious and unrepentant heroin fiend. He was also, for a few years in the 1950s, the most popular jazz trumpeter in the world, playing with a delicate, almost ethereal lyricism.

* * *

In 2002 James Gavin published his excruciatingly detailed biography of Chet Baker, Deep in a Dream: the Long Night of Chet Baker. (After 16 years, the book is finally available in paperback.) Gavin slices through the shroud of mystique that has enveloped Baker since his emergence as the personification of white cool in 1953. Gavin reveals Baker to be a timid and passive-aggressive personality, a deeply insecure musician, who often didn’t understand the structure of the songs he was playing. Even so, some of Baker’s records are undeniably beautiful, featuring an eerie noirish quality, the sound of American ennui. He was a genuine and unique talent, capable of reducing a song to its melodic core. He was the great minimalist of post-bebop jazz, though Baker himself may not have even appreciated the term. Gavin repeatedly refers to him as something of an idiot savant, a natural talent, even though the range of his genius was extremely narrow.

Deep in a Dream (the title is taken from an otherworldly Baker song from the late 1950s) is surely one of the most harrowing biographies ever written, an unrelenting and merciless account of the musician as junkie. The reading experience is exhausting and claustrophobic, something akin to squirming through Pier Paolo Pasolino’s Salo: 120 Days of Sodom.

Much of Baker’s life after 1958 is spent chasing the next high and doing almost anything to get it, from selling his trumpet to stealing drugs, money and prescriptions to using his many girlfriends and wives to run drugs for him, often at great risk to their own safety. Gavin renders the contours of Baker’s descent in prose as stark and austere as one of Baker’s own songs. Here’s Gavin’s description of the night when Baker forced his girlfriend Sandy Jones to shoot up with high grade heroin and left her alone in a comatose state:

Starting with his mother, Baker’s feelings about women had always been violently ambivalent: he needed them, yet he hated them for it. Jones became his latest victim. Years later she recounted the time “Chet tried to kill me.” In fact, it happened twice, although she never understood why. One day he came to the apartment with “a whole out fit of the darkest stuff in the world.” He shoved her into the bathroom, cooked up the dope, tied her arm, and plunged in a needle. “I got weak in the knees,” she said. “A couple of days later I came to.” She learned that Baker had walked out, leaving her on the floor – “blue, blue, blue.”

Chet Baker is a repellent figure, too coarse and pathological to be considered tragic. He was the ultimate nihilist. As a doper, he makes Keith Richards look like a novice. He seems to have had little curiosity about his condition, and even less empathy for the dozens of other lives he helped to wreck, including those of his children. When his son Dean was hit by a truck and seriously injured, Baker didn’t even call to check on his condition. Still Gavin’s account is strangely sympathetic. Baker lived moment to moment, fix to fix, gig to gig. And yet he was able, even in a heroin haze, to play some of the most unforgettable melodies in jazz, tunes that continue to haunt the mind long after his death.

* * *

Chesney “Chet” Baker, Jr. was an Okie. He was born in Yale, Oklahoma (home of Jim Thorpe) two days before Christmas in that grim year of 1929. His father, Chesney Baker, was a guitar-player, who idolized Jack Teagarden and Bix Beiderbecke. Chesney played guitar and banjo in the studio band at WMX radio. After work, he would often bring his friends back to the house to listen to jazz records and smoke dope, while little Chet fiddled around on a ukelele and an unwieldy trombone. As the grip of the Depression tightened, Chesney eventually lost his job at the radio station and skidded into a lingering despair that he tried to wash away with whiskey. Chesney got violent when drunk and regularly beat Chet’s mother Vera. Chet wasn’t spared his father’s wrath. “His father used to beat the shit out of him,” recalled Sandy Jones, one of Chet’s many lovers.

By 1940, the Bakers had given up on Oklahoma and joined the great migration west. Chesney left first, fleeing the household for California, where he landed a job at Lockheed. A couple of months later he sent two bus tickets for Vera and Chet. They eventually joined him in a small house in Glendale. By then Chet had picked up a trumpet. He seemed to be a natural. In 1946, Chet dropped out of high school and joined the Army. The war was over and Chet was shipped off to Berlin, where he played in the Army band, flirted with local girls, traded in black market goods, and goofed around amid the ruins of Germany. He was a wiry kid with the anodyne, unformed features of a pre-adolescent. Chet was out of the Army two years later, trying to study musical theory at El Camino College in Los Angeles. But Baker was so bored in the classroom that he soon reenlisted, landing a dream posting in the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio in San Francisco, where his primary military obligation was to play reveille and taps. In between, Chet was on his own, exploring the jazz clubs of the Bay Area, places like the Tenderloin’s Black Hawk and Bop City, the famous waffle shop / jazz venue on Post Street that hosted everyone from Billie Holiday and Lester Young to Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. One night at the Black Hawk young Chet sat in with Dave Brubeck and the great altoist Paul Desmond, with a young jazz-fiend named Clint Eastwood, skulking in the corner of the room.

But Baker was learning his chops mostly by listening to records, especially the early recordings of Miles Davis on 78s that would eventually become culled together into the landmark album Birth of the Cool. Baker was a gifted mimic, but never a stylistic innovator. He ruthlessly mined Davis’s phrasings, the soft, dark melodic lines, the terse, almost minimalist approach to the solos. “I didn’t really get locked into what I wanted to do until I heard Miles,” Baker told Downbeat a few years before he died.

For his part, Miles was never especially captivated by Baker’s playing. In 1963, Baker was performing at the Blue Note. He spotted Davis sitting in the crowd. Between sets Baker sauntered over to Miles’s table and gave him a salute. “Man, you suck,” Davis chuckled,shaking his head. Baker slunk away without saying a word, went backstage and shot up.

Chet Baker’s sound was a purified version of Davis’s ballad-playing, emotive and spare, which made it all the more appealing to the burgeoning West Coast jazz scene, which, headlined by players like Harry James, Artie Shaw, Buddy Rich and Art Pepper, was almost entirely white.

Years later Baker came to resent Davis and other black musicians. He deprecated Davis’ revolutionary second Quintet and his excursions into fusion. “They aren’t even songs,” Baker fumed. He couldn’t play the music and didn’t understand it. Chet was also an early proponent of the notion of reverse discrimination. He believed that music critics didn’t take white musicians seriously and that he was being denied gigs and record deals because he was white.

In 1952, Baker’s career took off when he was tapped to join a dissolute Charlie Parker for a series of West Coast gigs. Parker was the great innovator, the originator of bebop, the stoned visionary of a revolutionary new sound. He was also a helpless junkie, ravaged by a decade of almost unimaginable levels of opiate consumption.

When he hit the West Coast that spring, for the first time since being locked up in the notorious drug prison at Camarillo, Parker was a shambling ruin, drinking a quart of Hennessey’s every night, chewing Dexedrine like gum, prowling for smack every night. Chet Baker soon became Parker’s runner, driving down Central Avenue buying heroin to feed Parker’s enervating habit. Baker probably shot up for the first time with Parker, the Orpheus of addiction. Parker was generous with his dope and his praise. He said he enjoyed Baker’s playing, calling it “pure and simple.” Two years later Bird was dead and Baker was hooked for life.

Baker later mythologized his gigs with Bird, inventing a much-repeated tale about Parker returning to New York and chiding Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis about “a little white cat on the coast who’s going to eat you up.” But bootlegs of those performances at the Tradewinds and Tiffany Club tell a different story. Baker’s playing is timid and hesitant. He stumbles through his solos and seems lost in the cyclonic swirl of Parker’s sax. Even so, the dates with Parker conferred on Baker a kind of anointment; he had been blessed by a legend.

In the audience for those sessions with Parker was a young, gangly photographer from Pasadena named William Claxton. Claxton was obsessed with Parker, clicking photos of the band all night. But when he saw the images emerging in the dark room, it was not Parker who struck him, but the chiseled features and wind-swept hair of Chet Baker. In a city obsessed with the allure of images, Baker struck a captivating profile, emitting an aura as distinctive as any movie star. Claxton would photograph Baker for years, his stills charting the entropic decay of the trumpeter-junkie’s face. Call it the origins of heroin chic. Decades later, those early Claxton images would entrance the fashion photographer Bruce Weber, who became so enamored with Baker’s pallid visage that he tried to recreate the look in his shoots. Later, Weber spent more than a year making a documentary on the trumpeter, a strange, compellingly watchable film charting Baker’s final descent called Let’s Get Lost.

Baker was a hot commodity. Around town he became known as the James Dean of jazz. Hollywood celebrities, including Robert Mitchum, and Lana Turner, were dropping in to hear him play at places like the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, a venue that came to symbolize the new sound of the West Coast movement. Baker’s music in those days was airy and edgeless, featuring slow-paced beachside nocturnes, charged with a celluloid romanticism.

Off and on, Baker played with the tenor player Stan Getz in southern California clubs. Indeed, Baker’s first official recording was with Getz on a cover of “Out of Nowhere,” recorded live at the Trade Winds Club. Though they disliked each other intensely, Getz was also a junkie and he would often shoot up with Baker. In fact, Getz overdosed several times at Baker’s pad in West Hollywood. Baker recalled dragging the unconscious Getz into the bathtub and running cold water over him until he came out of it. At another party, Baker found Getz slumped in a heap, a needle stuck in his arm, his face turning blue. Baker and his pals spent an hour reviving the musician. When Getz finally came around, he snapped that Baker had “messed up my high.”

In the summer of 1952, Baker began his brief but intoxicating collaboration with the sax player Gerry Mulligan, who had landed in LA a few months earlier with his sax and a nasty habit. Baker and Mulligan couldn’t have been more different. Mulligan was tall, cerebral, a gifted arranger and songwriter with a deep knowledge of classical music and jazz history. He was mercurial and authoritarian. He was a reader and a dope addict, who first got popped by New York police in 1946. Mulligan was also something of a megalomaniac and control freak, who thought he was going to recast the sound of jazz by eliminating the piano.

Their relationship was fractious from the start with Baker storming out of the first rehearsal and telling Mulligan to “go fuck yourself.” But the Mulligan Quartet, with Baker on trumpet, Bobby Whitlock on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums, soon became one of the hottest acts in town. The band’s first gig was at the Haig, a small jazz club on Wilshire, where Erroll Garner was once the house piano player. In those early weeks playing together Mulligan and Baker created an intimate and smoky sound, more relaxed and melodic than the Birth of the Cool sessions. They complimented each other in surprising ways, tending to forgo soloing for playing duets or in smooth harmony. They played a mix of Mulligan originals and standards, none more famous than the Rogers and Hart ballad “My Funny Valentine,” which Mulligan had somehow excavated from the film Babes in Arms. Mulligan wrote new charts for the song, but Baker’s achingly beautiful, almost painfully deliberate solos turned the ballad into a dark classic of doomed love. “I believe Chet was kind of a freak talent,” Mulligan said years later. “There’s no figuring out where he learned what he knew.”

The band rushed into the studio to record an LP for the new Pacific Jazz Records. The album earned rave reviews and sold well. Movie stars, including Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, and directors came to hear them play and hang out with the band. “They were good-looking white musicians,” Mulligan’s girlfriend Jeffie Boyd said. “In LA, white was good. Black, people weren’t so sure how to take.”

Then Baker got arrested for smoking pot in his car. He got off lightly, only three months probation, but the police leaked the arrest to the press, trying to smear Baker’s reputation. Still the publicity only seemed to enhance his allure, especially for young women. Chet Baker may have been the first jazz musician with groupies. The women flooded to his gigs less for the music than to get a glimpse at his angelic profile. At the time, Chet was married to his first wife, Charlene Souder. But the trumpeter was soon hooking up with starlets, often in his car between sets. “It was girls, girls, girls for him,” drummer Larry Bunker told James Gavin. “He was fucking everything in sight, treating Charlaine like a piece of shit, balling chicks on the ten minute break out in the car while Charlaine was sitting in the club. That was his style.”

Though one of Baker’s lovers exalted his talent for cunnilingus (he was a trumpet player, after all), Baker’s sexual technique drifted far from traditional notions of romantic love. He had no interest in foreplay, didn’t like to kiss and basically wanted to have missionary position sex as quickly and harshly as possible. The sensual experience of being next to Baker also lacked a certain erotic appeal. Hygiene didn’t come high on Baker’s list of priorities. He didn’t like to bathe, wash his hair or brush his teeth—when he had teeth. He rarely changed his clothes or washed them. By the mid-1960s, he walked around in sandals, because his feet were swollen from repeated injections, his untrimmed toenails curling like a Chinese empress. Nearly all of Baker’s long-time lovers became heroin addicts, after they encountered Chet.

Baker was a beater. He would berate and slap and punch his wives and girlfriends, often in public. His wife Carol was repeatedly seen sporting a pair of black eyes. He tried to strangle his longtime girlfriend Ruth Young with a telephone cord and later broke into her apartment, looted the place and sold her grand piano to pay for drugs.

Groupies weren’t the only ones tailing Baker in 1953. He and Mulligan were also being watched by a pair of vicious LAPD vice cops, John O’Grady and Rudy Diaz, who had made it their mission—often unauthorized—to bring down jazz musicians. O’Grady was a racist thug who enjoyed terrorizing musicians, especially jazz players, who he viewed (like his hero Harry Anslinger) as degenerates and corrupters of youth. In his time, he stalked and busted Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Lenny Bruce and Dexter Gordon. “I ran Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker, the great saxophonist, out of town,” O’Grady boasted in his revolting memoir O’Grady: the Life and Times of Hollywood’s No. 1 Private Eye. “I could have nailed him. His arms were covered with track marks from heroin needles. But he was too old and too drunk and I decided it wasn’t worth wasting the time nailing Parker just so the City of LA could pay for his keep.”

So the savage O’Grady set his sights on the hot young guns Baker and Mulligan. O’Grady and his thugs busted into Mulligan and Baker’s pad one afternoon while the musicians were rehearsing. O’Grady found a few pot leaves and stems and used it as a pretext to arrest Mulligan’s girlfriend, Jeffy, and Baker’s wife, Charlaine. The drug cops then tracked down Baker and Mulligan. O’Grady noticed fresh track marks on Mulligan’s arm, enough for an arrest in those day, and badgered the sax player into handing over his needles and a tiny amount of heroin. All four were hauled into jail. Eventually, Mulligan took the rap for the whole bust. He was sentenced to six months in prison.

Baker walked free. But the band was without a leader. Chet didn’t fill the bill. Baker knew the melodies, but didn’t know chords and often couldn’t even tell the band what key to play in. Soon Baker was matched once again with Getz. The two junkies still despised each other. Getz considered Baker a primitive musician and it grated on him that the crowds came to largely to gawk at the trumpeter. The partnership ended at the Black Hawk in San Francisco when Baker, who showed up late for the gig, stormed off the stage because the band had begun playing without him.

Still Baker’s star was rising. He was getting great reviews in DownBeat and other jazz publications. Several reader polls in the early 1950s even slotted Baker above Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie as best trumpet player. His early solo albums, Chet Baker Quartet, Chet Baker Ensemble and Chet Baker With Strings, sold so well that Baker decided he didn’t need Mulligan any more, even though Mulligan had taken the fall for Baker and his wife in the drug bust. “Gerry’s so pissed off because I’ve been able to make it on my own, without him,” Baker gloated in an interview. “He can’t hack that. I was supposed to be his trumpet player for life, I guess. And at ridiculous wages. He wouldn’t give me a raise, and I’d just been voted the best trumpet player in the world.”

Then Baker decided that he wanted to sing. He demanded that Pacific Jazz boss, Dick Bock, record an album of Baker singing ballads. Bock eventually relented. The album Chet Baker Sings, featuring eight ballads, including “The Thrill is Gone,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” was unlike anything else in jazz at the time.

The reception in the jazz community was unremittingly hostile. Even his bandmates hated the record. “I thought it was bullshit,” his pianist Russ Freeman told Gavin. “Total bullshit.” Mulligan wasn’t impressed either. “That’s just the way Chet sang,” Mulligan said. “He didn’t know any other way to sing.”

This was not Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong or Anita O’Day. There’s no scatting here. Baker didn’t bend, elongate or improvise his singing of the lyrics. Instead, Baker’s voice was flat, nearly emotionless, a dry monotone. The lyrics are slurred in a vibrato-less delivery that makes them sound stark and austere, songs of doomed love crooned by an automaton. You will search in vain for even a fragment of irony. Jazz musicians and critics may have recoiled at nearly every dreary chorus of Chet Baker Sings, but women and gays loved the record, driving it up the charts and adding another curious layer to the Baker legend.

In keeping with his other prejudices, Baker was something of a homophobe and his growing mystique in the gay community of LA and San Francisco unnerved him. He was determined to set the record straight. “There was a very mixed reaction when I started singing,” Baker said. “In the first place, a lot people thought – foolishly so – that because of the way I sang I, y’know, liked fellars or something. I can only say that that’s a lot of bullshit.”

To be continued.

This Week’s Playlist

Gerry Mulligan Quartet, The Best of With Chet Baker (Blue Note)
Chet Baker, Baby Breeze (Polygram)
Chet Baker, Peace (Enja)
Bennie Maupin, Jewell in the Lotus (ECM)
The Coathangers, Scramble (Suicide Squeez)
Eddie C. Campbell, Baddest Cat on the Block (JSP Records)

Jeffrey St. Clair’s latest book is Born Under a Bad Sky. He is the co-editor of Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

>This is Not a One-Act Drama

This is Not a One-Act Drama
Call It a Revolution
by MISSY BEATTIE

Snarling riot cops evicted protestors and raided Zuccotti Park Tuesday morning, two months after Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was launched in lower Manhattan. Spin-off groups across the country were shut down as well.

Just minutes after I wrote the above paragraph, my son called from NYC to update that activists, amassing again, are being arrested. Several hundred demonstrators are marching through the financial district to block traffic. “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?” These questions are directed at the arresting officers.

This past week, I’ve viewed videos of policemen, stomping their official authority across the necks and backs of members of the 99 percent who’ve gathered to demand change with focus on lack of jobs, social inequality, injustice, the taxpayer bailed-out bankers responsible for crashing the economy, and the failure to hold corporate criminals accountable. Meanwhile, protestors are being cuffed (as I write) and pepper sprayed by a paramilitary-like police force.

Criminal, too, is the destruction of libraries at occupation areas, an act almost as unthinkable as the loss of human rights. Books are venerated, the compilation of ideas, an author’s vision, life map, revelations, inked to paper, like lyrics swirling to music, records of the past, present, what could and/or shouldn’t be.

Just hours before morning on Tuesday, police descended to machete freedom of speech and the right to assemble. Let’s make this less visible, the mayors must have said during conference calls. Like George Bush, they instructed their serfs to act in the absence of light— so Bushian and reminiscent of a president’s directive that dead soldiers would arrive to shattered families only at night.

What Americans can’t see, they, most likely, will not acknowledge. George Bush prevented photographs of returning war dead. Barack Obama learned from the experts and is, now, the master of universal subterfuge.

Good morning, Australia. Please welcome the US Marines. This is a policy shift to counter China’s power. You Aussies will be grateful. We will call this a partnership that’s, um, similar to a coalition. Of the coerced. Imagine you are ten years old, hands against the wall, and the United States of America is, as Obama says, “…here to stay.” Disregard the slapping sound. This is horseplay. The bases are yours, not ours. The US is with you in a constructive role to protect oil and minerals. This will not hurt. And don’t complain to anyone or Mommy and Daddy might be assassinated.

It’s just that we are “winding down” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the horses require other ranges to roam. The Empire rides, hard and fast.

Forgive the detour. I wandered from my intent to examine the mayoral edict to rid the 99 percent of its voice and accede to the 1 percent. And to emphasize that these smaller political fish miscalculated the repercussions of their order.

The battle for justice didn’t end this past week when local politicians allowed acts of violence not unlike the violations we condemn in countries we bomb to spread “democracy.” Witness to this is inspiring increased action. Protests are mounting. Activists are strategizing. This movement isn’t going to whimper. We are watching the aftermath of a decision that underscores the viability of OWS. This is not a one-act drama.

More: I just returned from Occupy Baltimore where we assembled at the Howard Street Bridge. “This is what democracy looks like,” we shouted, along with “jobs not cuts.”

The crowd, numbering well over 200 participants, has grown since my last visit to the occupation zone. In solidarity with protestors at raided sites, we stood on the busy corner during rush hour.

We must choose our targets wisely. How about the buildings in midtown Manhattan where the morning talk shows broadcast inanities such as how to bake the perfect turkey?

The times are imperfect. Perilous, really. Actions, small and large, demand maximum impact. Again, this is not a one-act drama. People are angry. And they will not acquiesce to big business, as usual. I think we can call this a revolution.

Missy Beattie lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She can be reached at: missybeat@gmail.com.

There is nothing the media love more than a good celebrity sex scandal. (Truer words will n'ere be writ.)

Sanctimonious Scavengers
The Media and the Penn State Scandal
by WALTER BRASCH

There is nothing the media love more than a good celebrity sex scandal.

Since the story of Scarlett Johansson’s purloined nude pictures had run its course, and the media squeezed every drop of ink it could from the Kim Kardashian/Kris Humphries engagement/wedding/marriage/divorce, they had to find something else to feed the beast with the insatiable appetite.

Something else was Penn State. Neatly packaged for the media was the trifecta of what passes as journalism—sex, scandal, and celebrity. And so the media circus rolled into State College, salivating at their good fortune.

The “sex” part of the story was that Jerry Sandusky, former defensive coordinator of the Nittany Lions, was accused of 21 felony counts of sexual abuse of boys. A 23-page Grand Jury report, released Nov. 4 following a drawn-out three-year investigation, detailed some of the specifics. However, this story, no matter what the media say it is, is not about sex. It is about child molestation, child abuse, and endangering the welfare of a child. Big difference.

The “scandal” is that it appeared that high-ranking Penn State officials, although they restricted Sandusky’s access to campus, didn’t contact police or child protection services, possibly believing they were protecting the university’s image.

The “celebrity” part is Joe Paterno, who listened to a graduate assistant who says he saw an act of sodomy by Sandusky, and then, disgusted by what Sandusky may have done, reported it the athletics director and senior vice-president for administration. Paterno met his legal responsibility, and isn’t under any criminal investigation. Questions to Paterno in court would probably result in the defense objecting to hearsay testimony since Paterno never witnessed the act.

Almost every Pennsylvania TV station and dozens of networks sent camera crews into State College. As the number of TV crews increased, the quality of reporting sank, as almost every on-air reporter seemed to feel a need to ask even dumber questions and make dumber statements than every other reporter. These are the TV stations that send camera crews to out-of-town football games, Spring training in Florida, and bowl games, yet have downsized their news staff, plead economic poverty, and failed to adequately cover critical news stories. In Pennsylvania, it has meant little original reporting about conflict-of-interest and ethics scandals in the state legislature. Sports, apparently, is “sexy”; the public’s money and legislature integrity aren’t.

These are the same members of the media who for many of Paterno’s 46 years as head coach had filed stories that he should step down after any two losses in a row, or during a losing season, or even a season that didn’t have enough wins. The media had also layered comments that Paterno was everything but senile, that he was too old to be coaching. But, Paterno, known in the media as “JoePa,” kept winning, and kept demanding academic and athletic excellence in addition to moral integrity from his players. The university’s library, not any of its athletic buildings, is named for him. America’s best-known coach was building not a place for future NFL stars, but a place where college students could supplement their education to become productive members of society. His graduation rate is among the highest in Division I athletics.

However, based upon the amount of newsprint and air time given to this story, you would swear that Paterno was guilty, arrested, and probably already convicted. The media almost forgot about Sandusky as they began piling on to Paterno. Six column headlines and five minute network stories dominated the news agenda. Like sharks, they smelled blood and circled their prey, a towering figure about to be toppled. With little evidence, these sanctimonious scavengers called for one of the most ethical and inspirational coaches and professors to resign, claiming he didn’t do enough, that he should have personally called the police rather than follow established protocol.

Many of the media horde, who had never written any story about Penn State’s excellent academic and research programs, soon began pumping out ludicrous statements that Penn State’s reputation would be tarnished for years.

Despite their self-righteous denials, the screeching of “Joe Must Go” in one-inch bold black headlines undoubtedly influenced the university’s board of trustees, which was constantly proving that incompetence isn’t just a media trait. Their attitude seemed to be not whether what Paterno did was a terminable offense, but that to terminate him would somehow save the university’s tarnished reputation—and maybe preserve the value of their own luxury seats at Beaver Stadium.

On Wednesday, Nov. 9, three days before the Penn State/Nebraska game, which was to be the last home game of the season, the Trustees, with a push from Gov. Tom Corbett, fired Paterno, thus justifying all the ink and air time spent by the media that seemed distracted from the real story—Sandusky, not Paterno, was arrested.

That night, thousands of students staged a demonstration of support for Paterno. The media called it a riot and almost universally condemned the students for exercising a First Amendment right of peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. What little damage done—the highest estimate was about $20,000—was by a relatively small number of participants.

On game day, the media camped in front of Paterno’s house. ESPN coverage of the game, which drew about twice as many viewers as expected, was constantly punctuated by the “scandal,” and what Paterno did and didn’t do. Tragedy had suddenly become a sport.

Contributing to the media’s shameful performance were mountains of crocodile tears, dripping with moral indignation. Had the media spent even a tenth of the time before the Penn State scandal to publish and air stories about child welfare problems, and what could be done to protect the most vulnerable of society, their myriad comments would have been credible.

In contrast to the masses, several reporters did credible reporting, including the hometown Centre Daily Times. But the best reporting might be that of Sara Ganim, who had begun her investigation first at the Centre Daily Times before moving to the Harrisburg Patriot-News. Three years after graduating from Penn State, she broke the story in March that the Grand Jury was investigating Sandusky and others. Her story at the time didn’t get much traction. But, for several months she meticulously gathered facts and wrote news, not opinion and speculation, which dominated the work of many of her colleagues, many of whom showed they were incapable of even reaching the journalistic standards of reporting at the National Enquirer.

Perhaps Joe Paterno should have done more; perhaps he should have called the police or at least followed-up with his earlier concern. But, we don’t know yet the facts.

One concern remains. Today, these Monday Morning Quarterbacks of the media and a pack of largely anonymous self-righteous fans all say that unlike Paterno they would have done “the right thing.” How many, if faced by the same set of circumstances, would have done “the right thing” a month ago?

Assisting on this story was Rosemary Brasch.

Walter Brasch’s latest book is Before the First Snow, a fact-based novel that looks at the nuclear industry during its critical building boom in the 1970s and 1980s.

Look What's Happening Out on the Streets In Praise of Failure

Look What's Happening Out on the Streets
In Praise of Failure
by DAVID Ker THOMSON

Is the Occupy Movement unsuccessful, as a friend of mine has recently written on CounterPunch?

What’s been going on with the Occupy movement?

Some of the bravest and best participant/writers have been talking about a war. And it is a war, but an odd one when one side has weapons and the other doesn’t.

Blueshirts destroying the libraries of the Occupy encampments in the darkness and domestic police beating up not just unarmed citizens (boring!) but beating up real soldiers who’ve fought actual armed people corresponds so closely to, a) the depredations of Krystallnacht and b) the presumed misgivings of a certain minority of real soldiers in Hitler’s forces in the early days of Reich3 that the student of human nature can hardly fail to be moved.

Actually, the student of human nature can fail at almost anything. But how bad is failure? The literary critic Paul de Man, who did some bad Nazi shit during the war and should probably have been shot, says my poet, spent his life writing about the distance between failure and the self or selves observing that failure.

“The man who has fallen is somewhat wiser than the fool who walks around oblivious of the crack in the pavement about to trip him up. And the fallen philosopher reflecting on the discrepancy between the two successive stages is wiser still, but this does not in the least prevent him from stumbling in his turn. It seems instead that this wisdom can be gained only at the cost of such a fall. The mere falling of others does not suffice; he has to go down himself.” (Blindness and Insight, U of Minnesota Press, 1983: 214).

Crying season, as novelist Dorothy Allison might call the last few months back here at the urban ranch and which the indie band Gomez might caption with the words, “I could cry on demand. Boo hoo,” has corresponded roughly with the rise of the Occupy encampment here in Toronto. That’s been my experience. I’ll typically have a cry and then walk through camp. The beauty of the encampment, its multiple niches of earnest speech rising as the polyphony of prayer amidst the fall foliage of St. James Park, this has been the incense of autumn in year eleven. That and a bit of home keening.

The sad fact of the Occupy movement, by far the most important movement in our millennium in this continent, is that most people don’t give a shit. It’s a failure in that sense. The rector of St. James, for example, who could offer sanctuary to the protesters of St. James Park, doesn’t give a shit for the Occupiers and he doesn’t give a shit for Jesus nor for the Biblical account of Jesus nor for what Jesus did to the moneylenders, nor any of that. He’s just like average Joe Canadian, in it for what he can get. If he can get the moneylenders to like him, that’s the master he’s going to serve. The rector has washed his hands of the matter, and turned it over to his in-house Pontius Pilate, Douglas Stoute, who claims to be a “Reverend,” but is an irreverent blasphemer and hater of Jesus and all he stood for, which was nothing and no one when it came to moneylenders in the temple. Jesus stood for none of it, in short, but kicked it all over. Douglas Stoute, let me ask you, do you think your God is mocked by your behaviour? Is he fooled for a moment by your handwashing rituals? You cannot serve two masters. Tonight your soul will be required of you. Name a night when that is not true. Men like you turn the churches into crypts, the actions of Jesus into dead stone, and then you wonder why no one wants to darken the doors of your churches. Shame on you, you men who are whited sepulchres. People have come to you for sanctuary, and you have turned them away, and now they will be beaten. On that day—no, not that one—on That Day, you will cry Lord Lord, have we not performed miracles in thy name? And what will your Lord say?

I hereby challenge you cowards, rector and dean, to a public Bible debate about your turning the supplicants away, the debate to take place on any day and time of your choosing; non-response to be deemed an admission that you’re in error. Bet I got more Bible degrees than you fuckers anyway. I assume you’ll chicken out.

The other day, the regular beating day, is now scheduled for this coming Saturday, [changed as we go to press to Monday] when the gudkops are planning to turn the unarmed people over to the badcops for the traditional truncheoning ceremony.

In Toronto the moneychangers and their lackeys are gudkopping the occupiers this week, crucifying Jesus afresh, as the Christians like to put it in other contexts, nickel and diming them with the orders of ‘judges’, about whom the most the prophet will say is, ‘judge not, that ye be not’, which is pretty strong if you think about it. To be, and not to be. That’s some pretty fucken serious poetry, the poet says to the prophet. It’s got drama.

I hear that the badkops were beating and beating and beating and beating and beating and beating and beating and beating and beating unarmed people in New York, and then one of them got a cut on his hand. Beating and beating and beating and beating and beating and beating and beating and beating unarmed people, and one of them got one cut on his hand. And then back to beating and beating and beating and beating and beating and beating unarmed people, and one cut. First blood, says the poet. Pilate washes his hands, says the prophet, noticing how liquid the blood is. He says something about the beater being hoisted by his own petard, but I don’t catch it.

My own theory is a simple one. You shouldn’t beat people.

Unless they’re beating you.

Michael Neumann’s critique of Occupy

I count Michael Neumann among my on-line friends, and 99% would be a good figure for naming how many times he gets it right in his writings at CounterPunch. He’s got a razor-sharp intellect with which I wouldn’t normally venture to tangle. But I gotta say that I think he gets it wrong when he writes that the “Occupy movement will go nowhere” because the very people who are blaming the Fat Cats on Wall Street when times are lean were happy to give them a pass during the fat years. People have been voting for capitalism all along, he points out, so it’s disingenuous of them to criticize now those who’ve succeeded at the game.

Michael’s criticism of voting practices is so close to my own extended criticism of voters—longterm readers know why I hate voting for capitalism and why I’m against voting at all (it endorses a corrupt system, for starters). But I think Michael’s wrong because he’s so right: it’s always been right to criticize Wall Street. Far from not criticizing them now because we didn’t then, we should do it now and then and always. Sure, it would have been morally more persuasive if Zuccotti Park had happened during the fat years, but who would’ve listened? In fact plenty of people were criticizing Wall Street during the fat years, not to mention flying planes into Wall-Street-style command posts, which isn’t even a nice thing to do, and to my mind seems downright judgmental, if not critical. So in partial opposition to Michael (“don’t blame Wall Street”) I’d say we could improve our ethical consistency by always blaming Wall Street. Who needs hard data on this? Not me, as I can figure out everything from street level—who’s almost hitting me on my longboard and with what. But if facts and figures are your thing, this should tide folks over till supper. The least persuasive part of Michael’s argument is the claim that Obama and Trump and their ilk are saying positive things about Occupy so we should be leery of Occupy. No we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t give a fuck what those blowhards think. What kind of person would even watch the blowhole at the front of the head of Donald Trump when it emits gas? Who cares?

Contra Michael I’d say the Occupy movement already has gone somewhere. But the more important point is that “success” and with it the concomitant notion “going somewhere,” together with all the calls for the movement to articulate itself in terms that fit with capital and that make sense to politicians and that play well to readers of The Star, these are precisely the systemic notions of growth and success people of good will should be fucking with, not catering to. In times of vast unchallenged evil, persuasive little chats are fine as far as they go, and if we can change the mind of some dipshit in Peoria who manages to get his face out of the Cheez Whiz for a moment, fine, but the real demand on people of good will in times like these is to Get In The Way. And “times like these” are the times inaugurated by slave states such as early America and ancient Greece and their successors, and what needs to be resisted is all the paraphernalia of the state apparatus.

99% of what people count as success is bullshit. History will not be as kind on the success freaks and their successors as they are on themselves. Success is theft. Nothing can make the Canadian tar sands success anything but theft, and nothing can make all those successful jobs you have in sales and law and politics and in an academia funded by gold mining and massive corporate bludgeoning anything but theft. Bay Street likes to pretend it’s better than Wall Street, but it has tar all over its hands. Its sands.

If the Occupy movement is successful, fine, [as I send this off my friend Missy writes from Baltimore to tell me that Occupy there and in New York is robust despite everything] but it will also be more likely to get co-opted that way, more likely to fit back neatly into capital after its brief sojourn elsewhere. Failure, by contrast, has a power not easily discerned. Excellent for surveillance regimes. Lots of disorganized getting in the way, refusal to articulate demands-on-demand like trained seals, lots of blocking Traffic in the broadest sense. Just fucking up. Failure is the success that comes through fire. Either way, we need lots of wrenches dropped, products dropped, obstruction up and down the line. We can’t say more, or it might be illegal. Talk’s easy for us this year, I guess (we’re no Oakland), but we were tried by fire last year in the G20, and we’re ready for any kind of brutality from the state and its willing helper, the church.

* * *

I know I said I wouldn’t show up here unless they were actually clearing St. James Park. The eviction notices that went up Tuesday have been overturned, first till Saturday and now, as we go to press, till Monday. None of these functionaries (religious and city) has given the occupiers the least reason to imagine they’re trustworthy, however, so we’ll see what happens.

David Ker Thomson has been occupying streets since he was sixteen. He files from Toronto. dave dot thomson at utoronto do ca

Something’s Rotten in the Crime Lab

Much Blame, No Accountability in Nassau County
Something’s Rotten in the Crime Lab
by ANTHONY PAPA

On February 18, 2011 the Nassau County Crime lab was closed down because of grave concerns about the integrity of testing evidence. A multitude of errors were found to be committed that jeopardized thousands of cases. It was estimated that 3,000 drug convictions might have to be reviewed. This followed the labs probation initiated by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB) on December 10, 2010 when an inspection report was issued condemning its practices. It was the second time in 4 years that the lab was put on probation.

The closing of the lab brought shock waves to the office of District Attorney Kathleen Rice, who focused on damage control. She had claimed she even did not know of that the Nassau County Crime Lab was under suspension. But soon after, the truth, severity and magnitude of the problem was revealed. Thus Governor Andrew Cuomo was forced to step in to protect the public’s confidence in the criminal justice system ,he appointed Inspector General Ellen Biben to lead an investigation.

Just last week Inspector General Biben issued a scathing 170 page report criticizing officials — including the police department — and blaming District Attorney Kathleen Rice for not knowing about the problems earlier. In the report I.G. Biben scolds Nassau County officials, arguing that the lab suffered from “weak leadership, a dysfunctional quality management system, analysts with inconsistent training and qualifications, and outdated and incomplete testing procedures.”



“The chronic failures of the Nassau County crime lab deprived Nassau County, the criminal justice system and the public of their right to have complete and unfettered confidence in forensic testing,” I.G. Biben told the Associated Press. But the inspector general’s most scathing criticism was for the police department itself. The report said problems were “exacerbated” because top police officials were not “appropriately attentive” to the Forensics Evidence Bureau, even though there were many warning signs of failures.



Biben’s report is important, but the fact remains that the report raises more questions that require urgent attention. First, no one has been held accountable for the labs demise and the report states that despite the lab’s problems, no one had committed any criminal wrongdoing. Second – and most importantly — the report states along with its a press release that as a result of the errors, as many as 10 percent of all criminal drug tests performed at the lab were problematic. In reality what this means is that potentially several hundred cases have been tainted by the testing procedures used by the lab. What is going to happen to the individuals who are currently serving prison sentences based on problematic evidence? Will justice be served and their cases be re-evaluated? Or will their cases be swept under the rug and be forgotten through the rhetoric of crime and politics?



No one should be rotting away in prison sentenced from a crime based on tainted evidence. Governor Cuomo who has supported Rockefeller drug law reform in the past, should take the next step to ensure that justice is realized not just in the crime labs of Nassau County, but in the prisons where Nassau County residents may now be incarcerated as a result of this growing scandal.

Anthony Papa is the author of 15 to Life and the Manager of Media Relations for the Drug Policy Alliance.

Covering-Up Child Rape

Covering-Up Child Rape
From the Vatican to Penn State
by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI
“There is only one religion although there are a hundred versions of it.”

– George Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant.

Penn State and the Vatican have some things in common (although there’s been no talk of shutting down the Vatican whereas a few curmudgeons suggested Penn State shut down its football program for a year; nor is there any talk at the Vatican of firing its head coach, Benedict XVI, whereas Penn State fired both its president, Graham Spanier, and its head coach, Joe Paterno.) The Vatican and Penn State each has formal reports describing the errors of the institution’s ways. Penn State has a grand jury report detailing sexual abuse by Jerry Sandusky and the Vatican has four formal reports detailing multiple accounts of sexual abuse by assorted priests in Ireland (to mention only one of many countries with such reports.) The last two pertaining to Ireland were the Murphy Report in 2009 and the Cloyne report in 2011.

The Murphy Report examined more than 300 abuse claims in the Archdiocese of Dublin between 1975 and 2004. (The Murphy for whom the report is named is not Father Lawrence Murphy who abused more than 200 deaf children in Wisconsin between 1950 and 1974. Father Murphy did not write a report detailing his activities and those who did, did so in letters describing his activities to top Vatican officials including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict. The letters were ignored.) The Murphy report said that rather than being concerned about the children, the Church was concerned about “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church and the preservation of its assets.” In response to the Murphy report, Pope Benedict sent out a pastoral letter on March 19, 2010. In that letter he said he shared “in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them. . . .”

The Murphy report was followed by the Cloyne Report that was released in July 2011. That report said that from 1996 to 2009 the clergy in Ireland’s Cloyne Diocese ignored complaints about 19 priests. In response to the Cloyne report the Vatican said enough contrition is enough contrition and recalled its ambassador, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, the Papal Nuncio, to the Vatican, for consultation. Vatican Spokesman, Fr Ciro Benedettini said: “The recalling of the Nuncio, a measure rarely used by the Holy See, denotes the seriousness of the situation, and the desire of the Holy See to deal with it (with) objectivity and with determination, as well as a certain note of surprise and regret regarding some excessive reactions.” In referring to “excessive reactions” the spokesman may have been referring to the speech to Parliament given by Ireland’s prime minister four days earlier in which he referred to the Church’s dysfunction, disconnection and elitism” in failing to deal with child sex abuse. He said: “The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation.’” On November 3, 2011, Ireland closed its Vatican embassy. Dublin’s foreign ministry said the closure occurred because the embassy “yields no economic return.” Presumably it has nothing to do with the Vatican recall of the Ambassador 4 months earlier.

Happy Valley is a lot like the Vatican except that football is its religion. Instead of the Murphy Report and the Coyne Report, folks in Happy Valley have the Grand Jury report. Its substance is not that different from the Irish reports, however. According to the Grand Jury report those in charge of the institution have been willing to overlook sexual abuse of children by one of its high priests, Jerry Sandusky, the high priest whose high jinks have disgraced the institution.

Mr. Sandusky is not only alleged to have abused children over an extended period. He set up a non-profit foundation called Second Mile the goal of which was to provide programs for troubled youth. The kinds of conduct in which Mr. Sandusky allegedly engaged in with troubled youth is not the kind of conduct contributors to the foundation thought they were supporting.

In response to the Grand Jury report, some suggested that as an expression of penance Penn State should forfeit its last home game against Nebraska. That would be like suggesting that the Vatican cancel Sunday services to show that it really cared about sexual abuse of children. It would never happen. After all, Sunday services are a time when the offenders can formally seek forgiveness and so was the last home game against Nebraska. The occasion of the final home game was marked by many as the time to move forward and the beginning of the healing process since the university has now had more than a week to flagellate itself.

Although there are many similarities between the church and Penn State there is one significant difference. The era of sexual abuse of children at Penn State has almost certainly come to an end. That cannot be said for the Church.

Christopher Brauchli is an attorney living in Boulder, Colorado. He can be e-mailed at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu.

Have the Feds Overreached on Medical Marijuana? (Yes, and they have been forever)

15 Years After Prop 215
Have the Feds Overreached on Medical Marijuana?
by FRED GARDNER

Occasionally the iron heel comes down on people who are widely respected and/or have the resources and will to fight back effectively. “The feds have overreached,” says Steve DeAngelo, who runs Harborside Health Center in Oakland and has been presented by the IRS with a $2.4 million bill for back taxes. He was referring to the DEA raid on Northstone Organics Oct. 13; the threatening letters to growers, dispensaries, and their landlords sent by California’s U.S. Attorneys Oct. 7; the denial of gun permits to registered medical cannabis users ordered by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in September; and other recent measures directed against the industry.

Overreach by law enforcement was a big factor in the passage of Prop 215 back in November, 1996. The No-on-215 forces, led by Attorney General Dan Lungren, arranged a highly publicized raid on the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club three months before Election Day. Their intention was to turn the vote into a referendum on Dennis Peron’s right to operate.

On Sunday morning August 4, approximately 100 agents from the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement raided 1444 Market Street. Simultaneously, five smaller BNE squads raided the homes of Buyers Club staff members in and around the city. The raiders wore black uniforms with BNE shoulder patches. They seized 150 pounds of marijuana, $60,000 in cash, 400 growing plants, plus thousands of letters of diagnosis that citizens had brought from their doctors and left on file at the club.

Mayor Willie Brown said the high-profile bust had been carried out unbeknownst to him, and he accused Lungren of “Gestapo tactics.” (The club’s front door had been battered in and the raiders hung black drapes over the windows to conceal what they were doing from civilian observers on Market Street.) The San Francisco Medical Society protested the confiscation of medical records as a violation of doctor-patient confidentiality.

Dennis considered defying the court order to remain closed. Members kept streaming by in the days after the bust, and expressed their dismay and anxiety as they stood outside the closed front door. Many went across the bay and joined the newly formed Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative. Several Castro District churches began dispensing cannabis. New clubs were launched in the Mission (Flower Power) and at Dennis’s old location at Church and Market (CHAMP —Cannabis Helping Alleviate Medical Problems).

Some of Dennis’s so-called allies in the Yes-on-215 campaign did not want to see him reopen. They argued that ongoing publicity around his operation would jeopardize their chances of success at the polls on November 5. Bill Zimmerman, the Santa Monica p.r. man appointed by reform honchos Back East to replace Dennis as campaign manager, went so far as to urge the Northern California ACLU chapter not to file an amicus brief on Dennis’s behalf. “Every time I debate Brad Gates,” said Zimmerman, referring to the Orange County Sheriff, a No-on-215 leader, “he always begins by saying, ‘This bill was written by a dope dealer from San Francisco,’ and emphasizes the looseness with which the Cannabis Buyers Club was run.” Zimmerman said he had developed an effective counter: “If Prop 215 were law, we wouldn’t need such clubs.”

It was against Dennis’s instincts to stay closed but he was exhausted and outnumbered. I dropped in on him at the club one evening in mid-September, shortly after a Superior Court judge in San Francisco had turned down a motion to let his club reopen. The place was quiet but not empty. Bob Dole came on TV —the News Hour was replaying his speech at Villanova University on “the drug issue”—and seven or eight club staffers gathered around to watch. “The simple fact is that drug abuse, especially among young people, leads to more criminal activity,” said Dole. “Because you get arrested for smoking marijuana!” cried Dennis. “Are they going to build prisons from sea to shining sea? Twenty million Americans smoke marijuana!”

Bill Clinton came on next, telling a police officers’ convention that he was second to none in his support for the war on drugs. He cited his appointment of 4-Star General Barry McCaffrey as drug czar — “He kept drugs from South America out of this country,” Clinton claimed, absurdly. Clinton also took credit for a bill that specifies the death penalty for “drug kingpins.” “Am I a drug kingpin?” asked Dennis. Clinton went on: “We proposed the largest anti-drug effort in history, and I hope Congress will give us the extra $700 million we asked for…”

Peron was disgusted. “It’s not even about marijuana anymore. It’s about America —where we’re going and who we are, just like the politicians say.” He had been doodling out campaign ads, but it was all just an exercise because Zimmerman didn’t want his input. “Imagine being called ‘a liability’ to your own movement,” he sighed. I asked why he had come up so short on the original signature drive (which led to the honchos Back East taking control). “I underestimated the climate of fear,” he said. “People think twice before they sign a petition that involves drugs. It’s like the McCarthy period —people worry if their name will go down on some list, if they’ll lose their job. Where are the liberals who will stand up and say, ‘This has gone too far!’?”

Doonesbury to the Rescue

On September 8, Peron’s lieutenant John Entwistle got a call from a friend who said he’d been at a party with Trudeau (a longtime advocate of reforming the marijuana laws) and that the cartoonist had expressed serious interest when the conversation turned to Proposition 215 and the bust of the Cannabis Buyers Club. Entwistle then spoke to Trudeau on the phone and sent him a packet of news stories describing the bust and the general situation. On Monday, Sept. 30 the Chronicle, the LA Times, and many other papers in California began running a Doonesbury strip in which Zonker’s friend Cornell says, “I can’t get hold of any pot for our AIDS patients. Our regular sources have been spooked ever since the Cannabis Buyers’ Club in San Francisco got raided…”

Attorney General Lungren feared the impact these strips would have on the Prop 215 campaign. He urged publishers that carried Doonesbury to spike the entire set. “Alternatively,” he suggested in a letter that was widely run as an op-ed piece, “your organization should consider running a disclaimer side-by-side with the strips which states the known facts related to the Cannabis Buyers Club.” According to Lungren, the BNE investigation had established that the club “sold marijuana to teenagers. Sold marijuana to adults without doctors’ notes. Sold marijuana to people with fake doctors’ notes using phony doctors names and in some cases written on scrap paper. Allowed many small children inside the club where they were exposed for lengthy periods of time to second-hand marijuana smoke. Sold marijuana to people whose stated ailments included vaginal yeast infections, insomnia, sore backs and colitis —hardly terminal diseases. Sold marijuana in amounts as large as two pounds, greatly exceeding the club’s ‘rules.’”

Lungren called a press conference for Tuesday, Oct. 1, to reveal some of the evidence his investigators had assembled against Peron and the SF Cannabis Club. Somehow he lost his cool during the question-and-answer session. “Skin flushed and voiced raised, Attorney General Dan Lungren went head-to-head with a comic strip Tuesday…” is how Robert Salladay began his Oakland Tribune story. Don Asmussen in the SF Examiner lampooned “Lungren’s War on Comics.” The New York Times devoted two full columns to the brouhaha, including a quote from Peron: “Crybaby Lungren… I think he’s just gone off the deep end. Waaa!”

Polls showed that a gradual decline in support for Prop 215 (with Peron marginalized) ended October 1. Lungren had Peron arrested Oct. 5 on criminal charges that included conspiracy to distribute marijuana —one more effort to make the vote a referendum on the proprietor of the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club. On Sunday, Oct. 20, Trudeau kicked off a week of strips in which Lacy, the refined Congresswoman, chats with an equally classy old friend who reveals that she smoked marijuana (Lacy checks her hearing aid) for relief of nausea brought on by chemotherapy; that she used to get it at the Cannabis Buyers Club; that she was reduced to trying to score in Dolores Park; and that she hopes the passage of Proposition 215 will enable her to grow it. Lacy wonders if her friend will have room amongst the orchids in her conservatory.

Cut to the Present

As in ’96, when the Drug Warriors took it for granted that Dan Lungren could squelch Prop 215, it appears that politicians in Washington, D.C. underestimate the extent to which people are fed up with marijuana prohibition. Just as San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said he wasn’t advised of the BNE raid on Dennis Peron’s club all those years ago, Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman said he wasn’t advised of the DEA raid on Northstone Organics, and California Attorney General Kamala was surprised by the threats made by the U.S. Attorneys Oct. 7.

When U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy made an additional threat to prosecute media outlets running ads for dispensaries, it was reminiscent of Dan Lungren’s crude attempt in ’96 to tell publishers what they should and shouldn’t run in their papers. Duffy was over-overreaching; none of her colleagues issued similar threats.

The Oct. 7 press conference had been organized hastily by Eric Holder’s top aide, Deputy AG James Cole. If Cole was trying to deflect media attention away from his boss’s oversight of the “Fast and Furious” fiasco, the ploy worked in the short term. (Fast and Furious was an ATF operation in which agents provided hundreds of automatic weapons to Mexican gangsters, intending to track them and find other gangsters. But the ATF lost track of the guns, and some of them would be used to shoot and kill two U.S. Border Patrol agents. Eric Holder contradicted himself about what and when he knew about the missing weapons. On Oct. 6 NPR ran a news segment headlined “Holder Takes Heat Over ‘Fast and Furious’ Scandal.”)

Sheriff Allman and Attorney General Harris are both aware that a majority of their constituents want cannabis to be legal for medical use. “Californians overwhelmingly support the compassionate use of medical marijuana for the ill,” is how Harris began a statement in response to the U.S. Attorneys threats go growers, dispensaries, and their landlords.

“While there are definite ambiguities in state law that must be resolved either by the state legislature or the courts, an overly broad federal enforcement campaign will make it more difficult for legitimate patients to access physician-recommended medicine in California.”

Allman said of the raid on Northstone Organics, “If the Mendocino County ordinance [with which Northstone had complied] is in violation of federal law, I want to be told that by the highest court in the land. But if it’s not in violation, I want to be told that, too.”

In 1996, the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club was the medical marijuana industry. Today there are a few thousand dispensaries and delivery services up and down the state providing herbal medicine to about a million physician-approved users. Some, like Harborside and Northstone Organics, have done everything in their power to comply with state and local regulations. They provide decent jobs (Harborside employs more than 200 people) and pay substantial taxes. Both Harborside’s DeAngelo and Northstone’s Matt Cohen, in protesting the federal attacks on their businesses, noted that others were diverting cannabis from the medical pipeline, i.e., selling to the black market, while they were following the rules. Their message to law enforcement seems to be: you’ll still have criminals to pursue —and much more public support— if you allow a regulated medical-cannabis industry to exist.

Zimm Again

Add overtones of ’96: professional campaign consultant Bill Zimmerman has drafted an initiative that is much, much weaker than the “Repeal Prohibition” initiative and several others that have been submitted to the secretary of state. “It essentially decriminalizes all cannabis use involving two ounces or less,” Zimmerman told David Downs of the East Bay Express.

“Zimmerman said his group spent a great deal of time and money on public opinion research polling after Prop 19 [the legalization measure that got 46% support in 2010] and found ‘The electorate in California is not ready to legalize marijuana for a variety of reasons.’

“Zimmerman said he’s only putting the initiative forward in case the big money wants a safe bet amidst a field of longshots,” Downs reported.

And we thought he was doing it just to muddy the waters!

Fred Gardner edits O’Shaughnessy’s the journal of cannabis in clinical practice. He can be reached at fred@plebesite.com

But Not Obama Labor Movement Honors A “Truly Courageous Man” by DAVID MACARAY

But Not Obama
Labor Movement Honors A “Truly Courageous Man”
by DAVID MACARAY

On November 16, Napolean Gomez Urrutia, General Secretary of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros, Metalurgicos y Similares de las Republica Mexicana (National Union of Mine, Metal, Steel and Allied Workers of the Mexican Republic), commonly known as “Los Mineros,” received the AFL-CIO’s 2011 “George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award.” The ceremony was held at the AFL-CIO’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The annual Meany-Kirkland award (named after the AFL-CIO’s first two presidents) was established in 1980. Previous winners include Zimbabwe union activist Wellington Chibebe, Ela Bhatt, founder of India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association, and the Independent Labor Movement of Egypt. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was joined by Leo Gerard, President of the United Steel Workers (USW) in making the presentation, and U.S. Congress members Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and Mike Machaud (D-ME) also gave brief remarks.

Since 2006, Gomez Urrutia has lived in exile in Vancouver, Canada, forced to seek asylum after the Mexican government filed numerous criminal charges against him. The government not only went after him, they launched an ugly, aggressive attack on the union itself, freezing its bank accounts, declaring all strikes to be illegal (including sending in federal troops to break them up), and exhorting mine employers to replace Los Mineros with company-sponsored lackey unions.

Gomez Urrutia got himself put on the Mexican government’s hit list because of his response to a February 19, 2006, mine explosion that killed 65 miners. He publicly accused the Vincente Fox administration of committing “industrial homicide.” While his accusation may have been melodramatic, it was accurate. As for the criminal charges, not only have Mexican and international human rights and labor groups called them baseless, all but one has been subsequently dismissed by Mexican courts, and all government appeals have been denied.

The 2006 explosion at Grupo Mexico’s Pasta de Conchos coal mine will live forever in the sorrowful annals of labor history. Prior to the explosion, union officials had repeatedly warned the company of serious safety concerns, notably the prevalent odor of flammable methane gas. Those warnings were ignored and the work continued. After all, there was coal to be mined and money to be made.

Then, following the shattering explosion, and after just a few short days of rescue attempts, the government abruptly declared the rescue operation to be futile, and, with the miner’s wives waiting helplessly outside, ordered the mine to be closed and sealed. That was it. Those 65 bodies were entombed on the premises.

Los Mineros (a sister union to the USW), has a proud history of challenging the Mexican government on labor issues, many of which will doubtlessly sound familiar to American workers—e.g., safety and health concerns, declining wages, and the replacing of permanent employees with temps. In his press release Richard Trumka described Gomez Urrutia as a “truly courageous man who has shown us how difficult and how important it is to be an independent leader of a democratic union.”

Being named recipient of the Meany-Kirkland Award is a great honor. Too bad Gomez Urrutia wasn’t there to accept it. Alas, the Obama administration refused to grant him a travel visa. It’s true. His wife, Oralia Casso de Gomez, had to accept on his behalf. Just when we thought President Obama couldn’t be any more gutless when it came to defending the underdog, he goes and proves us wrong.

DAVID MACARAY, an LA playwright and author (“It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor”), was a former union rep. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net

Assimilation At Last? The Reality of “All-American Muslim”

Assimilation At Last?
The Reality of “All-American Muslim”
by WAJAHAT ALI

For those constantly fretting about the inability of Muslims to integrate or assimilate into western culture, fret no more!

American Muslims finally have their own reality TV show – the Learning Channel’s “All-American Muslim” – focusing on the lives of five American Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan, who are predominantly Lebanese and Shiite. The show’s premiere gave TLC huge ratings and made the show No 2 in its time period. Mainstream critics have embraced the show citing it as “intimate and informative” and a “deeply intriguing, uncharacteristically thoughtful reality series”.

Reality TV is the current zeitgeist of popular culture. Unlike the euro, it is the predominant cultural currency, whose value is skyrocketing. America is on a first-name basis with their cultural ambassadors: Snookie, Kate Plus 8, Paris, Ozzie and Kim. Could Shadia, the show’s tattooed, country music-loving Lebanese American Muslim, with an Irish Catholic boyfriend, belong in the pantheon?

“[All American Muslim] is just a natural fit for us …We’re always all about telling compelling stories about real families,” says TLC’s Alan Orstein, VP of production and development. But some have already taken deep offense to this “reality” show, which claims to portray the “real” lives of Muslims.

Within days of the show’s premiere, the fear-mongering Islamphobia network complained the show is actually propaganda that promotes a “submission to Islam through the hijab” and “tries to make a religion which believes in world domination and the inferiority of women, seem normal”. The author of this article, posted on David Horowitz’s inflammatory Front Page Magazine, also goes on to compare Muslims to Nazis: “Muslims are like us [Americans]; that’s the problem. The Nazis were like us too. So were the Communists.”

Apparently, TLC is a stealth-jihadist outfit with grand schemes to brainwash American women into burning their swimsuits and tank tops and replacing them with modest, traditional Islamic clothing as a gradual means towards converting them to Islam. I’ll be waiting for their next reality TV show: “UV Radiation Fighters.”

Pamela Geller, founder of the shrill Atlas Shrugs blog and co-founder with blogger Robert Spencer of Stop Islamization of America, is convinced the show “is an attempt to manipulate Americans into ignoring the threat of jihad”. Who would have thought a reality TV show could have so much brainwashing potential? Instead of mounting violent campaigns, all our enemies needed to secure victory was to produce “The Real Housewives of al-Qaida.”

If Geller, Spencer and Horowitz were producing their version of American Muslim reality, the episodes would focus on the families’ radical stealth jihadist plots. Through eight episodes, they would attempt to turn McDonald’s golden arches into minarets, transform California to Caliph-ornia, place a burqa over the Statute of Liberty, creep sharia into the Denny’s breakfast menu, and spike the elementary school eggnog with sumac and lentils.

A “real Muslim” according to many is this anti-American, extremist, violent stereotype – an image often plastered over news headlines. This myth is unsurprising, perhaps, considering 60% of Americans say they don’t know a Muslim. Furthermore, the No 1 source of information about Muslims for American is the media, and often, the images are negative. Yet, according to all the studies and evidence, the reality of American Muslims is that they are moderate, loyal to America, optimistic about America’s future, in tune with American values, well-educated, and are the nation’s most diverse religious community.

That being said, nearly half of American Muslims say they have faced discrimination. The FBI just announced anti-Muslim hate crimes have risen 50%. And a Republican presidential candidate with an alleged proclivity towards sexual harassment and unintentionally hilarious campaign videos has claimed a majority of Muslim Americans are extremists.

The portrayal of Muslims living their daily lives is not only a welcome relief from the usual tawdry caricatures of Muslims as terrorists, extremists and taxi cab drivers, but it also helps defuse the deep-seated fears and bias that unfairly lumps 1.5 billion members of a faith in with the perverse criminal actions of a few.

However, even American Muslims have voiced their criticisms with the show. The Twitterverse exploded (figuratively) with comments reflecting the diversity of the American Muslim opinions. Some said the show misleads with the title “All-American Muslim”, since it solely focuses on one niche religious, ethnic community (Lebanese Shiite in Dearborn, Michigan) and leaves out the majority of American Muslim communities, such as African Americans, South Asians, Sunnis and those from the low-income middle class.

Others, apparently, want their TV Muslims to be avatars of religious and moral perfection and complained about some of the characters’ portrayal of Islam. (Shadia is a tattooed, partying rebel dating a white, Irish Catholic man who converts to Islam in order to marry her. Nina is a busty, dyed-blonde, opinionated business woman, with a penchant for tight dresses and ambitions to open her own club.)

Which only goes to show that representing Muslims and Islam in the mainstream is an utterly thankless job. The term “Muslim” is itself so politically and culturally loaded that it is impossible to escape controversy, no matter how trivial or manufactured. Since Muslims are a marginalized community with very few positive mainstream representations, audiences unfairly project onto these five families all their own insecurities, assumptions, fears, political ideologies, religious opinions, personal stories and other gratuitous baggage. So, if the characters do not 100% reflect the reality of certain audience members, then they cease to be authentic or valid.

The five families on “All-American Muslim” should not be asked to represent all Muslims, Arabs or Americans. Does Jersey Shore represent all Italians? If so, you can hear Frank Sinatra crooning in his grave. Similarly, Kim Kardashian does not represent all narcissistic, wannabe socialites with a fetish for athletes. (That may be an insult to fetishes.)

The best way to view “All-American Muslim” is simply a show about five families doing their best to be themselves. They’re just people, who happen to identify as Muslim, Arab and American. Their story isn’t the wild-eyed, paranoid fantasy that is colored by the hate-filled minds of the Islamophobia network. It isn’t the terrorist stereotype familiar to most American audiences thanks to mainstream Hollywood depictions and sensationalized news headlines. And it won’t be the story of this nation’s 3-4 million American Muslims (population estimates vary from 1.3 to 7 million), who will hopefully find more avenues to tell their unique narratives through mainstream outlets.

In the meantime, we should exhale and simply let this reality TV show succeed or fail on the merits of its ability to entertain, instead of obsessing about how “realistic” its depiction of Islam and Muslims is. If the ratings decline, TLC can always create a new talent show featuring the cast members of “The Real Housewives” and “All-American Muslim”, judged by Kim Kardashian and Ozzy Osbourne, whose winner gets an opportunity to join all the previous winners from “Dancing with the Stars” in a new “Survivor” series about who lives beyond the 15th minute of fame.

That’s a reality show whose authenticity cannot be denied.

Wajahat Ali is a playwright, journalist and attorney, whose play, The Domestic Crusaders, was published by McSweeney’s in December, 2010. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.
He blogs at Goatmilk.

Who Benefits From Austerity Politics?

The Long Fight
Who Benefits From Austerity Politics?
by ROB URIE

With so called “technocrats” being installed in Italy and Greece to lead governments through austerity programs, the discussion of who benefits from these programs and who pays remains largely in the background. When benefits are discussed they are usually couched in terms of systemic benefits under the guise that if the “system” benefits then everyone benefits. But the austerity programs being implemented straightforwardly benefit the large banks to the detriment of the citizens of these countries.

The banks see two benefits from austerity policies: the use of state power to enforce their claims that debts be repaid and they see asset prices driven down. The first goal is intuitive enough and it well explains why even in the U.S. government policies have been designed to facilitate debt repayment rather than to dismiss debts outright. No matter how malodorous the terms under which bankers lent the money, as long as borrowers can be forced to repay it, the banks benefit. And with sovereign debt, the “borrowers” being forced to repay the debt tend to be ordinary citizens who had little to do with incurring it and who just as likely saw no benefit from it.

The second benefit to bankers is less intuitive but more insidious. After all, why would banks want to see the value of the assets that are the collateral for the loans that they’ve made fall? The reason why is that the assets that the banks own are the loans that they’ve made and not the underlying collateral. As long as borrowers are forced to repay these loans the payments that the banks receive become worth more as collateral values fall because the money received will then buy more. Expand this idea to state assets in Greece and Italy and the banks can own water systems and roads from which they can extract fat incomes in perpetuity.

Why would core EU political leaders (and leaders in the U.S.) perceive it to be in their interest to be shills for the large banks by implementing austerity policies? Simply put, if the banks can’t enforce debt repayment they will either require bailouts in excess of what is politically feasible or the global banking system will re-enter the systemic crisis from 2008 that was never adequately resolved. The European banks are materially larger relative to the size of European economies than U.S. banks are. But banking liabilities are interconnected and if European banks fail they will take the large U.S. banks down with them.

Austerity policies are catastrophic for the citizens of countries that implement them because they force repayment of debts in ever more internally valuable currencies. The persistent economic weakness that these policies create produces high unemployment, falling wages and a broadly recessionary environment that can last for decades. They are being pushed because they benefit the banks but they come at the expense of the economic wellbeing of the citizens of these countries. The bind the banks put themselves in through excess leverage makes this a fight for survival from their perspective. And their use of the European and U.S. political systems to force debt repayment puts these governments on the sides of the banks and against the interests of their own citizens. Prepare for a long fight that will certainly get uglier.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.

Philadelphia Wins the Money Gap Lottery Trade Unions Give Occupy Philly An Offer They Can’t Refuse

Philadelphia Wins the Money Gap Lottery
Trade Unions Give Occupy Philly An Offer They Can’t Refuse
by JOHN GRANT

With a $55 million construction contract “imminent” for Dilworth Plaza — home since early October for Occupy Philadelphia – the city trade unions and those in Occupy Philly determined to hold-out in the Plaza have come to a showdown.

Everything in life is a dialogue with something, and that goes for the bottom-up/top-down dialogue known as the Occupy Movement. The Philadelphia Police are the well-armed arbiter in the middle of this dialogue with the city. The dialogue, however, just got more complicated with the entrance of the job-hungry trades union.

“We have a dilemma,” Pat Gillespie, head of the city Building and Construction Trades Council, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. While in “full sympathy” with Occupy Philadelphia on the larger economic fairness and justice issues, Gillespie said he and his union were determined to get to work on the 800 plus jobs in the Dilworth construction contract. Gillespie offered union workers to help Occupy Philly members move their belongings across the street to Thomas Paine Plaza – or wherever they might decide to move. The matter was to be taken up at the next Occupy Philly general assembly.

On Wednesday, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter posted an eviction order for Dilworth Plaza, citing the planned re-design project that the notice says is to start “imminently.” He ordered occupiers to leave the plaza “immediately.” The construction work is to be done by the Daniel J. Keating Company.

The $55 million project uses federal, state and other funds and is billed as a job stimulus project to last 27 months. The project has reportedly been planned for two years. It will feature a café, a market and skating rink in winter. The city’s promotional material claims 185,000 people live or work within a ten-minute walk of City Hall and will use the renovated public space. Critics say the $55 million should have been prioritized for low-income housing or other more needed projects.

A friend familiar with union issues in Philly said things could get dicey if the hold-out members of Occupy Philly don’t agree to move and allow the jobs-program to begin. Half-joking, he said trade unionists might turn on the occupiers and do their own “eviction.”

As for the police in the equation, last week, while at Occupy Philly one evening, I had an interesting conversation with some talkative police officers. A sergeant who told me he had been shot twice in the line of duty assured me cops were “part of the Ninety-Nine Percent” that Occupy Philadelphia was so concerned about.

“I totally agree,” I said. “But the problem is then cops turn around and do the bidding of the One Percent.”

Cops never feel comfortable debating citizens, so he didn’t dispute me. He certainly knew what I was talking about. The fact is, police officers, class issues aside, are about keeping order in the vertically organized hierarchy of control found in any major city in America. And if the order came down, they’d go through Dilworth Plaza like Patton’s “crap through a goose.”

On the other end of the organizational chart, the Occupy Movement — especially those citizens who choose to live in tents on Dilworth Plaza — is a famously “horizontally-organized” entity. Thus all the complaints from vertically-oriented people that there are no spokespersons or leaders to deal with. Consensus is always a hard thing to define, but consensus is what guides the core of Occupy Philadelphia movement, which amounts to a self-contained community of mostly dis-empowered people living in several hundred tents nestled up against the west side of City Hall, dead-center in the middle of Philadelphia in Dilworth Plaza.

I recently spoke with Philadelphia Police Department Chief Inspector Joe Sullivan, a tall, diplomatically-inclined man who expressed the city’s frustration with this kind of organization: “We can’t talk with 400 people!” he said. What Sullivan wanted was simple: someone from Occupy Philadelphia to speak in a vertically-oriented language he could understand.

This was just following the 2am military assault by New York Police on Zuccotti Park and a similar assault in Oakland. Occupiers in Philly were on alert. Sullivan assured me that Mayor Michael Nutter did not want a confrontation or to evict people with a military assault like the one in New York. City officials had earlier assured occupiers the Philadelphia Police would not evict anybody without giving ample advanced notice, which they have now given. And so far, the Philadelphia Police Department, compared to New York and Oakland, has been decent in how they have responded to Occupy Movement.

“A police department of our size could do it easily,” Sullivan said, referring to an assault on the site. So it’s not for lack of capacity that the PPD was not planning to sweep through the City Hall encampment. “We don’t want to go that way. It does no one any good.”

At one of Occupy Philly’s regular evening general assemblies, attendees voted to defy the city’s expected eviction notice and not to re-locate. The site most often mentioned is Thomas Paine Plaza, a square expanse of concrete across the street from City Hall and adjacent to the Municipal Services Building.

There are certainly forces in the city government and the Philadelphia Police Department who would love to assault the Occupy encampment. So far, these reactionary forces have been kept in check. There has also been disagreement within the Occupy Philadelphia movement. For example, the Reasonable Solutions Working Group is for moving and working with the city. They are very concern that the homeless involved in Occupy Philly not be abandoned in the process.

On the rainy night that the Mayor’s eviction order was first posted, the core hold-out Occupy group had a spirited candlelight vigil on the Plaza. There was a lot of emotional bonding that seemed to strengthen the determination to hold out. A march to “close down” one of the city’s bridges was scheduled for Thursday, and arrests were anticipated. Also on Thursday, Occupy Philly literally “occupied” City Council and undertook a theater of calling up and voting on the day’s agenda items — then they left. There were apparently too many for the police to remove without creating a major PR disaster.

Both the City and the hard core element of Occupy Philly, in their own ways, seem reluctant to recognize the other, lest they give away too much negotiating power. Plus, as I have witnessed, a very powerful human bonding dynamic among an assortment of pissed-off, disaffected and dis-empowered people has grown under the umbrella of Occupy Philly. The desire to hold out and fight for Dilworth Plaza — the site of this extraordinary bonding — is therefore understandable.

Given the Dilworth construction project is a pet of the powerful city trades union and it will certainly be characterized by the city and by the city’s media as an FDR-like job stimulus project, many questions hover in the air: Is it really critical for the movement to hold Dilworth Plaza? More specifically, since it seems clear the city is committed to the project, does such a hard-headed, principled attachment to Dilworth Plaza and an inevitable collision strengthen or hinder the Occupy Movement and what it stands for?

These are important questions.

Philadelphia Wins the Money Gap Lottery

A new report from Stanford University, in conjunction with Brown University and the Russell Sage Foundation, shines a light on Philadelphia as a case in point what the issue is behind the Occupy Movement.

The study examined shifts in family income in 117 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas has reinforced what any awake American citizen should know by now, that the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer — and in the process, the rich are segregating themselves so they don’t have to even see the poor.

What’s important for Occupy Philadelphia is that when it came to rising income segregation since 1970 Philadelphia and its suburbs were the dubious winner among the 117 metropolitan areas. The Philadelphia region, The New York Times reported, is “a red stripe of wealthy suburbs curving around a poor, blue urban center, broken by a few red dots of gentrification. It is the picture of the economic change that slammed into Philadelphia decades ago as its industrial base declined and left a shrunken middle class and a poorer urban core.” The inner city community of Germantown is cited as the worst hit in this decline.

I moved from the panhandle of Florida to Philadelphia in 1975 to attend graduate school in Journalism at Temple University. I had never lived in a major city, and I moved into Germantown. I worked for years on a community ambulance running throughout Germantown. I worked several years for The Germantown Courier. I think as I lived there and wrote about the community’s problems I actually fell in love with the community.

The story of the weekly Courier newspaper is instructive. I was part of a group of “young Turk” reporters who felt just like I did. We were fiercely motivated. One year we won “best weekly” in the state of Pennsylvania from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Publishers’ Association. But, then the following year we got slammed by the world of finance: the Wall Street owners of the little community newspaper decided our enterprise was bad for their business, and they eviscerated the little paper’s budget and effectively destroyed it.

I had won a PNPA award for an investigative story on red-lining of Germantown residents by home-owners insurance companies. People in tall buildings in places like New York and Chicago were deciding not to grant Germantown residents home-owners insurance based on some remote, at least partially racist, decisions that had nothing to do with community life in Germantown. So I’m not surprised to see Germantown’s demise hit the top of the charts in the Stanford study.

I’ve since moved on and now live in Whitemarsh Township, a comfy community in Montgomery County directly west of Germantown. I live in a cul-de-sac off Germantown Pike. Five years ago, the Whitemarsh Police Department was cleaned out by the FBI for racist and predatory attitudes exhibited by some of its ranking police officers. Cops tended to lay in wait for African Americans driving through the community on their way to a mall on Germantown Pike. Being poor, broken taillights and overdue inspections were a good bet. Things are much better now, but it’s a rich suburban force, and studies have shown police officers in such communities often see their job as keeping the community secure from dangerous outsiders and out-of-step misfits.

Thus, I can feel pretty complicit in this regional inequality mess, which may explain why I’m so much in solidarity with the message of Occupy Philadelphia. The city and its residents have gotten a raw deal over the past 40 years. The growing economic segregation is only making the situation worse.

Onsite with Occupy Philadelphia

During the Tuesday night General Assembly, the odor of urine was quite detectable in the air, and a number of instances of chalk and paint graffiti on City Hall walls were evident. About 120 people gathered for the meeting, which was undertaken utilizing the peoples’ mic. A facilitator fielded the various “clarifying questions” and “friendly amendments.”

Those attending voted to have a major clean-up-day every two weeks, alternating on Wednesdays and Saturdays. They voted to better represent all the various working groups on the Facebook Committee. And they voted to hold the candlelight vigil the next night

One man in his fifties sitting down in front had the aspect of an alcoholic from the school of very hard knocks. I’d heard him earlier tell another man, “Wherever I pass out is where I live.” I also recalled him from a previous night earnestly speaking with a police captain, trying to explain to the man what the occupation was about. The captain was polite but only half-listened.

During the meeting, this man had been raising his hand and yelling, “Mic check,” which indicates someone wants to speak — in phrases that are, then, repeated by the attendees so all can hear. The man’s repeated calls were ignored until towards the end of the meeting, when he again yelled “Mic check!” and — to his apparent surprise — everything suddenly stopped to let him speak. He marshalled his thoughts and gave a spirited call for the care of the mentally disabled.

“There are lots of insane people out here,” he said, slurring his words. The crowd repeated the sentence. Then he said: “And I’m insane!” There were a few, good-natured laughs and the crowd repeated the phrase: “And I’m insane!”

A wide, bright smile grew on the man’s face. He had been recognized, had some input and was part of the group. It was a matter of dignity and belonging. Here was a man who clearly had fallen low; yet, he was still ready to fight for positive change for people like himself and others. Maybe it wasn’t very significant in the larger picture, but it was quite moving to watch.

Two well-spoken homeless men explained to me why they were there. Both African American, Nathan was in his forties and Kenny in his fifties. Both had called Dilworth Plaza home before it was taken over by the Occupy Movement. They liked having all the Occupy people around.

“I feel good with all these people around,” Kenny said. “It’s less likely for something crazy to happen when you’re asleep.” He shook his head at how dangerous life on the street can be. “All I want is a roof over my head and something in my refrigerator. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to live and let live.” Kenny was quite pessimistic about the possibility for real change.

Nathan was more optimistic. He felt the Occupy Movement served an important social and educative function. “It has made people aware of issues of poverty,” he said. “People who never knew anything about poverty can now learn about it.”

What particularly interested him was getting across to people who had jobs and comfortable lives how difficult it was to re-gain one’s grip once one had lost his or her hold on a stable life – even a solid poor, working life.

“It’s very difficult to get back into the game,” Nathan said.

As I write this, I realize Nathan’s observation also applies to entire communities that have lost their grip — like Germantown, a few miles northwest of City Hall. This shift occurred over decades, a story of middle class and poor citizens losing ground while the wealthy in America accumulated more wealth and began to circle their expensive wagons.

“There should be a degree of discomfort to get the attention of politicians,” a young occupier named Pete told me. He was a sociology student at Temple University. “I want to see the movement grow,” he said.

An interesting member of the academic brain trust behind the Occupy Movement’s success was, ironically, profiled in, of all places, the October 31-November 6 issue of Bloomberg Businessweekmagazine. David Graeber is an anarchist and an academic anthropologist who studies how debt works on people and societies. Anarchism for him is about “re-defining democracy” and figuring out how power actually works in the world. He told interviewer Charlie Rose, “You don’t worship authority as a thing in itself.” Anarchism is about “trying to re-imagine the world.”

Graeber sees no problem with re-negotiating or forgiving debt when the conditions out of which the debt rose change. In the case of institutions “too big to fail,” we already know how willing The State is to forgive debt. Basically, Graeber calls for clearing the deck so the world can move on to better things. “Debts are not sacred,” he says, “human relationships are.”

We now live in very complex culture where –isms of all flavors work together — or against each other — to make up the sum of a globalized United States of America. That includes Capitalism, Socialism and even Fascism (think George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld). At this juncture in US social history, a little Anarchism in the sense of clearing the deck – ie. “re-imagining the world” — is arguably a good and healthy thing.

The fact the Philadelphia police can’t quite get a grip on engaging with the Occupy Movement is actually a good thing — sort of the whole point. It means they and those who control the established top-down power keeping everything locked up can’t just smooth-talk or intimidate a representative of the movement but, instead, must engage with — and thus act on — the notions of social and economic justice the occupy movement is raising from the bottom up.

One hopes all sides in the current Dilworth Plaza impasse can negotiate the future wisely and peacefully. As it was eloquently put in a past struggle, the point is to keep our eyes on the prize, which in this case is the growth of the occupy movement into an even more effective movement for change.

JOHN GRANT is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new award-winning independent online alternative newspaper.