Housing Market Doldrums (are likely to persists for a LONG time)

April 23, 2012

When Pigs Fly:  The Housing Market Doldrums

by MIKE WHITNEY

 

The housing market is in terrible shape. Prices have dropped 35 percent from their peak, 1 in 5 mortgage holders is underwater, and another 2 million people will face foreclosure this year. And, as bad as things are now, they’re going to get a whole lot worse if the banks suddenly dump their inventory of distressed properties onto the market in 2012. If that happens, prices will plunge another 15 percent or so, millions of people will see their hard-earned home equity vanish overnight, and the economy will slide back into recession. Even so, there are experts who think “The Big Dump” is coming, and soon, too. Here’s how they summed it up over at CNN:

“The dam may not burst in the next 30 to 45 days, but it will eventually burst, and everyone downstream should be prepared for that to happen — both in terms of new foreclosure activity and new short sale activity.” (“Flood of foreclosures to hit the housing market”, CNN)

While flooding the market with distressed properties might gratify a few “free market” enthusiasts; it would only make matters worse. Purging the market of unwanted inventory quickly is not the cure; it will only kill the patient. What’s needed is government intervention, (Mortgage principle reductions) but that’s not going to happen because the banks are calling the shots and their goal is to minimize their losses as much as possible. So, what will probably happen is the banks will continue to release their backlog of distressed properties in dribs and drabs for another 5 to 6 years, pushing prices down at a rate of 2 percent to 4 percent per year while extending the housing slump for a full decade. This is why there’s never been a worse time to buy a house.

The problem is supply. There are just too many homes and too few buyers. And, even though interest rates are at historic lows, mortgage applicants can still get financing with just 3.5 percent down via FHA, and prices on many foreclosures are below the cost of the materials; housing is still overpriced.

Did you ever think you’d see the day when you could nab a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage for 3.25 percent?

It’s unbelievable! If you adjust for the rate of inflation (currently over 2 percent); you’re only paying roughly 1 percent interest on hundreds of thousands of dollars. What does that tell you?

It tells you that the banks are desperate. They’re giving away money, but no one is standing in line. No one is borrowing, because the economy is dead, because people don’t trust the system anymore, and because housing has become an albatross. Isn’t that what’s happening?

Sure it is. They’ve screwed everything up and now no wants to play their game anymore. That’s why mortgage applications continue to drift lower 5 years after prices peaked. It’s a matter of trust.

The experts at CoreLogic, a California company that analyzes mortgage data, say shadow inventory is presently 1.6 million homes. but, of course, this vastly underestimates the number of people who are 90-days delinquent or in some stage of foreclosure and who will eventually lose their homes. A recent analysis by Bank of America puts the number at 6.6 million homes. Here’s a clip from the paper:

“The foreclosure inventory pipeline that must be cleared in the next few years is very large. Our mortgage strategists forecast that another 6.6 million homes will need to be liquidated over the next five years.”  (“No Housing Recovery Until 2020 In 5 Simple Charts”, zero hedge)

Others say the housing overhang is much bigger. Laurie Goodman of Amherst Securities, who testified before congress, says there's between 8.3 million to 10.4 million homes that will eventually have to be resold.

So, who’s right? How much supply is really out there? That’s what buyers want to know so they can make an educated decision about (what will probably be) the biggest asset purchase in their lives. But the banks don’t want people to know about the millions of  homes that are presently in the pipeline, because that just undermines sales. They’d rather you listen to CNBC’s dyed-blond in the plunging neckline who keeps blowing smoke up your trousers every couple hours.   While that may be entertaining, there is a downside, too, which is, that you could get lured into buying a house that’ll probably be worth 10 percent less in 2 years than it is today.  Who wants that?

Now get a load of this from Comstock  Partners:

“The growing optimism on housing is not justified ... Foreclosures have generally declined over the past year as a result of the well-known robo signing scandal that caused banks to voluntarily stop most foreclosures pending some kind of settlement. This has now been accomplished by an overall settlement between the states’ attorney-generals and the major bank mortgage holders. As a result, the significant number of potential foreclosures that were held back by the scandal will now begin to be processed and show up in future inventories. It is highly likely that the vast number of distressed houses coming into the market will depress prices even more in the period ahead.
….. it will be some time before the massive number of actual and shadow inventories are cleared from the system. Until that happens, home prices will remain under continued pressure.” (“The growing optimism on housing is not justified”, Comstock  Partners, credit writedowns)

None of Obama’s wimpish mortgage refi operations (HARP, HAMP etc)  have done anything to revive the housing market. Nor will the administration’s Foreclosures-to-Rental scam. The private equity (PE) boys and other bigtime institutional investors will soon discover that its much easier to make money swapping derivatives and loading up on oil futures, than it is managing property. (Property management requires too much elbowgrease) Oh yeah, they may go hog-wild and buy a million properties or so, (If Obama provides a generous financing package!) but that still leaves 6 or 7 million more to sell. So, no matter how you cut it, there’s a boatload of homes out there that have to be sold in the next few years. And, that’s going to keep prices in the doldrums for some time to come.

Of course, if the recovery gets a head of steam, and incomes grow while more and more people find jobs, than housing prices could do a quick 180 turning a 6-year bust into another real estate boom.

Sure. And pigs can fly.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

‘What kind of world is this that still insists on signing war agreements?’” - A world run by leadrs most rapacious and barbaric, THAT is what kind of a world

Weekend Edition April 20-22, 2012

‘What kind of world is this that still insists 

on signing war agreements?’”

Afghan Screams Aren’t Heard

by KATHY KELLY and HAKIM

Last weekend, in Kabul, Afghan Peace Volunteer friends huddled in the back room of their simple home. With a digital camera, glimpses and sounds of their experiences were captured, as warfare erupted three blocks away.

Two Afghan youth taking refuge together with the Afghan Peace Volunteers

The fighting has subdued, but the video gives us a glimpse into chronic anxieties among civilians throughout Afghanistan. Later, we learned more: Ghulam awakens suddenly, well after midnight, and begins to pace through a room of sleeping people, screaming.  Ali suddenly tears up, after an evening meal, and leaves the room to sit outside. Staring at the sky and the moon, he finds solace.  Yet another puzzles over what brings people to the point of loaning themselves to possibly kill or be killed, over issues so easily manipulated by politicians.

I asked our friend, Hakim, who mentors the Afghan Peace Volunteers, if ordinary Afghans are aware that the U.S. has an estimated 400 or more Forward Operating Bases across Afghanistan and that it is planning to construct what will become the world’s largest U.S. Embassy, in Kabul.  Hakim thinks young people across Kabul are well aware of this. “Do they know,” I asked, “that the U.S. Air Force has hired 60,000 – 70,000 analysts to study information collected through drone surveillance?  The film footage amounts to the equivalent of 58,000 full length feature films. The Rand Corporation says that 100,000 analysts are needed to understand ‘patterns of life’ in Afghanistan.”

Hakim’s response was quick and cutting: “Ghulam would ask the analysts a question they can’t answer with their drone surveillance, a question that has much to do with their business, ‘terror’: “You mean, you don’t understand why I screamed?”

Two days ago, “Democracy Now” interviewed Hakim about on-going U.S. military occupation in Afghanistan. “If we don’t address the agreements that the U.S. and Australian governments and other governments are making for a long-term war strategy in Afghanistan,” Hakim observed, “we are heading for an increase in violence in this part of the world, in South Asia, perhaps perpetual war, more serious than the Kabul attacks.”

Analysts could better understand patterns of life in Afghanistan by mixing with Afghans in their homes and along their streets, unarmed.

The analysts would spend less tax-payer money but possibly obtain a genuine perspective on everyday life in Afghanistan. If they interacted with Afghan people instead of surveying them from the air, they’d be better equipped to study ‘terrorism,’ their supposed intent.

What if U.S. analysts could feel the frustration Afghans feel as convoys of trucks bearing fuel and food for U.S. soldiers drive past squalid refugee camps where children have starved and frozen to death (250 die of starvation every day; 40 froze to death since January, 2012 ).

Hakim again: “They would understand quickly, even through cursory study by one ‘non-analyst,’ that Afghans are just as infuriated by U.S. soldiers urinating on corpses as U.S citizens are by their own police pepper-spraying college students.

They would understand that just as U.S. citizens can’t even imagine living under the barrel of the Mexican army, Afghan citizens, including of course those labelled ‘insurgents’, dislike foreign guns. No number of Special Ops forces staying on perpetually beyond 2014 can make Afghans like foreign guns. This is what the U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership War Agreement will do with at least 4 billion U.S. tax payer dollars a year spent just on Afghan security forces.”

16 year old Ali understands that the agreement being readied for the NATO summit won’t accomplish foreign troop withdrawal. This creates what for some is deadly distrust. Ali knows that a long-term foreign military means that the firing and killing will continue.  “It’s tit-for-tat,” says Hakim, “U.S. soldier-for-Talib, dollars-for-rupees, and all those insensible human decisions that occasionally make Ali cry.  But, the military and militant apparatus does not have human ears. It has bombs. So, when the recent Kabul attacks were going on, as seen in the very human moments in the video clip, the Afghan youth crouching in the refuge of a room were assured and delighted to hear from Voices activists, from across the miles, calling to ask how they were.

‘Ah! Someone cares. Someone listens.’

The monthly Global Days of Listening conversations which the youth have had with ordinary U.S., European, Middle Eastern and Australian citizens have helped change their lives person-to-person, overcoming the cold impersonal ‘shoosh’ of overhead rockets and under-running bloodshed.

Every day, Ghulam studies, cooks, washes the dishes and lives, very normally. But some nights, in the stupor of nightmares, Ghulam shouts subconsciously, out of ear-range to the million-dollar intelligence spies, ‘What kind of world is this that still insists on signing war agreements?’”

Kathy Kelly  co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She’s a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.

Voting With Your Feet Democracy in the Streets

April 23, 2012

Voting With Your Feet

Democracy in the Streets

by HOWARD LISNOFF

 

Several months before the 2008 general election, I stood with two other antiwar demonstrators outside of the town hall of a small town in Massachusetts. One of the other two demonstrators had demonstrated for peace there each Saturday at noon since just prior to the inception of the war in Afghanistan. We were in the habit of exchanging both small talk and substantive talk about issues of war and peace during the hour-long vigil.

I was hardly ready for the response I received from the longtime protester when I brought up my reservations about voting for Barack Obama. His frontal attack came seemingly out of nowhere, but reflected the long quadrennial tradition of substantial numbers of leftists supporting the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee as the lesser of two evils or the only alternative in a general election. “Keep your thoughts to yourself about Obama and his commitment to continue the war in Afghanistan! Look at the alternative! Do you want passersby to hear you?” Of course, the result of the election of Obama was the expansion of the war (and the defection of masses of so-called antiwar Democrats from the peace movement); the complete disregard for the union movement: jettisoning of millions of those who lost trillions of dollars of equity in their homes in the housing debacle; the neglect of pressing environmental issues; and finally, the expansion of the national security state with its attendant erosion of civil liberties.

Just a few days ago I listened to a segment of The Thom Hartmann Program on Free Speech TV. I paid special attention as Hartmann explained that both the voices of protest on the streets of America and traditional political activists had a home in the Democratic Party and could work together to support the President for reelection. The conclusion, I gathered, would result in Obama being given the opportunity to bring his agenda for hope and change to fruition. The latter, of course, was the same bill of goods that the electorate had been sold four years earlier. Common wisdom and history tell a different story for leftists to pay attention to. Whenever a politician does not have demands placed on him or her, then activists can expect nothing in return for their efforts. In other words, power concedes nothing without a struggle as so many Occupy movement activists have painfully and brutally learned on the militarized streets of America!

My own experiences as an antiwar activist and war resister during the Vietnam War speak loudly and clearly about change and maintaining a spirit of hopefulness. It was only through years of concerted effort on the streets that forced the political establishment to realize that the Vietnam War was too costly in political capital for the war to continue. There definitely existed a measure of self-interest on the part of many demonstrators during the Vietnam era, but the sacrifices of millions of people on the streets added up to a force that the Democrat Lyndon Johnson and the Republican Richard Nixon could not ignore.

When it’s suggested that organizations such as MoveOn (which allows for no correspondence among its members and is a hierarchical, top-down group) and the Occupy movement can together bring about the change necessary to alter the course of US domestic and foreign policy, I have to laugh. The only voice that power will listen and respond to in a right of center political system, bankrolled by the wealth of individuals and giant corporations, is the voice that comes from the demands of those who put the soles of their shoes on the streets (like the Occupy movement) of this nation and demand change in the oligarchic elite that now controls the government.

And when it finally comes time to vote in November, Ralph Nader had prescient words on what those disaffected by the two-party system of high-finance capitalism can do with their votes: “…in order to tell him (Obama) that they do have a place to go: they can stay home. And that’s what hurt the Democrats in 2010. People can just stay home.” (Democracy Now, January 25, 2012)

In the movie Sunrise at Campobello (1960), Ralph Bellamy, the actor who portrays Franklin D. Roosevelt observes, speaking of what interests voters in the US identify with, that once in a great while when social conditions are right, voters will temporarily turn away from materialism and vote for democratic principles. But, I doubt if the act of voting in a dog and pony show will change the oligarchy that governs the US in any measurable or meaningful way, especially since the common wisdom dictates that voter behavior can be heavily influenced by political advertising, which has been unleashed to an exponential degree by the Citizens United case (2010).

I don’t know if contemporary activists possess the wherewithal to change the entrenched system of extreme wealth and militarism. The stark brutality at the street level is breathtaking in its viciousness. Not many can stand that kind of long-term abuse and stay the course of activism, but what happens both on the streets and in the halls of government over the next few years in the US will determine the fate of this planet!

Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times published photos of US troops posing with dead Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan (“U.S. troops posed with body parts of Afghan bombers,” April 18, 2012). These gruesome photographs come on the heels of other pictured atrocities from Afghanistan committed by U.S. troops. Not only a violation of both international, U.S., and U.S. military law, the photos go to the heart of the dehumanization that takes place during military training and war. My memoir, Notes of a Military Resister: Looking Back From a Time of Endless War(2011) depicts the dehumanization of the so-called enemy that took place in basic training during the Vietnam War. Combined with the attack on individualism that is part and parcel of military training, it is a simple leap of the imagination to recognize how these two forces combine to create the environment for the committing of atrocities in war. Even the secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, was seen squirming in great discomfort at the news conference held just after the publication of the photographs as he offered his own tortured account of the incident while attempting to explain away these latest in a long line of U.S. atrocities.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He can be reached at howielisnoff@gmail.com

Economist Prabhat Patnaik on the Global Crisis What Should People Fight For? (Even more important question - what should people die for?)

April 23, 2012

Economist Prabhat Patnaik on the Global Crisis

What Should People Fight For?

by ROBERT JENSEN

 

After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik.

“There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response. “I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism.”

Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a rising economic power that is challenging the United States. While there certainly are no shortages of capitalists, there are still lots of Marxists in India, as well as communist parties that have won state elections. Patnaik represents the best thinking and practice of those left traditions — both the academic Marxism that provides a framework for critique of economics, and the political Marxism that proposes public policies — which is why I was so excited to talk with him about lessons to be learned from the current economic crisis.

In the interview, conducted during a break in the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge’s “Futures of Finance” conference,http://rethinkingcapitalism.ucsc.edu/ I asked Patnaik two main questions: First, is there a “golden age” of capitalism to which we can return? Second, can we ever expect ethical practices from the financial sector of the global capitalist economy? Before explaining why his answer to both questions is “no,” some background.

Prabhat Patnaik started his academic career in the UK, earning his doctoral degree at Oxford University and then teaching at the University of Cambridge. He returned to India in 1974 to teach at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi until his retirement in 2010. He’s the author of several influential books, including The Value of Money, published in 2008. Patnaik-the-politician served as Vice-Chairman of the Planning Board of the state of Kerala from 2006-2011 and is a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He regularly writes on economic issues in the Party’s journal and addresses trade union meetings.

In the United States, where people believe Marxism was buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall and communism can only mean Soviet-style totalitarianism, his political affiliations would guarantee a life on the margins. But India’s political spectrum is considerably wider, and left ideas have a place in the national political discourse there. (What an absolutely envigorating thought!)  On the world stage, Patnaik brings an unusual perspective: An experienced economist with a history of political organizing; an Indian who is engaged in the political debates of the West; a leftist who is not afraid to critique the weaknesses of the left tradition.

The quixotic quest for a “golden age”

Ever since the financial meltdown of 2008, there’s been more and more nostalgia in the United States — especially among liberals — for the immediate post-WWII period, the so-called “golden age” of capitalism during which profits and wages rose, and unemployment was low. This was the achievement of Keynesianism, the philosophy that unwanted market outcomes can be corrected through monetary and fiscal policy designed to stabilize an otherwise unstable business cycle. Primarily through “military Keynesianism” — massive spending on wars and a permanent warfare state — the U.S. government helped stimulate the economy when it went into inevitable periods of stagnation. That worked until about the mid-1970s, when growth started to slow.

Whether or not that system was good for everyone (lots of people in the Third World, for example, were not particularly happy with it), the question remains: Can we go back to that strategy? Patnaik says that golden age was necessarily short-lived, as the pressure for global investment pushed nations to give up the ability to impose controls on capital. This globalization of finance made national Keynesian policies less relevant. At about the same time, steep increases in the price of petroleum generated even more capital in the oil states, which went looking for investment opportunities around the world.

Globalization — this concentration of capital moving freely around the world — meant that no single nation-state could go up against international finance. And with the global flow of goods, the large “reserve army of labor” (the unemployed and under-employed) in places like China and India meant that workers in the advanced industrial countries had less leverage. So, productivity continued to rise, but wages stagnated. Patnaik said it’s important to see the contemporary crisis in that historical context.

“The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is certainly part of the problem but not the root cause of the problem today,” he said. “The immediate crisis it touched off helps make the underlying problem visible.”

If this financialization of the global economy, which has put so much power in so few hands, is at the heart of the problem, the question is clear: In the absence of a global state, who is going to control international finance capital?

If capital is going to be concentrated, can we at least make it behave?

If the power of finance capital can’t be diminished, is there a way to at least make it follow some sane rules to prevent the worst from happening again? Short answer: No.

“It’s important to understand that capitalism is a spontaneous system, not something that is always necessarily planned or controlled,” Patnaik said. Because the reward for ignoring, evading, or getting around rules is so powerful, the attempts to make capitalism follow ethical norms are bound to fail.

“Keynesianism worked in a specific time and place, but capitalism escaped Keynesianism,” he said. New rules will suffer a similar fate, absent a force as strong as international finance capital to enforce the rules.

Although Patnaik often talks in detail about the complex workings of the global economy, he also articulates simple truths when that kind of straightforward analysis is needed. In doing so, he often draws on aspects of Marx’s analysis that the world tends to forget.

To make the point about the futility of talking about ethical norms in capitalism, Patnaik pointed to Marx’s insight that a capitalist is “capital personified.” Here’s the relevant passage from the first volume of Marx’s Capital:

“[T]he possessor of money becomes a capitalist. … [A]nd it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.”

What Marx described as “the restless never-ending process of profit-making” and “boundless greed after riches” reminds us that as actors on the economic stage we are less moral agents and more “capital personified,” relentless in our restlessness and bound to believe in an illusory boundlessness. Society might be able make some moral claims on people with wealth if they were merely working in capitalism, but it’s more difficult to find common moral ground with “capital personified.”

What should people fight for?

If we can’t go back to business as usual, and there’s no reason to expect that new rules will solve our problems, what kinds of solutions are possible? Patnaik said that neither of the two most obvious responses to the financial crisis — creating a surrogate global state to impose controls on finance, or “delinking” a nation’s economy from the global finance system — are in the cards now. Even though capitalism is in deep crisis, resistance to capitalism is not nearly strong enough to produce movements that could make that possible.

Given his intellectual roots and political affiliation, it may seem surprising that Patnaik argues for organizing to bring back of the liberal welfare-state policies that developed in the advanced industrial countries during the postwar period when Keynesian economics ruled.

“That is not about going back, which is impossible,” Patnaik said. “We have to go forward with new ideas.” The call for a more robust social safety net (protecting workers’ rights, unemployment insurance, social security, health insurance, etc.) isn’t new, but such policies can be a step toward new ideas, a transitional measure, he explained. Rather than making those policies the final goal, as part of a more-or-less permanent accommodation with capitalism, they should be seen as a stepping stone toward radical change.

“We can work toward a reassertion of welfare state policies, not as an end but as a vehicle toward greater justice, as a way of making visible the inherent limitations of capitalism,” he said.

In additions to the limitations of capitalism, there also are ecological limitations we can’t ignore, he said, which means the goal can’t be raising India and China to material standards of the United States. Patnaik recognizes the need to adjust older socialist goals to new realities.

“The world simply has to be refashioned,” both in the Third World and in advanced capitalist countries, and specifically in the United States, Patnaik said, which means experiments in alternative ways of living that are not based on material measures.

“This really is a spiritual/cultural question, about what it means to live a good life,” he said, which should not be seen as foreign to socialism. “Marxism shouldn’t be reduced to productionism. The goal of socialism has always been human freedom, which is about much more than material wealth.”

“Gandhi talked about the ethical demands of nature, but I don’t like that phrase, being a socialist and anthropocentric,” Patnaik said with the hint of a grin. “But we do have to live within the limits of nature.”

The role of Marxism

It is easy to misjudge Patnaik from first impressions. Unlike many intellectuals, Patnaik does not immediately thrust himself into a discussion, and he’s soft-spoken both in conversation and from the podium. But when he does speak, his passion for justice comes through loud and clear. And, while Patnaik identifies very much as a communist, he also is quick to poke at some of the tradition’s platitudes.

“I just came from the (Communist) Party Congress, and I keep reminding everyone that they have to give up notions of a one-party State, of democratic centralism (the Leninist notion that party members are free to debate policy but must support the final decision of the party),” Patnaik said. “Democratic centralism always leads to centralism.”

If leftists reject the current dominance of finance in the world, Patnaik said it’s important to reject any suggestion that a single perspective or party should dominate.

“The hegemony of finance throttles democracy. The hegemony of finance beats you into shape,” he said. If the goal is to resist that kind of hegemony, then the approach of the old communist movement simply isn’t relevant, Patnaik said, but socialist principles are more relevant than ever.

“Any resistance has to be about opening up alternatives, opening up critical thinking to imagine those alternatives,” he said. “The only way to challenge that global regime is mass mobilization.”

Patnaik has no off-the-shelf solutions to offer, and it’s difficult to reduce his thinking to slogans. At the age of 66, when many people hold on tightly to what they believe will work, Patnaik doesn’t hesitate to say, “It’s time to invent.”

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of  Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.

Political prisoners in the U.S.A.? Shirley, you jest?

APRIL 24, 2012

Holder's Hypocrisy

Prosecutor Misconduct & the Obama Administration

by LINN WASHINGTON, Jr.

One of the issues driving protesters participating in the April 24, 2012 Occupy The Justice Department demonstration is an issue that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder knows well: prosecutorial misconduct.

Holder knows this misconduct issue well because he has criticized it during congressional testimony, in fact as recently as March 2012 when he was commenting on a special prosecutor’s report castigating the wrongdoing of federal prosecutors.

That wrongdoing, Holder acknowledged, unlawfully tainted the corruption investigation and 2008 trial of the late U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, who was convicted of corruption in his home state of Alaska.

Protesters, including fiery Philadelphia activist Pam Africa, want Holder to take action against the prosecutorial misconduct evident in scores of unjust convictions that have led to the wrongful imprisonment of political prisoners across America, most of them jailed for two or more decades.

Those political prisoners – ignored domestically while exalted abroad – include Native American activist Leonard Peltier, Puerto Rican Nationalist Oscar Lopez Rivera, the Cuban 5, author/activist Mumia Abu-Jamal and other former Black Panther Party members like the Omaha Two (Ed Poindexter and Mondo W. Langa).

Demands of the Occupy The Justice Department protesters include the immediate

release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the freeing all political prisoners, ending of the racist death penalty and the ending solitary confinement and torture.

Individuals and incidents underlying those demands are within the purview of USAG Holder to investigate and/or to act immediately to resolve.

April 24th is the birthday of Mumia Abu-Jamal, perhaps the most recognized U.S. political prisoner worldwide.

Abu-Jamal, for example, was the subject of two demonstrations held recently outside the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, Germany, one of which included extending a 2,200-foot banner around that embassy building.

Pam Africa is the head of International Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelphia-based organization at the center of the international movement seeking Abu-Jamal’s release.

Africa is the dynamo who most Philadelphia police, prosecutors, politicians and many pastors love to hate because of her strident advocacy on behalf of both imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and the MOVE members sentenced for a fatal 1978 shootout.

The advocacy of Pam Africa on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal – helping construct support networks while confronting incessant opposition – contributed to the climate where U.S. federal courts late last year finally killed the death sentence Abu-Jamal received following his controversial 1982 conviction for killing a policeman.

Abu-Jamal is now fighting against a life-without-parole sentence, which was automatically imposed when the death sentence was invalidated.

That elimination of Abu-Jamal’s government-sanctioned murder chagrined powerful figures across Pennsylvania and around America who had shamefully bent and broken laws (deliberately sabotaging court proceedings) in their various failed efforts to execute Abu-Jamal, known widely as the Voice-of-the-Voiceless.

While winning freedom for Abu-Jamal and the MOVE 9 is a prime focus of Pam Africa’s advocacy work, she is frequently found on ‘front-lines’ nationwide fighting for and end to the mistreatment of people regardless of their color and creed.

“Pam Africa is in each and every struggle for social justice in Philadelphia, the U.S. and abroad. It’s not just Mumia,” said Latino activist/writer Berta Joubert-Ceci, who recently chaired a program featuring former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in West Philadelphia.

Dr. Claude Guillaumaud, a professor in France who has known Africa for 20-years, said she’s “had time to appreciate her warm personality and total commitment to the cause of Mumia and the fight against racial discrimination and the barbaric death penalty.”

Temple University African-American history professor Dr. Tony Monterio first met Pam Africa during an ugly June 1979 incident in South Philadelphia where local police beat Africa. Philadelphia police pummeled her with nightsticks with one stick-strike knocking out some of her teeth.

The scholar in Dr. Monterio sees Pam Africa as a unique figure whose contributions locally, nationally and internationally merit both examination and recognition.

“She’s made history but she didn’t set out to make history. She started initially just to do the right thing,” Monterio said during a recent interview.

Monterio is a force behind two recent events honoring Pam Africa’s accomplishments. He has initiated a process for what he envisions as a study of Africa’s life works.

Prosecutorial misconduct is a core element in the Abu-Jamal case, albeit a festering injustice ignored by state and federal courts that have refused to grant legal relief to Abu-Jamal despite granting new trials to others where the evidence of prosecutorial misconduct was far less grievous than that evident in the Abu-Jamal case.

One example of prosecutorial misconduct in the Abu-Jamal case occurred during his 1982 murder trial, when the prosecutor perverted a comment Abu-Jamal made over a decade earlier when responding to a reporter’s question about the December 1969 murder by Chicago Police of Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton.

The police assassination of Hampton, later linked to the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO campaign, outraged many at the time, including leaders as diverse as the then head of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins and former U.S. United Nations Ambassador and Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg.

Hampton’s assassination, later documented by congressional and other investigations, was a part of a joint police-FBI campaign to slay BPP members which led to 28 BPP deaths between January 1968 and December 1969.

As a teenaged BBP member, Abu-Jamal told that reporter that Hampton’s murder proved that “power” comes from the barrel of a gun.

But the 1982 trial prosecutor shifted the context of Abu-Jamal’s comment from applying it to the police killing Black Panthers to a supposed proclamation of Abu-Jamal’s intent to kill police. It was one of many factual mischaracterizations that millions worldwide constantly cite when charging Abu-Jamal received an unfair trial.

That improper perversion of Abu-Jamal’s 12-year-old comment made when he was just 15 helped sway jurors to send an award-winning journalist with no criminal record to death row. That same prosecutor had improperly excluded blacks from Abu-Jamal’s trial jury despite their having declared their willingness to impose a death penalty if warranted by the arguments at trial.

Not only was the prosecutor, Joseph McGill’s, twisting of Abu-Jamal’s comment an improper tactic. It violated associational rights granted under the First Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court gave new hearings in the early 1990s to two convicted murderers –- a white racist prisoner gang member in Delaware and a white devil worshipper in Nevada -– while denying comparable relief to former BPP member Abu-Jamal three times on the exact same issue.

USAG Eric Holder, shortly after taking office in January 2009, went to court successfully to request dismissal of Sen. Stevens’ conviction, after finding that the federal prosecutor in that case withheld evidence of innocence from Stevens’ defense team and also tampered with witnesses and documents.

The recent release of the special prosecutor’s report in the Stevens case confirmed prosecutorial misconduct and wrongdoing that were also clearly rampant in the case of Abu-Jamal and other U.S. political prisoners.

The Occupy The Justice Department demonstrators are raising the issue of Holder’s credibility and of the ethical integrity of the Obama Administration in acting to dismiss the wrongful conviction of ex-Senator Stevens while ignoring the continued imprisonment of U.S. political prisoners who were also victims of misconduct by police and prosecutors.

On December 9, 2011 –- one day before the U.N. annual Human Rights Day –- Noble Peace Prize Laureate and noted anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu asked America to “rise to the challenge of reconciliation, human rights and justice” in calling for the “immediate release” of Abu-Jamal.

Linn Washington, Jr. is a founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He lives in Philadelphia. 

A diversion - a song whose lyrics will haunt me all the days of my lives!

While passing out copies of some of my CDs to the local 6:30 AM coffee club and Republican Caucus at the Barrington, Illinois McDonald's, one of the charter club members was kind enough (thoughtful enough, and insightful enough) to present to me a CD of 18 of his favorite Australian songs, asking me in particular for my opinion of song #14, lyrics to which are shown below.  Haunting.  

You say, “Well met again, loch keeper, 

we're leavin' even deeper than the time before.”

“Oriental logs and tea brought down from Singapore.”

As we wait for my loch to cycle I say “My wife has given me a son!”

“A son!” you cry, “Is that all that you've done?”

She wears boganvillia blossoms, you pluck 'em from her hair

and toss them in the tide. Sweep her in your arms and carry her inside.

Her sighs catch on your shoulder, 

her moonlit eyes grow bold and wiser through her tears.

And I say to you, “How could you leave her for a year?”

“So come with me,” you cry, 

“to where the Southern Cross rides high upon your shoulder.”

“Come with me,” you cry, “each day you tend this loch, you're one day older.

“While your blood grows colder.”

But that anchor chain's a fetter, and with it you are tethered to the foam.

And I would not trade your life for one hour, our own.

Sure I'm stuck here on the seaway, 

while you compensate for leeway through the trades.

And you shoot the stars that see the miles you've made.

And you'll laugh at the hearts you've riven,

But which of these has given us more love or life:

You - your tropic mates? Or me - my wife?

“So come with me,” you cry, 

“to where the Southern Cross rides high upon your shoulder.”

“Come with me,” you cry, “each day you tend this loch, you're one day older.

“While your blood grows colder.”

But that anchor chain's a fetter, and with it you are tethered to the foam,

And I would not trade your life for one hour, our own.

Yes that anchor chain's a fetter and with it you are tethered to the foam,

And I would not trade your life for one hour, our own.

First of all, Roger, THANK YOU for sharing this wonderful collection of Aussie tunes (many of which I have heard in the Irish bars of Chicago and the outlying environs; but, after all, who are the Anglo-Aussies except for the crminial element of the British Isles who unto whom was given the “freedom” to develop a new land where only tiny little beastie peoples lived along with animals unknown to the European Continent (the Koala, the Kangaroo, and the Krokodile).

Now, the real reason behind “freeing” this criminal element was economic. It was cheaper to ship 'em (many in fact were political prisoners – as in, yuck! The Irish!) to Australia to fend for themselves than to feed and house 'em on the tit of Albion's Shore. Somehow or another, the Aussies gained higher status (they were after all quite a bit further away) than the Irish, always the lowliest of white peoples (well, in Appalachia the Scots-Irish are pretty lowly too – in fact, they fared fare less well state side, as history played out – the ones that live there, in Appalachia, to this day, mining for coal, workin' for slave wages (if that's all the ambition they got, that's all the money they deserve, n'est ce quc pas?).

SONG # 14 – WOW!

This amazingly textured / layered / story / poem / epic / conversation is virtually impervious to interpretation unless you can see the lyrics. Thus, I have taken the liberty, while admitting that my hearing is not what it once was (I once interpretted the line “I'm a mixed up shook up girl,” as “I'm a mixed up sugar curl”) of presenting my best hearing of these wondrous lyrics.

This was a most rewarding exercise, as I listend and typed, and then listened and edited, and then listened and punctuated, and then listened, and tried to get the words and fonts correct. Because what emerged is one of those best stories as told by the best story tellers, which I'll exemplify by this line, from the movie CHINATOWN: “What do you expect? It's Chinatown.” That best story as told by the best story tellers is the story that is not told, the back story, which is most assuredly needed to form the most accurate conclusion(s). And the best story tellers will NOT EVER tell us the back story, because their greatness comes from what they give us that is the nothingness of the story (the absence of the back story): WE have to fill in the blanks, WE have to write our own back story, and we can only write this story from the lens and photo album of our own (limited and limiting) life's experiences, and thus, there is a never-ending mobia strip of back stories, leaving as at the beginning of THIS story with THE END of THIS story. Which again, is more easily understood via FILM (e.g., Pulp Fiction, Mullholland Drive, The Usual Suspects).

Here's what we know of this song:

It is told by one man, the loch-keeper, who relates to us the conversation of a sailor, clearly a friend, a good friend, a dear friend, even, and perhaps a friend since childhood; possibly a brother or a cousin; possibly even a father or a son! Let's keep it simple, and make it a good friend. A man with whom the loch keeper shares the honesty of his soul. A man to whom the loch keeper will tell the unvarnished truths as he knows them; as they are known by him, and who does NOT take offense at something very much akin to a thoughtless off handed comment. Good friends get not better than this from good friends: the truth, warts and all, and the attendant judgments that associate there with. And yet, there are many truths, and what is true for me, as to my values, aspirations, dreams, ambitions, hopes, disappointments, fears, etc, you may hold on to as nearly, as dearly, as I; and yet, we may be in direct opposition on many, most, or perhaps even ALL of the most salient points.

And in this song, there are diametric opposites of values, dreams, hopes, aspirations. Coming from two so different points of view, there are entirely different sets of underlying assumptions. Until we can come to agreement on an underlying set of assumptions, we cannot have a meaningful conversation on such matters of values, judgments, etc, etc, etc. This lack of agreement makes neither of us right, nor neither one of us wrong. It's only you and me, and we just disagree. It means we can talk for a long damn time and never move the one by the other, nor never be moved by the other, the one. And yet, IF, we are willing to continue the conversation, at SOME point, one (or the other) may make a point, hit an intersection of time – space – place that resonates with the experiences of the other. At this point, change becomes possible, and with change, growth and insight, and, hopefully, kindness, tenderness, loving, forgiveness, and compassion.

As we wait for my loch to cycle I say “My wife has given me a son!”

“A son!” you cry, “Is that all that you've done?”

“Is that all that you've done?” Sounding rather callous, sounding rather crass, rather not too very impressed with a man who prefers being a loch-keeper, husband, and father, as opposed to joining his (good and dear) friend fore to sail the seas. ONLY with a very good friend (certainly, NOT with a stranger) would one be so impervious to social decorum to ask “Is that all that you've done?” But note, the loch-keeper does NOT contradict or take offense. He has another question entirely (that his friend has minimized, probably – but certainly NOT certainly in jest – his friend having become a father).

She wears boganvillia blossoms, you pluck 'em from her hair

and toss them in the tide. Sweep her in your arms and carry her inside

Her sighs catch on your shoulder, 

her moonlit eyes grow bold and wiser through her tears.

And I say to you, “How could you leave her for a year?”

The loch-keeper tells now of the sailor's wife, and their greeting for each other, and asks this question: “How could you leave her for a year?” What kind of a way is this to treat the woman WHO LOVES YOU? (No matter how little you think of my accomplishment of creating human life, becoming the father to a son, HOW CAN YOU TREAT THIS WOMAN WITH SO LITTLE CARING? How can you stand to be away from her that long. I could not stand this (not even for one hour – as later we shall see; had the loch-keeper once loved the sailor's woman and lost her to the sailor?). Our loch-keeper knows a secret: when you've found a woman who loves you, that you are happy to see, you should stay with her. Nowhere is it written that you can forever take her loving for granted, nor even can you take her being alive and well when you return for granted. LIFE sometimes intervenes; and you, sailor, won't even know what hit you when she's gone!

“So come with me,” you cry,

“to where the Southern Cross rides high upon your shoulder.”

“Come with me,” you cry, “each day you tend this loch, you're one day older.

“While your blood grows colder.”

But the sailor has found something which uplifts, moves, and sustains him. And he wants to share this special joy with his friend, that his friend might know the sailor's joys, while he is still young enough to do so. This is the sailor's gift, the life he lives, and he BELIEVES (knows in his guts, understands intimately, just what this world, this sailor's world would mean to his friend; his friend whom he has known so long; who as boys, likely, watched the ships come into the lochs, and watch the ships leave the lochs, and the dreams they must have had of what the sailor's life would be like. And this is the GIFT he has to give. The GIFT of the life that he knows.

But that anchor chain's a fetter, and with it you are tethered to the foam.

And I would not trade your life for one hour of our own.

This is the crux of the disagreement, where the assumptions depar and radically sot: to the loch-keeper, “that anchor chain's a fetter, and with it you are tethered to the foam.” Tethered to the foam, the sea owns you, and you are its slave; its prisoner. And even if I could have every experience you have ever had with your sailoring, “I would not trade your life for one of our own.”

The loch-keeper's assumptions and the sailor's assumptions as to the life well-lived are diametrically opposed. No agreement ever can be reached on this matter. But, what of us, we who hear this song; we who read the story; we who have made our choices? Another matter, entirely. For we can judge, based on the underlying assumptions we choose to make, as to which life resonates more for us; which is the more meaningful; which one feeds us more fully; which one makes us more whole.

The loch-keeper continues, noting full well the limits and limitations (apparent, and perhaps even real of his own chosen life, and seeing full well it is NOT as “exciting” or as immediately and sensually gratifying, dangerous and exciting and erotic as the life of the sailor:

Sure I'm stuck here on the seaway, 

while you compensate for leeway through the trades.

And you shoot the stars that see the miles you've made.

And you'll laugh at the hearts you've riven,

But there is a compensation (and a very worthwhile and worthy one, worth far more to the loch-keeper than the sailor's excitement, joy, experiences, and female conquests:

But which of these has given us more love or life:

You - your tropic mates? Or me - my wife?

So it is a question of values, of which (women or woman) has given to each the more love; the more life? Your tropic mates and their gardens of variety (to you, sailor), or my wife (to me)? The loch-keeper has taken quite seriously the Biblical admonition that a man shall leave his mother and take a wife, and this loch-keeper is very much a “modern man,” in the Jesus sense: a man who LOVES women (note how anguished the loch-keeper is at the thought of the sailor's leaving of the one with the boganvilla blossoms in her hair for a year). Which is feeding us more, nourishing us more, sustaining us more: You with your Peter Pan lived life, or me with my grown up and settled down life with wife (and son)?

But the sailor's assumptions have not changed for the conversation (which, surely, these two friends have time and again; it is in the nature of friends truly loving of one another to have these serious conversations, that might even destroy the friendship someday – although, not this friendship; they have had the conversation before; they will have this conversation again, the next time the sailor returns; that is, IF the sailor returns, for the sea is a harsh mistress, and sometimes extracts a very high price from her sailors.

“So come with me,” you cry,

“to where the Southern Cross rides high upon your shoulder.”

“Come with me,” you cry, “each day you tend this loch, you're one day older.

“While your blood grows colder.”

My friend, LISTEN, please, to what I say – come with me, while you still have the time to enjoy it (it need not be forever; but please, one time, please, enter into my world!) - before it's too late and your blood becomes too cold to e're be warm (again)!

Emphatically, the loch-keeper answers, the same answer as was given before; and the same answer repeated once again, so compelling is this line of reasoning, its inherent, underlying, immutable, well-ordered sense of logic:

But that anchor chain's a fetter, and with it you are tethered to the foam,

and I would not trade your life for one hour, our own.

Yes that anchor chain's a fetter and with it you are tethered to the foam,

And I would not trade your life for one hour, our own.

The one will never convince the other. Their assumptions are too far apart, and too dearly held to ever change them. But, what of us? Do we seek to bea philandering Peter Pan (the sailor)? How many of us chuck all of that stability and certainty away, frequently in our 40's, trading in the old wife for a newer, more exciting (and younger) model; buying a Porsche, or a Harley? The sailor's logic swayed us, or was it merely that we wanted to be swayed, that we married too soon and find our life less exciting than it once was? Perhaps we got off track somewhere. And what allegiance does one owe a wife one no longer finds exciting; a job one finds no longer spiritually rewarding (if it ever was); a conservative (boring, one that father might drive) automobile that one would never get a speeding ticket driving?

But what of us? Do we KNOW in our hearts the good things we've got? The wife? The kids? The grand kids? The (well-earned and deserved) respect of the members of our community? The (well-earned and deserved) respect of our co-workers? Have all the long we been following a path that first led us to the only thing we ever needed to complete us? THE woman of our dreams, who has stuck with us, even when we perhaps went a little crazy, and drove a little too fast, or flirted a little too ostentatiously, the woman who gave us all the rope we ever needed to hang ourselves with, and in so doing, gave us the freedom to love her; to choose her; to make that commitment, to have and to hold, 'til death us do part.

Some will hear the song and perhaps be inspired to leave to sail the seas, to start over, to be reborn, perhaps even to erase the old slate, which maybe was fairly impressive, looking at it from the outside, but was never what some really deigned and dreamed to do, from the beginning.

Others will hear the song and smile, sagely, knowing the wisdom of the loch-keeper is eternal.

And, in the end, the story teller, the song-writer, the song-singer is the real hero, because he has given us something very worthwhile to chew on, mull over, and digest!