Israeli Blood Oil

In 1967, Israel was able to successfully defeat its Arab neighbors over the course of a 6-day war of preemptive aggression. War, of course, is merely a chess game for the rich and politically-connected; the common man is but a pawn. The common man tends to support many wars because he believes himself to be on a winning team. And, if your team wins something, it is to be shared by all. But, the spoils of the six-day war won't be shared by the common Israeli man.

 

Israel's success during the six-day war allowed it to significantly expand its territory and bring under its umbrella large numbers of foreign citizens. Much in the same manner that Europeans "relocated" or made life impossible for Native Americans, so too have the European-descended Israelis dealt with their brown neighbors. The Golan Heights -- part of Syria -- has been effectively colonized by Israeli forces. The likelihood of it being returned grows more unlikely as Israel takes advantage of the bloodshed in Syria to expand its financial interests.

 

Oil was found in the Golan Heights, and the Israelis -- considering themselves masters of the fate of Syrian soil -- have decided to lease the oil fields to an American company. Allowing an American company to build on occupied land will allow Israel to more strongly solidify its hold of Syrian soil; Israel's generosity is essentially a payment to the US military-industrial complex for its support in Israel's shipping in of colonists (also called settlers.)

 

These colonists, most of whom are religious fanatics, consider themselves to be on a winning team. Their religion has blinded them to the fact that Genie Energy is advised by none other than Dick Cheney -- the man who drilled blood into Iraqi soil -- and that one of the shareholders is Rupert Murdoch -- the media mogul who aided the Iraq-war-lie. Israel's objective in leasing the drilling rights is all about gaining the support of America's extreme conservative elements, which Cheney and Murdoch represent.

 

Though the Golan Heights is Syrian territory, it will soon be a "freedom oil field," with countless American military lives sworn to defend it. Though annexation of the Golan Heights is not internationally recognized and relocation of civilian populations is considered a war crime, it is only a minor concern considering that the US will veto any resolution against Israel in the UN security council. It turns out that the bloodshed in Syria is a good thing for Israel.

Obama's Biggest Fear

For the first time in US history, the Senate has delayed a secretary of defense nominee despite 59 votes in the chamber. This is even more unprecedented because we are currently at war. It's pretty clear that politics in the United States is no longer about the welfare of the majority, but rather political basis points. In the same way that the 9/11 commissioners complained that they were "set up to fail," I so believe that Obama was set up to fail.

 

Obama's future -- and the future of the United States -- is currently being decided. At the moment, Obama's future is being decided not by a recalcitrant Senate, but rather by the federal courts. With the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012, Obama gained the power to lock up Americans without hope of ever seeing a judge or jury. Though Obama pretended that he didn't need those powers, the urgency with which he fought to preserve them indicates otherwise. When an Obama-appointed judge sided against her boss and declared section 1021 of the NDAA act unconstitutional, the Obama administration filed an emergency injunction to maintain the law while they filed an appeal.

 

A court of appeals granted the Obama administration's injunction, and he still retains the power to lock you or me up forever if he suspects that we are in some way involved with Al-Qaeda or some other "associated force." The case is currently on appeal, and is expected to reach the supreme court. The lawyer challenging the government's assertion that section 1021 is constitutional, fears that the Obama administration is already indefinitely detaining American citizens somewhere, possibly Aghrams air force base.

 

I agree with the lawyer's assessment: all the evidence seems to indicate that the Obama administration believes it can detain Americans in secret and forever just like North Korea or China. The question then becomes: did Obama inherit said US citizen[s] from W Bush, or were they/he/she captured under his watch? At the very least, Obama is guilty of failing to faithfully execute the laws of the United States. He would clearly be guilty, legally speaking, if the courts rule section 1021 of the NDAA illegal.

 

If the supreme court rules that section 1021 of the NDAA act is constitutional, the United States officially becomes a police state. If, however, the courts find the act unconstitutional, Obama would then be in contempt of court. If/when Obama is found in contempt of court, the United States will be faced with a constitutional crisis and the prospect of a civil war. America currently finds itself in what could potentially be its darkest hour.

I Cried for the Terminator, but not Cantinflas

I can't possibly have been older than 5 years old when my aunt took me to enjoy Terminator 2 at the cinema in our town in the Dominican. Should a 5-year-old be allowed to enjoy such a violent movie? The truth is that I'm still not fully certain. The only reason I even remember being in the theater is because half-way through the movie I broke down in tears and it left a mark on me.

 

My aunt turned to me and asked me: "What's wrong?""

I wept, "I can't believe that man is letting himself get shot for money." I couldn't even tell the difference between reality and fiction.

 

Yep, I don't know that many Dominicans who pay close attention to movie ratings or anything of the sort. I remember turning on broadcast television back in the mid-90s and stumbling across softcore porn. At around that same time, the famed Mexican comedian Cantinflas died. As a result, his movies were being broadcast in marathon on the country's television networks.

 

 My good friend Tolo and I were enjoying a movie at his house when he said to me, "If he's dead, how can they still be playing his movies?"

I told Tolo: "Don't be stupid, Tolo, they [the actors] put on masks." Tolo's 75-year-old father simply observed our interaction quietly. I presumed that somehow Cantinflas was still alive. We watched anything on TV and imitated a lot of what we saw. I only had a black-and-white television with a few channels of reception back in the Dominican. It wasn't until I arrived in the Bronx at age 9 that I first had unfettered access to my own color TV with a pirated cable box.

 

Instead of imitating the Power Rangers dubbed in Spanish or a Mexican soap opera, I could now enjoy everything that unlimited cable had to offer. Somehow I enjoyed the attention my teachers gave me for being smart and it encouraged me to watch the History channel, the Learning Channel, and the Discovery channel. This was before the History channel descended into aliens and ice truckers. I'm not quite sure what has become of the Discovery channel, but I heard that the Learning Channel had also descended into post-Bush buffoonery. The channels were alright in the 90s.

 

My parents weren't really around for me for a lot of years and oftentimes television was the only thing outside of school raising me. From my perspective, excessive television watching has all come down to what I selected. All of my friends who watched Star Trek made it to college or another post-secondary school. On the other hand, my confidantes who watched BET and MTV are largely still in the Bronx.

 

Should we address the culture of violence that the National Rifle Association complains about? To a certain extent. From my experience, it's all about balance, making sure that kids are exposed to adult opinions and not just adult entertainment. The reality is that schools have not fully adapted to the reality of the 21st century.

 

If schools are supposed to be parental surrogates, shouldn't there be a class teaching kids proper television and Internet etiquette? After all, schools teach students safe sex, driver safety, tool safety, writing, public speaking, as well as physical and intellectual cooperation. Schools, however, don't teach kids to properly handle the media and technology that dominates our century.

 

 

Why I Fear Returning to the United States

I always think "it" may happen to me. When I saw Rodney Kind getting smashed to a bloody pulp, I thought it could happen to me. My fear, however, goes beyond such notorious incidents. In fact, the very thought of returning to the United States makes me almost succumb to paranoia.

 

It wasn't always like that. As a kid, I truly believed in the divine greatness of America. One of my favorite songs for several years was: "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue." Hell, for a long time I contemplated joining the army so I could spread freedom. People forget that after 9/11, many Americans revered W Bush. His approval rating was massively high, and it was not until the blunder that was Iraq that many Americans started losing faith in the greatness of our country. I felt deceived about the weapons of mass destruction that never materialized, outrage at torture in Abu Ghraib and in CIA black sites, and dismayed at the general incompetence of the government.

 

Unlike most of my liberal friends, however, my concerns for the future of the United States were not allayed by Barack Obama. My mistrust of America went deeper than just one man in the executive branch. I had lost faith in America's fourth estate.

 

I remember watching documentary after documentary in the 1990s and early 00s detailing the Saddam menace in Iraq. It's only in retrospect that I've learned that what the US media presented as a solid, clear-cut case was in fact anything but in the eyes of most of the world. And though the CEO of the executive branch has changed skin colors, the media remains as whitewashed as ever; the Murdochs of the world are still pulling the same strings.

 

It was with that lack of faith that I decided not to vote for Obama. That Obama was even being allowed airtime by corporate media outlets was enough to signal to me that he would continue many of his predecessor's policies. I knew there would be -- and there has rightfully been -- much needed change on the domestic front, but limited gay rights and a sub-par health insurance are not enough to blind me to Obama's foreign policy of drone executions, torture forgiveness, bailout of bankers, and general usurpation of the Constitution. None of Obama's CIA and Wall Street-subservient policies have surprised me. I knew when he was running for office that he had the "reformed" face the establishment needed. I knew before he got elected that the capacity of blacks for tyranny and subservience to corporate masters was just as well-developed as that of whites.

 

So, I lost faith in the fourth estate for supporting a corrupt executive and sanitizing his bloodthirst in the Middle East. Further, my faith in the police and the judicial system was eroded the more I read about private prisons. Correction Corp --- the very same corporation that just recently signed a deal with the same religious fundamentalists who brought us the W Bush caliphate -- circulated a memo requesting states keep their prisons at a certain capacity. State agreements with private interests in the freedom of men encourages draconian legislation that unfairly targets poor minorities. The United States has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners. America's prison population surpasses that of China by 1 million, and there are 5 million Americans also on probation and parole. America incarcerates more people than any other country on earth.

 

In the US, I'd be more afraid of a cop planting drugs in the trunk of my car, than I'd be of walking around the South Bronx at 3am. I have lived in the South Bronx, and can relate to this issue personally. It was a fellow Dominican cop from the Bronx who quit the force, outraged at the fact that he was expected to maintain quotas instead of "serve and protect." Simply put, I feel safer around American criminals than American cops.

 

Finally, and most controversially, I feel that the government has not been fully forthwith concerning the events of September the 11th, 2001. The government spent more money investigating Monica Lewinsky than it did the murder of 3,000 of our fellow citizens. On top of spending less money on the 9/11 commission, the commissioners have complained of getting stonewalled. The commissioners themselves wrote a book detailing how they were, "set up to fail." The fact that more than a decade after the attacks, I still don't know the truth hits me with more symbolism than memories of the Berlin wall. The culture of guns and conspiracy itself is enough to scare me. I truly fear that some new truth or widely-circulated rumor could set about a catastrophic chain of events.

 

As catastrophic as the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, which highlighted how the poor are neglected and outcast.  But of course, better disaster response means entrusting the executive branch with near-dictatorial powers. Congress gave Bush the power to declare martial law; this years after his follies in Iraq. Though he lost those power the following year, his executive orders and future legislation basically guarantees that a future president, if not this current one, will gain control of the Nation Guard, and the power to deploy the military in the streets; hopefully not as bloody as when Lincoln did. The imperial presidency has never been so more encoded into law.

 

When a federal judge declared Obama's power to kill Americans without trial legal, she said she found herself in a veritable catch-22. And indeed, the American catch-22 extends beyond government. It sinks into the psyche of every American that wakes up and still believes himself to live in a free and dignified Homeland.

Whore-haggling in Manila

I arrived in Manila almost instantaneously. I was drunk off my ass when my Quebecois buddy Pierre dragged me from some forsaken balcony in Itaewon, and put us on the train to Incheon airport. I blacked out as soon as we got on the plane to Manila, waking up in a different world. Consistent with my inability to plan, I had no idea what awaited me. Pierre joked that he was glad to finally be in South America, and the reality is that our knowledge of where we were was limited. 

I had read the Wikipedia page on the Philippines some years before flying into Manila, and had a Filipina friend in college. I wasn't fully ignorant -- I simply enjoy chaos and spontaneity -- but I knew nothing about the city. Pierre, however, had been told one word: Malate.

We hopped on a cab and told the driver to drop us off in Malate. Malate wasn't that different from the crippling third world poverty I had grown up seeing in The Dominican Republic. If anything, drinking a cold San Miguel in the first terrace we entered felt like I was back in the Caribbean. I could feel the tropical poverty being drowned out of my eyes by the cold beer and the excitement of adventure in a new city. 

However, I am not sure whether I was blind or a fool, but it quickly became obvious that Pierre and I were unusually popular with the ladies. Of course, we're both good looking guys who exude confidence, but that was overshadowed by the fact that we were North American. The very first two girls who approached us were tricking, they told us that straight up. 

We fled to the next bar and walked into a sea of women. There were maybe 60 girls and 6 guys standing around listening to the music. Pierre and I approached a couple of American dudes, clearly Marines, who simply told us they worked in the US embassy. "They'll ask your for cab fare once you have sex with them," the Marine in black told me. The dude was trying to show us the ropes, how to get the most bang for our buck, when an old white guy came in and stole the show. 

He was balding, nearly blind, and stumbling with a cane as 4 hot young brown girls trailed behind him. He sat down, one of the girls lifted his shirt and started rubbing his massive beer gut, as another started scratching his shiny bald head. The old guy gleamed contentedly behind his magnifying specs; he was nearly blind. 

Disgusted, Pierre and I walked out. Along the way to finding a hotel, we were approached by about 10 or 12 kids begging for money. It was late night and they were no more than six or seven years of age. Perhaps they were older; frail bodies sometimes betray the truth of age. They were mobbing us for money, and Pierre and I angrily shook them off: "get the fuck away!"  I screamed after I noticed my book bag was suddenly open. We knew we quickly needed a hotel to stash our bags, or we were gonna get jacked. 

We continued walking, stumbling past families sleeping on the sidewalk. Many of the kids sleeping with their mothers were wearing nothing more than a raggedy t-shirt. Pierre and I got the very clear impression that the cardboard box they were lying on was the only thing on earth they owned. We eventually walked over a family blocking the sidewalk, and were approached by a man trying to promote his "club."

His club was patronized by 10 times more women than men, and the promoter was very eager for us to drink with some of the girls. We tried to shake off the promoter, and walked out into a mob of more promoters, each trying to outbid the other in interest for us. We kept walking and they tailed behind while promising drinks and "many regular girls," but we entered the first brightly lit hotel lobby we found and ditched them. We needed to change, prepare for the night, and stash our belongings. 

We each booked a 60 euro a night room, and I took the elevator up to the 51st floor. I dropped off my bag, showered, and changed into something clean for the night. Before Pierre and I met in the lobby again, I decided to look down from my window. Down below, I saw the same families we'd walked around, and some of the same homeless kids. I knew that I was as powerless to help them from up above, as I would be a few hours later while drinking down below.