Thanksgiving Day; 2009

Portland, Oregon

“Soup Bone?”

“Dead”, said my table-mate.

I paused. Homeless people use pseudonyms a lot. When the one thing in the world which you have left is your identity, you guard it.  Jealously; and with everything you have left - which most of the time, is little enough.

‘Soup Bone’ was a fellow with a long black beard and a blanket; you’d see him wandering downtown Portland, Oregon, looking through garbage cans and muttering to himself. At one point he had, by most accounts, led a productive life. He’d been ‘downsized’ (that’s a sanitized term for ‘fired from his job as a construction worker’) some years earlier during the last recession, or so the story went.   As with real names, personal information is sketchy, hard to come by, and harder to verify.

“What happened?”

“Froze to death during the big storm last Christmas. Cops found him a few days before New Years.”

While a lot of people were celebrating Christmas, ‘Soup Bone’ was acting out the last chapter of his life – in the cosmic game, some people drew cards which said, “You get to stay with friends and family this year, eat turkey, open presents, and wonder what to do over New Years”, while ‘Soup Bone’ drew a card which said, “You get to freeze to death when the temps hover near zero in a back-alley in Portland, Oregon.” 

(Our winters here are far more severe than in years past – and last winter was the worst of several; the worst one we’d seen since 1968. It was during this freeze that several homeless people died in Portland, along with several people who had homes, but whose power had been turned off due to job losses and/or other severe income reductions.)

A word of background is probably in order.

Over Thanksgiving, as I’ve done nearly every year, I volunteer at an outdoor soup-kitchen. The regulars, members of several local charities, erect a big tent in one of downtown’s parks, then set up a kitchen inside it. There’s a dining area, and those of us who volunteer do our best to keep a smile on our faces and treat all-comers as if they’ve chosen to dine with us that day out of choice; as if they were in any of downtown’s restaurants.

The only things missing are fine china, a menu, individual tables – and a bill.

There are those of us who have been volunteering for years. Us yearly-volunteers have gotten to know some of the people who frequent the kitchen on holidays – as opposed to the full-time charity workers, who know these people up-close-and-personal, we only see them once a year.

Some are memorable. “Soup Bone” was one of these. He’d been coming for several years, and was usually one of the first in line. We’re not supposed to, but we’d usually find a way to save him an extra plate.

“Seconds” aren’t permitted, you see – we’re usually out of food long before we’re out of customers.

There were people I’d seen for years – and a lot of new faces.

A lot.

One woman and her husband; obviously new to the business of homelessness, huddled together.  She did nothing but cry and eat; cry and eat. He sat there, stoically; in between bites of turkey and dressing and cranberry-sauce.

We see the news-stories of people who’ve gone from homeless to successful, but those stories are few and far between - and are the product of a feelgood-media, intent upon preventing us from knowing the Real Story.  The reality of homelessness is that depression, loneliness and PTSD are all common among the homeless; usually, the circumstances which caused their fall from financial security are swift, merciless and  difficult; the result leaves them looking shell-shocked.

The lucky ones make it out. Most wind up, sooner or later, like Soup Bone.

(The nonsense which has passed for domestic economic policy over thirty years is largely responsible for this catastrophe.   With an 'official' aggregate unemployment rate of 17% - closer to 25% if every person in a tent-city is counted - and one in ten homes in foreclosure with one home in four ‘underwater’, we’re on track as a nation toward a proto-feudalism; with most homes owned by banks and rented to people for what they’ll fetch.

On occasion, I've seen homeless people who've chosen the lifestyle, but they're few and far between.   If you want to see the face of the New Homeless in America – you need only look as far as a mirror.   Homelessness is the fastest-increasing economic condition in the United States.)

Critical Depth III – The Uncontrollable Dive

Being An Unvarnished State of The Union....

"It is simple. This is America's middle class. We've hacked at it and chipped at it and pulled on it for 30 years now. And now there's no more to do. Either we fix this problem going forward or the game really is over." – Elizabeth Warren; Chairperson – TARP oversight committee

Tonight, Barack Obama is going to step up to a microphone, and try to tell the world, and especially those of us in America, why his presidency to this point has been a failure.

He has a lot of explaining to do.

A Short History Lesson

The history of the situation is well-known to those of you who’ve stayed awake in class – the collective economic issues Obama faced a year ago at this time were the result of thirty years of Neocon rule, beginning largely with the excesses of Reagan, who believed, as naively as some of the characters in his early movies, that if you trusted the good in people and gave them the keys to the cash-register, that not only would the money be there in the morning, it would have been put to the greatest possible good.

Human nature did the rest, and successive attempts to implement this piece of naivete had progressively-more-disastrous results, to the point where we stood on the edge of collapse at the end of 2008.

The solution proposed by both the waning Bush administration and the incoming Obama regime was the same:  Print money; give it to the perpetrators, and trust them, yet again.

Insanity, I’m told, is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.   If this is the case, thirty years of administrations have practiced a collective form of fiscal insanity; a rubber-room version of governmental finance which has placed us on the edge of the same situation faced by Germany in the 1920’s.

The bankers to whom this money was given – comprising the tax-revenues of our great grandchildren, among other things – have turned around and, instead of investing in American small business, parked it offshore, effectively betting against the country and its future.

Numbers; Numbers

The figures are not easy to find – but they’re out there, if you care to look.

The American auto-industry is gone; it’s been sold to people who speak Italian, German, and Japanese.   The real ‘trickle down economics’ had its effect – all of the suppliers of these companies are now also gone, and along with them thousands of jobs.   The auto industry is a macrocosm of the economy as a whole – in every industry, collapse is the norm, with very few bright spots (usually driven by government mandate).

Unemployment has reduced revenues to the point where deep cuts in everything (except the wars we’re fighting on borrowed money) are all but inevitable; Social Security; Medicare; and other social services are all on the block – in fact, one of Obama’s statements tonight will include a three year freeze on all non-military government spending.

Apparently, the public has spoken – many of these cuts are due to public-pressure, from people who believe that America is still a great nation, in spite of its bankruptcy.   Over half the nation wants the war in Afghanistan to continue; the expenditure of more blood and treasure will be the result.

Crime, in nearly every American city, has skyrocketed.   Every night here in Portland, there are several reports of stores robbed; people mugged at ATM’s; banks jacked-up for what’s in the till.   There’s one bright spot in retail – gun-shops are doing a land-office business, along with pawn shops where people are selling everything from heirlooms to TV’s, either to buy those firearms or to stay alive.

The real unemployment rate is somewhere near 25%.   While the government owns up to somewhere around 17%, they’ve left out a lot of people – including the ones who are now the new residents of tent-cities which have sprung up just off the interstates all over America.

Tea Parties; Opposition; And The Unadulterated Truth

You no longer see the tea-party people. Why?

Because they won.

There’s no need to stay on the set when the film’s in the can – and the tea-party types know that health-care reform is a distant memory; the New Deal (or what’s left of it) is finally in ashes; fiscal-regulation is gone; the bankers and brokers are celebrating, and (ironically) the increasingly conservative working-class in America are supporting this lunacy.

As Gary Hart said recently, “Those who claim to love their country the most, but who hate its government, have finally got the country they want.”

Last year, 207 publicly-traded companies filed for bankruptcy – the largest number in American history. Personal bankruptcies continue to rise, regardless of the 2005 credit-card-inspired legislation making it far harder to do so.

Jobs were lost in December at ten times the expected rate – and the trend shows absolutely no sign of stopping.

Foreclosures are at an ‘official’ 10%+ - bad enough, when you consider that every one of these homes houses one or more people who will, if they’re fortunate, be able to rent an apartment, and if not, will be living on the street or in one of the tent-cities mentioned earlier.

The rate doesn’t include homeowners who filed bankruptcy, and for whom the formal foreclosure process doesn’t apply. Further, the rate of foreclosure is expected to spike in early 2011, to an ‘official’ rate of around one in four – with the real rate being close to one in two. Add to this the fact that over 15 million mortgages are effectively ‘underwater’ – more is owed on the home than it is worth – and the stage is set for a disaster which will effectively create a nation of renters and homeless people in 2011.

That’s right. Absent a miracle – mainly either free-market or government-sponsored job-creation on a Herculean level – every other mortgaged home in America will be in foreclosure by this time next year, with far more turned into ‘jingle mail’ (where the homeowner simply mails the keys to the bank and walks away).

Epilogue For A Certain President

Obama can sugar-coat this tonight – but he’s beyond the point of anyone believing him.

He will be right in this – none of these problems were originally of his creation. He inherited thirty years of Neocon rule, and he really had two choices: Be a one-term president and fix the problems, permanently, altering the landscape of America’s business and financial structure through the reimplementation of regulations and stiff medicine – or do what he did, which was to steal from our grandchildren to bail out the companies which, with Neocon deregulatory favor, created the problems in the first place.

My personal bet is that Obama has already picked his side, and he’s not going to correct the problems he’s exacerbated in his first year – he’s going to carve yet another chunk out of America’s middle class – and come election-time, he’ll pay the price for it.

Nope – it’s a double-dip recession with a cherry on top, and it’s headed our way, folks.

Get ready.

From Satan's Phone-Pal to God's Warrior - The Strange and Surreal Biography of General Butt-Naked

War, Cannibalism, Pink Purses, and the End Time Train Evangelistic Ministries….

His real name is Joshua Blahyi.

He was born sometime around 1970, and had what passed for a normal childhood in Liberia during the presidency of William Tolbert.   Tolbert was one of the ‘Liberian Elite’; descendants of the original repatriates during the Monroe Administration.   At this point, the capital, Monrovia, had modern services (electricity; clean water; sewers) plus kept a lid on unrest.

Tired of the ‘few’ owning most of everything in Liberia (a lesson learned well from their American forbears), a Liberian master-sergeant, Samuel Doe, took power in a well-staged coup in 1980.

It was around this time that Joshua Blahyi got a phone-call.

Blahyi, a member of the Krahn tribe, had been named a tribal elder and a priest at the tender age of ten.   This gave his next statements some credence, at least among the folks in the rural Liberian village in the eastern part of the country he called home.

He claims that Satan called him on the phone and told him to raise an army.

This, he did – first, among his boyhood friends; then among the surrounding countryside.   What Blahyi probably didn’t know was that this was going on all over the country; small-time ‘leaders’ building power-bases which could be used to further their own economic gain through the application of military muscle.

One thing which wasn’t lacking in Liberia was firepower.   Soviet and Chinese-made AK47’s could be had for US $10/each; ammunition included (RPG's and artillery were a little more expensive).  The diamond trade was in full-swing, and the local warlords who held a piece of this lucrative but destructive business made good money, in a hurry.   Blahyi was no exception to this.

Now-President Doe, favoring authoritarianism, suppressed the media and arrested anyone he believed was a ‘socialist’ – which was anyone who opposed him.   His methods led to a brief counter-coup after the first post-Doe-coup elections in 1985 (held to legitimize his rule; every political observer worth a damn agreed that the Other Guy had won, but Doe stayed in office anyway, his position secured by the military).

In 1989, the civil war in Liberia began.   It was tailor-made for a man like Blahyi.

Blahyi and over twenty other small-time warlords jumped into the fray with their child-armies, supporting a rebel leader named Roosevelt Johnson against another man named Charles Taylor; it was then that Blahyi received one of many ‘visions from Satan’ in which he was told that to fully serve his new spiritual ‘master’, he had to fight naked.

Yep – naked.

No one in Africa leads a rebel faction without a pseudonym.  Among other things, it’s far too easy for the UN to find someone later, if they’ve used their real name to commit atrocities.   Also, pseudonyms are useful in striking terror into the hearts and minds of civilians, most of whom have never seen a radio, let alone a man wearing nothing but lace-up combat boots and an AK47.

There was a General Rambo (for obvious reasons).   A General Mosquito (because mosquitoes carry disease, and there’s no such thing as insect-control in Liberia) was also a warlord and truly frightening character.  The man who opposed him (fighting on the government side) was General Mosquito-Spray.

Also of note were General Peanut-Butter; General Fuck-Me-Quick; General Housebreaker, and General No-Ma-No-Pa (after a campaign slogan by Doe’s opponent, Charles Taylor).

As odd as all this might sound, it makes perfect sense in the sociopolitical climate of West Africa – and General Butt Naked fit right in.

"So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we’d looted from civilians. We’d slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people – so many I lost count.” – General Butt Naked

The first civil war ground on until 1990, when several African national organizations and the U.N. intervened to put an end to things.   A subordinate of Charles Taylor, Prince Johnson, captured Doe outside Monrovia, and in a well-distributed video, drank beer behind the man’s desk while his troops carved him up, and ate him.   Rumors persist that Johnson also partook of Doe; literally.

Meanwhile, Taylor’s rule was marked by more authoritarianism and mass-murder.  This led to the second civil war in 1999.

The fighting, always severe, moved into Monrovia-proper in 2003, where it continued for the better part of a year.  During this time, most of the city’s infrastructure was destroyed.  Eventually, Taylor was deposed, seeking asylum in Nigeria.   The U.N. moved in as a peacekeeping force, and the era of the warlords was over.

Our friend General Butt Naked, along with his protégés and opposite-numbers, had to find another way to make a living.

It was about this time that he received another phone-call – this time, it was from Jesus, who told him to change his ways.  Blahyi traveled to Nigeria, where he attended a ‘seminary’ and received a ‘diploma’ – returning to Liberia, Blahyi founded the End Time Train Evangelistic Ministries.

In testimony to the Liberian congress in 2008, Blahyi stated that he and his men had killed no less than 20,000 people, but that ‘Satanic influences’ had driven them to this, and that they could not be held responsible.

At this point, there are no plans to do more than let the former General Butt Naked shuck-and-jive his particular brand of Christianity – and while most believe that Blahyi is doing this to avoid war-crimes indictments, the locals seem to have largely forgotten the crimes of a teenager during the Liberian civil wars.

Especially one who fought butt-naked.

(Financed by the Sundance Institute, a documentary entitled “The Redemption of General Butt Naked” is scheduled for release in 2011)

Civil War, Rape, and Cannibalism - Film at Eleven....

Most Americans know the sanitized history of Liberia.

Behind the freed-slaves-gone-home / back-to-Africa twaddle that you'll find in eighth-grade textbooks here in America is another story.

Liberia is one of the most 'failed' of failed-states on the planet.  It's the fourth-poorest nation on earth (taking company with Somalia, the Congo, and the Central African Republic).

It has the highest population growth in the world, and the lowest life-expectancy (around 40 years)

80% of the nation is illiterate.

85% of the nation's workforce is unemployed.

Liberia has been in a near constant state of civil war since 1989.

80% of Liberians have practiced cannibalism.





One of my favorite alternate news-sites, VBS, has produced an eight-part on-the-ground documentary series on Liberia.   The language is salty; the film horrifying.   Heart of Darkness meets Hunter Thompson-esque journalism in what I'm going to call the best piece of work on Africa in over twenty years.

Go here to see the rest, at VBS.Com.

Here's an Idea - Put Your Money In A Local Bank....

Are you tired of supporting a huge bank which was 'too big to fail'?

Sick of hearing that the banks which we bailed out with our tax money 'rewarded' us by investing that money overseas (literally betting against America), and using a good chunk of those bailout-funds to pay bonuses to their top-execs?

So am I.

In fact, the idea was that these banks would use that money to square up their bad loans and start loaning money again to American small businesses. Instead, they've paid lobbyists to fight re-regulation, paid those damnable bonuses, and invested the rest offshore - literally betting that while America's economy was struggling to come back, it'd eventually circle the drain.

There's not much we can do about the idiocy which lead to this pass - and any comment about printing money and giving it to a private corporation without some strings attached is too late to matter - but there's something we can do; each of us, which will, indeed, matter.

We can vote with our feet.

It turns out that the people at MoveYourMoney can help you find a good, solid, local bank where you can move your checking, savings, and other investments (here's an interview with one of MYM's founders).

Y'see, local banks invest in local business. Local banks make for better neighborhoods. Local banks are what make America into the industrial powerhouse we once were - and it's time to bring them back.

There are plenty of them -- and if you've not considered a bank past the number of ATM's they have in the area, perhaps it's time to consider this: Can I do some good by the simple act of putting my money where my heart is?

Think about it. I did - and that's why I'm with a local bank, today.

Haiti - Several Ways to Help, Now....

Unless you've been under a rock, or are siding with the likes of Pat Robertson, you're aware that there was a devastating earthquake in Haiti this week.

Also, I know that several of you are wondering what you can do.

There are plenty of good charities out there which are coming to the aid of the Haitians.  What some of you might not know is that we atheists and secular humanists have been doing this sort of thing for decades now; not because we're better than religious types, but because we're literally about helping make life better for humanity.

While Robertson and his ilk are trashing the Haitians for 'selling their souls to the devil', you can check out the following humanist charities - we'll be busy helping rebuild Haiti (indeed; at least one of our charities have been in Haiti for thirty years) while the Fundies are busy raving about "God's judgment."

Here are some places which will gladly take a donation earmarked for Haiti.  In every case, over 90% of your donation goes directly to help (overhead is kept to a minimum):

S.H.A.R.E.:  The Secular Humanist Aid and Relief Effort is the granddaddy of humanist charities (link opens directly to the S.H.A.R.E. Haitian relief effort site).

Kiva:    Kiva is a dynamic group of atheists, humanists, and related people who create micro-loans to people in underdeveloped countries for the purpose of starting businesses.

Humanist Charities:   This organization has been involved in Haiti for thirty years or more, providing medical care to expectant mothers and running clinics in rural areas.

With God On Our Side....

“The 523^rd Attack Squadron is called the “Crusaders”.   Their symbol carries a giant crucifix…a giant Crusader’s helmet…and three stars representing the Trinity.  Is there anything more we could do to make it easier for already pissed-off and angry Islamic men and women in Egypt, Jordon, Lebanon and Syria to join and bolster the cause against us?   The dark side we are fighting is insanely well-financed…our job is to lay down a withering field of fire; kick ass; take names, and leave sucking chest-wounds on this unconstitutional Heart of Darkness.”

--  Mike Weinstein; Founder; Military Religious Freedom Foundation

As I continue to work on my series on religion in the military, I thought I'd post an interview with Michael Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

He makes his points better than I could - while this will take you a few minutes to watch, the material he presents is necessary, timely, and more than a bit scary.