Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

The Act Of Killing - Official Trailer

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/19/ ... th-philly/

Diary from North Philly

by LINH DINH

The corner of Broad and Erie is the Times Square of North Philly, but instead of flashy signs pushing Kodak, Samsung, Canon or Virgin Airlines, you have stark billboards urging you to “ELIMINATE YOUR DEBT” and “REBUILD YOUR CREDIT.” On utility poles, styrofoam signs promise, “JOBS! $400-$600 PER WEEK. CALL TODAY, START TOMORROW.” Is it legit? Ring to get sucked in, or you can stock your fridge, finally, by ditching your junk wheels for “$400,” according to one flyer, or “$250-$400,” per another. The biggest billboard touts “RAND SPEAR 1-800-90-LEGAL. He Eats Insurance Companies for BREAKFAST!” Are you aching all over, your skeleton permanently askew from that bus accident you weren’t even involved in? Are you emotionally spavined from having to dodge that abruptly swinging door? Now you know who to call!

With such signage, you know this is one broke neighborhood. The only high-rise is a long kaput National Bank of North Philadelphia. Its art deco grandeur gone to seeds, it’s now a 14-story eyesore, with all its windows broken or spray painted. On its sides are huge graffiti, FOREVER BONER. In fact, it’s known colloquially as the Forever Boner building. Here, there is no Planet Hollywood, Forever 21 or Disney Store, only a 99¢ DEAL outfit, with items for 59 and 79¢ also, though their sign also claims, “EVERYTHING 99¢ OR MORE.” With that logic, they can also flog a Lamborghini, though of course, in this hood, such whips only appear in rhymes. Hunched over on a beat up folding chair, a gypsy cabbie asks passersby, “Taxi? Taxi?” The Coke sign is broken. Crossing the street, a lanky man wears a “MY PRESIDENT IS BLACK” T-shirt, and here comes a middle-aged woman with consonants crowding her print blouse, SSSDDDMMMLLLRRRGGGFFF… She’s going into Black and Nobel, an urban literature purveyor with titles like Curse by Darkness, Ghetto Girl Games, If My Pussy Could Talk, Ride or Die Chick, Preacherman Blues (by Jihad) and Ghetto Ballerina by Philly’s own Tenia Jamilla. It’s about this valedictorian chick turned stripper, then whore. She has two main snuggly buddies, one loaded yet shady, one square. On the side, she also muff dives. Will our grasping heroine choose to be wined and dined until her facade fades, sags and crumbles, just like the Forever Boner edifice, or will she lock herself inside some dumbass room night after night to study for a degree at Howard University? While deciding, she continues to muff dives. Soon, though, one of her live dildoes will be wetted, for real, straight up. Buy book to find out more. “WE SHIP TO PRISON,” states Black and Nobel sign.

Curious about Jamilla, I NSAed her twitter page to find this tagline, “Too Sexy and Too freaking smart…” I then clicked on a video to marvel at her bumptious assets seriously quaking to Wacka Flocka’s “We Don’t Fuck Wit Dat.” Jamilla sang along, “I don’t fuck with fake jewelry. I don’t fuck with fake clothes…” Atlanta verses are itee, I guess, but if you prefer more homegrown stuff, North Philly has plenty, as in Dark Lo’s “I fuck your girl once or twice, I don’t keep her / Naggin’ stalkin’ ass bitch, I don’t need her / Pussy has a funny smell, I don’t eat her.” Or the currently jump suited AR-AB, “My aim nice when I’m tossin’ lead / Eyes closed I’d shoot a fly off your head.” And, “I’m hard as hell and I got hard for sale / Trash day I’m throwing bodies in the garbage pail.” Just before he got draped in prison garb, AR-AB briefly swept a playground and visited elementary school classrooms to prove that he was “more of an asset outside than inside.” Some people even signed a petition. It’s not clear who, since by AR-AB’s own admission, he “ain’t got no friends ‘cause they all been shot.”

It’s hard to get kids to care about poetry, you know, so you’ve got to bring in a rhymer like AR-AB, someone they can relate to, being just down the block, and I don’t mean just cell. As a daddy of four, he also knows how to communicate with children. “Techs blast, chest splash, that’s a mess right there!”

All of these images of butchery is making me damn hungry, dog, so let’s eat. Well, we can have cheap chicken at Church’s or Crown, or really, really cheap chicken at Checker’s, and if you want to go upscale, a platter of short ribs at Dwight’s, with two sides and corn bread, will set you back 17 bucks, but that’s way out of my range, so you’ll have to eat there alone, OK? We can also duck into the Clock Bar and get “COLOSSAL BUTTERFLY SHRIMPS. NOTHING LARGER,” but its concussive rap will knock out our few remaining brain cells. Drooling ketchup, we’ll collapse into an irreversible coma. Instead, let’s just drink ourselves full at the Broad Street Tavern.

It’s a mellow trough for old heads, with more R&B than rap, and even has Steely Dan in the jukebox. I know, I know, it’s weird, but get over it. The music is rarely so loud, you can’t talk. Often, there’s no canned music at all, which is best. On the wall, a Miller Lite poster, “We Celebrate Black History Everyday! IT’S Miller TIME,” so to down pissy beer is to celebrate Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King? I discovered X my last year in high school, read all I could and wrote an essay, then composed another on him during my first year in college. Meet Chili Willie from North Philly. He comes here around 1:30PM each day. Sixty-nine-years-old, Chili served four years in Korea, one in Vietnam, where he fought in Khe Sanh, then Hue, during the Tet Offensive, “I had buddies die in my arms.” Tour over, he missed his flight out of Saigon, “Cause I was getting some pussy.” In Korea, Chili fell in love with a Korean whore, “She was my woman. I gave her money for everything. Took care of her. We nearly got married.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I told my sister about this, and she said, ‘You should marry your own kind’.”

“And you listened to her? You were your own man, man! You should have done what you wanted to do.”

It’s not exactly wise to wed a whore, though the Vietnamese have a saying, “Better to turn a whore into your wife, than your wife into a whore.” Chilli continued, “But I listened to my family. After I was sent to Vietnam, my girlfriend thought I had died. Someone told her I had died. But I saw her after that. She was pregnant, you know, with my child.”

“You sure it was your kid?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see this kid?”

“No. She got married to another GI, and moved to Hawaii.”

“So your kid’s in Hawaii, with a stepfather?”

“I think so.”

In Vietnam, Chili made extra cash by funneling American cigarettes and liquor to the black market. He even sold gas and diesel pilfered from the American base, “I was a businessman, a hustler. I’ve always known how to make money.”

“But you could have gotten into some serious shit!”

“But I didn’t.”

Chili served 22 years, one month and 5 days altogether. With his pension set, he could relax a bit back in North Philly, where he lived with his ma. Until five years ago, he drained half a gallon of vodka a day, “and I could get two-dollar pussies up and down Erie Avenue.”

“Two dollar pussies?! How much does it cost today?”

“I don’t know, cause I ain’t buying no more.”

I asked Chili if it was weird to land in Vietnam, “I mean, Vietnam is nothing like North Philly. Did you freak out when you first saw it. I was born and raised in Vietnam, and it still weirded me out when I returned there as an adult.”

“No, it didn’t freak me out, because I had a job to do.”

Chili did what he had to do, without flinching, at least not in this retelling. Now, America has a fully professional Army of sentient drones willing to be sent anywhere. In Africa, we have troops in 35 countries, and it’s a safe bet most of these guys and gals have never heard of Djibouti, Mauritania, Burkina Faso or Seychelles, etc., until they got their marching orders. In Cheyenne, I chatted with a woman who thought her daughter was stationed in North Korea. In Philly, I saw a war veteran panhandling with a sign stating he was in “Sigon.” Another had served in the “Gulph War.” We sure don’t need to know where we are to start shooting. Behind the anti-terror smoke screen, we have created a nation of paranoiacs and psychos. As we kill and rape, many of us rap about raping and killing.

Leading me towards the back, Chili showed me a framed funeral program for one of his buddies, Ronald Joe French, with the deceased photographed in his Army dress uniform. Sunrise, 1942. Sunset, 2008. There is a long, uncredited poem, “Last Request,” with these lines: “Please don’t say that I gave up, / just say that I gave in. / Don’t say that I lost the battle, / for it was God’s war to lose or win. / Please don’t say how good I was, / but say I did my best. / Just say I tried to do what’s right, / to give the most I could, not less […] ” While it’s certainly no great literature, you can’t argue against its sweet, reverent and humble sentiments, for they reflect positively on the dead man’s family, and on all those who mourned him that day. What we hear and read reflect who we are. We are what we choose to hear and read.

All over North Philly, you’ll see these “Sugar to Shit” stickers that steer you to the Reading Sucks website. Its masthead: “Reading SUCKS! until… A unique book—a vital tool for literacy—currently in production.” Say what?! No novice to reading, I can barely make out what I’ve just read, but subsequent sentences do clue me in: “Teenagers who HATE to read will love this book—and then actually want to read more books.” And, “Reading SUCKS! will have short concise stories written by Hip-Hop artists, athletes, prison inmates, soldiers, and HS students.” So this is an initiative to get teens to read, which is good, obviously, though it’s interesting that actual writers are considered unenticing, a turn off to reading. Tales told by rappers, jocks and criminals are preferred to stories by trained fiction writers, but part of the problem must be pinned on these same writers, for too many of them have spent their entire adult lives cloistered in universities. Since they barely associate with anyone unlike themselves, they hardly make sense outside the academy, and here I’m talking as much about emotional as literal sense. They can’t grasp what’s urgent to ordinary folks.

To those who still think of American universities as hotbeds of radicalism, please note that former boss of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, is now President of the University of California system; Condolezza Rice was recently a Provost of Stanford; Patriot Act co-author John Yoo teaches law at Berkeley; and even a well known “liberal” school like Bard is run by an Israel apologist, Leon Bostein. At many colleges, professors may be disproportionately Democrats, but that just shows the limits of American dissent. Protesting, they voted for Clinton then Obama, two war criminals, and to prove how really progressive they are, they’ll vote for the next Democratic mass murderer. Yes, the university will allow you to cross dress and rage against all the wrongs done to your subgroup, for this serves their divide-and-rule scheme, but don’t think too hard about what’s destroying us all.

So the ones who more or less know spelling, grammar and syntax are out of touch, while the foot soldiers on the ground are stuck on “You know what I’m sayin’,” “Just sayin’” and “Aye.” Of course, the entire culture has been dumbed down to a frightening degree. According to the Journal of American Medical Association, 46% of American adults cannot comprehend the label on their prescription medicine, and The National Center for Education Statistics reports that half of our adults cannot read an 8th grade level book. Since most Americans no longer read much of anything beyond emails, texts and twitters, we should rejoice, I suppose, at each instance of book reading, though in a place like North Philly, they’re not soaking up Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Etheridge Knight or Sonia Sanchez, the last two Philly products, but Demettrea, Ca$h, Jazmyne or homeboy Brian Harrison, author of the novel Sugar to Shit (not to be confused with the website, though everything has gone from high fructose corn syrup to high fructose corn syrup). Here’s how Harrison defines himself, “Having an inner-city background and a suburban education, he combines these two forces and erupts in shear, flawless, diamond-like quality classics. While in the lowest moments of his life, surrounded by disaster and heartache, Brian Harrison narrowly finds his escape and turns his experience into an explicit, mind-blowing novel tht has never been told like this before.”

Jamilla thinks she’s “Too Sexy and Too freaking smart,” and Harrison considers his novel a “flawless, diamond-like quality classic.” After leaving Broad Street Tavern, I saw a man in his early 30’s wearing this T-shirt, “I NEVER CEASE TO AMAZE MYSELF,” and he wasn’t being goofy, “It’s true, I amaze myself every day.” Seeing that I was interested in his shirt, he even told me where I could get one, for only $3. How fitting that in a crumbling society that still stridently trumpets itself as number one, you’ll run into so many insanely narcissistic citizens with no sense of their shortcomings, though of course life will sucker punch you, good, even maim you thoroughly, until you learn what’s what, and in a moment of silence, alone, you can also reflect on all the humbling, even terrifying, clues to your smallness. Too many of us, though, would rather shoo away lurking insights with endless noise, alcohol or drugs. Numb, we rely on the pounding beat as our pacemaker.

Sorry, dude, to sound like some preacherman dropping Ecclesiastes. I best shut my grill. If you want religion, though, there’s the Universal Church just a block from here. Sometimes they have, ah, Holy Oil from Israel and shit, and if you’ve been hexed by witchcraft, the evil eye, envy or just plain bad luck, they can also fix you up and shit.

The first time I came to North Philly, I visited Etheridge Knight. I bought a yellow tin of jasmine tea. He fed me pork chops. This was in 1984, when I was dumber than dirt, naturally, though I had somehow managed to be featured with Knight in a poetry reading. This was at the Bacchanal, now long dead. Underaged, I had shown up on Mondays for their open readings. Speaking English not even a decade, I was presumptuous enough to think of myself an American poet, but then many young people see stardom in their future. They won’t just be good, but the best. An Oakland middle school teacher chuckled, “All of my kids think they’ll be stars,” and she taught 151 of them.

“A star at what?”

“They don’t know, but they’ll be stars!”

As Mike Tyson observed, “They all suck, but they all think they’re superstars!” (That’s not an exact quotation, by the way, since I’ve long lost that Ring Magazine.) So all these young’uns start out with visions of themselves as a future champ, CEO, kingpin or kick ass artist, but these hallucinations are quickly revised downward, until they find themselves pondering their spare change for the longest time, fidgeting, frowning and taking deep breaths, before deciding, finally, to buy that day-old donut. In 1984, I still thought that the right combination of words could wake up and transport everyone, bank tellers, bus drivers, butchers, and I was loco enough to think I had been chosen for the job. In any case, I had written so few poems by then, I could memorize them all. With my eyes closed, I’d recite without paper, clutching a beer bottle. The applause pumped up my confidence, and after a few weeks of this schtick, the organizer had me read with Knight. That night, as I was drinking a Rolling Rock at the bar, Etheridge ambled over.

“You ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you a poet?”

Annoyed, I stared at the man, “I’m reading with you and I’m not a poet?”

“Just answer me. Are you a poet?”

“Of course I’m a poet!”

“OK, so let’s go read then!”

That was the old fox’s way to get me riled up, and it worked. Later, Etheridge would jokingly call me “professor,” for my jejune seriousness, I suppose. I have never earned a college degree, and neither did Etheridge until 1990, the year before he died. Knowing Etheridge was very sick, I phoned him in Indiana.

“Goodbye, Etheridge.”

“Goodbye, professor.”

And goodbye, North Philly, at least for now, and let’s end with Etheridge’s words:

My life, the quality of which
From the moment
My father grunted and comed
Until now
As the sounds of my words
Bruise your ears
IS
And can be felt
In the one word: DESPERATION
But you have to feel for it.


Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

[American Dream]

i ate the state for trayvon martin by nico peck →

i want to dissolve it i want to dissolve the state on my tongue in a state of bliss-emptiness i want the state to melt onto my tongue i want to melt the state in the soft warmth of my mouth i want the state to touch all five taste realms i want the state to dissolve on my tongue touching all five taste realms and continue melting to a molecular level i want the state to mix with the saliva in my mouth, so that the amino acids can begin to break down the state’s proteins and starch molecules i want the state to be masticated

[American Dream]

http://theslowburningfuse.wordpress.com ... the-state/

[American Dream]

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/07/havana-ni ... r-on-cuba/

Havana Nights: Mobsters and the American War on Cuba

7.19.13
by Jack Colhoun

How an unholy alliance between American intelligence, Cuban exiles, and organized crime tried to bring about counter-revolution in Cuba.



August 1960, Miami: a telltale bargain was struck between exiled Cuban politician Manuel Antonio Varona and organized crime leader Meyer Lansky. Lansky, the impresario of the Mafia gambling colony in Cuba since the 1930s, had owned Havana’s Hotel Riviera and the Montmartre nightclub and their fabulous casinos.

In Cuba, Lansky was known as the “Little Man” for his five-foot-four- inch stature, but his cold, hard eyes and intense demeanor were physical expressions of a man used to wielding power and getting his way. His dream of turning Havana into a tropical paradise for North American tourists had come true. Havana had a reputation for the best gambling and wildest nightlife in the Western Hemisphere in the 1950s. And since Lansky shared the Mafia’s profits with General Fulgencio Batista and senior Cuban army and police officers, that gambling paradise became the cornerstone of a full-fledged Cuban gangster state.

But when Fidel Castro’s bearded revolutionaries drove Batista from power on New Year’s Day 1959, Castro condemned the Mafia’s gambling colony for corrupting Cuban values, and shut it down. The Cuban Revolution brought down the curtain on the era of gangsterismo in Cuba.

In the meeting in Miami, Lansky offered Varona several million dollars to form a Cuban government-in-exile to replace Castro’s revolutionary regime. Lansky also promised to arrange a public relations campaign in the United States to polish Varona’s political image. In return, Varona, a stout man with heavy dark-framed eyeglasses, endorsed the Mafia’s single-minded objective: to reopen its casinos, hotels, and nightclubs in a post-Castro Cuba.

Several months before the Miami meeting, Varona, a leading member of the reformist Partido Revolucionario Cubano-Auténtico, had publicly broken with Castro. Ever since, he had been shuttling between cities in the Americas to confer with other anti-Castro Cubans in a bid for leadership of the Cuban counterrevolution.

Varona had been both prime minister and Senate president under Auténtico President Carlos Prío Socarrás. For their part, Prío and his brother Paco were closely connected to Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano. In March 1952, Batista seized power in a coup d’etat (strike against the state), and Prío fled, leaving Varona to assume leadership of the Auténtico Party. But the Auténticos’ reputation as a reform party had been badly tarnished by the ties of its leaders to the Mafia gamblers. Varona himself had been connected with smuggling and kidnapping, and he kept pistoleros (political gunmen) on his payroll. A CIA memorandum reported, “[H]e maintained action groups at his service to force political decisions both in his [Camaguey] province and in Las Villas province where he was once provincial leader of the Auténtico Party.” Varona had good reason to accept Lansky’s offer. And so, in a remarkable act of political surrealism, the American Mafia, notorious for gangland murders and corruption of politicians, cleaned up the image of its Cuban partners in crime.

They hired the public relations firm of Edward K. Moss in Washington, D.C. Moss was a good choice for the job. Documents in his CIA file reveal that he had “longstanding connections” to organized crime in the United States. One report stated, “Moss’s operation seems to be government contracts for the underworld and probably surfaces Mafia money in legitimate activities.” Other CIA records reported that Moss worked for the Defense Production Administration of the Department of Commerce in the early 1950s.

Julia Cellini, who ran Moss’s secretarial services, came from a family of Mafia gamblers. Her brothers Edward and Goffredo were managers of the gaming rooms of the Casino Internacional and the Tropicana nightclub in the 1950s. Another brother, Dino, a close associate of Lansky, Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Charles “The Blade” Tourine, was a manager of the casino at the Sans Souci nightclub. His connection to Moss could be traced back to 1957. The Cellini brothers passed Mafia money—estimated at between $2 and $4 million—for Varona through the Edward K. Moss Agency, and Moss also solicited contributions from U.S. businesses for Varona. Moss was connected to other anti-Castro Cuban exiles in addition to Varona. He had met with Manuel Artime, leader of the Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionario (MRR: Movement of Revolutionary Recovery), and discussed raising funds for him.

Moss also had ties to the CIA. When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported that “[E]fforts are being made by United States racketeers to finance anti-Castro activities in the hope of securing gambling, prostitution and dope monopolies in the event Castro is overthrown,” in a December 31, 1960, memorandum to Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen W. Dulles, the CIA already knew that Varona had met with the Mafia gamblers. That was because Moss had told the CIA’s Domestic Contact Division about his work for Varona. An August 25, 1960, CIA cable from JMASH in Mexico reported that Varona had “solicited funds [from] Las Vegas gamblers on a recent visit to the United States.”

According to a CIA memorandum, “Moss commented that he had been in touch with President-elect Kennedy’s staff so that they will be informed of his activities. His purpose in doing this is that he does not know as yet what the policy of the new administration will be for publicizing foreign activities on U.S. soil.” CIA Inspector General J. S. Earman acknowledged that the Agency had an “interest” in Moss, but said the CIA did not use him in Cuba operations.

But matters got even more complicated. While Varona was negotiating the terms of his partnership with the Mafia gamblers, he was also working out an arrangement with the CIA. Varona’s CIA security file indicates that he was “of covert interest” to the Agency in 1957. An October 1957 CIA memorandum stated, “Subject [Varona] is reported to be very close to one Carlos Prío Socarrás, ex-president of Cuba.” Varona frequently visited Prío at his residence in Miami at the Vendome Hotel.

Varona was given operational approval for “amended” use as an informant by the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division on August 28, 1959. CIA headquarters recommended that “suitable controls” be used to keep Varona from “becoming an embarrassment to this Agency.” According to information in Varona’s CIA files, the Agency invited Varona “to the United States to set up an anti-Castro movement” in March 1960.

In June 1960, the CIA made Varona the general coordinator of the Frente Revolucionario Democrático (FRD) (Revolutionary Democratic Front), the CIA-sponsored Cuban government-in-exile. The CIA financially underwrote the FRD and the leaders of its member groups. Varona received a $900-a-month subsidy from the CIA beginning June 1, 1960.

Varona would also take part in a covert operation with the CIA and the Mafia gamblers to assassinate Fidel Castro. Thus, the circle of gangsterismo was squared. And an unnerving collaboration was revealed. Why would the CIA turn to gangsters? As CIA Director of Security Sheffield Edwards explained to the FBI: “Since the underworld controlled gambling activities under the Batista government it was assumed that this element would still continue to have sources and contacts in Cuba which could be utilized in connection with CIA’s clandestine efforts against the Castro government.”

In Washington, officials out of the intelligence loop on Cuba were unnerved when they learned how deeply the Mafia and their Cuban partners in gangsterismo were involved in the covert U.S. war in Cuba. Told by a “Washington businessman” about the Mafia’s subsidy of Varona, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Graves B. Erskine became alarmed. The retired Marine Corps general warned the administration that Varona’s ties to the gangsters could have disastrous consequences both for the FRD and the United States.

In a January 1961 memorandum, Erskine wrote, “The Washington businessman was quite concerned about the impact and potential propaganda value of this alleged connection of Tony Verona [sic] and the alleged racketeers in the event their organization is penetrated by Castro’s intelligence organization. He enjoys many contacts throughout Latin America and fears any propaganda stories by the Castro regime regarding such a relationship between Verona, American businessmen and Edward K. Moss’s activities would have a serious impact upon United States prestige throughout Latin America.”

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover alerted Attorney General Robert Kennedy to Erskine’s report in a January 23, 1961 memorandum. Hoover wrote, “We have received information to the effect that gambling elements in the United States have offered to distribute as high as two million to finance the anti-Castro operations of Varona and the organization he represents [Rescate], apparently in the hope of getting in on the ground floor should Castro be overthrown.”

The FBI was anxious about the political implications in the United States of Varona’s alliance with the Mafia. What if the Cuban Revolution was undermined, and the Mafia returned to the island to reclaim its gambling colony? Would U.S. public opinion turn against the White House and intelligence community?

A January 1961 FBI memorandum asserted that a “critical public reaction could be expected to follow the reactivation of large-scale gambling operations in Cuba by top hoodlums should Castro be overthrown.” Even the veteran spy William Harvey called the CIA’s covert collaboration with the gangsters a “hand grenade” waiting to explode. Harvey, who ran the CIA- Mafia assassination operation in 1962–1963, warned CIA Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) Richard Helms that there was a “very real possibility” that the Mafia would use its inside knowledge of the plotting to blackmail the CIA.

The baleful bargain struck by Lansky and Varona in Miami was a telling moment. Gangsterismo had migrated into exile in the United States along with tens of thousands of anti-Castro Cubans by August 1960. And it was to play a major role in the secret machinations of the CIA and Cuban exiles to overturn the Cuban revolution for years to come.

Excerpted from Gangsterismo, out now from OR Books.



- See more at: http://jacobinmag.com/2013/07/havana-ni ... r-on-cuba/

[American Dream]

http://www.bruceperlowin.com/kingofpot.html

BRUCE PERLOWIN

The King of Pot

Bruce J. Perlowin could give the CIA lessons in how to run an operation - or a country. By J.L. Pimsleur* – “The Berkeley Monthly” – November 1985

The biggest and most sophisticated marijuana smuggling organization in California history had its roots here in Berkeley, Richmond and Orinda. Details of the incredible operation of Bruce J. Perlowin came to light in September after the King of Pot was brought to the Bay Area from Texas as part of the federal government’s ongoing investigation into his 200-man international organization.

Perlowin, a ponytailed, bespectacled, studious and mild-mannered man who looks more like Mr. Peepers than one of the world’s biggest drug dealers, is currently fighting government efforts to have him testify before a federal grand jury in San Francisco. He is being held temporarily in a San Francisco sheriff’s department cell at the Hall of Justice. Assuming a semi-lotus position during a series of jailhouse interviews, he said he turned down offers by federal prosecutors to let him “walk,” and took a 15-year prison term rather than snitch on his former employees.

“There’s nothing I can do about being called before the grand jury,” says Perlowin. “However, I have absolutely no intention of testifying against all the people who worked for me in my organization. If I planned to betray all my friends I would have done it two and-a-half years ago and never spent a day in jail.”**

The staggering scope of his operation began to surface after a federal indictment was brought in September against one of his former associates, Larry C. Donnie, a San Francisco attorney. Prosecutors accused the 44-year-old lawyer of acting as a “money manipulator” for Perlowin’s mammoth drug operation, which smuggled over 250,000 tons of marijuana into the United States between 1979 and 1983-using an entire West Coast fishing fleet to ferry the stuff.

Federal prosecutors allege that Donnie acted as Perlowin’s “front man” because, as a fugitive from a federal arrest warrant in Florida, the boss could not make investments in his own name. Donnie was charged with illegally purchasing and concealing thousands of dollars in assets for Perlowin, including a Cessna airplane and a house in Ukiah.

The house is not exactly your basic rural fixer-upper. A $3 million armored fortress on a 246-acre plot, the house included a $100,000 gymnasium; a complete automobile repair shop; voice-activated, electronically controlled drapes; a steel-lined, bulletproof, computer-controlled central command post; 16 surveillance cameras with night-vision capability; a 14-line telephone and telex system; and a spiral staircase leading to the master bedroom which could be electrified to repel intruders.

To make the place feel homey, however, it also had solid-gold bathroom fixtures and $70,000 worth of carpeting, custom-made by the same firm that does the carpeting for the White House.

A special federal drug task force has been investigating Perlowin’s far-flung operation for nearly five years. According to U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello, 30 of Perlowin’s associates have already been convicted on various drug charges in four states – California, Florida, Georgia and Michigan – including some characters that are almost as intriguing as Perlowin.

Perlowin’s former partners in the Midwest, for example, were the Shure brothers. Well known in academic circles, Fred Shure is a brilliant, Harvard-educated former University of Michigan professor of nuclear engineering. His brother, Ned Shure, was the proprietor of one of the university community’s most profitable textbook stores. Together, the Perlowin-Shure connection is believed to have trucked some 100,000 tons of high-grade marijuana between the West Coast and Ann Arbor.

In a series of interviews in his holding cell at the Hall of Justice, Perlowin declined to discuss the charges against his associates, but admitted that the government’s charges against him were “accurate.”

A small, slightly-built, 34-year-old Floridian, Perlowin said he had been dealing drugs since the age of 17. Since moving his operation from Florida to California in 1975, he said he had imported $150 million worth of marijuana, mostly high-grade “Punta Roja” (red bud) pot from central Colombia and Thailand.
That’s the wholesale value. The FBI and the DEA estimate the street value of Perlowin’s imports at well over a billion dollars.

To run his vast operation, Perlowin operated a flotilla of ships that was larger than the navies of all but a handful of the world’s nations. His fleet consisted of 94 marine vessels – including the Polar Sea, a 120-foot ocean-going tug, a 90-foot North Sea trawler, a converted mine-sweeper, more than a dozen steel albacore fishing boats from 47 to 85 feet long, shrimpers, crab boats, bait boats, motor sailors’, 29 60-foot fiberglass barges, a string of speedboats and a surveillance and communications yacht. He directly employed more than 200 people and hired on others as needed, including captains and crews, boat stagers, fishermen, professional pot salesmen, computer operators, electronic technicians and radiomen.

His operation was so sophisticated it even included his own “counter-intelligence” unit, which monitored the movements of Coast Guard craft and kept track of DEA and FBI agents.

The actual smuggling operation worked like this: Growers in south-central Colombia would fly the marijuana to isolated coastal sections where there were no paved roads and no transportation by train or bus – nothing but big beaches and small villages. The bales of marijuana were kicked out of the planes as they flew low over the beaches. “We would hire whole villages to gather, store and secure the marijuana,” said Perlowin. “Meanwhile, we’d outfit our boats for whatever was in season. We’d rig for tuna during tuna season etc., and send the boats to Costa Rica to refuel get provisions and stand by. As soon as the radio message came that the stuff was on the beach, the boats could get here in a couple of days.”

Bur how did Perlowin’s people manage to offload thousands of pounds of pot in the heart of San Francisco Bay without being spotted?

Simple. He owned the pier.

A meticulous man with a talent for organization and a reverence for detail, before moving his operation from Florida to California Perlowin conducted one of the most remarkable research projects in the history of crime. He hired a Berkeley firm, Information On Demand, to analyze every major marijuana bust on the West Coast during the previous ten years. The idea was “to find out where everyone else had made their mistakes – and then design an operation to avoid them.”

The data disclosed that the weakest link in failed smuggling operations had been the vulnerability of the drop-off points – coves, estuaries, abandoned docks, vacant warehouses and so forth – over which the smugglers had limited and unreliable control. Perlowin eliminated that problem by buying his own dock, a 1,000-foot concrete pier in San Francisco Bay. It was ideally situated, just north of the Red Rock Marina in Richmond.

“Logistically, it was one of the finest offloading spots in the country,” says Perlowin. “It was 40 minutes by boat from the Golden Gate Bridge and right in the radar shadow of the Richmond Bridge.”

Perlowin’s boats would come in to dock and “disappear” – drop off the radar screen. In effect, he said, they would become “invisible.” Perlowin maintained that it was safer to “hide in plain sight” – run his boats in and out of a heavy traffic area – than call attention to himself by trying to sneak around some estuary in Mendocino.

The theory worked to perfection “In Florida,” he says, “you bring in a boatload of fish and everyone thinks its marijuana. In San Francisco, you bring in a boatload of marijuana and everyone thinks its fish.”

Meanwhile, the money-laundering arm of his operation was stretching half way around the world – from a gambling casino in Las Vegas to a pair of trust companies in Luxembourg to banks in the Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles, Panama, Costa Rica and the British West Indies, to a loan brokerage firm in Sarasota, Florida, and back to a string of shell corporations in Nevada.
Headquarters for the Perlowin operation moved around the Bay Area. “The Ukiah house I considered a home and didn’t do business there as a general rule,” he says. Business was conducted out of a house in Berkeley, an apartment in San Francisco and a house in San Rafael. Headquarters for running the dock and houseboat building company he owned (called Shelter Engineering) was an office in San Anselmo.

Marijuana sales headquarters were in various “stash houses” or ranches his operatives bought and rented north of San Francisco. They purchased three such houses outright, with a total value of approximately $1 million, and rented half-a-dozen others.

Perlowin’s VIP headquarters was a house in Orinda lived in by a distinguished-looking 62-year-old gentleman, and impeccable dresser, highly-educated – an individual Perlowin calls “a perfect front man for the organization.” This house, lavishly furnished, was used to entertain the Colombians as well as bankers and businessmen connected primarily with the money-laundering end of the operation.

Surveillance headquarters was a rented house in San Rafael, on a mountain top in direct line of sight of the dock. From here the North Bay was monitored with powerful two-man binoculars and broad-band scanners. A voice-activated tape player recorded all police, Coast Guard, DEA, FBI and other law enforcement radio transmissions. The tapes were reviewed nightly.

The South Bay was monitored from a 37-foot Pacesetter motor home parked on property which Perlowin’s organization rented on Skyline Boulevard. From the outside the motor home looked perfectly normal. Inside, however, it was packed with $1 million worth of sophisticated electronic equipment that not only enabled Perlowin to keep in radio contact with his own boats, but to track every Coast Guard craft from Panama to Alaska and Hawaii. He also tracked all routes flown by the Coast Guard’s surveillance planes.

CB antennas were mounted in the rearview mirrors. Then antenna for Perlowin’s marine single-sideband radio was concealed inside the motor home’s flagpole, with the American flag flying on top. High in several redwood trees on the property were mounted other antennas for marine VHF radios and broad-band scanners. To insure privacy, Perlowin own communications were carried out over his own secret frequencies – accomplished by having his electronics experts shave the standard crystals to specifications that enabled him to transmit and receive in-between regular frequencies.

At one point it struck Perlowin that his communications network was far superior to anything that the local Office of Emergency Services could muster. In a major emergency, he noted, all radio frequencies would be jammed from overuse.

Never one to think small, Perlowin had his own plan. If a major earthquake or other disaster struck the Bay Area, he had contingency plans to mobilize his entire organization to assist in the rescue operations. “With all our boats, trucks, 4-wheel drive vehicles, vans, pick-ups, wagoneers, jeeps, emergency repair trucks and spotter cars, and our ability to communicate with each other by radio – not to mention personnel used to working under dangerous and stressful conditions – we would have made an impressive impact helping the authorities,” Perlowin mused. “When the emergency was over we’d disappear and go back underground.”

But Perlowin’s altruism will never be tested. In March 1983, in Chicago, he was finally arrested. Ironically, what he was doing there had nothing to do with any drug deals. He was on his way to a three-day White Tantric Yoga seminar conducted by his spiritual advisor, Yogi Bhajan.

Despite his painstaking planning, in the end it was not his marijuana operation that tripped him up, but his money-laundering organization. One of his operatives in Sarasota, under pressure from the Feds on a separate drug rap, cut a deal for himself by handing over compromising documents on Perlowin’s money-cleansing methods to the FBI.

When he was busted, Perlowin had marijuana shipments contracted for – or already on the high seas – worth $120 million.

Through it all, Perlowin insists, he is proud of one thing. He stood firm on a basic principle: He never dealt cocaine, which he considers a “vicious and destructive” drug peddled by “violent people.”

Perlowin now spends his days in Federal Prison in Texarkana, and rarely has any man adjusted so well to prison life. Perlowin claims his confinement has improved his self-discipline and helped him to purge himself of “negative habits” (such as drug smuggling almost exclusively - to the exclusion to other meaningful life endeavors). He virtually vibrates with inner peace.

His days now, he says, are the “most calm and relaxed of my life.” A vegetarian, he says he meditates twice daily and reads 15 books a week. He is using his time to study for three degrees and, by the time he gets out of prison, he expects to hold PhD’s in nutrition, psychology and criminology.
Perlowin said he plans to combine the formidable organizational skills he developed as one of the world’s biggest drug dealers with his knowledge of Yoga, meditation and nutrition to forge a revolutionary new holistic approach to prison reform and rehabilitation.

He insists that the current prison system is in a “shambles,” with an 84 percent recidivism rate. “Everyone agrees it isn’t working.”

But he maintains that his method of reducing stress and changing violent behavior through Yogic techniques can turn the system around and produce at least an 80 percent success rate.

With the support of prison authorities, he’s already been allowed to put some of his theories into practice in a small pilot program in Texarkana.

“I’ve been an outlaw half my life,” he notes, “So I certainly comprehend the criminal mind.” On the other hand, he adds, he also understands the humanistic approaches that are necessary to genuinely alter the criminal’s conception of himself and society.

The private prison business is on the verge of becoming a $200 million industry,” Perlowin says with a modest smile, and he’s confident that when he’s released, sometime around 1990, he’ll be in the forefront of that business.

“Who,” he asks, “is better qualified?”



*J.L. Pimsleur is an award-winning reporter who has interviewed everyone from Fidel Castro and Malcolm X to Marilyn Monroe.

**True to his word, Bruce Perlowin never did testify against the far flung members of his organization and did all his time in prison. Because of that at least 100 people form the Perlowin Marijuana Smuggling Organization were never charged with any crimes.

[American Dream]

Cross-posted from the Trayvon Martin thread:

White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action. Mass media then brings us the news of this in a newspeak manner that sounds almost jocular and celebratory, as though no tragedy has happened, as though the sacrifice of a young life was necessary to uphold property values and white patriarchal honor. Viewers are encouraged to feel sympathy for the white male home owner who made a mistake. The fact that this mistake led to the violent death of an innocent young man does not register; the narrative is worded in a manner that encourages viewers to identify with the one who made the mistake by doing what we are led to feel we might all do to “protect our property at all costs from any sense of perceived threat.” This is what the worship of death looks like.

This quote is from bell hooks’ 2001 book, “All About Love: New Visions,”

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://theslowburningfuse.wordpress.com ... t-angry-2/

[American Dream]

http://robotmonkeys.net/2013/07/04/scro ... ger-delta/

[American Dream]

No Valentines on Stolen Native Land, Marika Swan (Tla-o-qui-aht)

[American Dream]

http://kloncke.wordpress.com/2013/07/22 ... g-dealers/

A Tale of Two Drug Dealers
JULY 22, 2013




When I went last night with a friend to see the award-winning film Fruitvale Station, depicting the final day’s events of police murder victim Oscar Grant, I naturally expected to get angry about racism. And I did get angry — though, owing to the film’s complex, relatable approach, deftly shifting between heartbreak, horror, and humor, I felt many other things, too. (You should really see it, if you get a chance.)

But one of the most striking reminders of U.S. white supremacy glared across the screen even before Fruitvale’s opening credits.

Meet the Millers is, according to the trailer, a zany comedy about a white dude sent on a mission to Mexico to smuggle in a ridiculous amount of weed. Knowing he’ll be more conspicuous at the border if he’s alone, he assembles a team of white working-class ne’er-do-wells to act as his hetero nuclear clan, faking wholesomeness (synonymous with whiteness) to deflect any law-enforcement suspicion.

This, just before a film whose main character, a Black man, struggles to stay out of prison, wrestling with whether or not to keep selling trees to pay rent for his family.

And whose racist criminalization makes his last encounter with the law anything but a joke.


Black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data.

—NYT


Telling [people of color] they’re obsessed with racism is like telling a drowning person they’re obsessed with swimming.

—Hari Kondabolu

[American Dream]

http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentf ... lfcare.php




In the 1980s, as she struggled with cancer, Audre Lorde asserted that caring for herself was “an act of political warfare.” Since then, self-care has become a popular buzzword in activist circles. The rhetoric of self-care has moved from specific to universal, from defiant to prescriptive. When we talk about self-care today, are we talking about the same thing Lorde was? It’s time to reexamine this concept.

But what could be wrong with care? And why, of all things, pick on self-care?



For one thing, because it has become a sacred cow. It’s painful to hear people speak sanctimoniously about anything, but especially about the most important things. Pious unanimity implies a dark side: in the shadow of every church, a den of iniquity. It creates an other, drawing a line through as well as between us.

Self and care—in that order—are universally acknowledged values in this society. Anyone who endorses self-care is on the side of the angels, as the saying goes—which is to say, against all the parts of us that don’t fit into the prevailing value system. If we wish to resist the dominant order, we have to play devils’ advocate, searching out what is excluded and denigrated.

Wherever a value is considered universal, we find the pressures of normativity: for example, the pressure to perform self-care for others’ sake, keeping up appearances. So much of what we do in this society is about maintaining the image that we’re successful, autonomous individuals, regardless of the reality. In this context, rhetoric about self-care can mask silencing and policing: Deal with your problems yourself, please, so no one else has to.

Assuming that self-care is always good means taking for granted that self and care always have the same meaning. Here, we want to challenge monolithic and static understandings of selfhood and caring. Instead, we propose that different kinds of care produce different kinds of self, and that care is one of the battlefields on which social struggles play out.

Don’t Tell Me to Calm Down

Though advocates of self-care emphasize that it can look different for each person, the suggestions usually sound suspiciously similar. When you think of stereotypical “self-care” activities, what do you picture? Drinking herbal tea, watching a movie, taking a bubble bath, meditating, yoga? This selection suggests a very narrow idea of what self-care is: essentially, calming yourself down.



All of these activities are designed to engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs rest and recovery. But some forms of care require strenuous activity and adrenaline, the domain of the sympathetic nervous system. One way to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, is to allow the sympathetic nervous system enough freedom to release trauma from the body. When a person is having a panic attack, it rarely helps to try to make them calm down. The best way to handle a panic attack is to run.

So let’s start by discarding any normative understanding of what it means to care for ourselves. It might mean lighting candles, putting on a Nina Simone album, and rereading Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family. It could also mean BDSM, intense performance art, mixed martial arts fighting, smashing bank windows, or calling out a person who abused you. It might even look like really hard work to other people—or ceasing to function altogether. This is not just a postmodern platitude (“different strokes for different folks”), but a question of what relationship we establish to our challenges and our anguish.

Caring for ourselves doesn’t mean pacifying ourselves. We should be suspicious of any understanding of self-care that identifies wellbeing with placidity or asks us to perform “health” for others. Can we imagine instead a form of care that would equip each of us to establish an intentional relationship to her dark side, enabling us to draw strength from the swirling chaos within? Treating ourselves gently might be an essential part of this, but we must not assume a dichotomy between healing and engaging with the challenges around and inside us. If care is only what happens when we step away from those struggles, we will be forever torn between an unsatisfactory withdrawal from conflict and its flipside, a workaholism that is never enough. Ideally, care would encompass and transcend both struggle and recovery, tearing down the boundaries that partition them.

This kind of care cannot be described in platitudes. It is not a convenient agenda item to add to the program of the average non-profit organization. It demands measures that will interrupt our current roles, bringing us into conflict with society at large and even some of the people who profess to be trying to change it.



By your response to danger it is
Easy to tell how you have lived
And what has been done to you.
You show whether you want to stay alive,
Whether you think you deserve to,
And whether you believe
It’s any good to act.

-Jenny Holzer



Love Is a Battlefield

If we want to identify what is worth preserving in self-care, we can start by scrutinizing care itself. To endorse care as a universal good is to miss the role care also plays in perpetuating the worst aspects of the status quo. There’s no such thing as care in its pure form—care abstracted from daily life in capitalism and the struggles against it. No, care is partisan—it is repressive or liberating. There are forms of care that reproduce the existing order and its logic, and other forms of care that enable us to fight it. We want our expressions of care to nurture liberation, not domination—to bring people together according to a different logic and values.



From homemaking to professional housekeeping—not to mention nursing, hospitality, and phone sex—women and people of color are disproportionately responsible for the care that keeps this society functioning, yet have disproportionately little say in what that care fosters. Likewise, a tremendous amount of care goes into oiling the machinery that maintains hierarchy: families help police relax after work, sex workers help businessmen let off steam, secretaries take on the invisible labor that preserves executives’ marriages.

So the problem with self-care is not just the individualistic prefix. For some of us, focusing on self-care rather than caring for others would be a revolutionary proposition, albeit almost unimaginable—while the privileged can congratulate each other on their excellent self-care practices without recognizing how much of their sustenance they derive from others. When we conceive of self-care as an individual responsibility, we are less likely to see the political dimensions of care.

Some have called for a caring strike: a collective, public resistance to the ways capitalism has commandeered care. In their text “A Very Careful Strike,” Spanish militants Precarias a la Deriva explore the ways care has been commodified or rendered invisible, from customer service in the marketplace to emotional care in families. They challenge us to imagine ways care could be wrested away from maintaining our stratified society and instead lavished on fostering togetherness and revolt.

But such a project depends on those who are already most vulnerable in our society. It would take a tremendous amount of support for family members, sex workers, and secretaries to go on care strike without suffering appalling consequences.

So rather than promoting self-care, we might seek to redirect and redefine care. For some of us, this means recognizing how we benefit from imbalances in the current distribution of care, and shifting from forms of care that focus on ourselves alone to support structures that benefit all participants. Who’s working so you can rest? For others, it could mean taking better care of ourselves than we’ve been taught we have a right to—though it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to undertake this individually as a sort of consumer politics of the self. Rather than creating gated communities of care, let’s pursue forms of care that are expansive, that interrupt our isolation and threaten our hierarchies.

Self-care rhetoric has been appropriated in ways that can reinforce the entitlement of the privileged, but a critique of self-care must not be used as yet another weapon against those who are already discouraged from seeking care. In short: step up, step back.



A struggle that doesn’t understand the importance of care is doomed to fail. The fiercest collective revolts are built on a foundation of nurture. But reclaiming care doesn’t just mean giving ourselves more care, as one more item after all the others on the to-do list. It means breaking the peace treaty with our rulers, withdrawing care from the processes that reproduce the society we live in and putting it to subversive and insurrectionary purposes.



Beyond Self-Preservation

“‘Health’ is a cultural fact in the broadest sense of the word, a fact that is political, economic, and social as well, a fact that is tied to a certain state of individual and collective consciousness. Every era outlines a ‘normal’ profile of health.” –Michel Foucault

The best way to sell people on a normative program is to frame it in terms of health. Who doesn’t want to be healthy?

But like “self” and “care,” health is not one thing. In itself, health is not intrinsically good—it’s simply the condition that enables a system to continue to function. You can speak about the health of an economy, or the health of an ecosystem: these often have an inverse relationship. This explains why some people describe capitalism as a cancer, while others accuse “black bloc anarchists” of being the cancer. The two systems are lethal to each other; nourishing one means compromising the health of the other.

The repressive function of health norms is obvious enough in the professional field of mental health. Where drapetomania and anarchia were once invoked to stigmatize runaway slaves and rebels, today’s clinicians diagnose oppositional defiance disorder. But the same thing goes on far from psychiatric institutions.

In a capitalist society, it should not be surprising that we tend to measure health in terms of productivity. Self-care and workaholism are two sides of the same coin: preserve yourself so you can produce more. This would explain why self-care rhetoric is so prevalent in the non-profit sector, where the pressure to compete for funding often compels organizers to mimic corporate behavior, even if they use different terminology.

If self-care is just a way to ease the impact of an ever-increasing demand for productivity, rather than a transformative rejection of that demand, it’s part of the problem, not the solution. For self-care to be anti-capitalist, it has to express a different conception of health.

This is especially complicated as our survival becomes ever more interlinked with the functioning of capitalism—a condition some have designated with the term biopower. In this situation, the easiest way to preserve your health is to excel at capitalist competition, the same thing that is doing us so much harm. “There is no other pill to take, so swallow the one that made you ill.”

To escape this vicious circle, we have to shift from reproducing one “self” to producing another. This demands a notion of self-care that is transformative rather than conservative—that understands the self as dynamic rather than static. The point is not to stave off change, as in Western medicine, but to foster it; in the Tarot deck, Death represents metamorphosis.

From the standpoint of capitalism and reformism, anything that threatens our social roles is unhealthy. As long as we remain inside the former paradigm, it may be that only behaviors deemed unhealthy can point the way out. Breaking with the logic of the system that has kept us alive demands a certain reckless abandon.

This may illuminate the connection between apparently self-destructive behavior and rebellion, which goes back a long time before punk rock. The radical side of the Occupy Oakland assemblies, where all the smokers hung out, was known affectionately as the “black lung bloc”—the cancer of Occupy, indeed! The self-destructive energy that drives people to addiction and suicide can also enable them to take courageous risks to change the world. We can identify multiple currents within self-destructive behavior; some of them close down possibility, while others open it up. We need language with which to explore this, lest our language about self-care perpetuate a false binary between sickness and self-destructiveness on one hand and health and struggle on the other.

For when we speak of breaking with the logic of the system, we are not just talking about a courageous decision that presumably healthy subjects make in a vacuum. Even apart from “self-destructive” behavior, many of us already experience illness and disability that position us outside this society’s conception of health. This forces us to grapple with the question of the relationship between health and struggle.

When it comes to anti-capitalist struggle, do we associate health with productivity, too, implying that the ill cannot participate effectively? Instead, without asserting the ill as the revolutionary subject à la the Icarus Project, we could look for ways of engaging with illness that pull us out of our capitalist conditioning, interrupting a way of being in which self-worth and social ties are premised on a lack of care for ourselves and each other. Rather than pathologizing illness and self-destructiveness as disorders to be cured for efficiency’s sake, we could reimagine self-care as a way of listening into them for new values and possibilities.

Think of Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Voltairine de Cleyre, and all the other women who drew on their private struggles with sickness, injury, and depression to craft public expressions of insubordinate care. How about Friedrich Nietzsche: was his poor health a mere obstacle, which he manfully overcame? Or was it inextricable from his insights and his struggles, an essential step on the path that led him away from received wisdom so he could discover something else? To understand his writing in the context of his life, we have to picture Nietzsche in a wheelchair charging a line of riot police, not flying through the air with an S on his chest.

Your human frailty is not a regrettable fault to be treated by proper self-care so you can get your nose back to the grindstone. Sickness, disability, and unproductivity are not anomalies to be weeded out; they are moments that occur in every life, offering a common ground on which we might come together. If we take these challenges seriously and make space to focus on them, they could point the way beyond the logic of capitalism to a way of living in which there is no dichotomy between care and liberation.





Further Reading

Self-Destruction

“On Audre Lorde’s Legacy and the ‘Self’ of Self-Care”

“On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf

N’Drea: One Woman’s Fight to Die Her Own Way

[American Dream]

"Biopower" is a term coined by French scholar, historian, and social theorist Michel Foucault. It relates to the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations".

**

http://mappingthecommons.wordpress.com/ ... opolitics/

Twelve theses on biopolitics and the commons

[1] We use “biopower” [in the sense defined by Foucault, and later detailed by Deleuze, Hardt and Negri] to describe the form of power in contemporary networked society. Biopower, as any kind of power, has to be understood as a strategy and as a relation; it is deployed through technics or technologies.Biopower is not aimed at prohibiting and punishing, but it rather deals with the production of the real; it aims to produce the totality of social life.

[2] The main aim of biopower, being part of capitalism, is not to repress people, but to make populations productive.

[3] We can better understand the technologies of contemporary biopower by comparing them to the technologies of [bio]power in the industrial society. The diagram of power technologies in the industral society is the panopticon. It was deployed in the so called insitutions of enclosement, such as factories, schools, offices and homes, where bodies and minds were disciplined in space and time. The Greek term “biomechania” describes effectively the biopolitical dimension of industrial society. Technologies of biopower in the age of networks are different from those of the industrial era. They are often described by the term society of control, coined by writer William Burroughs and commented upon by Gilles Deleuze [1990].

[4] Society of control technologies aim to make people productive, as we already mentioned, but they do so, not through the tayloristic organization of time and space, but rather through the modulation of subjectivities and behaviors in the open, fluid fields of networks. In the networked society, people become productive when they are able to operate autonomously, flexibly and creatively. Control functions through the modulation of these conditions.

[5] Production of subjectivity, technological and social protocols, laws and norms, and governance are three of the main families of power technologies in the society of control.

[6] Biopolitics would describe on one end the technologies of power that relate to biopower. Biopolitical production would refer to the production of forms of life, as in the sense addressed by the Greek term “biomechania”. However, biopolitical production is used, too [by Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato and others], to describe the kind of politics and political actions that oppose capitalist biopower. In this sense, biopolitical production would describe the production of forms of life [technical, social, subjective ecologies] alternative to, and confrontational with capitalism.

[7] The value of contemporary production has shifted from the production of commodities to that generated by biopolitical production, that is the production of forms of life, subjectivities, knowledge, social relations and affects. We can see this in a privileged way in economic fields such as branding, entertainment, media, web 2.0, software, health, care, beauty, tourism and cultural industries. In the context of biopolitical production becoming hegemonic, the former concepts of production and social reproduction tend to merge.

[8] The wealth of the postfordist contemporary economy is produced within and by the networks. As Castells explained, today the value of a node that is not connected to any network equals zero. Therefore we can affirm that the wealth generated by the networked society is wealth generated in a large extent through and by communication, social cooperation and collective intelligence.

[9] The cooperative, open, shared dimension of the networked resources necessary for production, and of the results of networked biopolitical production itself, is what we call the “new commons”.

[10] The postfordist metropolis, that we describe as the material and social side of global networks, is the locus of the production of the commons. [This was the object of the mapping project we developed in Athens in December 2010] Following Hardt and Negri, we can describe, then, the posfordist metropolis as the place of production [of the commons], of encounters [that make the commons], and of antagonism [around the making of the commons and their expropriation, enclosures, and exploitation by capitalism].

[11] Contemporary capitalism depends intimately on the wealth produced by networks, that is on its ability to extract value from the wealth produced by the social cooperation made possible by the commons. It is a paradoxical situation. Capitalism needs to promote the autonomous social cooperation that produces the commons, as it constitutes its main source of benefit, while at the same time it needs to govern and modulate it, so that it doesn’t become uncontrollable. This is the paradox that interests us.

[12] Making the commons has to be understood, then, not only as the creation of more or less marginal communities that share resources producing alternative subcultural forms of life, but rather as a process in the center of the contemporary metropolis, with the potential to become a radical process of deterritorialization, that could take society, through capitalsim, beyond capitalism.