Beware Those Who Protest Too Much

Beware of those who protest too much!  

 

Ranching and logging interests have, in Northern California particularly, loved to complain about the bad ole Federal Government and its treatment of "public lands". 

 

The "public lands" they are complaining about are national forests, game preserves and BLM lands that private interests desperately want to get their hands on to "develop"; i.e. plunder.   

 

Up until about 1900 the private interests in this country had their way with practically everything. And the bison herds were massacred, the Native Americans likewise, and forests and mining plundering went on at a never ending pace.

 

In Northern California this resulted in watershed disaster, the birth of the Central Valley Project and reclamation projects aimed at repairing a century of mis-use.  The San Francisco Bay, if mining interests would not have been stopped, was filling up with sediment and would have ceased to be a viable port; no more San Francisco Bay!   

 

That is how bad the watershed damage was during from 1849 to 1910.  

 

After WWII there was a housing boom that virtually cut all the old growth forests of America down.  The only old growth timber left was in national forests and other preserves that Teddie Roosevelt established in the early 1900s.

 

And from 1940 to 1980 loggers attempted to cut even those areas down.

 

Clear cutting was used extensively in Northern California because it was very profitable and the mountainous terrain made "scientific logging" difficult. I have even had some argue with me that clear cutting is scientific logging!   

 

I remember as a child going for rides through the forests and marveling about the deep growth of trees seemingly endless against the sky.

 

What I didn't know was the logging companies purposefully left strips of timber along all the highways, giving the impression that the deep forest still existed.  In fact, when viewed from the air, the companies had disingenuously created corridors of trees lining the highways, leaving thousands of acres of clear cut where motorists could not see them.  

 

If you doubt this, google Hwy 44 in Northern California on Google Earth and look at the highway from space...you will see thousands of acres of clear cut...these areas were logged over twenty years ago!

 

In short they lied and deceived and cut all the damn trees down.

 

And when they ran out of private land timber, they turned on public lands, just like the protestors in Oregon are now demanding access to public reserve lands.

 

But his time the American public was on to them, and through a burst of new respect for what was left of wild lands in America, stopped the plundering.

 

So, the logging interests took their ball and went home. They purposefully moved operations overseas, putting cut timber on barges and shipping it overseas for milling in Asia.  They also automated the plants that still existed, laying off thousands.   In short they created the lie that it was the government's fault for running out of timber when it THEIR fault. They shut down plants prematurely like petulant children putting all the blame on the government.   

 

And Northern California suffered immensely.  Men and women who had devoted their entire working lives to the logging industry were laid off, many times just before their retirement dates; leaving long term employees with nothing save their social security.  Just to add to the angst wood products industries killed pensions for everybody, leaving thousands who earned them with nothing.

 

The logging companies blamed the federal government for their years of deceit; and the public bought it.

 

Today in Northern California you can still get hurt if you point these facts out to former loggers.  They blame the Democrats and the environmentalists for their unemployment and poverty.  The Democratic Party has almost ceased to exist in what was a former bastion of working class liberalism.  Former union men vote Republican with the mistaken belief that it is the Democrats fault.  

 

In point of fact, the logging companies are to blame for their predatory and disingenuous behavior that over logged the land and then ruthlessly blamed the government for the whole thing.  It is a huge con job!  

 

Ranchers joined in this con, blaming the federal government for not allowing them to have jurisdiction over public lands, that many of them were grazing their cattle on for ridiculously low leases from the same federal government they professed hatred for.  In short they wanted their cake and eat it too.

 

And the public bought most of this con as well.  Ranchers and logging interests blame the federal government for everything.  And it seems to be working, unless you dig a little into the facts.

 

Look, the reason the logging industry tanked in the 1980s was clear cutting; they cut down all the private land timber then wanted to cut down all the public land timber as well.  And today, what you hear is the federal government is "mismanaging public timber whenever there is a fire". The logging interests incredibly say "trust us" we will "scientifically log" public lands if only the government lets us do it...

 

These are the same guys who clear cut almost all the private timber down in the United States, hid the damage behind walls of trees around highways, then laid off thousands in an effort to force the government to give them the rest of the old growth forests.

 

A similar reason the ranchers are angry is they want to overgraze lands that they barely pay for, or they want to purchase public lands so they can use the mining rights for fracking.

 

Either way, it is private interests plundering the remaining publicly owned land in the United States for selfish private interests whose history, if you look at it fairly, if full of deceit and greed.

 

Don't buy it, they are lying to all of us for their own selfish gain!  

Bullshit killing the Wolves

The same old refrain.  The same old, excuse the pun, bullshit!

The same old, State of Jefferson bullshit:  city slickers don't understand us, so leave us alone to make bigger profits by killing the herds of cattle by killing anything that gets it our  way.  Profit trumps morality and good sense!  

The same thing happened in the not so distant past.  

In 1850 California became a state, part of the land grab of the Mexican War.  

There were thousands of immigrants (that's right immigrants) who came for gold.  Unfortunately making money gold panning was not easy or very lucrative except for large companies.

So many 49ers lost (another bad pun) and had to do something else, since it was a long way to simply go home.

So they took land that was someone else's, and ranched.  The white population of California was booming, and there was a need for meat that far exceeded the wild game.

In those days barbed wire was not invented, so open range ranching was the established practice.

But, someone was on that open range: deer, wolves and people.  

The deer were shot by the thousands since they ate the grass the cattle needed. The wolves were exterminated by bounty hunters since they preyed on the cattle since the deer were gone.  And finally, the people were hunted for bounty because in desperation they killed a steer or two  to keep from starving.  Most Native American hid in the hills, venturing into the valleys to foreage for food. The 49ers had chased them off their ancient bountiful streamside  lands. 

It all came down to the bullshit (pun) cattle!  One steer killed by starving Indians meant ALL the wolves and native people had to die.

Anti-government ranchers led the charge to get the fledgling state government to form militias to hunt people because of cattle killing.  Funny how government is used to make them money?  Subsidies anyone? 

The wolves and the people were nearly completely exterminated in thirty short years.  The same bullshit was used to justify killing wolves AND people; everyone didn't understand, the ranchers knew best, the poor cattle. 

One bounty hunter, a Methodist Minister, bragged how he had been "humane"  because when he cornered a mother and two small children in a cave near Old Shasta, California, he "shot the five year old in the face with my pistol rather than use my buffalo rifle; I didn't want to hurt him".  

He shot a whimpering five year old in the face "humanely"?  What kind of human being was he....oh...a "Man of God"....

The wholesale slaughter of animals and human beings was led by ranchers!  It was all bullshit, the fact was the cattle loss from wolves and people was minimal. What was not bullshit was the justification for genocide, exterminating ALL the major predators save the white man. 

Some of the ranchers we hear now are descendants of the killers who murdered thousands.

And now the same old bullshit....the poor calves...right?

What they don't tell you is they kill ALL  those calves ultimately anyway. .  Unless the cows are milk cows, they all are butchered so we can have our Big Macs!

And it all comes down to PROFIT.   And killing boosts rancher's profit.   

It is profit that drove the last great genocide..  

Keep the wolves, fight for the environment...save yourselves and your children from the Reckoning that most assuredly is coming!

YES WE CAN

Expectations?   As I have pondered Justice (?) Scalia's now infamous slower colleges for "the blacks" versus the University of Texas, I hit on what should be obvious.

We have been trained as teachers that setting high expectations are critical to academic achievement.  A teacher's  high expectations and guidance with students is critical to how they perform.

It is true that students from poor schools, and bad backgrounds will struggle in elite colleges.  I had that experience at Stanford.  Shasta High, now a first class school, was not so in 1965.  I had a World History teacher who taught from the book with worksheets that everyone copied.  I read the text and because of my avid interest in history got a little out of the course. But, when faced with the History of Western Civilization my freshman year at Stanford, I was in deep trouble.  I did not have the background in Western Civilizations that my preppie peers had.  

It was the only class I asked to tutoring for, and pulled a C working my tail off.  

You see the Preppies were way ahead of me.  The privileged class shined in "Western Civ".  The years of privilege made a difference.  Many of the "Preppies" had traveled to Europe.  Many had gone to plays, concerts; etc.    And being a poor kid from Redding, I struggled.

I often have said the first major college football game I saw was the one I played in!  

But then I joined the ATO, a fraternity that had just been kicked out of the national for pledging men of color and Jews.  At the time I knew I was part Native American but had never acknowledged it.  I knew I was behind many of my freshman peers at Stanford; one being a friend named Mitt Romney, a very nice guy who was a preppie.

My lifelong best friend was also a preppie.  Our sophomore year, as I worked twice as hard to "get it" in classes, he pulled me aside and taught me how to write.  Both of his parents were teachers at an exclusive prep school in Minneapolis.  

He explained it was a code, that once you knew it, then let your passion take over.

Now this was while I was fighting my ass off trying to make the Stanford Varsity Football team, spending four to six hours a day, working for my board and room, AND going to class and doing homework.

It meant I could not go out and drink with the boys at the Goose, in season (?) and I just didn't have the time.

But I roomed with a guy named Al Wilburn, the first African American captain of the Stanford Football Team, an All American, pro football bound who instead decided against all our pleadings to become a .....DOCTOR.  This young man from the Fresno area, whose father was a sharecropper, and poorer than hell told us all he was going to UCLA med school and was going to be a doctor.

He was 6 foot four and weighed 245 pounds and could run like a damn deer.  I had to block him my freshman year, he almost tore my head off.

But someone along the line had raised his expectations and he was going to be a doctor by God.  And he was one of the first African Americans to pledge ATO.

And the place raised expectations for all of us.  We played against USC and UCLA when they were the best in the country; and got beat.  But my senior year, with Jim Plunkett as our QB, we almost got them.  

Raised expectations by John Ralston, one of the greatest men I ever knew, drove us, we worked and worked and worked, practicing twice as long.  I probably got beat deep  by Gene Washington and Plunkett more than any other cornerback in football.

But  the high  expectations built success.  In the classroom and on the athletic field football players were EXPECTED to be students FIRST AND athletes SECOND; so what if you studied 20 hours a day in both, we did it.

And we succeeded.  And we won.  But WE did it.  In the ATO we were brothers, we learned about each other's culture, preppies, poor part Indian kids from Redding, African Americans from L.A., Jews from New York, and Latinos from Los Angeles, we learned together; and the place drove us always expecting excellence.

So don't tell me Justice Scalia,  that African Americans need a "slower track", don't you dare.

I have seen it at the highest level.  I also was trained as a teacher to never accept excuses.  If a kid came in and said I can't, I said no...you can.  And many times they could.

Finally there was Steve Anderson.  Steve had been struck by a car when he was a toddler.  He was brain damaged and his motor skills put him in a wheel chair.  Back then we were just starting mainstreaming so he was placed in my Resource Specialist Class; I went into Special Education, that's right from Stanford to Special Education because I care about the wonder of human capacity and potential; unlike Scalia.

Scalia and his ilk would and did put students like Steve in special school, away from the privileged, away from a chance.  

Steve's parents were insistent that Steve experience a regular student's existence.  So we tried.  We tried so hard that one day, when Steve's personal aide was sick, I assigned two of my kids to push his wheelchair to PE.  They lost control of the chair and Steve rolled down a hill and suffered some minor cuts on his face.

The parents came to school to check him out.  I held my breath waiting for a lawsuit: they just laughed and said, other kids fall down don't they, we EXPECT him to be treated like everyone else.  We expect him to fall and to get up and try again!

That is what Scalia doesn't get.  That is what this country of white privileges doesn't get.  People of color don't want a handout, they just want a fair shot and to be pushed for excellence like the privileged. You delegate them to inferior schools and "slow" colleges and you don't get achievement.  AND, we lose human capital and capacity that can add immeasurably to America.  I have always thought that some poor Native American on a reservation somewhere, who will die of alcoholism, has the capacity to cure cancer; but white supremacy America is in the habit of not just wasting human achievement but crushing  it!  

Finally, when Steve graduated his parents demanded that he WALK  across the stage.  They EXPECTED HIM TO WALK ACROSS THAT STAGE!  Steve could not walk except with considerable help.  

Now Steve fell a lot.  I mean a lot.  So we tried to talk them out of it...they would have none of it.

So we practiced the walk, they call the last walk for the football seniors to the stadium at Stanford the WALK as well.  I did that one too many times.  And this WALK was only ten steps or so.  But ten steps in front of thousands of people.  

One Walk with thousands rooting you on, the other....the same!

So we practiced.  His parents expected him to make that walk. They had high expectations.  

And that graduation I hooked my arm underneath his and we walked those ten steps.  And as we walked the entire stadium erupted in applause, they rose to their feet and Steve, smiled, then laughed and mumbled,  "I did it".

DO NOT EVER SAY YOU CAN'T.  DO NOT EVER LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS FOR ANYBODY.  STOP WHITE SUPREMACY BY TEACHING WITHOUT BIAS AND EXPECTING EVERYONE, I MEAN EVERY SINGLE ONE TO SUCCEED AND TO REACH THEIR FULL POTENTIAL.  AND THAT MEANS INVESTING WAY MORE IN EDUCATION THAN WE CURRENTLY DO!

THAT IS WHY I AM ANGRY AT JUSTICE SCALIA AND EVERY OTHER CONSERVATIVE WHO HIDES THEIR RACISM BEHIND THE HE/SHE CAN'T.........

YES....WE CAN!

Divided We Stand

I would urge you to read the article, "Divided We Stand" in the San Jose Mercury News" Sunday, December 13, 2015.  

  It shows that the entrenched system of white supremacy is only slightly less obvious than in 1960!  That is heartbreaking to say the least.

Right now the Supreme Court is about to eliminate complete any vestige of Affirmative Action.  Voter rights have already been curtailed making Selma irrelevant.  In short, white supremacy is on the rise and winning in every area.  

Consequently, people of color  lead in virtually every indicator of poverty and agony, from incarceration rates to reading scores.  Charter Schools have been pushed, along with private schools, to segregate our schools worse than 1960.  And "Black Lives Matter" is a outrage of African Americans against the wholesale slaughter of young men by the police in shoot after shoot after shoot.

A political party, once of Lincoln the Great Emancipator, now feeds off racial prejudice and white privilege.  The stereotyping of an entire religion (which is mostly practiced by people of color) is just one more example of WASPs incredible racism.  

And then there is the violence in the mean streets of America, by gangs, drug peddlers you name it, making  living to maturity an accomplishment for many.  Chicago is a town where an African American young man has more than one way to get shot on the way to school.  White kids just worry about which bus to take.  

And I haven't even mentioned Native Americans, who have made absolutely no progress in the last 40 years: none.  Sadly the Casinos have made more white people richer and the  lot of most Native Americans is the same as always, poverty, addiction; and early death.

And white supremacy rides on, in all its evil; now supported by a denier class championed by Fox News and other conservative voices who simply pretend the whole thing is not there.  After all, we elected a Black President, right; as they sabotage everything he has tried to do.

And the gap between the rich and the poor is now a chasm.  And white former middle class victims of this swindle, turn on the poor scared to death that they are next.  And, the way this is going, they already are next; poor, dying early, angry, miserable and lost.  And what do they do?  Why they rally around Trump, as their savior; who is NOT their friend by any stretch of the imagination.  

Divided we stand for sure.  And weakened as well.  America is losing. It is losing because in the world economy we do not get the fact that white supremacy is an enormous weakness, and invitation for reaction, and retaliation (call it terrorism).  Why do "they" hate us....for Christ's sake think about it!

Why do "they" hate "us"?  A Presidential candidate promises to send all the Mexicans home, stop Muslims from entering the country, then brags that "they" all love me.  

Look in the mirror this Christmas and who do you see?  When will we ever see the face of Jesus, shaking his head because we simply do not get it.  When will we stop hating and love; when?

And finally, for those who say, not me...it is our ancestors who did all that bad stuff; then why are people still screaming.  Why do we think we have integrated colleges when the University of Alabama, who just had a young man win the Heisman, still have segregated fraternities?  

How does that make any sense, if we truly are "All men are created equal".  

It doesn't...so divided we stand, with a target on us from the rest of the disbelieving world.

Here We Go Again

Here we go again.  In 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War college campuses exploded in protest.  Moreover the Civil Rights movement was going full throttle and M.L. King was murdered.  Protests shut down campuses, administration offices were occupied, the ROTC building at Stanford was torched.  

And the newspaper articles decried the immaturity and lack of knowledge of the college "spoiled brats".  Articles were written like this one, calling students immature and spoiled.  

Dr. Spock was assailed for teaching a permissive humane form of child rearing, that was a cause of young men not wanting to go off to die in a senseless war.   The fact that it was a senseless war was discounted by the greatest generation.  Parents were turned against their children, second guessing "sparing the rod".  One wonders what happens to cultures who produce soldiers first and citizens second?  

The greatest generation watched in horror as their anti-war sons and daughters resisted, demonstrated, and dropped out.  

And now, we listen to  the same nonsense when young people act like America's promise is real.

Vietnam, as it turns out was wrong.  Only the most conservative hard liner believes that the mistakes in Vietnam were warranted.  The dominoe theory, that was thrown up to us constantly by Johnson and then by Nixon, did not happen.  

Today every baseball cap you buy is "Made in Vietnam".  We discovered, after the war, that Vietnam hates China, even fought a brief war in the mid-seventies with China and is a capitalist nation economically; communist politically.  

In short the children of the sixties, spoiled and immature, had it exactly right.  The greatest generation was wrong.

And Civil Rights?  The sit ins, the marches at Selma, all led by the young.  And the deaths, borne by the young college students who discovered the white supremacy realities of the American nightmare.  And the non-violent  protests turned to angry violence when Martin Luther King was gunned down.

I suppose those riots were the actions of spoiled brats?  With yet another leader shot down, it was that superficial a reaction?  Really?    Talk to any African American about the M.L. KIng murder riots; they will tell you straight up what those riots were all about.  And the white supremacy leaders did not listen then either!  

And the Civil Rights Act was passed, and the Voter Rights Act was passed after bloody Sunday, when the march at Selma was attacked by white state troopers in an ugly example of white supremacy at its worst.  And we all choke up when we hear Glory, the song of Selma.

Milk and cookies?  Tell that to the students at Kent State with blood on the ground, or U.C. Berkeley, where Govenor Reagan earned his tough guy image by ordering actions that killed students.

And  there is David Harris, Stanford Student Body President, who elected prison over Vietnam; another "spoiled brat" ?

David Harris went south with the demonstrators; he paid his dues.  He has more love for this country in his little finger than the author of this nonsense has in her whole body.  

When  we invaded Normandy the first boats were loaded with 19 year olds.  The brass knew it would be bad and the youngest were sacrificed; they were brave and foolhardy.  The young feels the passion more and are less careful.

Young people are who die first in a war.  The Young die for old people's mistakes.  

But, as any parent can tell you, children often look up from their milk and cookies and ask, "Daddy, why are black people treated bad?"  Why are people mad at "Redskins".  Daddy, why are we fighting a war?   Daddy, why does that old man have no leg?  

It is not spoiled brats we are talkiing about.  This con has it as usual all wrong.  It is the insightfulness of innocent youth that we are seeing; calling us to our promises and ideals.

Listen to your children!  It is in their innocence that we find our idealism.

Neocon/Isis Both Terrorist

The civilized world is in a battle with terrorism.  There are several terrorist regimes, who cannot gain political footholds in any nation states, so they use fear and terror to try to undermine authority.

Terrorists are a diverse lot, ranging from tribal affiliations gone bad, to religious fanaticism.

After 9/11 Americans of the conservative persuasion, mostly Christian conservatives, decided we were in a Holy War, with Islamic Radicals who were intent on religious warfare.  The fact that most terrorists are secularists have been lost on the GOP.    

The Republican Party, in reaction to being absolutely asleep prior to 9/11, grabbed at this fabriciation, and attacked Afghanistan to destroy terrorist training camps, and Iraq to supposedly rid the area of WMDs.

They never found any WMDs nor any "Yellow Cake Uranium", but they did throw away trillions, and created even more terroists by their arrogant and stupid treatment of Iraqi Sulnnies.  George W. Bush was so ignorant of the middle east that his administration did not know the difference between a Sunni or a Shiite, or Kurd for that matter.  

He blundered into Iraq, destroyed the infrastructure, stupidly tried to privatize the rebuilding effort, put a Shiite in power, put all the Sunnis out of work, and created Issis.  

Meanwhile, the neocons persisted in a demanding yet another military solution to a complex political and historical situation in the middle east.

In short, the foreign policy of the United States is a mess thanks to neocon stupidity.  

Now, as Syria burns with Civil War, GOP "experts" decide to not take refugees and guess what, call for ground troops in Syria; which would be again stupid beyond belief.

Basically the Republican neocons are at it again, calling for widespread war to rid the world of terrorists.  

And of course, in the African black nations, the world's worst state terrorism is totally ignored because there is little oil in that part of Africa; and the faces of the victims are overwhelmingly black not white.  

Oil drives the neocons approach to the Middle East.  Donald Trump, a poltical humorist, even has stated outright that he will "take all the oil" if he is elected.  At least he is honest.  Evil but honest.  

And, fear reigns supreme.  Even though very few United States citizens have been harmed since 9/11, you would think there have been countless slaughters to listen to right wing radio and Fox News.  

Fear, fear, fear is the mantra that is used by right wingers to stir up irrational and wrong headed reactions to terrorist attacks.

This comes from the same crowd who sponsored the disaster in Iraq that is resulted in the rise of the Isis terrorist organization.

So we stumble along, deeply divided, reacting exactly as the terrorists expect, being played like a fiddle by both the terrorists and the neocons who are desperate to regain power, so they can spend more lives endlessly and get back into power.  

It is all about power, for the Isis terrorists and the neocon terrorists...

Terrorism has goals and objectives.  The terrorist has gripes and issues that got them into this revengeful state.   We never bother to investigate the reasons for the terrorism, but are lured into reactions that only feeds their recruits.

The neocons we halfway understand, the Isis no way.  

A Free Press

Two  events recently are of great alarm to those of us who still value freedom in the United States.

One was the behavior of Republicans on the Benghazi Committee in the way they handled Hillary Clinton's "testimony".  In actuality it was a partisan witch hunt; Republicans for eleven hours attacked, maligned and tried every trick they could to rattle the presumptive Democratic Presidential candidate.

Why did they do this?  American politics have  deterioriated into a Gotcha game.  If the opposing party can find a gaffe, just one, it is lifted from the tape, and played over and over during the campaign.   Elections can turn on just one gaffe.  The former  Secretary of State of the United States was fair game for eleven hours of searching for that one gaffe, that one statement from fatigue, that could win the election.

Never mind that all of us, in a pressure situation, can say almost anything.  No, the rules are now inhumanely attack looking for the kill.

And try as they might, the Republicans whiffed.   The only time the Secretary came close was when she laughed when asked if she was alone the night after the attack...the questioner lept to the attack and said, "It is not funny, four Americans died".  Ms. Clinton was certainly not laughing about the deaths but about the ludicrous question and quickly said so.  I will bet this shows up in a campaign ad!  

But that is America's gotch politics.   In the first hours long Benghazi Committee appearance of Mrs. Clinton, she in frustration said something to the effect, all of these questions don't matter, lives were lost and we need to find out why.  Conservatives ran ads claiming she really said the lives did not matter.  

Her comment was lifted out of context, placed among a damning narrative, and ran as a hit ad all over the country.  I had conservative friends actually chant this to me....It doesn't matter to Hillary that people were killed!   Dirty politics at its worst has become the new normal in Washington.  And, the right wing is practicing it at full bore.

Now the ultimate in hypocrisy.  It seems that in the last Presidental "debate" run by CNBC, with one questioner a Latino, the candidates complained about the content of the questions.  Incredibly, the head of the GOP has suspended NBC from carrying a future debate!

Interesting, Republicans get to pick and choose their questions to answer, the Democratic front runner for President is subjected to eleven hours of witchhunt with no chance to screen the questions?  

The real threat is to the First Amendment.  A free and unfettered press is essential to the existence of a democracy.  The press, and this includes Fox News, is necessary to hold politicians accountable.  Watergate comes to mind.  So does the Vietnam War and yes, the Iraq War.  During the Civil War, when the nation's very existence was in question, the free press attacked President Lincoln at every turn.  

The Press, even the opposition press, must be able to ask probing and yes even stupid questions.  This is necessary and proper to our freedom!

If a politician does not want to answer the question then he/she has the option of saying so.  There may or may not be fallout.  At a recent debate that happend to Mrs. Clinton.  She was asked about her emails and she simply chose not to answer.  That was it, no answer.  

The Benghazi Committee is not the free press, but Mrs. Clinton still showed up and endured eleven HOURS of grilling so brutal that even Republicans were shocked.  It is a direct threat to our basic political freedoms for the National GOP leadership to boycott CNBC.  

What is next, allowing political parties to shut down news companies they don't like?  That my friends is totalitarianism.