The Haves need to get a grip

Four on line stories, one from the Daily Mail, one from a California radio station, and two from Guardian, reinforce the class divisions. This is just a sample.

In sunny California, paying for access with celebrity royals as citizens protest cuts. Most people will ignore the struggles, compartmentalize them as they prefer the diversion of polo and Pimm's; even if they don't (or cannot afford) to participate, they'll live it vicariously by reading about it.

Daily Mail:

The billion pound brand of William and Kate Inc
Next month’s US trip has already made millions for charity. The royal couple's potential earning power for Britain is immense, says Gordon Rayner

KALW News:

16 arrested in Downtown Oakland “anti-austerity” protest

Crazy insanity of consumerism and crazy desperation to survive and obtain the good life: About 15 years ago my partner and I went to Las Vegas and had lunch at the Debby Reynolds casino and hotel (now defunct). There was a museum attached and I swear we saw the Monroe dress among the "antiquities."

Guardian:

Migrants run Mexican gauntlet to make leap of faith to US

And placed just under this story is

Marilyn Monroe dress sells for $4.6m

This is not one of The Onion's satirical stories:

The Guardian:

Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms in southern California schools after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for "oral sex".

Merriam Webster's 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the "sexually graphic" entry is "just not age appropriate", according to the area's local paper.

The dictionary's online definition of the term is "oral stimulation of the genitals". "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

Both sides await Prop. 8 decision on anniversary of ruling

KTVU.COM

SAN FRANCISCO -- Friday was the one-year anniversary of a California Supreme Court ruling that allowed same-sex marriage - only to be struck down six months later by a voter initiative that made a ban on gay marriage part of the state constitution.

Supporters and opponents of gay marriage are now awaiting a second State Supreme Court decision on whether the initiative itself, enacted by voters Nov. 4 as Proposition 8, was constitutional.

The court heard arguments on the case in San Francisco on March 5 and must issue a ruling no later than June 3.

IN CALIFORNIA THEY DREAM OF TASERS: ANOTHER CITIZEN DIES

On Sunday, I wrote about the taser death in Lakewood, Calif which happened late Saturday night. Today RickB (Ten Percent) made an apt comment on my post:

Pepper spray and Taser! This is lazy violent police work, if someone honestly thinks deputies are doing everything right when a naked man dies during arrest then you have internalised the police state and are a submissive herd animal sleepwalking into slavery.

Here's an UPDATE on the Lakewood death from a local watchdog group.

It never ends. Also in California, on Friday there was another taser death, "the sixth to occur after the use of Tasers by San Jose police since 2004." Thanks to Chris Floyd, who comments

The Taser has simply added another deadly refinement to the fun and games. Whereas in the old days the San Jose police probably would have been content with just clubbing a prisoner with batons, now they can whip out a handy-dandy ray-gun and shoot him full of electricity as well. Sure, sometimes the suckers die -- but because the ray-gun is not, ostensibly, a lethal weapon, the deaths can always be written off as an unintended consequence caused by an unknown pre-existing condition or something.

Of course, you can sometimes get a "pre-existing condition" from, say, being clubbed into bloody goo by batons -- or, as in a recent case of my personal knowledge, being handcuffed from behind and having your face slammed repeatedly into a concrete floor by a five or six deputies for the heinous crime of "sass." But it's best not to delve too deeply into these matters. After all, the Taserers and clubbers are only trying to keep us safe from terrorists -- sorry, from criminals. And as our entire bipartisan political class has taught us -- and keeps teaching us every day -- brutality, torture and murder should never be prosecuted if they are committed by government officials in the name of "security."

CALIFORNIA BURNING: BLOWIN' IN THE WIND

Here are a few choice comments on Lenny's short and sweet post about the California fires.

Well, according to Mike Davis, capitalism (in the shape of rampant development) was there already... See the wonderfully titled "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" in The Ecology of Fear, which contrasts the handling of the tenement fires in LA (119 deaths, 1947-1993) with that of the Malibu fires (16 deaths between 1930 and 1996), concluding that whilst the first could be prevented if it weren't for systematic (class) racism, when it comes to over-subsidized regions such as Malibu, "periodic firestorms of this magnitude are inevitable as long as residential development is tolerated in the fire ecology of the Santa Monicas" (p. 99)
savonarola Homepage 24 Oct, 22:31 #
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Speaking as someone breathing the foul orange stuff overhead and wiping the ash off my car, I can tell you that fire prevention and land management have been underfunded by the Bush Administration even though it is cheaper than fighting wildfires. And, of course, the National Guard and its equipment is in Iraq.

The whole point in my mind is the privatization of government services, especially the military, to undermine any sense of community or obligation to one's neighbors, country, environment, etc. or the benefits of collective action. By atomizing and decoupling agencies and people from their joined sense of destiny, Constitution, whatever, the elites think they can undermine organizing or at least using a totally privatized army to turn on protesters.
Madame X 24 Oct, 23:30 #
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San Diego is not New Orleans

New Orleans is one of the poorest major metropolitan areas in the US, thus rendering it an excellent candidate for the expulsion of a lot of poor people for redevelopment after a catastrophe, and the city's affordable housing was ideally situated for destruction in the event of a hurricane

conversely, San Diego is one of the wealthiest metropolitan areas in the US, and it happened by design, as Mike Davis and others explained in Under the Perfect Sun

from the city's inception in its modern form at the turn of the century, city planning and economic development was driven by a desire to keep out semi-skilled workers susceptible to initially, radical activism, and later, unionization, and people of color (both Latinos and African Americans)

according to Davis, for much of the 20th Century, San Diego had a lower percentage of Latinos than that statewide average even though it was right across the border from Mexico

such people, as was the case during the New Deal, were considered the cause of "blight", and good government progressive types pushed planning policies that essentially created middle and upper middle income neighborhoods

city leaders consciously sought military facilities as an alternative to smokestack industries, and FDR graciously obliged during World War II

by the 1960s and 1970s, San Diego moved towards the economic model of development that we see now everywhere: suburban projects geared towards, first, middle income, and then, upper middle income people, with hostility towards any effort to meet the social needs of anyone else, and a willingness to cater to a desire for social exclusion on racial and class grounds, consistent with the city's history

San Diego, at least until recent waves of immigration, was a New South city within the boundaries of California

I could go on, but the bottom line is that San Diego is one of the places where the current model of capitalist transformation urban environments and their surrounding areas was pioneered, it influenced what subsequently transpired in New Orleans
hence, given that many of the victims of the fire lost homes in some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the US, what we are going to see in San Diego is the contrast between how the needs of predominately white, older, upper middle income people are satisfied with the greatest solicitude by the state and federal government, while the poor people of New Orleans still find themselves spread around the county in conditions of isolation
Richard Estes | Homepage | 25 Oct, 18:24 | #

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There's even some talk that Blackwater started the San Diego fire as residents had opposed the building of a Blackwater military base on some ecologically delicate land. Given what we've seen from these people and their mentors, I find such suspicion highly understandable.
Madame X | 25 Oct, 18:25 | #

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Now the talk on Fox is: Alqueada did it.
Mooser | Homepage | 26 Oct, 03:05 | #

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Now the talk on Fox is: Alqueada did it.
Mooser

Turks, Jews, Albanians, anarchists, terrorists, and even left-reformists and ecologists caused the summer fires here in Greece - according to the Greek media and some politicians.
anticapitalista | 26 Oct, 12:45 | #