A letter to our readers Reparations: The Value of White Privilege Highly Suspicious Christian Soldiers Neighborhood Watch in Havana Binges and Wars Over Wall Street

The grand scope of the – literal – American reconstruction after World War Two was designed to meet a howling white demand: affordable housing and racial segregation. To achieve this, the national landscape would have to be reconfigured. The suburbs were born, and the core cities were brought near to death.

Now, how many billions in compensation is that crime worth? Don’t bother with your calculator – the criminal enterprise is ongoing.

Suspicious minds

There is a disorienting disconnect between the fearsome technology of the U.S. military and the archaic crudeness of its Commander-in-Chief. George Bush threatens laser-death vengeance in every corner of a wired world, then slouches around like some good ol’ boy racist provocateur back here on the ranch. His TIPS program is too racially brazen for even the sheep farmers in Congress to sanction. “Y’all see any ‘spicious characters actin’ funny and such, y’all call somebody, hear?”

Code words ain’t code when they’re that blatant.

It would truly require a national mobilization to involve one out of every 24 Americans in the Justice Department’s proposed Terrorism Information and Prevention System. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s millions of volunteers would need proper indoctrination as to what is, and what is not, suspicious. For example, Bible-thumping in the middle of the night is normal. Ashcroft does that all the time.

All white Christians are normal, including those who belong to the World Church of the Creator. That’s the affiliation of the female half of a Boston couple, charged with planning to bomb, assassinate and otherwise provoke a race war that “would lead to an all-white Aryan nation,” according to prosecutors. The church has a website, in which it piously proclaims to the victims of the World Trade Center attack, “Our condolences are extended to the families of those killed and to those injured who are of our White Race.”

Good, Christian folk. Nothing suspicious about them.

The male Aryan belongs to the White Order of Thule, which must not be suspicious, since we’ve never seen the organization listed on any Homeland Security Terror Alert. We assume there is no Black Order of Thule – because that would be highly suspicious.

The Christian couple’s neighbor, 22 year-old Harvard student Kathy McGaffigan, told reporters that she knew her friends were planning to build a bomb, but didn’t want to pry.

“I was intimidated,” she said. “Leo just got out of jail, and Erica was moving here on a whim. I didn’t want to interrupt anything.”

America. It’s all about learning to fit in and get along.

Watching out for the neighborhood

A newspaper columnist who believes himself to be an open-minded, liberal kind of guy stole a sneer at the TIPS idea by comparing it to pervasive spying in the Countries Formerly Known As Communist, and to the very much alive and socialist republic, Cuba.

Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, or CDRs, are encouraged to operate in every Cuban neighborhood. I met with groups of CDR activists in both Havana and Santiago-de-Cuba, during a 1985 visit to the island, and was impressed with their… ordinariness.

With nests of terrorists living with impunity just across the water in Miami, constantly threatening to resume the bombings and sabotage of their homeland that were weekly events throughout the Sixties and Seventies, you’d think the CDR people would have been full of diatribes against the U.S. Instead, these middle aged busy-bodies, most of them women with grandchildren, talked constantly about sneaky youngsters who they suspected of being marijuana smokers, various good-for-nothings who didn’t get up and go to work like they should, and men who like young girls.

Since I am nobody’s dupe, I confronted the do-gooders: You’re really a Neighborhood Watch, aren’t you, I challenged. Deflated and defeated, they confessed: Yes, we watch the neighborhood. That’s what we do. All the time.

Sisterly solidarity

The Women’s wing of the Pan African Liberation Organization is pulling together “women’s organizations and individuals that oppose the U.S. Blockade against Cuba.” Their press release states, “PAWC believes that the women and children of Cuba are most affected by the illegal Blockade established by the U.S. in 1962.”

The sisters are building toward an international display of solidarity on July 26 of next year, with “protests, press conferences and rallies to take place at U.S. Embassies all over the world.”

The way things are going, it will be difficult to get near a U.S. embassy anywhere on the globe in 2003. Enemies, once mostly imagined, are certain to proliferate exponentially in the face of America’s world-wide deployment of forces. Bush is like a mean drunk in a bar; before the night is out, everybody wants to kick his ass. Unfortunately, his butt is attached to our own.

Binging other people’s lives away

The real crisis – the one that shakes up the corporations that run the newspapers – is the crisis of confidence that threatens to cripple crony capitalism. Little George Bush is pure crony, his only function within the system. Since he has never run a company, Bush has never had to learn the meaning of malfeasance, which is why he pronounces it “malf-ance.” And, since he has grown rich after already being born rich without doing anything to earn even one dollar, the current economic trouble seems to Bush like the after-effects of a party: