This is why the Vatican squashed the Liberation Theology movement in Central America that made the mistake of takings Christ’s teaching about clothing the naked and feeding the poor seriously through its emphasis on Democratic Socialism.

The Sandinistas of Nicaragua, with their blend of Marxism and Christianity, were anathema to successive American administrations until they were finally crushed by Reagan’s Iran-Contra initiative, which returned “God” to his heaven and made the world safe for democracy.

Now, another Christian with dirty fingernails has appeared, Filipino minister Goel Bagundol who works in the Philippine’s Mindanao province with its concentration of the nation’s Muslims.

He believes that it is a Christian’s mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

And he has raised this to an art form.

Recently, three young girls were taken from the families to begin a life of prostitution, with the rapes and beatings that would have been an integral part of their vocational training.

Bagundol took his life into his hands, plunged into the back alleys of Manila to rescue the girls and returned them to their families.

For this, and other activities in behalf of the poor, the government has branded him a Communist, and he has received numerous death threats. Given that there have been 900 extrajudicial killings in the Philippines over the past seven years, the threats are real. There have been 200 disappearances, as well. None of these have been solved.

Bagundol is a member of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP). Sixteen of his fellow pastors have been murdered.

He responds to the death threats with cheerful good humor. In his church, there is a wall with photographs of the murdered and disappeared. With a laugh, he muses that next year his photograph might join the others.

His courage in the face of death is an integral part of his faith.

The Muslims of Mindanao have never taken kindly to foreign rule. When the Spanish invaded the Philippines in the sixteenth century, they conquered the northern end of the archipelago and converted the unsuspecting natives to Roman Catholicism, but they couldn’t touch the Muslims of Mindanao who outfought them.

When America took over the islands after the Spanish-American War, the Muslims nearly fought the Americans to a draw, as well. Then, in 1911, General John L. Hansen Jr. decided to apply some American ingenuity to the problem.

He knew Muslims believed that if a pig contaminated them, they would go straight to Hell. So, he took eight Muslim prisoners and sentenced seven of them to be shot. The eighth was to be a witness.

First, he had the seven dig their own graves. Then he tied them to stakes without blindfolds. Before their eyes, he slaughtered a pig and smeared their bodies and clothing with its blood. Then he had the big cut into seven pieces with a piece dropped into each open grave.

According to eyewitnesses, the prisoners all went “blue/black with terror, screaming for Allah to save them,” while the handcuffed eighth prisoner looked on.

Leonard left them like that until sundown when had had them shot and buried with their part of the pig.

The eighth prisoner was released. The story of the American’s methodology for executing Muslims spread rapidly, and the war ended.

(There is no doubt at least one clerk in the War Department bemoaned the loss of a good pig.)

The respite was temporary.

Since the Philippines achieved independence, the Muslims of Mindanao have fought for their independence, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not.

However, since 9/11, this struggle has taken on a new twist with the advent of our Global War on Terror, known to some as the Eternal War of the Empty Policy.

The GWOT has led to the emergence of an unusual natural phenomenon: wherever there is a plot of land that contains a valuable resource beneath its surface, terrorists suddenly sprout.

The hills of Mindanao contain gold and other minerals that have caught they eyes of large mining firms. Nothing mucks up a good mine like an indigenous people occupying the land. So it was that Muslims struggling for independence became terrorists.

As a part of our War on Terror, which is really a War on Resources, America started providing the Philippine government with military aid and technical assistance to clear the land for the mining companies (or to facilitate economic development, as it is euphemistically known.)

We have a lot of expertise in this area, though George Armstrong Custer did hit a slight bump in the road when he tried to clear the Black Hills of Native Americans to make way for gold and silver mining. But in the end, civilization prevailed.

It is in this hothouse of conflict and oppression Bagundol works. He doesn’t care about people’s religion; he only cares about their needs. He raises money to feed the malnourished and to provide tribal people with water buffalo to help with their farming. He provides books for the area’s elementary schools and arranges for scholarships to send student to high school, an opportunity normally denied them.

And as the war between the Philippine government and the newly-minted Muslim terrorists ravages the land, he is there to provide comfort, assistance and, where needed, sanctuary.

For this, he is called a Communist.

For this, he lives under a constant threat of death.

All for an annual salary of $1,600 (US).

Now we know. Simply conflate immigration and environmental degradation. At least this is the approach taken a half-page ad in last week’s New York Times.

The reason our pristine forests and bucolic farmland is being torn up to build even more shopping malls is because of all those Mexicans pouring over our borders. That’s why, according to the ad, the bulldozer is America’s bestselling vehicle.

This takes a load off my mind because I’d always thought that all this building was the creation of greedy developers who saw nature as a commodity to be exploited. I should have known the Latinos were to blame.

The ad doesn’t give us an exact ratio of how many “illegals” have to slip into the country before another mall is put up, but given the number behemoths that are cropping up, there must be a solid stream going over our walls faster than we can build them.

The ad was paid for by “America’s Leadership Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Planning.” The “team” is a consortium of five organizations that care deeply about preserving the purity of America’s wilderness.

To support their arguments, one of the organizations, Numbers USA juggles the numbers to tell us that from 1776-1976 the influx of immigrants to the United States averaged 250,000 a year. Since 1990, the group tells us, the number has jumped to 1.8 million immigrants, annually. (Who knows what happened to the 1977-1989 period. Maybe it diluted the average.

This is quite a statistical accomplishment since immigration data only goes back to 1821. I assume the 250,000 annual average cited by the group includes the entire range of immigration from the 143,439 that immigrated in the 1821-30 decade to the 8,795,386 that showed up in the 1901-10 decade.

It’s nice to see bigotry going upscale. For too long it has been monopolized by beer-swilling rednecks. I’m sure the addition of the latte-sipping demographic will give it some well-needed class. Intolerance flourishes when spoken in the measured and reasoned tones of the pampered and educated class.

Now, I admit to having a suspicious nature, and for some reason it has flourished in the last eight years. But I kind of, sort of, wonder if the anti-Latino bigotry that is being spewed by our political leaders might not have something to do with the leftward movement of our Latin American neighbors. Just think of the contagions they could bring over the border with them: the Bolivarian Revolution, liberation theology and the writings of Subcomandante Marcos. It’s enough to give a corporatist nightmares.

But hell, if I keep thinking like that, I’ll end up believing that every new mall represents 186,375 new Latinos who have slipped across our border.

Every presidential campaign is the same. The public looks for a savior to rise from the tomb that is the American political system, and every four years its hopes are dashed. The only thing to rise from the tomb is the stale smell of cancelled checks, as Americans continue to yearn for a Prince Charming who will quell the nagging voice that tells them all is not well in America.

The qualities this prince (or princess) must have are charisma and a vision (any vision will do). Above all, he/she must be a manicured mannequin, smooth of voice and skin, well coiffured as she/he gives the impression that he/she “feels our pain” and is prepared to soothe it with his healing balm, even though the balm’s recipe is a proprietary secret, but trust him, we’ll feel nothing.

As for me, I am looking for an overweight candidate ugly as sin with an acne-scarred face, who speaks with a lisp and rather than feeling my pain is ready to kick some ass to alleviate it.

But alas, we are well into the 2008 beauty contest and the toxic fog of vapid platitudes is as thick as ever.

But this year, something has changed. Slowly the public is beginning to realize that America’s greatest shame is her government, so a few wisps of fresh air have managed to break through the fog.

There was Ron Paul turning Rudy Giuliani spastic by pointing out that, “If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and attack us because we’re over there. I mean, what would we think if we were-if other foreign countries were doing that to us?”

Then there was John Edwards breathing some fresh air into the campaign when he stated the obvious:

The war on terror is a slogan designed only for politics, not a strategy to make America safe. It is a bumper stick, not a plan. It has damaged our alliances and weakened our standing in the world. As a political “frame” it’s been used to justify everything from the Iraq War to Guantanamo to illegal spying on the American people. It’s even been used by the White House as a partisan weapon to bludgeon their political opponents. Whether by manipulating the threat levels leading up to elections or by deeming opponents “weak on terror,” they have shown no hesitation whatsoever about using fear to divide.

How refreshing; it’s such a pity that both candidates have problems.

Ron Paul is a breath of fresh air with warts. He has run on the Libertarian ticket, is a little too attractive to racist organizations for my taste. He is also opposed to federal funding of the social safety net because he advocates shrinking the federal government.

Edwards’s biggest liability is he might win the Democratic nomination. If this happened, party consultants would descend on him like flies on a carcass, and before you could say “neoliberalism” he’d be touting the same party line that has led the Democrats to defeat in the last two elections.

Paul is a great Kamikaze candidate, one who will go down in flames for speaking the truth. Edwards, if elected, could never live up to his pre-nomination rhetoric.

There has been some talk about a third party, followed by the qualifier that there has never been a successful third party in our country’s history. However, the qualifier fails to understand that America is at a unique point in her history. For all practical purposes, we are now a one-party country, and that party is the Corporatist Party made up of two factions—hi Republicans and lo-Republicans. Instead of elections, we have shoving matches between Alpha pigs to see who gets first crack at the feeding trough.

So, what this country needs is not a third party but a second party, and in truth we already have one that is a dormant seed lurking in the American soul waiting for the right conditions to blossom. This party is an integral part of the American psyche, a psyche quite content to drift as long as all things are equal. We have seen this party before. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the Populist/Progressive Party. In the 1930s, it was the New Deal. The problem is that when the crisis is over, the party goes dormant again. With the passage of time, the vermin who caused the original crisis crawl out of their holes and begin to gnaw at the repairs the party made to the system.

However, let life shift out of balance, let the public discover that the privileged classes are screwing them, and this party will reawaken with a roar and becomes a party that does not reason but demands, does not speak in polite, measured tones but shouts, it’s not quiet but loud. Finally, it is a party whose platform swims upstream of the conventional wisdom that has long clogged the arteries of the Beltway crowd. For now, we will simply call it the Second Party.

This Second Party is our only viable alternative because the various factions and splinter groups that make up America’s political scene all have issues. Liberals are embryonic Neocons in denial while progressives spend too much time arguing that progressives must formulate a position on (fill in the blank). Neocons are simply Pollyannas with PMS.

So, bear with me as I create a fantasy platform for America’s Second Party.

Public Financing of Elections

Capitalism is dead; it has been dead for over a century, done in by corporatism. Capitalism morphs into corporatism when it becomes addicted to the pathological pursuit of growth. As one sage put it, a belief in infinite growth in a finite world is the doctrine of a cancer cell.

The differences between the two are striking. Owners ran capitalism while the CEOs who run corporatist entities are employees. Capitalism accepted risk while corporatism eliminates risk by fair means or foul. Small businesses made up capitalism while corporatism chokes on its elephantine conglomerates. Capitalism’s relationship with government always swung between conflict and conciliation. Corporatism has absorbed the state, and the firewall between the two is no more. So we are stuck with a Corporatist State managed by a Corporatist Party.

The rise of the Corporatist Party took place because elections are so expensive they need corporate contributions to survive. And a campaign contribution is a polite way of saying “bribe.” If you take the king’s money, you work for the king. We will only break this parasitical relationship if we excise the corporate money by publicly financing elections.

A component of these publicly financed campaigns would be an FCC requirement that free airtime be given to qualified candidates. These are public airways for the people’s business, and an election is as about people-business as you can get. While we’re at it, let’s bring back the equal-time rule and get the partisan loudmouths off the air, those on the left as well as the right.

However, publicly financed elections will never happen unless we…

Put the Corporations back on the Leash

To paraphrase Michael Ledeen, every fifty or sixty years the American public has to grab big business by the throat, slam it against a wall and teach it some manners.

Guess what?

It’s time!

Ronald Regan introduced America to what he called “deregulation.” In truth, the term is a misnomer. Business was not deregulated; it simply traded a benign regulator, the government, for a brutal regulator, the marketplace. Under the rules the market regulator plays by, if you screw up, you lose. In theory…except…

…in 1984, the Continental Illinois National Bank of Chicago made a few too many bad loans and went under. It was the largest bank failure in the history of the FDIC.

It was simply too large to be allowed to fail.

So, the government shoveled out two billion dollars of our tax money to bail the bank out, and the FDIC promised to reimburse out everyone regardless of the size of their deposit.

And it was bye-bye to the invisible hand of the market—as long as you’re big enough.

This lesson was not lost on the Savings & Loan industry that proceeded to go belly up in 1987. Once again, we had a business that was simply too big to abandon to the invisible hand of the market. The Corporatist Party was quick to create Resolution Trust Corp, which supplied fifty billion dollars to the bail the fools out.

Now we have the subprime mortgage market ready to hold out its hand for some corporate welfare.

Sorry folks, but if my tax dollars are going to be used to bail out corporate ineptitude, I want some major oversight.

In spite of this, our leaders continue to assure us that the Invisible Hand of the Market will make everything just fine in the end. All we have to do is believe in it as we lose our jobs and our homes.

For those wishing to visualize the Invisible Hand of the Market, execute the following exercise: Place your elbow on a table with your forearm perpendicular to the surface; make a fist; now, extend your middle finger heavenward.

There you have it, the Invisible Hand of the Market.

So how should we relate to our corporations? Let me give you an example. I discovered a long time ago that I couldn’t drive nails with my forehead. Not only is it painful, but it’s downright inefficient. To drive nails I need a hammer. However, this doesn’t mean I worship the goddamn thing and build my entire life around it to the exclusion of all else. No, when I have to drive a nail, I take the hammer out of the toolbox, and when the nail is driven, I put it back. It’s a tool, no more.

Likewise, a corporation is a tool and nothing more. I expect it to put food on my table, a roof over my head and clothing on my back at a reasonable price. When it’s done that, it can return to its corner and sit quietly until I need it again.

So, what do we do with the darlings? A good place to start would be a constitutional amendment stripping corporations of their fictive personhood. And it is a fiction. The question of corporate personhood came before the Supreme Court in Southern Pacific Railroad vs.. Santa Clara County. The court never explicitly stated that a corporation was a person. That statement was made in a header, written by a court clerk that summarized the case. But that was enough to make it a precedent.

Once stripped of their personhood, corporations would no longer have any rights, only privileges granted by their charters, which could be revoked if they misbehaved. As it stands, the only rights corporations have are the ones they’ve bought and paid for—which is all of them, plus some.

Stripping corporations of their personhood is in line with the rightwing Doctrine of Personal Responsibility, which is the rationale for privatizing Social Security and shredding our social safety net. Why should we allow corporate executives to have their safety net while they take away ours? Personal responsibility is an equal opportunity ideal.

As long as they are considered persons, corporations would be able to challenge the public funding of elections by claiming that it infringed on their freedom of speech. However, if all they .have are privileges, then their freedom of speech is the same as a slug’s.

Terminate the Cold War and its Clones

Every time I look at the Pentagon, I see what could well be the world’s greatest indoor shopping mall. It has the square footage, it has the parking and it has a War Room that would make an awesome video game center.

It’s time we admit that the Department of Defense is a white elephant that is bleeding America dry. The Cold War is over; the Global War on Terror should be renamed the Eternal War of the Empty Policy. We no long need an engorged military establishment. All of the chatter about national security is code for spending taxpayer money to protect corporate interests overseas, just so the corporations can move their headquarters offshore so they don’t have to pay us back for protecting their sorry asses.

As for terrorism, it is not something a nation declares war on, it is a crime best handled by police and intelligence services. It is instructive to compare the 1993 World Trade Center bombing with 9/11. The only difference between the two is that 9/11 succeeded in bringing down the twin towers. The 1993 conspirators thought they would bring them down by placing their vanload of explosives against the north wall of the South Tower. It didn’t work.

What is interesting about this comparison is that all of the 1993 perpetrators were arrested, indicted and convicted without the benefit of a Patriot Act, a Military Commissions Act, torture, black holes or the suspension of habeas corpus. Yet after 9/11, even with all of the above, not one goddamn individual has even been convicted for their part in 9/11, and we are not even bothering to look for Osama anymore.

The most effective anti-terror weapon in existence is “playing nice” overseas. I realize this might shave a point or two off corporate profits, but this is a small price to pay for our security. As for now, I refuse to take seriously any politician who shills the threat of terrorism unless he first dons a fire-resistant jump suit and a crash helmet before getting behind the wheel of his car. The probability of his being whacked in an automobile accident is far greater than being whacked in a terrorist attack.

Some might argue we need a massive military establishment to control the world’s oil supply. This is nonsense. Amateurs discuss strategy while professionals sweat logistics. Looking at a globe, it becomes apparent that maintaining the supply line necessary to “control” the Middle East would be a Herculean task for the United States compared to the relatively short supply lines China, India, Russia or the EU would have to maintain. The bottom line is that it is a hell of a lot cheaper to fly a trade delegation over to the Middle East to cut the best deal it can, as in free enterprise. And it would burn a hell of a lot less fuel in the process. If we were to divert the billions we are wasting to control a vanishing resource, we would be able to develop alternatives that would reduce or eliminate our dependency on foreign oil.

There is an old saying that if you walk ten miles into the woods, you have to walk ten miles out of the woods. An immediate dismantling of the military-industrial complex would be economically traumatic. For a start, we could send the Pentagon to the end of the line when public money is handed out, and dump the pipedream known as the Starwars defense system. God knows we could use these resources to repair our frayed social safety net, although to do so would pop some Corporatist blood vessels since their game plan is to use the military-industrial complex to drain the treasury until we are forced to dispose of our safety net all together.

The Neocons tell us we are the world’s sole superpower. We are not; Iraq has proven that. We simply have more military hardware than anyone else in the world. The problem is that most of it is useless for the type of wars we have faced since Vietnam (unless we are kicking the ass of a postage-stamp size country).

The Neocons are mired in the nineteenth century and continue to believe that foreign policy is simply a chess game writ large. Unfortunately, the rules of the game have changed over the years. The lowly pawn now carries a Kalashnikov and can move with the same impunity as the queen. The pawn can also leave the board, hide behind the game box and blow away the king and queen as they pass.

The Neocons also cling to a belief in a Great Chain of Being that begins with the simple amoeba and ends in the heavens with God the Father Almighty. And tucked into God’s bellybutton, above all of creation, is the white male of Northern European descent before whom all lesser life forms are expected to bow.

What the Neocons call America’s destiny is nothing more than blind momentum driven by ego, greed and stupidity.

So, What do We Do?

For our Second Party to flourish, it must appeal to all sectors of society. It must appeal to the redneck swilling beer in his cabin, to the urban black with his doo rag, the Hispanic day worker standing by the curb hoping to get enough work to put food on his family’s table. It must appeal to the soccer mom, the NASCAR dad, the Hello Kitty™ toddler, and the motorcycle gangs of America.

This means only one thing—we’ve got to bring God on board. God’s downside, of course, is organized religion. God dies when the ego farts and the soul thinks the Breath of the Spirit is upon it. Thus is a dogma born, thus is a church born, and thus do the bodies begin to pile up.

The God of the Bible is a shape shifter, a multi-facet complexity of contradictions that can mean just about anything to anyone. To paraphrase the late constitutional scholar John P. Roche, the first precept of biblical interpretation is whose ox was gored. Biblical interpretation is always selective. To insist on the inerrancy of the Bible is to invite a schizophrenic episode.

That being said, let’s select.

The God of our party is the God who would not hesitate to destabilize a predatory economic system. When the Egyptians reduced the Israelites to units of productivity, God zapped them, big time. When Jesus trashed the temple, he went after the bean counters.

One of the ironies of the Religious Right is their efforts to place the Ten Commandments in public buildings. Anyone bothering to sit down and actually read them would discover that the Commandments are virulently anti-capitalist and anti-corporatist. The first three warn us against displacing God with materialism, a real blow to consumerism. The remainder are rules for communal living as opposed to a world grounded in Social Darwinism.

Basically, the Commandments tell us, God first, don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie and don’t exploit. How in the hell is a country supposed to build a corporatist world empire with commandments like that hanging around its neck.

Because of God’s radical nature, organized religion expends a great deal of effort to geld Him and reduce Him to a secularized idol whose sole function is to protect the status quo.

But, when religion takes a positive turn, it is a powerful force for good because faith brings to the political arena a poetic truth that can move mountains. Poetic truth is a greater force than objective truth. Martin Luther King taught us that this poetry could shake the status quo to its core. Only a poetic spirituality can neutralize the bile that is flooding the country, much of it released in the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

If there is no poetry, if there is no music, if there are no troubadours, no hymns, no songs of protest or songs of aspiration and hope, you end up with a sterile party whose idea of a good time is either to create a position paper or to run an attack ad. Poetry transcends both of them.

Religion can be a positive force only if it is grounded in the Beatitudes and not Leviticus. This means we are talking about a faith based on Judeo-Christian love. Now, 1967’s Summer of Love gave love a black eye because people came to associate it with a good-looking creature skipping through La-La Land with a beatific smile on her face. In reality, Judeo-Christian love means descending into the deepest pit of Hell and loving every low-life son of a bitch one sees there even though one’s knee-jerk reaction is to tear their frigging throats out!

Solidarity, hell! I may despise the bastard who lives down the street, but I’ll damn well demand that he be treated fairly, that he have food on his table, clothing on his back, a roof over his head, and that he be paid a living wage so he can raise a family without having to work three jobs.

It’s a Nice Dream!

The truth be told, all of the above is as utopian as it is delusional…

…today.

However, we must be grateful to our Neocon brethren for the valuable lesson they have taught us: today’s fringe is tomorrow’s mainstream. If their delusions can go public, ours stand a damn good chance of doing the same.

Something is working in our favor.

For the first time since the 1920s, Wall Street is once again a sheltered workshop for financial retards. Our wonder boys are up to their asses in hedge funds and esoteric financial instruments only a handful of people understand, while Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) are spread through the system, carrying within them tumors of subprime mortgages. However, no one knows where the tumors are, how they have metastasized. Both publicly and privately, we are a half step away from the nearest debtors’ prison as we trash our treasury and our children’s legacy through ill-conceived foreign adventures and draconian tax cuts.

That is only one of the problems we face. There is a bigger crisis looming, one so pervasive it’s rarely acknowledged. We hear a lot about the dot.com bubble and the housing bubble. But we hear nothing about the fact that since Dec. 7, 1941, our economy has been propped up by a War Bubble, and this bubble is holding us captive. Some have suggested that the Great Depression never ended but is still waiting in the wings for the War Bubble to pop.

This bubble forces us to pursue a policy of confrontation and armed intervention just to keep it afloat. Were it to pop, the monster waiting in the wings would enter from stage left and draw the curtain.

In short, the system is ready to collapse, and when it does, America will finally realize that CEOs should not be allowed to leave home without adult supervision. In the chaos, confusion and pain of the collapse, our Second Party will stand a chance of being reborn.

Killing Time

So what do we do in the meantime?

Imagine, if you would, a balance scale. On one tray sits a bowling ball, on the other an empty bucket. Naturally, the bowling ball controls the scale. One day, a man sits down next to the scale and starts pitching B-Bs into the bucket. Day after day, he pitches one B-B at a time. Nothing happens, but still he keeps pitching, day after day. Then one day, the scale shifts, the bowling ball is lifted a fraction of an inch off the ground. After many more days of pitching B-Bs, the bucket is full and the bowling ball hangs in the air.

So all we can do in the interim is pitch B-Bs, throw darts, and fight our battles, some of which we’ll win and some of which we’ll lose. And we must remember that all power, no matter how entrenched and unbeatable it may seem, carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. For once power reaches a certain level, it comes to believe itself to be invincible, and that is when it oversteps and in doing so trips, stumbles and falls.

So we wait, and pitch B-Bs. And on every B-B is engraved the Second Party’s mantra: The Emperor is Buck-Assed Naked.