Hattie's Web

Watch out, Canada

The Canadians are going to lose postal service delivery in towns and cities. This is an attack on the public and public unions. It is highly significant bellwether, indicating the malicious intent of Harper and his conservatives, because mail delivery to one's home is a very much taken for granted right and a sign of a civilized and useful public sector. It's a convenience that taxpayers expect and pay for. What kind of assets will Harper and friends sell off, as they reduce services?

With most of the wealth in Canada coming from extractive industries and creating hugely wealthy people with no social conscience,  and large amounts of Canadian assets being sold off, ordinary Canadians are in danger of losing their social welfare benefits. Attacking the postal service sends a strong signal that other public goods will be eliminated or sold off. What's next?  The schools, public libraries, the universities, universal Medicare, roads and bridges: there is so much to take away or sell off, and I don't know if Canadians can mount sufficient opposition to keep from having virtually every government service privatized and sold off to speculators. They are not as numerous or diverse as we are, and, aside from Quebec separatists, not really geared for fighting.  Thus they could be seen as a soft target. This is really really bad news. 

Slogging along, getting it done

My granddaughters want to do claywork, so I'm cleaning things out now and setting up. It is a heavenly day here, with fresh trades and temperature in the low 70's. Perfect for working or idling, depending.

Terry figured out how to transfer documents from my e-mail to my computer, so I'll be getting the League of Women Voters newsletter out on time!  How would I manage without my handy tech person in the office next door?

Fascinating, isn't it, that the Pope is Time Magazine's  man of the year. Runner up was Snowden.  It is extraordinary that the Pope would directly critique capitalism as the cause of our present woes. 

Now that Mandela's death has focused attention on South Africa, there is plenty to learn. Amy Goodman did a fascinating interview on Democracy Now today with Ronnie Kasrils,  a white man who was an early member of ANC. He describes his first meeting with Mandela when he himself was a young person, only age 23, the guerrilla warfare he participated in, and other matters. He says that the amount of white resistance to apartheid was minuscule: some Brits from working class activist backgrounds, Communists like himself as he was then, Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and so on. Mainstream White South Africans did not participate in freedom movements, and it's important to understand that. They really had little to do with defeating the apartheid regime.

Kasrils mentions, among the inspirations for the ANC, the sit-ins in the Southern U.S.A. and the idea of passive resistance. But they were not totally passive. They engaged in covert activities: sabotage and so on.

Well, what were they supposed to do?  That was strategically the best way to win. And win they did, over powerful enemies.

This is the entire program which has a news rundown at the beginning, followed by the long interview with Ronnie Kasrils .

 

There is a lot of hope in all this. I thought  Kasrils  was a totally engaging person and was fascinated by his "testimony." Oddly, he is exactly my age! What is this? Is that we remember WW II, however faintly? That our parents told us about times when things were different? I don't know.

Our lights are going out, one by one. A  Nation discussion group member died yesterday, of a massive stroke, and it's sad. Luckily he had the right directives in place, and when it was clear that he had sustained massive brain damage, they pulled the plug and saved him all that medical torture. He was a physician, so he and his family were smart enough to understand how to deal with end of life issues.  I believe he was around my age. 

I spent a couple of days in a funk last week because an old friend from the Swiss days died recently, the kind of person you would imagine to be immortal. Not just because of her general good health but because she was so important to everyone around her.

Yep. We are on our way out, the Depression babies.  I hope the treatment I'm getting now for my heart condition will give me a few more years. We live in the healthiest state in the nation, according to some evaluations.

More: I'm thinking about the "Faustian bargain" Mandela made, as Kasrils describes it, to capitulate to neo-liberal corporatism rather than to risk a bloody revolution in South Africa. 

More in the center of things than you think...

Jeremy Scahill discusses the new news organization that he is joining. He talks about "the war on journalism," taking place everywhere in the world, not just here. Journalists are being imprisoned and murdered. So far, journalism is "only" being covertly undermined in this country (as far as we know).

As he points out, the Obama administration would like all news and commentary to be like MSNBC. Yes. We can give ourselves points for how enlightened we are compared to the know-nothing masses and the Tea-Partiers. Which we are, of course, but this gets us nowhere.  (Cue laughter)

 

NSA is everywhere in Hawaii. It's no secret to us who live here. Nice work if you can get it.  The whole mentality is that it does not really matter whether what you do is worthwhile, moral, whatever. Everything is a scam anyway, right? Nobody really has ideals. And it pays very well and you can have a big fancy house. It was this state of affairs that set Snowden off, I'll bet. How could a person doing that work regard himself as leading a life worth living?  It isn't even glamorous, that kind of spying.

Pierre Omdyar, founder of eBay, owner of the blog, Honolulu Civil Beat  and Hawaii resident, figures importantly in a new journalism endeavor that Scahill has joined.  Others who have signed on are Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.  Although he is a winner in the economic scheme of things, Omdyar is coming down on the side of transparency. He is willing to finance tough and truthful journalists like Scahill.

This is class warfare: most of the rich against the rest of us. The farther up the class scale people get, the more secretive they become, because they know that knowledge is power. It takes a sponsor, someone like Omdyar,  with very deep pockets, to stand up to rich media moguls.

So whenever tempted not to look at the facts, the truth, it's a good idea to ask oneself, "Why am I afraid to look at this? How can I claim to be happy about a state of affairs where I am not in possession of the truth, or where I am denying the truth? "

Yes, I cultivate my orchids and my garden in general, but this does not mean I live in la-la land. I've eyeballed Scahill in person, so I know he's real. He is a very brave person, who actually saved a women from drowning, as I observed on a Nation Cruise. He's a good man, and a caring man. You know, the kind of man Bush pretended to be.

I read Dirty Wars the book and have the DVD of the same name. Can't quite bring myself to watch it yet. It's easier for me to deal with tough subjects in print.

I already give money to Democracy Now, and I will now subscribe to Honolulu Civil Beat, too.  The print papers are not worth bothering with.

 

Orchids in the early a.m.

Happy Monday!

Above is a cheerful tune to get your week started right.  Don't forget the weed! Thanks for sending this, Debby, old friend! The Idaho gal in the song does not in the least describe my nieces who live in Idaho, however.  Our Monday started with this lovely rainbow. How glad we are not to be in the midst of the Mainland storms and bitter cold.

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I'm still in a state of disbelief that Big Island Mayor Billy Kenoi signed the anti- GMO bill into law. One thing that means is that he is not in the pocket of Monsato. We should all be grateful to the activists who convinced the Council and the Mayor to listen to the people on this issue.

Reflections on public image of President and family:  public figures lose privacy protection that ordinary citizens have.  The President has taken measures to protect his family from unwanted press intrusions and especially candid photographs or videos that could be used to criticize or belittle them.

The recent photo-op mini-catastrophe at The White House is sad, and I do think it was low and mean to post a picture of a little girl falling over a boy's walker and being comforted by Michelle Obama.

I'm still not in agreement, though, with Maya Saetoro Ng's request that I take down a You Tube video of her dancing at an award ceremony for her here. This seemed fun and harmless to me, but controlling the public image of her as a family member of Obama was important, she felt. As she told the woman who phoned me with the request to take the video down, there are so many people ready to attack her brother that she feels she has to be very careful.  So I complied, but not willingly.

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My friend Mary has spent the last three years learning to be a skilled potter. I have acquired two of her pieces that I am very happy with. She has been selling a lot of her work this holiday season. She went back to college and is taking ceramics classes. Her planned trip to Italy to attend a master class fell through, because she broke her leg. I hope she can get there next year.

This is a small pot, about 4 1/2 inches wide. She's thinking of doing larger scale work next.

I, however, will always be an amateur, making orchid pots and little plates and pinch pots and odds and ends. This piece I did looks nice.

I do love funky work, such as my friend Merle does. Our teacher loves it too. Merle's an artist with a totally wild and original imagination. 

 

We seniors in the Kamana Senior Center pottery class are pretty cool!

Have a nice week, everyone.

Saturday tweets

A new feature of this blog.

colson whitehead ‏@colsonwhitehead 2h

Sometimes I look back on the mistakes I've made and realize they all stem from the same thing: my bad decisions.

Joyce Carol Oates ‏@JoyceCarolOates 2h

Cherie Picks: "Sleeping Through History: Notable Cat Naps During Times of (Human) Crisis." Focus on comfortable places to hide & sleep.

Frank Conniff ‏@FrankConniff 22h

Santorum is wrong to compare Obamacare to Apartheid because unlike Obamacare, many Republicans supported Apartheid.

Greg Cox ‏@gregorysean 14h

I give you... the 'stache brothers.

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

Volcano Art Studio Open House

We certainly have some talented artists here. Last time I was up at Volcano I saw this raku pot and said to myself that I would buy it the next time I came up to Birgitta Frazier's studio.  Glad it was still there. It is small, about five inches in diameter. I really like it.

Detail

Also, I bought this piece by Emily Herb. The bird is a fairy tern, which is originally from the Northwest Hawaiian Islands but thrives in Honolulu, having adapted to urban conditions. I don't think I have seen any around here.

And I don't know the name of the person who made this bell, but I like it a lot.

I just love that open house!

Thinking about Mandela and South Africa

Even though this was so far away, it was important. I knew several white South Africans in Switzerland.  Their stance was that they were Africans, too, and they had heroic Afrikaans pioneer legends and a lot of cultural pride. One of my German teachers in college, whose Jewish family had fled Holland for South Africa as the Nazis invaded and who had learned Afrikaans, wanted to teach a course in the language. There was so much protest that she gave up the idea. 

Of course all white Africans benefited from the virtual slave conditions the black Africans endured. There really isn't much that they could be exonerated from. If white people left it was because they feared a violent revolution or because they were protesting the regime and felt they could not live with it any more. Most admirable among the whites were the anti-apartheid activists who stayed. But the real heroes were the black South Africans themselves, of course.

I'm groping around here. I lived in such an apolitical atmosphere then and really did not grasp the importance of the South African freedom movement. Or the importance of international moral opprobrium and sanctions.

There should be more information coming out now as Mandela is eulogized and memorialized.

And here is the lovely sliver of moon we saw tonight.

And this is the moon with Venus.

Koch bros. plan all-out assault on the public sector

From the Guardian

You can look at the sidebar at this link and see what the richies are up to in your state. 

And look how cheap they are! They expect huge returns on what for them is a piddling amount of money.

Hawaii is being left alone, for the time being.  The rich own so much of Hawaii it probably is not worth their time and effort to take away more of our public goods at this point, especially when we have a liberal Democratic governor.

What annoys me most about David Koch is seeing  those little white chiclets in his dumb,  smug face.  Everywhere I look these days I see those white choppers on young and old. Very few people actually have perfect dazzling white teeth, and when they do they look great, I must concede. And I suppose my off white and uneven teeth, with fillings, have a negative effect on the young and perfect. But they are consistent with the rest of me.

In Germany, they called those perfect white teeth the "Hollywood Gebiss." Gebiss is German for choppers.  Dentists will whiten and brighten your teeth. You can get implants. And so on. Meanwhile, millions of Americans can't afford any dental care at all.

I think the reason that the upper classes have become so overtly political is that they do not have a moral sense, or backbone, in the way middle class people do. The rise of the new elites which include women and people of color, and even a black man in the White House, angers and bewilders them, as it also does their Tea Party friends.

Noblesse oblige died long ago.  What they are about these days is amassing giant amounts of property and other assets, founding and enabling the flourishing of big extended families, playing with their toys: yachts, airplanes, exercising their will in every aspect of existence. The rich have always felt that the main job of government is to protect them from the lower orders. And of late they also want to make sure that all public assets enrich them and theirs. And that's not you and me. Our job is to love them unconditionally, the way we did in the 90's.

When dealing with the rich, don't ever give them time for free, for any reason. They understand that. In the meantime, take any entitlements you can get, as long as you can still get them.  Rich people try to trip us up by appealing to our middle class morality, of which they have none at all. Don't fall for it. Don't love them. Don't try to appease them. Don't waste your time instructing them on morality and goodness. They don't believe in such things.

I just had a long conversation about  a rich family that underscores what a big waste of time it is to consort with rich people unless there is some money in it for you. They may let you play with their toys if you are real nice to them; they may even act as if they like you sometimes, especially if you provide ego boosts to them,  but understand: everything is theirs. They are now coming after public goods as never before.

More: Great news,  however. ALEC is losing members.

 

Can someone explain Arizona to me?

Here is the bio and legislative record of one Arizona State Senator, John Kavanagh. What do all these bills mean anyway? Is this serious legislation?

Obviously this is a place where most people don't give a damn, except about their money and their stuff and maybe their own people. That was sure my impression when I was there, based on only one week in Scottsdale, for sure.  I kept waiting for someone to say they gave a damn, but no one said they did.

The ordeal of an imprisoned woman in the Arizona private prison system, as reported on Al-Jazeera,  is disgusting. Take a look if you can stand it. If not, take my word that it is revolting. And there is medical neglect and deaths in prison that no one is ever held to account for. Mr. John Kavanagh doesn't think there is a problem.

State Rep. John Kavanagh wrote the legislation that privatized Arizona's prison health care. We asked him whether he thought it had put inmates in danger.

“I mean, people die in prisons,” he said. “I receive a lot of handwritten notes from prisoners. I receive emails from prison families with all sorts of allegations of crazy behavior. And then, you call the prison people up and they usually have a reasonable explanation for it.”

Well that settles that!

I'm sure glad I don't live in a place where such heartlessness is just an everyday matter.  He does not even pretend to care.

I just hope Governor Abercrombie gets all the inmates out of the private prison for Hawaiians in Eloy, Arizona, and opens up more beds here, as he promised. Re-opening Kulani, the prison here where I worked as a teacher,  is a good step, and that will happen in 2014. What I favor is building medium sized prisons on each island. No megaprisons! And with plenty of well-trained staff and programs of all kinds for rehab and re-integration of prisoners. Sending those people to the state with the worst and most uncaring people imaginable in corrections,  which was the contribution of ex-Governor Linda Lingle, is a blot on the reputation of this state.

McCardle's outrageous defense of privatized prisons. This is the typical kind of reactionary stuff that Ann Althouse goes in for, too. You go, gals. It makes me twice as mad when women do this as when men do this, because they know better and are just doing it to get ahead. They are consorting with the worst kind of men and telling them what they want to hear 

I wonder if the prisoners in Arizona are getting all the porn they want, the way they did in a Minnesota prison, as an inmate told me once. He loved it. His own cell, his own toilet, his own TV and VCR, his own porn. Now he was grumbling because he was back at Kulani on the Big Island and had to go through programs and get his high school diploma. And share a dorm and the toilets, too. And no porn but plenty of the real thing, though maybe not exactly what they would like.

It is clear to me that most of the people who decide how prisoners are going to live have no direct experience of prisons or prisoners. Or if they do, they don't give a damn.

OOPs. It looks as if I have maligned Arizonans. Plenty of them think Kavanaugh is their worst legislator ever, though some say there are other hot contenders. They really have got to stop electing Republicans in that state. Clearly, Kavanaugh uses the guns, god and gays thing and  a lot of silly legislation to cover up his real purpose, which is to make his rich friends richer by privatizing as many government services as possible.

More on Kulani: The facility will be re-opening in July, 2014. I am not enamored of the new warden, who strikes me as an opportunist, to put it kindly.  I never thought that highly of her, and we never got along. Considering what the stakes are, however, I wish her all the success in the world.