The Independent is sponsoring a lecture by populist champion Jim Hightower of the HIGHTOWER LOWDOWN on
April 1st. No joke!
Gates Common Room, Palmer Hall, Colorado College, Tues. 4-5pm.
I confess for some reason I had ex-agricultural commissioner Hightower confused with Texan kill-joy Marvin Zindler of Chicken Ranch fame, but I loved him all the same.
The Gazette reported this weekend that Alexander Pring-Wilson, now of Court TV fame, has won a second reprieve against accusations of knifing an Hispanic Boston teen in 2003. Pring-Wilson’s legal team has twice successfully confused juries by defaming the victim’s poor man’s past, detracting from Pring-Wilson’s drunken, unprovoked pounce with a knife.
In the fawning article about the family’s blue blood Wood Avenue heritage, the Gazette oddly shrunk Pring-Wilson’s 4-inch-blade Spyderco military jackknife to a “penknife!” We’re informed the CC grad will be spending the holidays in Colorado. And will the ex-rugby captain be drinking?
I say, won’t somebody visit the CSPD and ask if the Colorado College campus hasn’t any unsolved closing-time stabbing deaths among its cold cases?
Maybe Pring-Wilson can stop by the Police Department and volunteer the DNA sample he refused to give them from Boston. The CSPD were alerted in 2003 about the similarity of the Boston stabbing to the fatal assault on Jocelyn Sandburg in 2002, and have yet to be given evidence to preclude him as a suspect. But Pring-Wilson’s mother was a long time Colorado Springs prosecutor and, as the Gazette article reminds us, is from a very influential family.
In Boston, Pring-Wilson was stumbling home from a Reggae bar after closing time. He came upon a car parked next to a pizza joint, with two Hispanic teens who he thought were laughing at his drunken state. Pring-Wilson approached the car, opened the passenger door and began stabbing one teen as the other ran from around the other side to pull Pring-Wilson off. The driver had not realized that the pummeling he was witnessing involved a knife. Pring-Wilson claims self-defense, prosecutors are suspicious of Pring’s having begun at the onset with his knife unpocketed, blade open.
Before Pring-Wilson moved to Harvard, he attended Colorado College. The year after graduation he still returned to Colorado Springs regularly to visit his former-teammates, parents and girlfriend. Might one of his visits have coincided with Jocelyn’s murder, a weekend night in 2002, a little after 2am?
Jocelyn and passenger were just a block from home when someone threw an object at their car. Jocelyn stepped out to address the young pedestrian, he suddenly threw what looked like a punch but oddly Jocelyn fell face forward to the pavement. She got up to chase him further into the CC campus where her body was found later with multiple stab wounds.
If you trace a direct route between the bars of Tejon Street and Pring-Wilson’s house, as a drunk might navigate, you cross Jocelyn Sandberg’s car right in the middle. It happened at an hour when Jocelyn was returning from a concert in Boulder, and when a drunk would be turned out from a bar at closing time. And what an unusual scenario for an altercation: knife-wielding pedestrian versus car.
Pedro Zapeta‘s case is a case of the US government robbing the very poor to give to the National Security State.
He was a Guatemalan trying to get back to his native country with savings from his extremely low paying US job as a dishwasher. Instead, the US government seized his piggy bank at the airport! Then they set his deportation up after lifting his wallet, so to speak. So how does the US government treat the well-to-do Guatemalans? Does it rob them, too, like they did this poor Guatemalan, Pedro Zapeta ?
I can answer that myself. In 1985 I flew back from Guatemala City to Houston, Texas. On board, their was a fellow US citizen who was scared to death because we were seated 2 rows right behind a wealthy Guatemalan who I started euphorically making fun of. I have a big mouth and was excited to be going home but my American companion was scared to death. It seems we were seated right behind Mario Sandoval Alarcon.
Who was he? Why was he being waited on by the air steward as if he was royalty? Why was he on a plane going to the US? Below is a little about the guy. The American woman next to me on this flight had to return to Guatemala so I shut up for her sake. Maybe that is what kept me from being thrown out an open door as we flew over Mexico that day. Who knows?
Now here is a bit about ‘Mario’ taken from some info published by Right Web about the US based World Anti-Communist League (WACL) headed up by Jesse Helms for so long ….
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Guatemala: In 1954, with the formation of the CIA-sponsored Army of Liberation (AOL) organized to overthrow reformist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, Guatemala became fixed in a pattern of anticommunist political violence which persists today. (11)
The Eisenhower administration tagged Arbenz as procommunist and sent E. Howard Hunt of the CIA (and, later, of Watergate fame) to organize the AOL. (45) In 1957, a radical right faction of the government set up by the U.S. to replace Arbenz assassinated his successor, President Castillo Armas, and formed a new party, the National Liberation Movement (MLN).
Mario Sandoval Alarcon was the driving force behind the government, and the MLN became the legitimizer of his paramilitary operations. (11)
Sandoval Alarcon, known as the “godfather,” launched his career in the AOL, and has been head of the WACL in Guatemala since 1972. (11) He was the coordinator of La Mano Blanco, which oversaw the operations of many of the death squads in Central America. La Mano Blanco was coordinated by CAL.
The death squads have terrorized Guatemala since their formation in the 1960s. When interviewed by the authors of Inside the League a political analyst said,”People ask if the death squads are controlled by the [Guatemalan] Army. They are the Army.”(11)
Sandoval Alarcon was head of the National Congress and vice president under Colonel Kjell Laugerud Schell from 1974 to 1978. While vice president, he established close ties with Taiwan through his leadership of WACL. He sent an estimated fifty to seventy Guatemalan army officers to the Academy in Taiwan for training. (11) In 1980, WACL requested that Sandoval Alarcon help D’Aubuisson establish death squads in El Salvador. (11,45)
In 1979, John Singlaub and Daniel Graham of the American Security Council and soon to be founders of the new U.S. WACL branch, the USCWF, visited Guatemala. The purpose of their junket was to begin to heal the relationship between the U.S. and Guatemala that had become strained under the Carter administration. They also informed the Guatemalan government that a Reagan victory would lead to a resumption of military ties between the countries.
Mario Sandoval Alarcon attended President Ronald Reagan’s inaugural ceremonies. (11) Alberto Piedra, WACL member, was appointed ambassador to Guatemala by President Reagan. (38,40)
While Sandoval failed in his bid to become president of Guatemala, he remained the power behind the throne. In 1985, he was still the head of WACL, claimed to have a private army of three thousand, and the ability to put thousands more paramilitary troops into action on short notice. (11)
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(End of article. Alarcon is now dead.)
Ken Salazar, Democratic Senator from Colorado, has grown a spine and has begun to Filibuster against Iraqi War funding!
He was egged on to take a principled stance for once, by Richard Skorman of Poor Richard fame, who was named CS Mr Liberal Guy of the Decade by The Independent weekly newspaper in our fair city. This filibuster has already started and the coverage of Salazar filibustering in the Senate can be seen on youtube. Check that Ken out!
I met an otherwise conservative old gentleman yesterday with a refreshing answer to the immigration question. Said he: “I’d welcome them!”
“This nation was built on immigration, we’re all immigrants -except the Native Americans- and I believe there’s room for plenty more. There’s obviously work so let them come.”
That’s the kind of empathy I think is necessary before we can address the real problem of immigration: what is driving refugees to cross our borders?
If Iowans suddenly started flooding into Kansas, only the most self-centered xenophobe would conclude it was for Kansas’ superior character. The rest would wonder, what is happening in Iowa to drive all those people from their homes? What industry is destroying the farms and businesses leaving Iowans no choice but to move off? More than likely it would be the same culprits that are at work in Mexico.
Big Agra and the usual multinationals, aided by the traditional ruling elite, have been raping Mexico and Central America for years, forcing the populations to move north, not for greener pastures, but any pasture at all. Mexicans are not coming to America because they want to be Americans. They do not embrace American culture, even our language. They are a displaced people. Let’s welcome them into our system and together we can address what powers are at work which have stolen their homelands. The forces are multinational, but the tools are American. They are the World Bank and friends. Our government.
It wasn’t always thus. I chanced to look up Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty where there are more words than form the fabled phrase we know by heart. To me they reflect a grand ideal that today serves only to inflate the American sense of self-importance. Time to go back to school lest The New Colossus (Mother of Exiles) become like the old.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Israelis accuse their Muslim foes of wanting to wipe Israel off the map. They extrapolate that Israel’s “right to exist” is threatened by exterminationTM, even nuclear holocaust (no trademark needed). In reality opponents of Zionism are only suggesting that European Jewry return from whence it came. Wipe away the aparthied borders, they say, which designate Judea as for Jews Only.
Many Israelis hold dual citizenship, attesting perhaps to their own personal reservations about Israel’s tenure in the Middle East. Israelis know they are but visitors on a Zionist pilgrimage to Jerusalem, imposed at the expense of Palestinian lives. Israeli immigrants preserve their dual citizenship escape clause, their right of return to their lands of origin, should the Palestinians ever reconstitute themselves successfully.
Meanwhile the Jewish Anti Defamation League defames all critics who would question Israel’s underlining claim to statehood, the Zionist usurping of Palestine’s statehood to be more precise. (I’m reminded of how the US beef industry has enacted laws in some states which make it illegal to criticize bad meat. Both stink.)
Israel is most certainly wiping Palestine off the map.Town by town, Palestinian beach-goer by Palestinian. Israel is undeniably in contravention of every Palestinian’s right to exist. And Israel has the temerity to point its finger at its victims and accuse them of wanting to “wipe Israel off the map.” The rapist crying “foul!”
The recently unveiled Air Force Memorial seems to me to miss the point of memorializing its people. The tall columns stretching upward remind me of Albert Speer’s famed searchlights which created shimmering columns around the Nuremburg Rallies. These are not columns of smoke from descended tailfins, rather they are vapor trails upward. They are inspiring of course, and if they represented PanAm or Nasa, they’d celebrate flight. But as this is for the US Air Force, they celebrate militancy. As a memorial, they celebrate death.
Working Class. What does that mean to you? Bruce Springsteen? Blue Collar? Manual Laborers? It’s easier than that. Those who work for a living. The American Dream has always promised an escape from the tedium of labor. The Bourgeois had long before broken from the laborers, setting themselves apart from those who possessed no property or education. But Bourgeois are still workers. So are white collar workers and professionals. The middle class, the upper middle class and frequenly beyond. Who is not working class? The Leisure Class.
Why make the distinction? Because of the increasing gap between the rich and poor. The haves gather more and the have-nots less. Less money yes, and less leisure. The famed middle class aspirations of education and pursuit of personaly fulfillment will be soon be out of reach. A great bubble of self-delusion keeps the American populace from fully embracing their peers. A belief that a little hard work, or good fortune, entitlement, will elevate them above their station, above the problems of their neighbors and co-workers.
Paris Hilton, heir to what could have been an aimless life of leisure, decided to work. Bill Gates works. As do the Bushes.