For the love of God, please bury Michael Jackson and place several concrete slabs above the sarcophagous.

Los Angeles, Cali-forn-ia--As the world rapidly and dramatically moves towards a wide conflagration, ecological catastrophe, and as the global economy starts really looking like a village (and none of this in the same order), we get wall-to-wall coverage of everything "Jacko."

Considering all of the aforementioned, it's not hard to understand why the coverage is everywhere, ubiquitous, and of course, pathetic.

Jacko, Jacko, Jacko, and more Jacko, 24/7 Jacko, until it feels like the 1980s all over again when the first three listens of Thriller were great until that 339th one came along. But fortunately for the young, nobody has to listen to the radio or watch television if they don't want to, the "captive audience" syndrome being a dead letter. There must be a God, after all.

There's a smell in the air, and it's the smell of dumb-laced fear with a twist of formaldehyde-impregnated clothing from China that we're told is "safe for humans," and a dash of dying free market extremism.

That's great, I hope that doesn't work out for you...

It goes without saying, so why not say it again since it's not sinking-in: yes, he was the "king of pop," and yes, he made a lot of moronic and corrupt assholes richer, just as Ronald Reagan did back in the "glory years" of the 1980s. Yet, the 1980s weren't that great, the economy was in the shitter just 26 years ago according to solid economic statistics, the time of "Thriller" when America was in-the-process of sticking its collective head in the sand just as we're attempting to do now.

It won't work, and it didn't for the last 20+ years, but nothing exceeds like failure and Americans think that they can just change the channel and things will go away. When that fails, firearms and widescale hyperbole are necessary.

Michael Jackson's story is America's story, and it's a pathetic one because he never owned or controlled his life. Like the rest of us, others who didn't mean him well and wanted to exploit him did, and that's not the worst of it amazingly enough: there's every reason to think that he was physically, if not sexually, abused by his ostensible "father," Joe Jackson (not the British pop singer). Call it the vagaries of poverty, but there was no excuse for it.

Jackson detailed Joe's emotional abuse in a few interviews over the years, as did some of his siblings and other witnesses to their lives. Joe Jackson was hardly the first or the last person to maim Jackson's life. Racism coupled with greed destroyed the pop icon, disfiguring his face and his mind.

If Michael Jackson's life embodies anything at all, it's that the American Dream has been a lie, a nightmare, and something that we're all waking-up from after sixty years. The music and entertainment industries exploited him (and still are), pushed him, used-him-up, and threw him away, just as businesses are throwing-away millions of American workers right now in their feeble and dying game of dazzling profits at everyone else's expense.

Did they ever care about Jackson's well being beyond how much money it might generate for them? Of course not, and they still don't. And yet, nobody is likely to ever hold them accountable, which is more than a little sad...and pathetic.

D.C. Stephenson: An Old Case of Molestation

"Everything is fine in politics as long as you don't get caught in bed with a live man, or a dead woman."--D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, circa 1920s

If you think that the Foley scandal is some kind of aberration--as the GOP will try to convince-you--think again. In the 1920s, there was no man more powerful in Indiana than D.C. Stephenson. He had the Governor and a Senator in his pocket. Like the GOP incumbents today, he was arrogant and a braggart at the apex of his power--until it was found that he had forced a young woman onto a train, and got her drunk and violently raped her:

In 1925 he had met a statehouse secretary, Madge Oberholtzer, at an inaugural ball for Governor Ed Jackson. She was later abducted from her home in Irvington, a neighborhood of Indianapolis and taken by Stephenson and some of his men to the train station. While on a trip to Hammond, Indiana, Stephenson repeatedly attacked and raped Oberholtzer in one compartment of his Pullman railcar. In Hammond she took poison to frighten Stephenson into letting her go. He immediately rushed her back to Indianapolis where she died a month later, either from the effects of the poison or the severe bite marks she incurred during the rape. Stephenson was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. (NICH site)

She died weeks later but named Stephenson as her attacker before she died. Shortly before the scandal, Stephenson stated without a trace of irony that "I am the law in Indiana." At the time he said it, he was right. But once the scandal broke, he was finished, just as the GOP has been wrong in thinking that they could do anything they wanted in private. Life doesn't work that way, especially public life.

Imagine a victim taking poison to escape their attackers, it's truly unbelievable.


Stephenson started as a Democrat, but changed his affiliation with the most hardcore racists in America: the GOP.

Stephenson supported the candidacy of Ed Jackson (GOP), who became Governor of Indiana in 1924. It's my opinion that at this point, the Republican Party gradually began to take-up the gauntlet of racism from the Democrats who were still headed in an essentially progressive direction. FDR's New Deal, the Great Society, and the Civil Rights movement, would cement this in the 1960s, and a peculiar trading-of-places occurred. There are few original "Dixiecrats" left today besides Senator Robert Byrd.

Since then, the GOP has been the national party of racists (not that the DNC doesn't have its own problems). Why? If you are going to be the political arm of the business sector, you have no choice. Exploitation and abuse requires that the oppressor become racist, and not just to have some "justification" in their minds for their criminal policies against minorities and the poor. Choosing to separate yourself from the rest of humanity as an exploiter makes one a racist by definition and has little to do with color or cultural differences, but a form of nihilism. These creatures use the weapon of legislation, and it is informed by a primal hate. Their rhetorical flourishes tend to state the obverse of what they're actually guilty of in just another permutation of the big lie.

Remember that D.C. Stephenson spoke frequently about the Klan's desire to "protect Protestant womanhood," and then raped a young German-American woman to death. This is similar to Foley's numerous public statements against pedophiles and it was a cover created with just as much forethought. Where do scoundrels hide? Out in the open.

The saddest aspect of Stephenson was that he had been active with the Socialist Party for a time, but was gradually corrupted by power. It appears Foley was always a greedy scumbag who never believed in anything, so he can be viewed as a step down from Stephenson. The onetime Grand Dragon served 31 years of a life sentence and was paroled twice. The first time, it was alleged that he had attempted to molest a 16-year-old girl while on release. The Indiana authorities put him back inside right away. He was finally paroled in the early 1960s and died in-obscurity in Tennessee where he was probably a minor hero to some. Even to the Klan, he was an embarrassment, and that's saying something in America.

Stephenson was just someone who got caught, just as former Rep. Mark Foley (Fla.) is now busted. The rest of them...that's anyone's guess. This is why we need a politically insulated investigation of Foley and wherever the trail leads us. [Ed.-11.24.2009: this of course never happened.] Expect to be horrified by upcoming revelations this week. As a kid, I remember reading about the 1920s as being the most corrupt decade in American history. This is simply no longer true. This is the most corrupt era in American history to date.

It's obvious that all of this--from 1980-on, worsening in 1994 until very recently--has been an era of an omni-pervasive culture of corruption. But it isn't just the GOP. This includes the Democrats, too, and some will eventually be caught, although they're much smarter than their Republican cohorts at hiding their criminal behavior. The Teapot Dome scandal, runaway stock speculation on Wall Street, our reckless loans to Germany to pay-off war reparations to France and the rest of the Allied powers--it all just pales-in-comparison to the GOP's current reign of corruption and fiscal misrule. It is ending, and we must not spare the guilty, not even when they've left office.

One last note: Stephenson was abandoned by his political allies while he was in prison. In 1927, he threatened to "name-names"' of all the politicians who helped him, and then he finally did. It took down the Mayor of Indianapolis, the Governor, and several other fellow scoundrels. D.C. Stephenson never held public office because he didn't need to. He raped and murdered a wonderful young woman who taught poor people and black children to read. He stole her life, just as the majority of politicians steal ours, a piece-at-a-time. These are the kind of degenerates that the wealthy hire to flay us all.

Lightly Revised and Corrected, 11.24.2009

More on Stephenson and His Scandal:

http://experts.about.com/e/d/d/D._C._Stephenson.htm
http://www.centerforhistory.org/indiana_history_main7.html
http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/Books%20Pages/Book%20Descriptions/GrandDragonLutholtz.asp
http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/imh/100.2/safianow.html
http://experts.about.com/e/i/in/Indianapolis,_Indiana.htm
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8390

Boyfuckers Inc: the Mark Foley Story (MOLESTATION NATION)

"The GOP really stands for Group Of Perverts. Investigate Hastert and Boehnner while you're at it. They knew for at least 10 months. And yes, the Christian Right has no problem with this kind of behavior. Groping children and exploiting them is right up their alley."
--An anonymous poster at www.rawstory.com

"A world of secret hungers
are hurting the men
who make your laws.
Every desire is hidden-away..."
--From 'Brown Shoes Don't Make-it' (1967), by
Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention

Washington D.C.--In case you think this post is insensitive, think again. It's from a victim of child molestation. This perp from Florida needs to be put under house-arrest for the rest of his life.

More galling the whole affair is the fact that the GOP's leadership KNEW FOR YEARS that this degenerate was guilty of this. This is a criminal act, or at least was before the year 2000. Apparently, it isn't any longer if you're a Republican, a Bishop, or priest, or just powerful and connected.

I've done social work with children who have had their parents put-out their cigarettes on their bodies, beaten them, everything you can imagine and worse. The problem of abuse is far more widespread than most Americans know (or do they know?) or would care to admit. It's a "conspiracy-of-silence," our dirty secret as a nation.

The e-mails/IMs released yesterday by ABC were transmitted by Foley in 2003. It is likely the teenager alerted the press to this, good show.

The Washington Post really hits the GOP hard with the facts in today's article, it's stunning, but it appears ABC tipped-the-balance by actually doing their job. Once again, like Bob Ney, this scum says he's "failed his family." Well, no shit.

House Majority Leader John Boehner has admitted knowing since this Spring about Foley's sexcapades, a criminal act of suppression for not reporting it immediately, and a felony. The House Speaker, Dennis Hastert, is playing cagey about whether he knew of it or not.

At the Capitol Hill signing ceremony for the commissions bill, a GOP campaign priority, reporters asked Hastert only about Foley. "He's done the right thing," Hastert replied. "I've asked John Shimkus [R-Ill.], who is head of the Page Board, to look into this issue regarding Congressman Foley. We want to make sure that all of our pages are safe and our page system is safe. None of us are happy about it [my emphasis]." (Washpo, 09/30/2006)

There's an obvious problem with the last sentence: for as long as ten-months, page boys were unprotected by this veil-of-secrecy, done for political gain. Of course they "aren't happy" about it, but they don't really care about the victim--or the ones we might not know about. Ironically, it was a journalist who told members of the congressional GOP about what was happening between Foley and staffers.

We are a sick culture. With this example of Foley, our own social statistics on sexual molestation (the ones we know of), Abu-Ghraib, the torture sessions in Afghanistan and the CIA's secret prisons dotting-the-globe, we come-off as one big child molestation machine.

This is because we are. Small-wonder that people in other nations hate and fear us. They should, we are a shameful people, we are moral-cowards. Foley should be put in general population of a State Prison, where inmates will pour their urine on him every time he walks the cell-block. If there is there is a line--even for murderers--it is this: you don't hurt a child, and they will kill this child molester. If he somehow miraculously survives his time in prison, he should be under house arrest for the rest of his life, with no legal rights or protection.

Now we know what the GOP is willing-to-do to win in November, besides rigging the polls. Foley was also the co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. He was also Tom Delay's right-hand (job) man. Apparently, the GOP has a sense-of-humor after-all, a sick one. He voted just like his other peers in the GOP: against working-class people, then felt he was above-the-law and molest our children too. The GOP is the part of child-abuse, the disease-made-flesh. The horror-of-it-all...

The email-exchange (molestation):
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/BrianRoss/story?id=2509586&page=1

Boyfucker-Central:
http://www.nrcc.org/

For Republicans, Conservative Democrats, Bishops & priests:
www.nambla.org

Tim Mahoney's Take on Marky:
http://www.timmahoneyforflorida.com/e3/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=46