A Shout Out to My New Friends

I could not help but notice that hundreds of web surfers from all over the world have chosen to visit…and for some inexplicable reason, revisit my site in the last few weeks. I find it charming that folks from outside my little world would be interested in reading my most humble opinions regarding town, state, country, and the world. To all of you out there I wish you a hearty welcome, wolkom, laipni ludzam, wilkommen, dobro pojalvat, oh so, khosh amadid, huan ying, laskavo prosymo, welcome, (ya hoser!), velkommen, bienvenidos, greuzi, harzliche woikomme, benvnou / wilcome, bienvenue, selamat datang!

I apologize for the lack of proper accents, umlauts, etc., but, either my old computer lacks the requisite international sensitivity, or I am just too mentally challenged to find the correct program.

I am also writing you, because I am mindful that you as well, are reaching outside of your little worlds. I am interested in your interests and would welcome any questions, comments, dialogues, or diatribes, that you would care to leave in the comment section of this or any of my posts. I will do my best to respond to each and every one of your notes.

As a bit of a disclaimer, I must tell you that, in generating an answer to your question, I will probably involve the liberal use of my own personal opinion, which will not necessarily reflect the opinion of any particular group of people, political party, or even the current official positions of various governmental entities in the United State of America. In my country, as in many of yours, we have the freedom to openly express our opinions, which is engrained and enshrined in the first Amendment of our Constitution. Opinions here as everywhere are like…navels (belly buttons): everyone has one and in my country, most of us are not shy about expressing our opinions, whether they are based on truth, lies, statistics, pure conjecture, signs of the Zodiac, tarot cards, or tea leaf readings. Therefore, although I will do my best to back up my opinions with empirical research, I cannot and will not promise you that any of my responses to your questions or comments will be anything more than those of the man in my bio, which you have no doubt previously read.

Thank you again for visiting my site. I look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

P.S. Within one month, I will be posting a link to my rock n roll band’s website. Until then, please enjoy yourself on my favorite avant garde music/video site, breakmastercylinder.com.    

Minus One: A Warrior's Requiem

While most of us have been distracted by the smoke and mirror acts going on in Washington and in state capitols across this country, there are hundreds of thousands of young men and women in our armed services all over the world who are being forgotten.
 
They don’t grandstand, or protest, or use their status to enrich their personal wealth. These soldiers, most little more than children, just quietly risk their lives every day, so the rest of us can enjoy our weekends, invest for the future, or bitch about our iPhones, or sports teams, or Facebook pages, or what is left of our democracy.
 
No, as far as I know, today is not a veteran’s "holiday." You will notice no hypocritical politicians or pundits paying false-homage to our troops, so they can catch the evening news-cycle. My guess is that, though the troops do appreciate any mention at all, our young soldiers have come to realize that their service, and even their lives, have been all but reduced to little more than a game of political football, played by politicians in a  club, which they will never be asked to join.
 
These warriors come predominantly from our nation’s growing underclass. They obey orders, provide humanitarian aid, fight, and die for their country, even when their country puts them in harm’s way for no good reason. It’s not in their job-description to ask why, just to serve. And they make do with substandard body armor, and vehicles not made for combat and even faulty showers that electrocute them. And they step on land mines for lousy pay, while war profiteers like Halliburton and Blackwater and Raytheon reap billions hawking the garbage they call the goods and services that these kids have to use to survive in the most hostile environment imaginable.
 
And when they come home to their families, if they come home, many are broken. Some are missing limbs, while others are psychologically damaged from exposure to daily terror, constant life-threatening situations, and the unimaginable pathos that permeates all wars. And they go back to the same underclass from which they came, and most of us don’t want to think about them, or see their scars, or pay any real money to try to put them back together again. Even those soldiers who return relatively unscathed often come home to find infidelity, apathy, or unemployment waiting for them.
 
I am reminded of the saying, “There, by the grace of God, go I. ” Not being a particularly religious person, I have always interpreted this to mean that, no matter how bad I think I have it, there is always someone who would gladly walk in my shoes. I am also not a particularly military-oriented person, but my heart cannot help but go out to these youngsters, and I am fully willing to make the emotional investment necessary to start a serious conversation about their sacrifice and their plight. 
 
Maybe it is time that we put aside our anger and frustration and greed and self-pity, for just a few moments, and take a short walk in their combat boots. Our feet will swim in them.

 

 

  Minus One: A Warrior’s Requiem

 

By: J Brandeis Sperandeo

 
 
She had all that she needed and all that she wanted,
 
She had sunshine and horses and meadows to ride,
 
She had boys at her doorstep a future secured,
 
She had staggering beauty beneath she could hide,
 
But she packed up her clothes and left all that behind,
 
For a life full of sadness, invading her mind,
 
All the souls that she saved, all the battles she won,
 
Minus one.
 
Those closest to her, they still ask themselves why,
 
If they had just listened closer would they’d have heard her
 
crying                               
 
And the rest of us patiently kept in the dark,
   
Minus one.
 
But remember her smile as she stood up to fight
 
And remember the fear that she kept out of sight
 
And remember the love that she gave everyone,
 
Minus one.
 
Some are feeling their age, others' times just begun,
 
Some are counting the days till it’s all said and done,
 
But there once was an angel, both irreverent and sage
 
And she picked up our hearts with her courage and her rage,
 
Up against the indifference, the power, she won 
 
Minus one.

Faux Emergencies In America

You’re driving home in rush hour traffic and suddenly a Lexus cuts you off and you have to slam on your breaks to prevent a collision. You are contemplating a response which involves the use of your First Amendment rights, when you notice that the Lexus driver seems to be highly agitated, fists a-waving, head bobbing in rapid motion and you’re thinking that this guy may be a dangerous psycho. After being momentarily distracted and even a bit alarmed by the spectacle, (and by thoughts of your own mortality) you notice that the Lexus has made the light and you didn't. You’re still a little shaken by the experience but try to calm yourself by picturing a scenario, in which the Lexus driver was rushing off to the birth of his first child, or home to his dying dad, or his house was on fire or something. I mean, you’re not just a schmuck for letting him cut you off, if he had a real emergency, right?

 

While you’re sitting at the light wasting gas, you turn on the radio and hear about the Japanese earthquake and wish that there was something you could do to help. You think about your friends and relatives on the West coast and hope that they are okay. The next story on the radio is about how Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and 18 other Republicans decided to break their own laws, by stripping the collective bargaining rights of their own state workers. They say it needed to be done as an emergency measure to balance the budget, but you wonder. You already heard that the workers made all of the financial concessions necessary to “share in the sacrifice” two weeks ago, but Walker ’s union-busting agenda seems to have had little to do with the actual budget emergency. If it had, he would not have given away $100 million to big business the moment he took office in January, right before the emergency that required state workers to give up $100 million and their right to collectively bargain for anything at all in the future. Doesn't seem like the emergency in Japan. Maybe more like your very recent Lexus emergency, but Wisconsin voted in Walker and those 18 other folks, right?...After a twinge of inexplicable malaise, you take comfort in the notion that you are almost as far away from Wisconsin as you are from Japan .

 

It’s not until you are almost home that you actually do begin to feel like a schmuck, for letting that jerk cut you off. But you are tired and maybe don’t care that Republican governors and legislatures are having similar emergencies all over the country, and triaging the damage by “making government smaller.” In Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder’s idea of “smaller government” is passing a law which allows HIM to unilaterally declare any and all counties and municipalities in Michigan to be under a “state of economic emergency” so he can kick out each and every duly-elected local government official and appoint his own person to take over. Sounds like Moammar Kadafi, in Libya , don’t it? I’m not kidding. They passed the law already. Smaller gummint? I guess so, if a dictatorship, means smaller government. Hey, you begin to think, do we have any emergencies, here in Colorado ?

 

You get home and flick on the national news. After the Japanese quake/tsunami-related stories, you see a twenty-second blurb about patriot-Rep. Peter King. R., of New York , who is busy spending our tax dollars right now, doing his best imitation of the former patriot-Rep. Joseph McCarthy. Joe McCarthy conducted communist witch-hunt hearings in the 1950’s. Only this time for Pete King, the witches are Muslims. No, not the Muslims from our rich oil-buddies in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, who raised their children to attack the World Trade Center 10 years ago. No, the Muslims he is going after are Americans, who have been cooperating fully and voluntarily with the FBI and Homeland Security, the American Muslims who provided the intel to the FBI, so we didn't have another 911, for the last 10 years. You may recall that patriot-Rep. Peter King R., was the same guy who thought that it was morally okay for the militant wing of the IRA (the same IRA that perfected the car-bomb for Al Qaida) to target and blow up over 600 civilians in Belfast, as long as they were somewhere in the vicinity of the government troops, who really deserved to die. "If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it". That’s our Peter King. He’s right on top of this emergency du jour and so must be protecting us from those radical American Muslims.What an American patriot, right?  

 

But then you begin to wonder why patriot-King has this particular Muslim bug up his butt.  Yeah, he says that it's an emergency, but there are so many more home-grown terrorist organizations that the FBI thinks are WAY more dangerous to actual life and limb, like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Army of God, the Aryan Nations, the Covenant, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord, the Earth Liberation Front, the Jewish Defense League, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Phineas Priesthood. There are more I could list, but the above are just the wackos who have recently committed acts of terrorism or have been caught plotting to kill, and maim, and burn, and kidnap in the name of the same God that Peter King worships. None of these truly  deranged and dangerous groups are Muslim, and it is not politically expedient to pick on them, because these little posses for Godliness currently support  many politicians in the Bible-Belt and the Pacific North West. They are violent, extremist hate militias that hale from the ultra-left, and the ultra right, but all have one thing in common.  They claim divine inspiration and justification for their acts of carnage. Them radical American-Muslims are WAY down on the FBI counter terrorism list, because they are not nearly as crazy-violent. Still, you are thinking “those towel-heads look really different than us and wear funny clothes and pray all the time and what is this Sharia Law and caliphate stuff, Glenn Beck keeps yammering about anyway?” Glenn Beck thinks it’s a big, fat emergency. Like a tsunami of Muslims, coming at us at 400MPH!

You know, when you have the time, you might want to take a minute and think through why Peter King, (given the above statistics), is really staging this little Kabuki theater in Washington. Maybe there is a connection between his emergency and the Republican's emergencies all over the country who are giving away the farm to big business with one hand and screwing the rest of us with the other. You see, if we have an economic emergency, or a terrorist-related emergency, then politicians don’t have to actually act or react in a moral/ethical fashion, or obey laws, or the Constitution, or actually give a whit about the folks who voted for them. The more of us who are distracted by non-issues like the Boogie-Muslims, or who can marry whom, or what  people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, or just a fear of getting the ax at work, the less we notice this sleight of hand being perfomed on us by the same politicians who have already chipped away at our privacy, decimated our incomes, and made a mockery of our basic liberties.

During WWII, Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and jobs and sent to prison camps, and the U.S. Supreme Court just looked the other way. President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War (or the War of Yankee Aggression, depending on your point of view), with a similar blessing from the Supremes. One could argue that these measures, although certainly drastic, were necessary, or at least understandable, given the actual emergency of war and the endemic mass hysteria. But today, we don’t got no stinkin emergency! And the Tea/GOP and Fox News and Rush, and Glenn, and Sean and Bill, telling us we do, over and over and over again, doesn’t make it true. The earthquake in Japan is a real emergency. The revolutions all over the Middle East are real emergencies. Our so-called emergencies all over America are nothing but a series of manufactured, low-life, carnie-scams. And politicians are using these scams to slowly and systematically rob us blind.

The distribution of wealth in this country has been this badly skewed only once before, and that was just before the Great Depression. The ultra-rich (like Charles and David Koch) have rigged the system to become richer than they have ever been, pay less taxes than they ever have, and own more politicians than ever. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has instructed all major corporations to stockpile their capital, instead of hiring new employees. The ultra-rich are holding out for nothing less than total hegemony. It is not an accident that the middle class is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by millions of indentured servants, who are forced to run faster and faster, just to stay in the same place. And those servants are us.

When you lose your job to a teenager in Mumbai, or you can’t put your kid through college, or you lose your home to the same bank that you bailed out with your tax dollars, or your vote is taken away, because some wealthy politician just fired all the folks you voted for, those will be real personal emergencies. And you can bet that other shoe will drop while you are being distracted, or otherwise made to be afraid of some other issue entirely. And, if you don’t think any or all of the above can happen to you here in Colorado, just read my last post.

 

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

Walker Stapleton: Gentleman Farmer

I am sure that you all know Walker Stapleton as the recently elected, Republican, Colorado State Treasurer. Most of you know that he comes from a rich and powerful Colorado family (hence, the old Stapleton Airport, etc), and that he used millions from his family trust to buy a whole bunch of premium land and had expensive properties developed. That allowed him to call himself a “developer/businessman” instead of a trust-fund baby.

Not many of you know, but probably but most suspected, that Walker Stapleton bought the election with the money from his family and other rich “developer/businessmen” buddies. Such is life. Quit whining. Yes, we were again stupid enough to elect some rich guy who only cares about other rich guys. Duh. Our bad...again, I guess.

You may or may not know that he is still working nights and weekends spending his family’s money to develop more prime real estate into properties that none of the rest of us can afford, even as he simultaneously represents the People of the State of Colorado. Poor guy needs a second job just to make ends meet. I guess his state salary and compensation is not enough to pay for all of that prime commercial land purchasing and developing.

When the protests in Wisconsin bled over into Colorado, he was our only politician to go on TV and defend Governor Walker’s plan to balance his state's budget by busting the state employees’ unions. Stapleton wore his best Bugs Bunny, “weally sad and worried” look for the camera and told us about how our middle class state employees must share in the sacrifice, because of our billion dollar budget shortfall. He didn’t mention that we had a shortfall because his rich buddies lobbied the legislature to artificially lower corporate tax rates, give subsidies to big business and root for the Tabor Amendment, which, contrary to what any sane person would do, prevented our state from saving for a rainy day. I am assuming that at least some of you knew all or most of the above.

But, I’ll bet none of you knew, until the Denver Post printed it today, that Walker Stapleton has a third job: that of Gentleman Farmer. Yes, in Colorado alone, Farmer Stapleton owns 180 acres of primo real estate near Castle Rock, worth millions right now, which will be worth tons more, after he’s done speculating and decides to actually develop it. No, no crops are actually grown on the land. A cow or two were most certainly plopped down on the fenced property to eat the weeds for a day or two and were then removed, never to return.

But the “rent-a-cow” thingy was enough to allow Walker Stapleton to have this pre-development acreage classified as “agricultural”, and so he paid exactly $116 in property taxes last year. Last year was the same year that the lack o’ revenue intake caused us to suffer a billion dollar shortfall, this year. Farmer Stapleton also owns 6.4 acres with a cabin in Gunnison, which he “farms” as well. He paid only $1,618 in property taxes. But Farmer Stapleton is not alone. He and other rich celebrities, media moguls, politicians, land developers, tycoons, and otherwise independently wealthy individuals are doing the same thing all over our state, so that they can also be Gentleman and Lady Farmers under Colorado law and pay pennies on the dollar in taxes on prime real property. The rest of us tax payers in Colorado are quite literally giving away the farm to Walker Stapleton and other rich folks and are being forced to make up for the $336 million (and rising) shortfall thus created.

According to the official State of Colorado website, the mission of the state Treasury:

            ...is the constitutional custodian of the public's funds. It is the Treasury's duty to manage and account for the citizen's tax dollars from the time they are received until the time they are disbursed. The Treasury's staff is committed to safeguarding and managing the people's monies with the same diligence and care as they do their own….[ By continually optimizing cash flows and maximizing the return on the state's investments, Treasurer Stapleton plays an important role in helping to minimize the tax burden on Coloradans.]

Or not, if you happen to be a State Treasurer named Walker Stapleton. And the fact that he tried to hide this little scheme under his wife’s name just shows what a wascallly, wabbit, Walker, weally is. And it’s all legal. Any multi-millionaire…uh…farmer can do it! I’m soooo glad that we have Walker Stapleton as our champion of fiscal sanity!

But, seriously, what do the rest of us do? We elected the SOB and, last time I checked, the same middle class that is being asked to make up for our budget shortfall doesn’t have a fancy, high-priced lobbyist at the capitol. There is about as much chance of a politician in Denver changing the “agricultural exception” amendment as winning the lottery. And, not incidentally, how much did you pay in property taxes last year?

Add the $336 million lost to Gentleman Farmers last year, to the $300 million we needlessly donated to the obscenely rich oil companies, to the $300+ million in welfare checks for the equally rich mega-agricorps, to the $8.8 million un-earned bonus to Wal-Mart, (the world's largest retailer) and then you can plainly see why we have a $1 billion budget shortfall.

But I have a notion and it goes something like this:

I plant a garden in my back yard each year. My dog occasionally “grazes” on my grass, and my yard is completely fenced in. I think that I should apply for a zoning variance, so I can take advantage of the agricultural tax exception. And I’ll bet that most of you would qualify as well, especially, if you have a chicken, rabbit, goat, horse, pig, or other some such Hooterville-type animal on your premises. If each and every one of us applied for the agricultural tax exception, then maybe Walker Stapleton and his rich buddies would be forced to “share in the sacrifice” they keep yammering about and the exception would go back to protecting real farmers and ranchers, which is what it was intended for in the first place.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

State Workers "Share In The Sacrifice" Every Day.

Lately, when I read a piece in my local newspaper, in which some pundit or politician is yammering about the need for state workers and pensioners to “share in the sacrifice,” my general response can be summed up in one word: SERIOUSLY?

I sacrificed a fat pay check out of law school more than 22 years ago, when I took a low-paying, “at will,” state job defending poor people. I never heard anyone in government or the press clamoring to raise my salary to a level even remotely commensurate with that of my counterparts in the private sector, who, not incidentally, never seemed to tire of berating me for undervaluing my services. In fact, over the length of my career, my real income actually went down. In the last three years of my state job, my salary was completely frozen by the government, and I took five voluntary furlough days, so that the younger workers would not have to be laid off.

Since I started working for the State in 1988, my government-funded health insurance went from good, to so-so, to crappy, to “take it or leave it.” Oh, right! My required contributions to health insurance premiums, co-pays, and out of pocket expenses went up as fast as the quality of care went down. This became a series of sacrifices, always advocated by pundits and mandated by politicians.

In the last ten years, I sacrificed my pay, my benefits and my pension, because I loved my job and because I had finally fewer years of work ahead of me than behind me. Sacrifice is supposed to come as second nature to a die hard public defender. I taught so many Ivy League debutantes to practice law in the trenches of the criminal justice system and kept fighting as most of them ran away literally crying and screaming from the office, because their refined sensibilities were not attuned to the stress of the 55-hour weeks and the dead bodies and the unscrupulous police and prosecutors and sanctimonious judges and the often mentally unstable, addicted, and sometimes dangerous clients. The job was not for the faint of heart. There has been a 51% turnover rate in the public defender system in the last three years. Go figure! Colorado politicians always got way more value from their public defenders than they deserved, yet each year, we would have to beg for the minimum amount of money to do a job which  they knew full well was mandated by the U.S. Constitution. Politicians and the press knew that we carried 2-3 times the case-load recommended by the Colorado Supreme Court, but they just looked the other way while we continued to make the sacrifices necessary to do an impossible job.

The last ten years is important, because, during that period of time, both the national and Colorado state governments lowered taxes (mostly for the wealthy, but that is another story), thus revenues went down. In Colorado, the State was prevented by its Constitution from saving excess revenues from good years, to get us through years of economic down-turn. In those same ten years, our infrastructure continued to crumble, middle class private-sector incomes went down, and then went to Mumbai, and finally, we went broke  after being suckered into two unjustified wars and welfare checks for multi-national corporations.

About four years ago, I was asked to sacrifice my relatively stable metro position, for a double caseload on the Eastern plains. Since there was no money for an actual office I sacrificed by driving 80 miles from my home to court, each way. My office was a Jeep, a lap top, and a cell phone. I became the first permanent public defender in a jurisdiction that had previously suffered from a mish-mash rotation of “du jour” attorneys. My last four years in that position were by far, more challenging and rewarding than my preceding 18 years in a metro placement. Many of the police and prosecutors had seemingly never heard of the Constitution, and some of the judges had a nasty habit of putting way too many people of color in prison. No, we never got along, but I was consistently and truly appreciated by the folks whom I was lucky enough to represent. It was a huge sacrifice and it was worth every minute.

About a year before the middle class got the bill for bailing out the criminals on Wall Street, there was a Colorado government/press hue and cry about the allegedly “dire fiscal crisis” awaiting (in 20 years or so) my state pension plan. I was told by the same politicians and pundits that I again needed to sacrifice in the form of  larger worker contributions, astronomical buyout figures, and  cost of living increases that were no longer tied to the actual cost of living, but tied instead to state revenues, (ie. no increase at all).

I sacrificed every day, for 22+ years and borrowed money to buy a few more years from my pension plan, before the government completely cut that off too. Now that I have finally and fully met my end of the contract to PERA and am taking the pension THAT I EARNED, I am told, by the same politicians and pundits that I have it too good, like I am a corporation on welfare or something. I sacrificed every damned day and now the same politicians who balanced their yearly budgets on my back for 22 years are telling me that I have to “share in the sacrifice?”

Though I am on a pension, I still pay federal and state taxes and would not mind paying more in taxes, so that potholes and bridges can be repaired, children can be fed and educated, our neighborhoods can be kept clean and safe, and the right to decent, affordable, healthcare can be extended to all citizens. I would be willing to sign on for that additional sacrifice, as I believe in the responsibilities concomitant with the social contract all tacitly sign and share in as citizens of this country and of this state.

The fact that state workers are among the few who still have jobs with something resembling benefits has nothing to do with the end result of 10 years of unbridled corporate greed and government’s fiscal mismanagement. We were not the cause, and it is simply unconscionable to make us more than a small part of the solution. Rather, it is the time for the politicians and pundits to stop this pointless, mean-spirited blame game and begin a serious discussion about what we all know must be done.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

Latest on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Human Rights Violations

This is by far, the most comprehensive and virtually up-to-date article written by MICHAEL WARREN
of the Associated Press:

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - Police on Easter Island raided the grounds of a luxury hotel Sunday to evict the last of dozens of indigenous protesters battling for ancestral lands and a larger share of profits from the tourists who come to see the Pacific Island's mysterious statues of giant heads.

A Rapa Nui clan's claims to the land under the new, $800-a-night Hangaroa Eco Village & Spa has won support from international human rights agencies, and it poses legal and political dilemmas for a Chilean government already criticized for its treatment of indigenous people on the mainland.

The Hito clan's attorney, Rodrigo Gomez, said the last handful of about 50 squatters were hauled off and jailed by police Sunday after they had tied themselves down in the lobby.

Police Maj. Fernando Lobos said all the Hitos were processed and freed pending a court hearing. He said officers were following an order to empty the property so that federal investigators could survey its condition.

Members and supporters of the Hito clan had been squatting on the grounds of the $50 million development since August, claiming the land was swindled from their illiterate grandmother and then illegally sold into private hands by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

They initially demanded recognition of property rights from the conglomerate that now owns the land so they could earn rent from the new hotel, insisting that Chile adhere to the international indigenous peoples treaty it signed in 2008, which requires governments to pay compensation for usurped land.

Their protest inspired nearly two dozen other native families to claim ownership of government properties on ancestral land. Police moved in with pellet guns and clubs in December to remove them in violent confrontations that injured more than a dozen islanders and several officers. Pictures of native women and men with bloodied heads were published internationally, shattering the tranquil image that attracts many tourists.

While dueling civil claims wind through Chile's court system, prosecutors have sought to persuade judges to charge 17 of the Hitos with trespassing at a hearing scheduled for Tuesday on the island.

Standing against the clan is the Schiess family, which runs one of Chile's most powerful private holding companies, Empresas Transoceanica.

The Hitos have opened a case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington and won support from the United Nations. A Chilean appellate court, rather than approve the evictions, recognized that the two families have dueling claims that must be resolved by Chile's Supreme Court.

U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii on Friday urged Chilean President Sebastian Pinera to order the removal of police surrounding the hotel, and to provide food, water and medicine to the Hitos inside. James Anaya, the U.N. special investigator on indigenous rights, warned Chile that forcible evictions won't help resolve the situation peacefully.

Instead, Chilean police finally moved in Sunday morning.

"They knew we were going to win in court on Tuesday. This is a desperate move by the Schiess," Gomez said.

Jeanette Schiess, who runs the hotel project and is married to Empresas Transoceanica's chief executive, Christoph Schiess, said she couldn't immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday from The Associated Press. She has said in the past that the Chilean government should be responsible for any compensation, and while her family plans to make the resort a cultural center to benefit the entire Rapa Nui community, she won't negotiate with lawbreakers.

The Hitos' great-great-grandfather was among the Rapa Nui elders whose names appear on the 1888 annexation treaty, along with Chilean sailors whose ships were built by a company that is now part of the Schiess conglomerate.

The Rapa Nui civilization once numbered up to 20,000, with a written language, a royal family and an ancient culture centered on the awe-inspiring statues, which were carved from volcanic rock and moved around the island despite weighing tons apiece.

But internal strife, European conquests and Peruvian slave ships ravaged the population, and only 111 remained before Chile annexed the island, 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) off its coast.

The Rapa Nui population has recovered under Chilean rule, to about 3,500 natives and nearly 2,000 non-native residents. But the islanders were long treated as slaves or servants, herded into the island's small town of Hanga Roa by the Easter Island Exploitation Co., which claimed the rest of the land as a sheep ranch and kept the natives isolated from the outside world.

The native people were denied citizenship until 1966, and kept on small plots in town as the rest of the island became national property - and now a World Heritage site.

Chile's government, which also struggles to cope with land protests by the Mapuche Indians in Patagonia, insists it wants to honor indigenous rights and encourage the Rapa Nui to enjoy the fruits of booming tourism, which has grown to some 50,000 visits a year.

"The government of Chile has a debt with the Rapa Nui people. And we are prepared to take responsibility for this debt," said Raul Celis, who governs the island from Valparaiso, to The Associated Press.

He said that when Chile took over, "They were clearly in the process of extinction, at the point of disappearing. And it's possible that in the 122 years since the island has formed part of Chile's territory, that there have been moments when the state hasn't paid enough attention. That's why there's a debt. But we're trying to resolve it."

Celis said the Hitos never complained until the Schiess family invested millions developing a small, government-built hotel into a first-class resort. The Schiesses have said their title to the land is clear, but the Hitos say they the developers had to know islanders had tried for years to assert property claims despite unequal access to Chile's legal system. They argue that a 1979 law says only natives can own property on the island.

Celis also blames a few islanders for refusing to accept negotiations between the government and natives on four key issues: land rights, limits on residency by non-natives, economic development and a proposed law that would give the Rapa Nui more local control over their affairs, if not outright autonomy.

But Lorena Fries, who directs the government's Human Rights Institute and has an official watchdog role in such conflicts, says Pinera's administration could have avoided force by broadening the dialogue. Instead, she said, it picked compliant locals to make deals with and found ways of jailing the most outspoken.

"In response to any social conflict, this government shows a tendency of going to the extreme and criminalizing the citizens," Fries told the AP from the island after investigating the conflict.

Attorney Leonard Crippa of the Indian Law Resource Center in Washington, which is building a case at the Inter American Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States, also says outspoken islanders are deliberately left out.

"I'm representing more than 30 clans. Most were not participating in that dialogue," Crippa said. "They don't know what's being agreed to. The Chilean government promotes this peaceful dialogue, says it's working with the Rapa Nui people and will get results. But that's not true in reality."

Addendum: Since the printing of the above article, intel has indicated that the "Schiess Family," a huge shipping conglomerate, is bent on using Rapa Nui as a strategic shipping port, and their hotel on the island as a resort for its executives. Their eventual game plan has nothing to do with eco-tourism at all, and they are presently in negotiations with the Government of Chile for a sweet deal which will guaranty them permanent hegemony over all of Rapa Nui and its people. If The Obama Administration makes the proposed Chilean/U.S. trade deal without a provision for the Rapaniu People, there will be no remaining incentive for Chile or the Schiess conglomerate to negotiate at all.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41448363/ns/world_news-americas/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/06/AR2011020602018.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/world-latin-america-12378736

Google The Koch Brothers...Just Once!

Or not. Not unless you want to know about the billionaire sibs who personally started and  still finance the so called “grass roots” Tea Party. You may not care that they own the prominent conservative think tanks and politicians who advocate shutting down the gummint unless we continue tax breaks and corporate welfare for the richest 2%, and force the rest of us to pay the bill. You may not be interested that Charles and David Koch, worth $21.5 billion…each, colluded with another mega-corp megalomaniac, billionaire Rupert Murdoch, a handful of other billionaires, and a couple of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, to buy the last election and that they were largely successful. To get just a taste of just some of the national politicians in Washington whom they now own, you may also refer to my post dated January 21, 2011, entitled, If We Did This, We’d Be Fired.

You probably have heard about the trouble in Wisconsin, but don’t Google the Koch brothers unless you want to know that they have bought and paid for Governor Scott Walker. Governor Walker actually created the fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, by giving huge tax breaks to mega-corps (guess who?) and then used the drop in revenue he created to justify taking away the collective bargaining rights of his 175,000, middle class public employees. Many days ago, these state troopers, firefighters, and teachers, etc. had agreed to the cuts in pay and benefits that Walker demanded, but the Republican Governor is holding out for a law that breaks the back of the only grass roots organization (public employees union) that hits the streets for Democratic candidates. This little scheme, along with political gerrymandering (redistricting) is being used simultaneously all over the country by the Tea/GOP to stamp out any and all pockets of support for Democrats. And guess who is behind all this?

You may not find it interesting that the two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, whom the Kochs have been wining and dining (Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia) are the same dudes who bestowed personal civil rights on corporations, by magically declaring them to be “persons,” under the U.S. Constitution, while taking a position that the same Constitution does not protect the rights of women.

If any of the above does not prompt you to Google the Koch brothers, you probably are not a   small business owner, a student, trying to get your child through school, unemployed, because your job got outsourced to Mumbai, a minority, a woman, retired, sick, have lousy, expensive health insurance, have no health insurance, a vet, a Democrat, an Independent, or work for a living. However, if you fit into any one or more of these categories, you might want to give it a try. You are being buggered by the Koch brothers even as you sit in rapt attention before Facebook, Dancing with the Stars or American Chopper. I can promise you that a simple Google search will provide an even more mind-blowing experience than J. Lo and Justin Bieber combined, followed by a permanent ability to smell the stench of every poop stew cooked up by Kochs & Friends. These titans of industry have an alarmingly few degrees of separation from just about every screwage coming from the very politicians whom you thought were elected to protect your interests. Each time you are once again forced to bend over and grab your ankles, you will be able to thank the Machiavellian Princes. And maybe by 2012, you might feel compelled to cast your next vote, based on the facts, instead of commercial sound-bytes and talking points.