Reflections from the Heart of the Empire: On the Greens, Cornel West, Disaster Gentrification, and Haitian Iridium

• Cornel West’s paternal grandfather was a Southern Baptist pastor in Oklahoma. Mine was a day laborer in rural North Texas.

• The Green Party is primarily an upper middle class, bourgeois reformist party which has no history of calling for the destruction of capitalism and its replacement by something else.

• On Maui, an unprecedented but easily preventable wildfire devastated all but the homes of the very wealthy in the old capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii.

• Democrats are now saying that, in order to preserve democracy, their own voters cannot nominate their candidates, any speech contradicting their narratives must be suppressed, and that science does not allow questions and independent research.

• Cornel West grew up in upper middle class comfort in Sacramento, thanks to his mother being a high school principal and his father a defense contractor. My father grew up the youngest child of six, his father a ditch-digging Communist.

• Most of the aid for the survivors of the Lahaina Fire has come from ordinary Hawaiians, with a big assist from Hungary(which sent modular homes). So far the imperial US Government has sent $700 per household.

Modular homes from Hungary, photo courtesy Honolulu Civil beat:

• Haiti has the second largest iridium deposits in the world!

• Cornel West spent the late 60s and most of the 70s earning all sorts of impressive academic credentials at Ivy League universities.

• Iridium is the most corrosion-resistant metal known, and is used in everything from 5G smartphones to LEDs to catalytic converters to spacecraft.

• Lahaina survivors have still not been allowed in to see the sites of their old homes. The ruins are fenced off and guarded by armed troops.

• The Dominican Republic has closed its border with Haiti, citing a water dispute.

• How come the Dominican Republic can close its border but the United States can’t?

• Cornel West has been married 4 times, therefore he has three times the number of ex-wives as I, and probably three times the number who think he is impossible to live with. Ah, life’s trivial and probably pointless comparisons, but I’ll take it.

• Canada has deployed a couple of destroyers to Haiti. Is Trudeau afraid of boat people, or just following orders? You get two guesses, but only need one.

• The US Empire wants Kenya to send troops to Haiti to “restore order,” whatever that means. Haitians think that’s a bad idea. Probably most Kenyans do, too.

• Cornel West and Jill Stein think that a former Clinton political operative, who built a career attacking supporters of reformers like Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders, and(drumroll please)…Jill Stein, as vote-stealers and Putin puppets, is the right man to manage a campaign which faces the Democratic Party as its greatest opponent.

• Wishful thinking may be the resource of which the US Empire now has the greatest supply.

Thank you for reading. Good day, and good luck.