P r e l u d e

A Safehouse in Central Moscow

The year is unknowable.

Two partisans hide in a safehouse in central Moscow near the Arbat second inner ring. The room is lit only with eerie glow of soft blue light from electrical candles. A man with strange gray eyes is seated with a tidy bale of manuscript papers working on a small primitive lap top device on a red desk. Also on this desk is a large silver scroll, opened to reveal an ancient manuscript. A woman with blonde hair is seated on a bed taking apart a futuristic pistol and putting it back together.

In the background, the Russian song Oy Moruz plays.

The sound of a record skipping and it becomes a dancehall song. Then abruptly turns off. Sebastian Adonaev, a 29 year old American is seated at the red desk going through a lengthy manuscript, copying out the scroll. Intermittently he is also typing. The words appear holographically projected about the walls of the room. Daria Andreavna, a 25 year old Russian with bleached blond hair is meticulously assembling a pistol while smoking a banned Newport cigarette.

SEBASTIAN:

I strangely recall that I’ve had many and multiple lives. Some past. Some future. Some even running concurrently! I feel as though I have visited the top inner most quarters of the Ziggurat! Had powder blown into my eyes! And then I awoke again here. In your begrudging arms. My head is spinning!

DARIA:

You must keep those mad notions to yourself for now. Your eyes are so sad. It seems you have lost the muscle memory to even smile. I would go so far as to say, it’s time to stop fighting. Stop using your brazen words in English, when you do not fully comprehend what they mean.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘The snow fall was exceptional. It was as if my god had pulled a vast white blanket upon us to tuck America to bed. Then the devil and a host of petty bureaucrats did not take the time to keep the power running. This winter was the winter that tens of thousands across the empire were tucked in without heat into a long kiss goodnight. That was the winter the Chornay finally fought back. Remembering also where they came from.’

DARIA:

Where did you find that? English! Stupid fucking English. I don’t think they say ‘blacks’ anymore over there. It’s so dated. It think its ‘Negs’, or ‘Noires’ maybe. In the raps they call everyone their niggers!

SEBASTIAN: 

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘In a well-fortified safe house buried in the heart of the Russian capital. I lock eyes with a woman who in another life broke me down and sold me as a slave!’

DARIA:

‘Indeed’, as you like to often say.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘Her eyes, her eyes! Even the bluest day on the Caspian contains no such expansive shimmer! There is no comparison for this level of captivation. All things we have done, or did or may even still have to do are only so that we might never have to bear again the painful agony of our tumultuous separation.’

DARIA:

My, my, Oh my the fuck my! The stories you tell yourself, and others. Read then my little bleak one. My American Mayakovsky. Read and you can torture yourself once again.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘Poem #38: The Millennium Hostage Crisis. Part One.’

DARIA:

Dedicated to heroic little me! Dasha Andreavna! A true Russian patriot!

SEBASTIAN:

Are you blushing yet woman?

DARIA:

We Russians know not how!

Reciting the Poem:

‘Life of the slave show. Let me remove you from your castle and let you observe how we live, in the wilderness below.’

SEBASTIAN:

I take it you liked it a little bit? To remember even a line. A very great flattery.

DARIA:

I like very much it when you try and talk so emotionally dirty to me in such poetry. This is for sure.

SEBASTIAN:

I am capable of just about anything when you believe in our work!

DARIA:

Our work!? The history books will again say you wrote it all yourself.

SEBASTIAN:

Our work! Important work! Giving the working class some actual hope. Giving the people in the streets and trenches of America’s greatest uprising something to believe in. Art in service of revolution and of course a brilliant kind of code. Code to make sure the communication lines don’t crumble as the material conditions worsen. When they turn the internet off. Code to signal and trigger events!

DARIA:

Ha! I believe, that you still believe in your very own lies. Your own strange delusionals about the so-called ‘Brooklyn Soviet’. Blat! Believe the bullshit stories we fabricated together. You still seem to find it a useful propaganda. Publishing these, Je ne sais; conspiracy theories and varying alternative realities. These delusions of grandeur the underground is still apparently circulating. Written in antiquated prose of a dying language!  Just I think it’s dated. Using plays and poetry to rile up the mobs to blood shed.

SEBASTIAN:

Poetry and Martyrs are immortal!

DARIA:

I think all your dead friends have very little use for any poetry.

SEBASTIAN:

Such overwhelming blackness! Such hopelessness embedded in all our mad man ideations! You have a very deep amnesia. You always whisper always of such treacherous things, and remember nothing that was useful and good about out work, our short happy times together. 

DARIA:

An amnesia you say! Perhaps knowing you is very traumatic?

SEBASTIAN:

You don’t ever remember the good times! You forget all the possibilities we unleashed together. You forget, that we have played a part that absolves us now of any further responsibility to any higher cause. We don’t have to get involved ever again. We don’t have to come back to life, we can just live this one out.

DARIA:

Remind me! Story time Tovarish lover. I challenge you right fucking now Blat. The Ministry wants to know how our poems are coded. The Department of Homeland Security accuses you of course of treason, thus to your country of origin you will probably never return. Worse places to be exiled to than Russian though. The proles still need something to believe in! Your Millennium Hostage Crisis, it cost the Oligarchy dearly.

SEBASTIAN:

The poem or the siege?

DARIA:

Of course the mother-fuck siege! No one care about the poetry anymore, if ever. That which you cannot see with your own eyes, is just some kind of pornograph or propaganda being distilled to you! Tell me your best tales! like you used to on the boardwalk. Remind, me again what we’re worth on the market. Why is it that I assume such a huge risk for you? It sure isn’t love.

SEBASTIAN:

It is a kind of love though. Between two people fully unaccustomed to having it. The trouble sweetness, with your tales, is that not a single one of them are ever true, ever. Frankly, they’re all just bleak.

DARIA:

The greatest fun with your war stories is that so many of them are trying to be real. You give everyone away. You reveal your entire naked plot points! You expose yourself to serious liability. Your voice is so fucking loud, even the bed bugs can inform on you!

SEBASTIAN:

What will be the prize for the partizan with the premium story tonight?

DARIA:

The usual my daring! Only the base usual. As, at this juncture nothing is real and anything is possible. We suffered badly in New York. I won’t get again raped and you won’t get tortured for weeks on end. With blades, beatings, gas, current, water fire boards and sodomy. The people you love most won’t have to get killed this time. Maybe they can even sit the great war out. Maybe you’ll get to bring your city and homeland back from the ashes. Your people come back from the dead. Fuck, maybe I’ll date you for a while. Have summer fling in Moscow, take a train to China. Like you always said you wanted to.

SEBASTIAN:

Your amusement and our perpetual survival have gotten us in quite a lot of danger so far. You’re worth every bullet though, I stand by that. You will draw on Russian fairy tales but I will spin from the ghosts of my dead friends and the overwhelming darkness inside me.

DARIA:

Ladies always go first, for this is the ‘Code of the Haitian Gentleman’. Let both the high and low minded mind games begin! If I am woman, and he attempts to be man, then we are easy prey.

For the gods, the spirits, lesser demons and also human devils! Sin and general winter are historically undefeated. That’s a fact. Above all those forces seeking to make us base slaves, we are bound most to our own wild passions! I am creature ruled almost selfishly by my passion, and so is he. Inevitable really that so much did burn. I do not make any remembering when we had this conversation. Only that it once occurred. It was sometime after our very first meeting.

Sometime before I found myself handcuffed to a chandelier fixture in the Millennium Hotel awaiting my deadly snuff and torture! Sometime after blue moons of their Bohemian festival moved reality about. Sometime before that ultra murderous uprising called “the Great Disorder”. Sometime after the far more bloody “Great Revolt”. Which was its more articulate, yet ultimately more homicidal older sibling. Before I sold our souls to a devil without making ask of questions! Certainly after I realize I loved you as I have never loved a man before in this life or the next, or one after that. But, it was a dark and unusual love.

I realized that I had loved you several times before. And that we are both so dangerous when in love. To each other. Also the world at large. And that Russian love, and American love have very different expectations that come with them.

I will now make careful choice of my words.

Speaking your American language with my Russian thoughts is to attempt placement of entire Caspian Sea into a shitty hip flask. My English when spoken without any intoxication hints that I will speak more clearly with my actions.  Were you sober then when we found each other on that roof top, instead of passion punch drunk you’d not have ignored the threat our lusty adventures soon presented. We would have walked away. Despite his fascination with me. Despite my overwhelming beauty. But that is not how the story was to write itself!

He could deny me nothing. But no one dare should point the finger to me that I did not give warning! Perhaps we were blinded by the vodka lullabies, the bright lights of the towers and the good night moon.

She then pauses.

I’m going to use you. I announced as much on the roof of the district back when. And I know you don’t care. Completely and utterly so that I may get from point A to point B. Did I say that to him, or did he say that to me?

SEBASTIAN:

I consented to such use, use the fuck away. We will see how far in the alphabet we can climb with you on my shoulders!

DARIA:

The Russian alphabet, it has more letters. More strategic depth. The letters also can take different subtle meaning based on where they are placed. The sounds, they will completely change. Some very hard, some soft.

SEBASTIAN:

Place yourself besides me, for now. You know me to never surrender. Not a hair on your head, not one inch of the turf.

DARIA:

I shall, but tomorrow this will have to be finished. How long can you make more of your favorite poetic noises, your rhymes in American English as you devote your life to something hopeless that cannot ever be? You want crazed impossible things, which of course all know is the road to tremendous suffering. You believe in a revolution, that frankly kills all it touches and scorches the earth with fire. You concurrently believe in a love, that when examined is not love it is you own need to anchor yourself in the impossible again, perusing me of all people. A cold, self absorbed debutante, to put it nicely.

SEBASTIAN:

I like the way that all sounds. I like way the way the word hopeless rolls off your lips. I am an Amerikansky, as you accuse me. Hopeless, is just a call to arms. Hopeless, impossible to me those words are exciting. The kind of words to separate boys from men, cowards form heroes.

DARIA:

What can I say in the face of such mad idealism! Your passion did then and does still touch me. In some weird way. I’m going to devastate you though again, you know. This is my effect on men, you are still a man. No angel. Or Devil. Or Ghost. I know I am a human woman of Penza and I know that you can certainly bleed. And, also cry. But sadly, you are not a normal man. Your of very different stuff.

SEBASTIAN:

Well we shall not later claim I wasn’t given a very fair warning. Had we met in another time, were I a different person wearing a different life; I would still know you. I cannot put my emotions to bed as easily as you.

DARIA:

Your emotions and your memories, are not real. In the darkness of the district night, in the wilderness of North America I repeatedly told you nothing but enormous destructive white, black and blue lies.

SEBASTIAN:

It was, what it all was.

DARIA:

I did what needed to be done. As Absofuckinglutely usual.

SEBASTIAN:

He quotes her.

‘It is sad that it all has to end.’

DARIA:

These were the first words uttered in acceptance of a risk and a warning between myself Daria Andreavna and the mad idealist named Sebastian Adonaev living under his various code names. Our love and the totality of our affair will be thing of Post-Soviet lore and Amerikansky voyeuristic fascination. There have been many doomed loves before. Captured artistically in bright theatre lights of both empires. There have been tales of hard hearts which remain unbreakable. Wild bohemian longings that conquered heroically the conventions of their day. I needed to get you to Moscow.

SEBASTIAN:

Is the story of our love to be more like Russian literature or more like Amerikansky cinema? Mere flickering Paramount Pictures? Or, was it all just a job t you? Work that needed to get done. For your pocket? For your mother?

DARIA:

General Winter has never been defeated, not once ever. So we will have to perform still more wine soaked miracles in the wilderness to remain together. A variety of strange longings took shape and bore most irregular if not unnatural fruit.

SEBASTIAN:

That much is now clear.

DARIA:

The first miraculous act will be turning your tragic tears into Vodka.

This is my happy gift to you. To turn an unusual and storied past into a heroic song and dance. To make your long dead mechanical heart beat like a war drum as the waves of the uprising crashed upon the nation we shared or really I should say, strategically co-inhabited.

The second miracle will be the theft of the moon itself. Such a task is just a starting point for you to please me, also pay my ransom.  Take to heart that the materialism of a Russian woman is but an ante up to play a high stakes game of loyalty. As for my freedom, Dmitry asked for that moon. I can have Oleg introduce you to her.

The third miracle will be for us to put some bullets in the devils collective. In retaliation for crimes of the past committed against us, and our love, and humanity in general. We’re gonna kill some oligarchs, at the very least.

The fourth miracle act will be that I can truly come to love you, maybe one day. To forgive you for what you had to do in my name, the easy part I suppose. In the name really of your long dead wife, bless her martyred soul. For the freedom of long abused inhabitants of Hispaniola too. More on all that later. But, to even consider loving you of course you must secure me. It will take several lives and a solid contact between us to accomplish these four miraculous acts. They will make wild tales and epic songs. And some poems, 

when we must.

SEBASTIAN:

It seems you remember the entire bloody manuscript before me! I would prefer it if we keep my alleged tragedy, the story of me dearest intended, my dead and violated martyr wife out of this all, completely.

DARIA:

Whatever we need to compel you to vengeance, my friend. Save me now and avenge your fallen tortured soul too! Via my company and our illicit secret series of kisses we made war on those oligarchical devils and their sickly entourage. We painted together a portrait. That in the end makes Russian literature look like tame romantic comedy, and Amerikansky Cinema, just flickering Soma on telescreens. Wakanda is real!  To beat back brutal hunger and or feed those dependent upon us. To meet the benchmark called survival, the human body and mind is capable of any number of enormous sins. At times grossly unpalatable to human soul. If you believe in such things!

SEBASTIAN:

It is not just a question of what we all must to do to preserve our own selves. The shifting of alliances in pursuit of securing our deliverance from the wilds of worldly living is exhausting. Strange bed fellows make and break even the strongest of hearts. The wilderness at night is vast and treacherous place that to some is source of fearful moral panic. To others, a sheer bevy of potential opportunity!

DARIA:

In darkness of night fallen angels appear as demons at times. Most treacherous are our human misjudgments. The nuances of intention are lost to perceptions of trickery. Violations of trust. Devils can look angelic for a time and humans with host of mixed motives can see best kept secrets revealed like so much dirty laundry blowing in the cold winds of night.

But, I’m not here to talk to you about night! Or about all the devils that thrive in its long shadow. This just story about when feeling returns to the heart when the body has been dead for many days. So many that the world of the living is but a restored memory. Also about the selling of souls and the banding together of destinies.  

SEBASTIAN:

Also about whether poems can feed anything more than hope in the face of hopelessness!

DARIA:

They certainly do not!

SEBASTIAN:

And whether more reckless and brazen hope, is indeed the only cure something so called hopelessness invites.  

DARIA:

IT ISN’T!

SEBASTIAN:

So it’s Haitian love story, but also a Vodka Lullaby staring brave Russian angel from Penza! And of a daring American paramedic.A friend of the people fighting under a Kurdish name. An adventurer born in New York City! Or as it was later called; Newyorkgrad!  

DARIA:

It’s also about trying to steal away another man’s wife. Which is whole category of crime and punishment onto itself.

SEBASTIAN:

It’s really about old souls coming back for each other, even if just for a fall.

DARIA:

Based on a mostly true Brooklyn Noire, circulated by the underground in 2012. Based on some wide range of prophesied events which we set in motion via of our high impact knowing of each other. Maybe like in a biblical sense. But with more carnality! And gun play.

SEBASTIAN:

Set in the Holy Land of Brooklyn and the Wilderness of the Financial District in the City of New York, mostly to glow of blue moon light at night and structure fires by day. In Moscow! In Haiti! In Kurdistan! In Arabia! In the heart of twisted dystopia called Brooklyn Soviet! In places that were and also soon could be!

DARIA:

Set in your occupied and homeland called Israel. It is also a tale of forbidden impossible love in the age of anarchist trials. Of great train robberies in the former Soviet Union and of a tavern in the wilderness where lost souls find short but wholly tumultuous company in post Capitalist America on the eve of a global human rights revolution. Or, something. Something hopefully both ludicrous and profound.

SEBASTIAN:

So begins again the tale of Daria called Dasha and Sebastian called Kawa. A Russian she and a most irregular Amerikansky me and the partisans we led into a grim losing battle. Star crossed lovers with the moon as our witness, fuck and vodka as our means of cross interrogation and higher ground beyond the waves of hopelessness and fate as our primary objective.

DARIA:

You use a lot of fucking words. You begin tales often with strange memories of a foreign murder and a liberation war. I however chose to begin with my winning smile. With my chest pressed against you. Also with a warning. This courtship cannot ever end well. A promise of deliverance via passionate love, once adequately demonstrated.

This is not ever to be that tale.  I begin instead with a double funeral!

SEBASTIAN:

You my dear old friend. My Tovarish. You are a genius artist. A most thrilling propagandist. A temptress. A siren. To destroy a mighty fleet. I remember when you took me in after the hospital camps and all their torture. When you took long walks with me down the Brighton Coney boardwalk. Allowing me to re-compose my inner thoughts. Restoring my will to fight.  I am honored, truly honored to be your front man. If only as you proclaim, for another life of night. I am your fall guy, your dagger man. Your sword. You are my comrade and my everlasting droog.  What have I done to me, in the name of you? A lot of terror.

DARIA:

You have too many fucking names! When the history is finally written, they’ll make you a lunatic. A fanatical zealot. A real mad man. A terrorist. And me, just some whore.

And at best a hapless muse!

And then, she blows a powder into his face and the story begins again. To the sounds of trumpets and gun fire.

HaOlam HaBa, or “the world to come”, is an important part of Jewish eschatology, although Judaism concentrates on the importance of HaOlam HaZeh (“this world”). The afterlife is known as Olam haBa, Gan Eden (the Heavenly Garden of Eden) and Gehinom.^[4][5][6] According to the Talmud, any non-Jew who lives according to the Seven Laws of Noah is regarded as a Ger toshav (righteous gentile), and is assured of a place in the world to come, the final reward of the righteous.^[7][8]

Legends[edit]

In the 19th century book Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg compiled Jewish legends found in rabbinic literature. Among the legends are ones about the world to come and the two Gardens of Eden. The world to come is called Paradise, and it is said to have a double gate made of carbuncle that is guarded by 600,000 shining angels.^[9] Seven clouds of glory overshadow Paradise, and under them, in the center of Paradise, stands the tree of life. ^[10] The tree of life overshadows Paradise too, and it has fifteen thousand different tastes and aromas that winds blow all across Paradise.^[11] Under the tree of life are many pairs of canopies, one of stars and the other of sun and moon, while a cloud of glory separates the two. In each pair of canopies sits a rabbinic scholar who explains the Torah to one.^[12] When one enters Paradise one is proffered by Michael (archangel) to God on the altar of the temple of the heavenly Jerusalem,^[13] whereupon one is transfigured into an angel (the ugliest person becomes as beautiful and shining as “the grains of a silver pomegranate upon which fall the rays of the sun”).^[14] The angels that guard Paradise’s gate adorn one in seven clouds of glory, crown one with gems and pearls and gold, place eight myrtles in one’s hand, and praise one for being righteous while leading one to a garden of eight hundred roses and myrtles that is watered by many rivers.^[15] In the garden is one’s canopy, its beauty according to one’s merit, but each canopy has four rivers – milk, honey, wine, and balsam^[16] – flowing out from it, and has a golden vine and thirty shining pearls hanging from it.^[17] Under each canopy is a table of gems and pearls attended to by sixty angels.^[18] The light of Paradise is the light of the righteous people therein.^[19] Each day in Paradise one wakes up a child and goes to bed an elder to enjoy the pleasures of childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age.^[20] In each corner of Paradise is a forest of 800,000 trees, the least among the trees greater than the best herbs and spices,^[21] attended to by 800,000 sweetly singing angels.^[22] Paradise is divided into seven paradises, each one 120,000 miles long and wide.^[23] Depending on one’s merit, one joins one of the paradises: the first is made of glass and cedar and is for converts to Judaism; the second is of silver and cedar and is for penitents; the third is of silver and gold, gems and pearls, and is for the patriarchs, Moses and Aaron, the Israelites that left Egypt and lived in the wilderness, and the kings of Israel; the fourth is of rubies and olive wood and is for the holy and steadfast in faith; the fifth is like the third, except a river flows through it and its bed was woven by Eve and angels, and it is for the Messiah and Elijah; and the sixth and seventh divisions are not described, except that they are respectively for those who died doing a pious act and for those who died from an illness in expiation for Israel’s sins.^[24]

Beyond Paradise, according to Legends of the Jews, is the higher Gan Eden, where God is enthroned and explains the Torah to its inhabitants.^[25] The higher Gan Eden contains three hundred ten worlds and is divided into seven compartments.^[26] The compartments are not described, though it is implied that each compartment is greater than the previous one and is joined based on one’s merit.^[27] The first compartment is for Jewish martyrs, the second for those who drowned, the third for “Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai and his disciples,” the fourth for those whom the cloud of glory carried off, the fifth for penitents, the sixth for youths who have never sinned; and the seventh for the poor who lived decently and studied the Torah.^[28]

Zoroastrian eschatology[edit]

In Zoroastrian eschatology, the world to come is the frashokereti, where the saoshyant will bring about a resurrection of the dead in the bodies they had before they died. This is followed by a last judgment. The yazatas Airyaman and Atar will melt the metal in the hills and mountains, and the molten metal will then flow across the earth like a river. All humankind—both the living and the resurrected dead—will be required to wade through that river, but for the righteous (ashavan) it will seem to be a river of warm milk, while the wicked will be burned. The river will then flow down to hell, where it will annihilate Angra Mainyu and the last vestiges of wickedness in the universe.

• 

PART I: 

THEORY OF CHANGE 

What is Emancipatory Development

We would like to take this opportunity to summarize the primary tactical and philosophical lessons being drawn from our study of Social Movement Organizations (SMO). 

It is vital to us as Development Practitioners who view the Universal Human Rights as a mere baseline and hold the desire for real change coupled with full emancipation in our hearts; that we help dispel some mythologies and embrace a program fully in line with “emancipatory development”.  

Emancipatory Development (ED) is the collective tactical blueprint by which the masses render the sources of their dependency obsolete, the violence of their oppressors is neutralized and they emerge with full human capability as well as the agency to uplift their fellow humans. There are four primary tactical sets of ED framework for resistance. First are the Development Technologies; the aspects and technocracy of infrastructure to both sustain life in austere environments but more importantly to achieve baseline control of the Maslow hierarchy of Needs. Post survival comes Mass Capacity Modules; this is didactic/practical expansion on life saving humanitarianism to begin cultivating vocation skills and livelihoods with dignity out of a recently oppressed, traumatized and impoverished populace. The third aspect is Militant Nonviolence or Peacefare; the 198+ tactics codified by the Albert Einstein intuition coupled with every advance in non-lethal warfare coupled strategically to dislodge the iron heel of the oligarchy off our collective neck. 

That is to say, active and passive resistance maneuvers that refuse to take human life. Finally, the Parallel State the subject of this pamphlet; the ongoing effort to break apart the global plantation system into communities of choice and free association. Not by smashing the existing state architecture or engaging the agents of repression in the forests, hills and streets, instead by taking responsibility for our own development. We will achieve self-determination by dispelling the fallacy that we must pay government taxes to survive or that these governments act in our interest.

We will prove the legitimacy of solidarity, mutual aid and human agency.

The most nefarious victory of the “global elites” over the human masses was to remove the legitimacy of our vocabulary to speak of real change. To keep billions on the precipice of survival (3 billion plus living under $2.50 a family a day) requires a vast campaign of delegitimization and historical revisionism as well as vile and periodic atrocity. “Neoliberalism” and globalization itself are an exploitative construct to force an intellectual and tactical break between those fighting for freedom and those attending to the immediate Maslowian needs of billions of our poor. As if to disconnect acceptable from unacceptable change and sanitize the strategic action field of actors with a means to provide as they engage to resist. The poor are poor because of overt political decisions made to pre-determine their non-development. Hiding behind the veil of Human Rights is their open and acknowledged widespread violation. Behind the wool; the smoke screen of development is but a complex, vaguely sanitized version of colonialism. But neo-liberalism is only one school of thought in development. There are dozens of both drivel of crude reductive economists or utopian fallacies hiding the purpose of the architecture. 

The purpose of the global Westphalian state system is not mere extractive servitude from periphery to center. It is also not purely about economics. It is not just about an elite group of ‘capitalists’ and ‘robber barons’ raping the earth and its people for a profit. It is not just about control over finite resources. Or some imagined a clash of civilizations.

It has everything to do with psychology.

Three billion poor are victims of an organized structural violence perpetrated by the economic elites of the traditional hegemon powers and each nation’s cabal of local oligarchs. But, as we prepare to wage wide scale peacefare; as we prepare to organize and train for our total liberation we must attempt to articulate a Social Movement “ideology” that incorporates the lessons of the historic freedom struggle with the most cutting edge arsenal of anti-poverty development capabilities. But, that wouldn’t be enough to get “free”. 

It would likely only unleash further holocaust.

    “Emancipatory Development” is both an ideology and a tactical framework in the service and liberation of the poor. Those of us who are fighting for baseline Universal Human Rights and speak of real socio-political freedom must now embrace the tools of development cautiously as a supplemental mechanism to the tactics of nonviolent resistance. 

    Development means nothing unless it is emancipatory, egalitarian, and led by the people it serves. It must also rely on and invest in the capacity of the masses to be their own agents of delivery, progress, and victory over oppression. We must fully break from neo-colonialist controls, “poverty entrepreneurship”, and measure all our work by its value in national struggles for human liberation. 

    We have to question our own evolution. Our own awareness of the so-called “human condition”. Because we cannot see the soul in a normative sense and perhaps should call to question a deity that has so many prophets and so few deliverables; that is why development itself becomes for a now an issue of psychology; of waking up the dying and asleep.

The poor are so poor because they are victims of a global economic system. A system which breeds technocratic dependency on “aid”, whose structural adjustments gut social systems and place control of national resources in the hands of multinational corporations. It is easy to identify our primary targets. There is not a government on earth without some varying degree of culpability. “Development” however means absolutely nothing unless it is completely rooted in tangible victories of the poor over the sources of their poverty, the external and internal. We stake our legitimacy as a social movement on our ability to wed resistance fully with development. 

To hit the nail on the head; we must utilize tactics that model the world we see in our hearts as well as the conduct. The parallel state is not built on the ashes of a burned out revolution. It is the piece meal adaptation of a new world’s values into incremental liberation. Territory has been shown to be worth far less than opened minds.

It should be a radical notion in light of thousands of years of carnage that we are actually capable of being rewired to collective care. That we are capable of achieving the rights and beyond without implementation form above. 

Any overview of social movements begins with theory. Why they form and theories on their success or failure. Drawing from this I bring attention to the “Resource Mobilization Theory” which states that movements take preexisting organizations able to marshal resources of various types and their synergy yields movement success. Charles Tilly said that Social Movements are “sustained campaigns that make collective claims aimed at authorities” Sidney Tarrow called them: “collective challenges based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities.” What is clear from the recent mobilizations of Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Brazil, Bulgaria, Thailand and the Ukraine is that mass mobilizations are most successful at resisting government repression when they can a) clearly articulate demands and b) mobilize the resources of pre-organized associations to sustain the movements operations and c) supplant the corrupt government as the primary agent of delivery of services ie; DEVELOPMENT. That failure of all of these movements so far, even ones that have brought down highly repressive governments in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Ukraine is to have incorporated any development component that makes their confederation of SMOs, viable alternatives to the states they dismantle or assail.

The main reason the Black Panther Party and Nation Islam were the two greatest recent threats to the oligarchy of the United States was that they embraced bootstrap social services. Occupy did to some extent but they were suppressed in less than three months.

Referring to Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach; Mass Capacity is a social movement led development methodology that declares “human capability” most liberated via education on the skills and technologies human’s need to survive.

In Theory of Fields we read that “defection of economic elites is one of the most critical aspects to the success or failure of a social movement to seize power” They cite the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986 and the Somoza Regime in Nicaragua in 1979. There is a correlation between expanded social movement activity and expansion of state strategic action fields. Modern states are stronger by separating from economic and social bases, then forming alliances with the vital players of the major non-state fields. “Development” via the third (NGO) Sector and government aid is itself a strategic field to conquer. Social Movements for Emancipatory Development must in fact make mastery of development and delivery of services more of priority than resistance to regimes they oppose.

In fact we can clearly see that every single group of partisans that have taken up arms and challenged a violation of rights is either crushed in time; unleashes such carnage that their claims to be liberating anyone are suspect; and or take power and become exactly the as their oppressor. As has been the case is most of the existing parallel state.

In our case studies, we learn the obvious moral strength of non-violent resistance, economic boycott, and mobilization out of intuitions of cultural relevance. In both the cases of the American Civil Rights Movement and the Indian Independence Movement, we see the moral superiority and tactical relevance of non-violence. We read in these cases the necessity of harnessing economic buying power away from assets owned by your oppressors. We see that militarily it would have been disastrous for the Indian people to take up arms against England or the American Negro to fight the Federal government with arms (as the Black Panthers learned in 1968). Instead, both movements achieved considerable constitutional victory without arms. Yet looks at the millions of oppressed Dalit (untouchables) in India or the state of blacks in America. In modern day Syria we can see just how quickly a non-violent pro-democracy movement can devolve into a protracted war with nearly 200,000+ dead and a new Caliphate (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria systematically raping and exterminating all non-believers on their territory; a perversion of parallel state theory as we shall examine later in the pamphlet, albeit a type of one.

Never underestimate the violence unleashed combing greed, grievance and imagined identity. Never forget how many generations are later affected by the traumas of war.

In our studies of Liberation Theology, we examined the power of subverting traditional mechanism of reaction and repression into new social gospels for change. We identify the power seen in Latin America via the “little Church” and in Political Islam in the recent 2011 uprisings across the Middle East. Clearly, Zionism is profound example of utilizing a religious framework coupled with development technology for geo-political ends. As was the Islamic Revolution in Tehran in 1979; Revolutionary Shi’ism, and Hezbollah. It was used to topple the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. We fully advocate that the Movement continue to embrace the universal messages of justice found in the world’s religions as long as no aspect of the movement will seek to impose a singular religious norm over communities not of that religion.  Liberation Theology is so subversive because it conquers one of the elites’ traditional main fields of social control. In the case studies a large chunk of the parallel state was liberated via various liberation theologian movements.

In our examination of Paulo Freire we analyze humanization/ dehumanization; internalization of oppression; and understanding of the elite as divided, uncompleted human beings. Isolation of the mind, disempowerment, and mental slavery was his diagnosis of the oppressed. He spoke of the “false generosity” of philanthropy. And of how the poor live in an “ahistorical world”; a completely deterministic world that they cannot escape of total resignation about their plight. He states that “liberation is painful like childbirth” and that only via the direct empowerment of the people can we achieve political rights or social freedom. In agreement with this philosophy and that of Amartya Sen in “Development as Freedom” Mass Capacity is different from “State Capacity”. The most vital tool of a movement for Emancipatory Development is direct investment in the education and technical training of the masses to develop their own communities as they collectively determine. The concept of mass capacity is vital to the success of our movement because only by achieving self-determination can a people enjoy rights, development or freedom.

In our readings on the anti-caste movement, we see the emancipatory power of abandoning imposed identity. We read about mass conversion for Hinduism to Buddhism.  Forced to “act out one’s oppression” via the caste rituals millions are enslaved. Stopping the belief that you are inherently a slave goes back to Paulo Freire. Breaking ones “psychological isolation in an ahistorical world.” It would not be a strategic social movement position to oppose Hinduism, which is the foundation of the Indian State. The conversion of millions to Buddhism is profound example to the rejection of outsider imposed identities that allow class and ethnic exploitations. There is no cultural relativism to be respect to universal human rights, simply cultural paradigms that either can be understood and adopted (liberation theology) or rejected out of hand as the invention of an oppressor (Hutu/Tutsi). 

 In our cases on land reform of course we go back to the most fundamental question of movement; what is your turf? What is your territory? What is yours as people? To what extent do 206 governments built nearly all by historic rapes and expropriations have legitimacy to declare some land yours? I would argue that not one nation-state on earth has a legitimacy the masses should respect. This movement cannot be defeated if it is universal in demands and universal in expectations. It cannot regard one last repressive regime standing to be acceptable. It cannot abide one single person living in starvation as an acceptable norm. It cannot have national aims. The reality of nation state experiment is that in the guise of security, it usurped control and it build a global system where most of the species would be subjugated to the minority.  

In our cases on resistance to Apartheid, we see that just because a social movement can take state power does not in any way make it able to wield political power to the end of economic empowerment for its poor. We think it should be clear to us that violent revolutions and non-violent revolutions do not improve the economic situation of countries poorest citizens, in fact protracted widespread violence via civil war comes after every violent revolution. The aim is not to improve the existing state system. We would argue that the primary aim of emancipatory development is to completely circumvent the state system and place tools directly in the hands of the people. It is historically clear that taking control of an instrument of mass coercion, i.e. the state; is not a successful means to use its power on the behalf of its citizens. It has historically only fostered a new predatory elite.

We are often confronted with the “apolitical  northern generation” raised post-Cold War that do not have an “ideological” paradigm to view world events. It is quite likely that due to historical revisionism and the previously discussed sanitization of political vocabulary for change many young people in the West may actually believe that globalization is the face of progress. I would say frankly that little has changed since the days of colonialism except that direct rule has been replaced with proxy rule. I would go so far as to say that 3 billion poor and extreme poor, also means 3 or 4 million more pliable workers that can be utilized in the global supply chain. Except right now it is not necessary to mobilize 6 or 7 billion workers, half will suffice and the other may hover on the brink or ruin as a reserve. This is not about economics as much as it is about control because even in the hegemon and metropol nations there are percentages starving, percentages working nearly cradle to grave, and a tiny controlling elite. The fallacy of our entire “Development Enterprise” thus so far is to pretend, to trick ourselves in that the governments were acting in good faith. If Development is not an instrument of political power then it is simple charity. The poor do not need our manipulative carrots and their governments’ sticks. They are not empowered via your charity. We reject that dichotomy that aid is either politics or charity. It’s always politics. It’s got to stop being charity. We have to divest our development from states and put it squarely into people. 

The slogan of our entire movement is simply to “teach a person to fish.” 

With one arm of the movement we strike back at the violators of human rights and with the other we build up the global capacity, the ‘Mass Capacity’ of the people to secure their universal rights and more. This will not come from mobs in streets, from civil disobedience or rifles.  We will bring our oppressors to their knees by illustrating their functional irrelevance. A free people can teach their children to read, tend to their people’s health, and operate the means of development needed by a community. Let it be clear. The liberation of a people comes not from the barrel of a gun but in via control of the means of development; the schools, the hospitals, the civil service, sanitation, and all other trades that by their nature promote self-determination and the public good. And any development practitioner that is not working to build that mass capacity; they are “poverty profiteer”, a “bright eyed idiot”, or worse a “dirty collaborator” perpetuating the system that keeps so many destitute.

We came here to unite a movement hiding in the shadows and fighting for survival in the streets. We know that in every slum, in every city, in the mountains, deserts, woods and rural interior are partisans holding out, fighting disconnected in the darkness. We know in every NGO and CBO, even in elected office are those who still believe in real change but are shackled by politics. We must connect the underground, to the partisans to the sympathizers; to the change makers in the halls of power. 

Above all we will rely on indigenous knowledge and empower the people. It is our goal to open the lines of communication. You are not fighting alone.

January 4^th, 2012

It has been two years since I first arrived in Port-Au-Prince. It is remarkable how short it feels, the eyes close just for a second and flashes of the dream on fire emerge in a slew of most visceral memories; as if they were the lips of a lover parted with just one moment before. Yelizaveta, how I miss her already; and if the last two years has erupted now in snap shots, bombastic escapades and grind; well in just eight hours I miss her as if it were a month, then a year, a forever passing in rapid cycle. Time is relative, memory subjective but for the past two years, really two human moments, there has really been only the desire to possess Yelizaveta juxtaposed with my total solidarity with the Haitians. The moral empathy, endless struggle to know them as a people so that I might wed my trade and toil and talent to the cause of their inevitable liberation.

    The attainment of human rights long deferred and structurally denied.

    I am now on a plane. It is Continental Flight 1647 and Victor Emile Cange, my stalwart comrade and partner in this operation slumbers silently, Christianly even. Next to me. We have succeeded in moving 840 kilograms of Basic Life Support medical equipment past U.S. customs and home land security. Long boards have become surf boards, bags loaded with stethoscopes, sphygmometers, training manuals, wound care supplies, are all just our non-declared tourist items. The second anniversary of the quake is eight days away, it is 4th January, 2012, by body is tried still from the ethanol athletics of New Years. Yelizaveta is still on my very lips, I can still feel where she grabbed the blue collar of my uniform and pulled me in.

    Victor and I are wearing the unmarked blue battle dress uniform fatigues of the movement we are affiliated to; the Banshee underground, and the z.o.b. We suspect these uniforms will allow us more scrutiny going into country while lending less scrutiny to our bags. There is an embargo on all bulk items entering the country not coming in as declared and taxes humanitarian cargo until January 15^th. 

    Like most Blan initiatives pre/post-quake; the dynamics of doing any so-called good are maddening and inexplicable; and have many factions to blame themselves on. Principally always the tiny 5% of the Neg, Mulatto and Arab bourgeoisie, followed by the MINUSTAH UN authorities, the cartels, and the Republic of NGO technocrats. And also the heat, and also history and illiteracy, and famine and rampaging Nepalese Cholera too. 

    Once again, we are flying into a hell. Flying into the city of lost children and shattered dreams; the land of many mountains. Ayiti Cherie! We are the third wave of the reinforcements from New York. We will meet Tiputti Capois, our oldest associate and brother at Toussaint L’Ouvature International Airport. And re-supply the Gwoup Ayisyen pou Ijans, the Haitian Emergency Group. We will meet their members and prepare them rigorously. EMT practical drills and negotiations on their future, and plans. We will ready them to stand before the archangel Michael Mastroianni who arrives 21^st January to administer a witnessed practical and written EMT exam. For whatever good it will do I pray we find them stalwart and reasonably well organized.

    I pray too that the city isn’t exactly as I left it two years ago.

    Around us on the plane are the faces of Haiti; noire, mulat, blan and representing all things. Things tragic, things ineffective, things self-serving, self-dealing, against and for human dignity, faces of perseverance, of calm of nervousness of taking and of giving. There is also the hard face of Haitian pride, indomitable. 

    So many trying with the mandate of science, God, and reason to remake the face of Haiti; save her somehow in some small way.

    So many never even asked the Haitian people. Too many are simply short sighted interventionists. Or cowered by the ten million masses shackled in the modes of survival. Today we will ask the GAI and their members where to from here? Victor, myself, Michael, all of us in Banshee and LAHAF; all the supporters of the movement; all the veterans of the first and second waves; one and all are fighting for a small dream too.

    But thankfully none have died for it, yet. I remember so many faces from the first time; from 15 January, 2010 to 28 January, 2010; the first wave. The Bed Stuy-AMHE Detachment. Our tumultuous landing in the 6^th day of relief, before the bodies were buried or the smoke had cleared. Indomitable will; fearlessness and selflessness and all of that faith we had in our humanity. The cooperative solidarity of a Kombit Medikal. That two weeks, that slaughter of so many Haitians; who knows whether it was 1, 2, 3,000,000 people; no one knows at all. That laid the basis of my dream, the dream I sold to Victor, to Cassidy, to Dominich, to Lou Auguste Jr and LAHAF, to Jenn Slitter, to all of the Banshee underground, well I’d sold the dream even to myself convincingly. We dreamed that the Haitians would have the training, will and organization to save lives.

    I must always remember the steams of the bathhouse, where me and my first partner, my first co-conspirator beautiful Yelizaveta Kotlyarova gave me true support and true unflinching council. Must also keep my parents in mind, or in a heartbeat I would lose myself in the people of Haiti and never return to America at all. Go big or go home, banshee-motherfucka-if-ya-ain’t-running-with-it-run-from-it.

    Victor knows this well.

    We were both there in the blood and rubble of the trembling earth. Our tears and their lack of tears our blood and their blood, mixed into the casement and cracks on the pavement. I may have the face of a blan, but my heart is that of a Haitian. My constitution to take the struggle to where it must logically go, all the way up the great mountain, to secure this people, my adopted people from vicious exploitation, mismanaged sympathy, foreign rape and plunder. For two whole years we organized volunteers, we supplied the GAI with trainers and gear. And reinforced the shared dream. Not EMS in Haiti! Not mere ambulances! The power to respond to human and natural disaster on their own, the ability to rescue their own people. Liberty through control of their own social services, full human rights would come later, full reclamation of sovereignty. Realization of emancipation and the conclusion of the revolution. Haiti, finally in the hands of Haitian people. 

How am I such now a major patriot for a foreign people? In their eyes I see my own people, maybe I see myself in another life. That is what the earthquake showed me about myself and my destiny. I see my reflection as a human in them. I see a way to reclaim my own humanity, restore my own life through something much more important than mere me.

And I have lost so much on this battle already, they think, some think I am a mad man possessed by the spirits. Which spirit I do not even bother to guess. Something had entered me in those grisly days of the first wave. I saw the world to come.

I saw that were I to show ineffable might, like a Haitian; I would live to see the liberation. I would live to see our victory over that oligarchy.

    The Haitian oligarchy first and then the tyrants in my own nation and all of the other plantations too. For it was in this country, this was the beginning of the Great Revolt, it was the very first time a rebel alliance took on European hegemony, slavery and colonialism; and for a time won.

    There was no only Yelizaveta and the slaughter I saw from the quake. Both opened my eyes to hating and to loving, to despair and to a possible freedom. With my eyes opened now they can never close until I am cold and dead. Haitian and foreigner, blan, mulat, neg; l’union fait la force! We are here to keeping laying a base.

The ability to heal and help is not the ability to save. Wounds and sickness across a body politico cannot be helped with small cosmetic Band-Aids. The blame for what happened here is a shared blame. There are so many people black and white and in between that have conspired to ruin Haiti. To keep her people backwards and maldeveloped as lesson to all those who would join the revolt.

Haiti hemorrhages now for 200 plus years and they kick her when she is down, they steal whatever there is to steal, they plunder and they rape and they abuse her while she lies long vanquished. 97% of the fucking trees are gone! 84% of the people live below $2 a day. No one even knows how many died in that quake because there was no census since 2004! When US marines kidnapped the first and only elected President Aristede and dragged him off to house arrest in the Central African Republic. 

But Haitians will never be exterminated. Or long brought to their knees. They are capable of incredible resistance. Résistance to both foreign and domestic enemies. A year ago Jean Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc the last dictator) returned to a city of barricades and a populace demanding his arrest. Aristede returned to be celebrated though his party Lavalas is banned an illegal still. Resistance to and beyond death. In one generation or two in diaspora Haitians have become doctors, lawyers, nurses, lawyers and business men. More millionaires than any other Caribbean diaspora. They make up 1/5 of the Greater New York healthcare work force. Who knows if these statistics are true, they reflect a fact on the ground.

In Haiti, despite the best efforts of 10,800 non-governmental organizations (Klass ONG), charities and missionaries unleashed in the 1980’s after the fall of Duvalier in 1986; things have gotten as bad as sub-Saharan Africa. A UN garrison of roughly ten thousand Brazilian and Argentine soldiers occupies the only UN peacekeeping mission in a nation with no declared ceasefire between combatants; neo-Duvalierist oligarchs and the Famni Lavlas party. 

Here everyone is dying.

Of cholera, of being a restovik child slave, of preventable disease, of Cholera, of road accidents, of child birth, or exposure and tropical storms, of hunger. Life expectancy is below 58. There are over 46,000 mostly white development technocrats here, they live well. On the top of the hills with servants and drivers. Parts of Kenscoff and Petionville look like high society France. With chipping paint. There is an opera house at the top of the mountain called Tara’s. You can see plays there or famous international musicians. There are so many Haiti’s except the one that most of its citizens live in; one of early death and great squalor.

If you are blind to that then you have not really been to this place. Or you are part to blame for it.

Many but few, have made Haiti what she is. The iron heel is elusive and complex. The violators are of all colors and creeds. NGO imperialists, human and drug traffickers, Dominican businessmen, the local oligarchy. But before we can know our enemies we must know our friends. Tiputti and his sister Tipudine Capois do not talk politics. They are not affiliated with Lavalas or any faction we are aware of.  They met us during the quake and have told our grand alliance; Alliance 01 that they will organize their people.

We began with 68 EMT trainees and I am told we now have only 25 or 26 that are ready to test out, a year later. The other possible 100 members of GAI dropped the course Paramedic Instructor Howard carried out for 6 months, but they hang around the club and see what will be offered. Their motives are as diverse as our own collection of idealisms, but they want jobs in the medical sector. They want to leave the island some. They have varying degrees of patriotism, none speak English except Tiputti and his sister Tipudine. Many were original responders like Tiputti Capois who met Victor and I two years ago during the first wave in “unit C” when we enlisted several hundred to secure the General Hospital. Many are new. Most of the serious opportunists are gone allegedly. The GAI has held out with no pay for nearly two years, we sent a scout Wilkinson Francois to assess them three months ago, he reported enthusiasm but virtually no command structure of program for the future. He reported 25-30 possible EMTs and 40-100 first aiders, Haitians despise making rosters and lists of names, so they don’t do it. 

These 25 potential EMT trainees, and 100 some odd responders, their family and friends are what we are here to properly assess the operational capability of.

Are they young bold visionaries seeking change in Haiti? Or are they opportunists as so many warned. Do they want real change, or do they just want jobs and livelihood? Well only Wilkinson had asked. Paramedic Instructor Howard has disappeared. Wilkinson as a Haitian and speaker of Haitian Creole had reported to us that they were sincere. And also a bunch of disorganized civilians in their early 20’s.

His report was what got authorization for Victor and I to proceed with a third Wave.

All the experts and much of the diaspora had told our Alliance that EMS in Port Au Prince is simply impossible. They told us our volunteers would be kidnapped, our supplies stolen or killed. They told us Haitians don’t do anything without being paid. Thinly guarded racism, a lot of it.

Victor has faith. I have zeal. And Michael Mastroianni has a great deal of expertise and we all wish to see if two years of effort had a result. Hundreds of other members and volunteers are waiting for our unit to validate or invalidate a lot of sacrifice. They came from Atlanta, from New York, from Miami, from Las Vegas, from Seattle and Chicago; 104 in the first wave, 28 medical and communications volunteers in the second wave. Now, just 3 in the third. Civilian volunteers all, mostly EMS, fire, and communications backgrounds kept this going for two years. GAI survived without pay or resources cut off from LAHAF and BANSHEE in the states except phone calls and email, periodically. They and we are fighting to give the people here and abroad something to believe in.

Hope floats? Maybe.

Soon people will testify. Haske & Mapfre, Greenlee, Denby, Marriana, Fishman and Resnick who shot a lot of film and took a lot of pictures. Hundreds of hours of never gonna be seen footage. How this occurred was wrongly held faith in the power of the media. No film was ever made. Thomas later made a short one.

Victor and I are emergency medical professionals, I’m an EMT, and he’s a paramedic. We have to determine alongside paramedic Mastroianni; was this all for nothing or is the GAI real. Can GAI pass BLS exams, take multiple choice tests and pass? They never even had power points or text books. Can they complete the eight stations of basic life support practical skills, can they hold up as real EMTs? Are they school kids or potential heroes and avenger of their people? We have to testify in less than 20 days.

Testify about the birth of Haitian EMS, and if a clandestine Haitian human rights movement can grow from that or not. In an hour we land at Toussaint L’Ouvature.

This time I bet they stamp my passport.

Thank god this is all finally happening. Despite all the struggle and all of the loss and hardship I feel as though we are close to the edge as well as the tipping point too. Real change. I pray I will never forget Yelizaveta’s face, how could I? More I pray I never fail to separate FACT from EMOTION, as all too many do in Haiti coming from the outside. I must make sure I sleep more, a little more. We have a lot of work cut out for us. Making the GAI ready for Michael, the 22 January test, the 26 January Consortium on EMS in Haiti, a lot must be done in just 22 days. 

If you ain’t running with it, run from it. That’s what my life coach Lil Wayne told Yelizaveta and that’s what she told me.

The man was beleived to be an informant and so we seized him off the street and put a bag on his head. Which was overall uncomplicated except that he was Austailian. It is of course customary to clean your own house before you attempt to deal with the oppression of others. In this particualr case, we had to confirm a suspicion that a. Kirkuk was being auctioned to the Iraqi Army, and b. The foreign fighters database was actually legit. This man knew the answer to at keast one and a half if those questions. Perhaps, after we filed off his right knuckels, and put out an eye, hed talk like he talked to the Australian intelligence.
The idea that you can induce confidence by offering things is rarely as effextice as torture. But you have to be judicious with torture, since people will sometimes say anything to not be tortured anymore. We are hardly amateur at both being tortured, and when push comes to shove torturing our enemies.

The Kurdish word Josh quite literally cones from the word Donkey, but its more vile. Its origin qas during the Al Anfal genocide when our own people sold us out to the murder of the Saddam regime. Its very much a know and universally rule of the guerrilla, taught to us by the Palestinians that before you take in the enemy, you liquidate the traitors in your midst.

Now this man is a Westerner, a YPG veteran whi did 9 months in Rojava mostly in Mambij. But, a man has got to do what his leadership twlls him, there is no life with out a leader and this cones from the top of the Party. People who sell us to the Turkish intelligence, or anyones intwlligence are marked to die.

People say that the PKK is a terorist organization. The European nations do not allow us our flag or the flag of the YPG YPJ, SDF or of Serok Apo. But I say only this Heval, who is the biggest terorist. Us, or Turkish fascist state who emptied 5,000 villages and killed 40,000 civilians? Us, or the Iraqi military and Saddam who killed 800,000 of us in death camps. Us or the butcher Assad who has tortured 1 in 18 of all Syrians and wioed out 500,000 and growing in this war? Us, or the howling Shiites of Iran who hang our leadrers one a month. Us, or vicious Daesh with their sick perversion of Islam. Us, or the U.S. lead forces and CIA that set in motion the rise of Daesh? Perhaps we are terrorists only of vatying gradients. I will say this heval, if the Australian intelligence know about the list, and the Slovaks have a copy, then everyone already knows. This man took the list while infiltrating YPG at mambij.

This list of 5,700 foreign fighters, with photo with real names and more is a proof. A proof that Turkey, Saudi, Pakistan and the UAE cultivated ISIS with full knowledge of the CIA. It confirms in essence the word on the street, that leading Daesh at the highest rank, perhaps Baghdafi himself took money from U.S. allies, intermediaries.

I use so something like a file to grind the cartilage off his left hand. This goes on a bit and is messy. I then put out his left eye.

The situation was such that Turkish artillary and airstikes pummeled our primative defenses around the clock, not even bringing the enemy in rifle range.

The Party had over estimated the local preparations for defense, the ideological commitment of the population as well both Russia and Americas failure to intervene and reign in the Turkish state.

Soon, after just a week of combat, Afrin City was fully encircled, many small towns had been take by the FSA irregualrs, and little pockets of resistance were fighting fir survival.

Heval Ana’s tabor was trying to reenforce the positions in Afrin but most of the fighters didnt even get to fire a single shot. War planes killed almost everyone on the roadway to the city, charring the ground and pulverizing out forces in firey deluge.

The Kurdish revolutionary jangles, played on until the very very end. A series of heavy airstrikes rip apart the convot. The grisled survivors taking firing positions at the road side. Most of the tabor was simply anniellated in the death from above. It happens very quickly. In several loud rapid rumbling bursts. About thirty people die immediately, about thirty died later from terrible wounds. A few survived, ingloriously maimed at least on the inside.

A Policy Recommendation for Urban Revitalization in the Age of Sustainable 

Development 

First Draft

12/18/2019

The ultimate objective of this legislative measure by bundle would be to take aim squarely at housing, education, infrastructure and healthcare for the middle class and working class people of New York City  in order to fund long term redevelopment of our regressive welfare institutions. 

These measures would propose a complete reprioritization of public spending aimed at achieving a greater equality of the fundamental social services. 

Side by side incredible wealth and poverty exist in our city. Some 57,000 Manhattanites worth 37 million and up living alongside the neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn and South Bronx which appear to depend entirely on a regressive welfare state and multi-generational poverty to furnish Manhattan with the lowest paid castes of wage slaves, welfare dependants, and ongoing quality of life blights.

This analysis approaches this non ideologically. Though its recommendations are based on Democratic Confederalism/ Municipal Confederalism. There is no blame cast here on demographics, i.e. specific underserved ethnic groups, new immigrants and the extremely poor, only on public policy. To allow a continuation of such poverty on our door steps is actually a betrayal and embarrassment of the American dream. 

We will in 10 stepwise points address underdevelopment causality, and immediately prescribe broad radical policy for solution oriented approaches. Of course we invite criticism and encourage public dialogue in the solution process.

1. On Language, there is no valid reason to have large bodies of people with no ability to integrate to culture and economy. 

The inability of immigrants to speak English directly degrades their prospects for successful integration to our society.

Recommended: All new immigrants must be sent to language immersion programs immediately on their arrival. All existing and Recommended service programs must be contingent and encouraging of language acquisition. Encouraging undocumented people to live lawfully and provide a way to build a new life is more desirable than a permanent victimized under class.

2. On Social Service Apartheid, as all hospitals, public schools, and public housing in these neighborhoods are sub-standard, barely fit for dignified habitation; an active program must made to aggressively demolish and replace existing stock.

Recommended: This will require new taxes on the Middle and Upper classes to fund better hospitals and schools, as well as a systematic destruction of all decrepit city public housing.

A. Funding for Jacobi, Lincoln, Woodhull and Kings County should be tripled. The city should municipalize (i.e. reverse privatization of vital services) Interfaith and Bronxcare. New monitoring and evaluation standards will be placed on city health services alongside a Cuban style system of proactive community paramedicine and public health work.

B. Funding for Public High schools, all Public High schools in these neighborhoods will be triple funded, salary structures for all teachers will be increased with differentials to bring new talent to this intuitive. All private schools will be partnered with public schools to reanimate curriculum and pedagogical training. All private, charter and religious schools will be funded by the city to absorb larger scholarship cohorts. More magnet schools and city as school internships will be established. 

PUBLIC SCHOOLS

To triple the current funding levels of all public schools and triple the wages of all teachers, a partnership tax will be placed on all private schools for development of a public institution. 

All private schools will accept a percentage of high scoring public students at a rate triple what is offered now.

PUBLIC HOSPITALS 

Triple funding and the establishment of citywide a single payer system charged in relation to annual income will be based on the flat tax.

C. A systematic policy of public housing demolition will begin with a transfer of the elderly and disbaled last to acceptable housing outside the 5 boroughs. The wealthiest most expensive city in America will  no longer indefinitely subsidize rent. In a stepwise pattern all able bodied persons will be sent to vocational training centers or paid labor battalions. All elderly and disabled persons will be transferred to external sites complaint with best norms and standards befitting improvement in their living conditions. All existing public housing will be demolished. Affordable middle class and working poor stock will be erected in its place. 

All women’s shelters will be replaced with dormitory style centers with vocational training, child care and temp work placement programs. 

All homeless shelters will be systematically demolished and replaced with dormitory screening sites that will transfer these people, suffering from mental illness and long term drug use to special detox facilities set up peripheral to New York.

3. On EBT Cards, The electronic benefit system is wrife with fraud and a key element of regressive welfare. It will be eliminated in its present form.

Recommendation: EBT, WIC and Varying EBT schemes will be replaced with meal voucher cards for cafeterias. You will no longer be able to use the EBT as an ATM card, where fraud is occurring at the Bodegas. You will be able to obtain varying essential rationed goods, and 3 meals a day but no longer will the EBT payments be applied as tender.

Elderly persons and disabled persons must be screened from those capable of paid work. In cases of the elderly a new type of EBT Medicare will be issued insuring basic needs are met. Those with physical and mental disabilities will be considered for a type of Medicaid EBT but greater controls will be placed on them. People are entitled to clean bedding, clothing, water. Not flat screen TVs, pets, motorcycles and luxury sneakers. 

A new policing initiative on welfare fraud must police the spending habits of all recipients.

5. On Dignified Work and Labor Battalions, the South Bronx/ Central Brooklyn has become a festering labor ghetto, a reserve for the worst lowest paid jobs and exploitation of undocumented workers.

Recommended: The formation of new temp centers, vocational schools and paid labor battalions to provide work for unskilled workers while they transition to high paid, higher skilled jobs. We must fund this effort to show that everyone willing to work, is working and everyone able to go back to school has a system to accommodate that.

6. On the Toxic Environment.The daily trucking operations, widespread use of cars and the emissions from this have created an asthma epidemic. The streets are covered in trash and the neighborhoods look like blighted slums. Fast food, liquor stores, and bodegas have proliferated in a food desert, i.e. green fresh food depots.

Recommended: trucking will move to Yonkers and Pelham based depots where it will load goods on new supply trains. Public transit citywide will he triple funded. Single occupant vehicle use will completely restricted. New taxes will be placed on all personal vehicles. Labor battalions will focus on enhanced trash collection, public mural painting and neighborhood clean up. City run green market projects will be enhanced.

7. On Criminal Justice, despite widespread citywide gentrification these areas remain wrife with violent crime and illegal activity.

Recommended: Membership in gangs, mafias and drug dealership groups, as well as all manner of violent crime will lead to municipal deportation post incarceration. 

We will close Rykers island and replace it with 5 smaller detention/rehabilitation centers. Non violent offenses will lead to unpaid labor battalion sentences and heavier fines. 

Violent crime will lead to citywide deportation. Membership in any organization of criminal conspiracy will be grounds to revoke municipal citizenship. In some regards the prison population will be greatly reduced and persons of criminal inclination expelled from the city.

8. On Incentivizing the Working Class,

Approximately half of population does in fact work currently for minimum wage or off the books for less if undocumented. We must understand that rewarding labor and creating further pathways to economic security are integral to this revitalization program. 

We are triaging those who cannot work, from those that will not work from a small minority of outright criminals. Then we are eliminating structural impediments to progress, i.e. healthcare, education and infrastructure funding. But crucially we must show a return on investment to our working and middle classes, not unsustainably displace our underclass. 

Recommended:

A. Rent Control/Stabilization & Subsidy/ Zone, Control and Freeze. See attached rent scheme.

1. Luxury developments should by law help fund off site affordable housing developments and or public infrastructure in adjacent districts concurrent with construction of future hugh rise and luxury rentals.
2. Higher property taxes, especially for people with multiple properties, and a special tax on pied a terres and vacant properties 
3. A system of preferential longevity where native New Yorkers and ten year or more residents are entitled to differentiated sets of prices for ownership called Rent Ceiling renting. 
4. Rent ceilings, capped every four years to the median net income in a city district, all rental  properties must be zoned 2/5 rent ceiling apartments, 1/5 rent controlled, 2/5 market rent. Existing housing stock must switch to this modality on death or vacancy of residents under older rent regime.
5. Setting up a system of 5 income tiers that very clearly indicate what an individual or family is entitled to, which can be upgraded each year. Rent ceiling, rent stabilized, rent controlled or market zones units must give preference to the teir an applicant falls in. This someone above 250K income is not entitled to lease a rent controlled apt. This tier is linked to your after tax income. 
6. Rent depreciation  after 5 years of consistent leasing, your rent will go down not up to stay put. 
7. More mixed zones large scale residencies like Waterside Plaza or Coop city, market rental, rent control, rent stabilize and coops or condos in the same development. 
8. The ideology here is not social equality or home ownership. This is a city of extremes and a city of constant newcomers. But there is extreme wealth here that should pay for the right to have luxury goods and services by assisting in the elevation of the bottom 1/5 that are in public housing on regressive welfare payrolls. This is about squeezing the wealthy to subsidize a bigger welfare state. It is based on the idea that affordable housing should be considered a right earned by working. 
9. Linking the ideas that mixed zoning, denser development and privileging working residents I link this housing policy with a City Service policy where we have youth ages 18 to 21 joining the city services similar to the Israeli modal in exchange for access to rent controlled housing. We would also like to make students eligible for that as well.

1. Dissagrigation By Income

In order to establish legislation that is actually beneficial to working class and middle class taxpayers payers, as well as capable of uplifting the working poor and welfare dependent class we must arrive at some agreement on the illusion of their being a middle class in this country. 

As the average American worker does not make a much higher income than the people on public assistance and the jump into the 4% of high income earners is approximately 40x the so called middle class, disaggregating and taxing by after tax take home allows a much more equitable redistribution to the public services by taxation.

Thus this legislation focuses on designated income classes and positions within an improved tax bracket system accordingly.

Persons on Public Assistance 

No taxable income. Must demonstrate physical or mental disability, be beyond working age 65, and or be pregnant with no clear means to be self-sustaining.

I.e. (Recurrent Welfare Mothers, Mentally ill and the physically disabled)

Person who are Working Poor T1

Persons earning at or below 50K. 

I.e. (retail workers, EMTs, bartenders, delivery staff, unskilled workers.)

Person who are Working Poor T2

Persons earning at or below 50K, with up to 100 K in bank or assets. I.e. savings, property or a car.

I.e. 

Persons who are Working Class T1

Persons who are earning between 50 to 90K.

I.e. (Semi-skilled workers, truck and livery drivers, not for profit staff, dental hygienists, paramedics)

Persons who are Working Class T2

Persons earning between 50 to 90K with up to 200 K in bank or assets. I.e. savings, property or a car. I.e. (cops , fire fighters, nurses, 

Persons who are Middle Class T1

Persons in range 90 to 110K.

Persons who are Middle Class T2

Persons in range 90 to 110K, 

with up to 300 K in the bank or in assets. I.e. savings, property or a car.

Persons of High Net Worth T1

Annually earning 110 to 400 K with between 100 to 500k in bank or assets.

Persons of High Net Worth T2

400K to 1 Million with between 500 to 5 million in bank or assets.

Persons of High Net Worth T3

Between 1 and 5 million in annual earnings or revenue with any amount above 5 million in a bank or in assets.

Persons of High Net Worth T4

5 to 50 million and up in annual earnings or revenue with any amount above 100 million in a bank or in assets.

Persons of High Net Worth T4

1 billion and up in annual earnings or revenue with any amount above 10 billions in a bank or in assets.

B. Municipal Participation/ Campaign Finance Transparency 

All candidates must list by total percentages where their campaign was specifically funded by in order to determine conflicts of interest and access buying. 

Public Financing of Campaigns 

Setting matching funds for all candidates that achieve a certain number of electoral endorsements. 

Housing  

Rents would be annually set to the median after tax income of the district electorate based on five tiers. In essence what a community actually earns will establish a rent ceiling which holds the duration of a lease. This would disaggregated by incomes at or below 30k, 60k,100k, 250k, and all high net worth incomes above. 

Rent control, where ones rent decreases every 5 years. Ensuring a percentage of the market is kept stabilized at all times. Forcing luxury development to be taxed at a higher percent and demonstrate all projects have social return on investment. 

B. City Citizenship a program of incentives, protections and subsidies for new arrivals and long term multi genrational New Yorkers.

C. City Years: an Israeli style program of uniformed municipal service ensuring 17 to 21 year olds health and education subsidies. 

CITY SERVICE

All public service departments will set aside a large percentage of new hire seats for young men and women take a three year national service track later entitling them to major subsidies of their future health and education.

9. Restructuring of Municipal Services: i.e With augmentation of paid and unpaid labor battalions and city years corps, we will be halving the size of paid Fire Suppression, tripling the size of the teaching services, doubling the EMS services with new role of community paramedicine, enlarging sanitation services, and expanding city health services. At the same time wages of city council workers will be decreased, the social work fields will be radically reimagined, corrections cut by 3/4s. All existing NYPD precincts will be partnered with new community appointed policing units and arrest quotas will be eliminated.

10. New York City will reduce its Federal and State tax contributions and increase its Citywide taxes. 

Taxes will involve a flat tax where by payment ensures your vote in city elections and a wealth tax with gradients that move sharply upward at annual wealth and income calculations. See attached taxation scheme.

It was nearly winter in the Wilderness of North America, but this time the machines had been running for so long that it was neither cold nor impassible, nor even vaguely uncomfortable. It was still leather Jacket season just a week before the Christ Mass. And Sebastian Adon, this time in his own body and grounded in reality was humming and strolling with his hands in the brown leather jacket he’d owned for fifteen years. It sowed as much.

Alkaline, the Jamaican philosopher says ‘Everything in life just takes time,’ and that was the song in his head and that song sustained him. It was the water to parched lips and limbs and it was the kiss before jumping out a plane into the black sky of night.

    In Hebrew, ‘he’ means ‘she’ and ‘who’ means him. And right now though, for the first time in a while since he became a civilian again; he; was Sebastian Adon and wasn’t using any fake papers, faces or nationalities. And she was Valentina Stanovova, aloof and whimsical and strangely interested in checking up on him.    

He hadn’t heard from her in four and some months. 

After the scary episode of fourth dimensional travel, her accusations in the Air Bathhouse, the wearing of the German suit for the first time. He was shook up, and even deleted her social security number and cell phone too. He knew he was gonna get out gunned, out spent, out classed and quick too. She was so real and so powerful, he had not been near magic like that since, and well dare he even say.

Curiously the next time Valentina Stanavova popped into his life; it was via an email inviting him to go ice skating in the globally jeans and t shirt warm late December in Bryant Park; filled with those who skate fast and those who dash their booties hard on the ice for all to see. And Sebastian Adon remembered that he used to roller blade when he was young which could not be conceptually much different. He hoped.

It was only her smile and little hand clasping his that prevented him from becoming a casualty of the ice and hoypaloyik mobs flying by all around them. She was so patient, she let him take her hand and slow her down and they spun by, several times he almost toppled them both. This was nothing like sky diving, nothing like gun play, nothing like painting, nothing like giving public speeches, nothing like evasive driving, nothing like hard fucking; nothing at all like several of things he believed he was good for. This was so pleasant. And it wasn’t very cold at all, and he genuinely felt that Ms. Stanavova didn’t judge him. Didn’t have man expectations at all.

Around they went. He was happiest holding her hand though she pushed him to find balance on his own, as many women ultimately did. There seemed like hundreds of people watching them, pointing waiting for people to wipe out. He’d give them a run for their money.

    I’ll tell you what the strangest part was. She couldn’t read his mind so she didn’t see him scanning the crowd for a suicide bomber to blow apart all these happy people. She didn’t hear him ask himself were they being watched, all the paranoia of all his other work.

She couldn’t hear him being crazy, basically. Because this was the temple mount, this was the top of the citadel. There weren’t gonna be any bombings here. This wasn’t a backwater colony on the edge of the empire, like say Tel Aviv. This was a hard an monitored place.

“You know” she says, “you can buy a pair of skates on Amazon, we can make a little habit out of all this,” and she smiles at him. And he breaks his mental train of thought about wondering what year it was.

“I should, I mean I like it,” he replies.

The skate on and then she heads to the center of the rink to practice her precision amid some little cones. He mostly watches. The war is so far away, it was maybe like; there was no war?

“I love skating so much, I love all winter sports; do you ski or snow board, maybe we can make a trip later on, when I come back.” 

 She was always coming or going this little architect. She was supposed to have been visiting family in Russia, but had ended up in Hong Kong. She was soon to be off for Brazil, but who knew it was all so effortless her various movements. She had changed her architecture firm about four times since they met, maybe that was normal. She was an artful dodger, filled with wanderlust like him, but perhaps with more means to act on it casually. She was either wealthy herself or had a patron, like everyone else in this city.

A massive airship was moving directly above the city New Jersey bound, these ‘floating fortresses’ were massive cold fusion powered leviathans. They could wipe out whole cities, they housed vast drone fleets and terra drone soldiers for mop ups. Actually no one could see it seemed, but him. He’d seen on brought down over Strong Island two years before in the Battle of Brooklyn Soviet.

“Stop day dreaming droog, look at me, look at my moves!” she says and executes a little spin twist, twirl.

“How now!” he smiles.

Was it real? The airship and the Battle of Brooklyn? Can his soul be loaded like a wetware microchip into a German businessman’s flesh suit? Was that real, did that happen? Did the map that he had seen in the bunker on avenue J indicate that the elevation of Manhattan, therefore the entirety of the Isle of Man citadel was actually almost 40,000 kilometers above sea level; therefore like a veritable mountain above the mostly flat Brooklyn Soviet? Was it disguised by hologram?

“You’re doing it again Sebastian,” she laughs, “you’re spacing away when you should be here with me. Are you having fun with me?”

“I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a year,” he says, which is true as this is very fun and you cannot line up tantric sex and ice skating, because they are not even the same category of fun. His last couple ex-girlfriends were not that ‘fun’. 

“I’m happy too, this is great,” Valentina says and they return into the fray of clockwise movement, dashing, darting, moving fast and slow.

Had he ever been ice skating in this decade? No, he doubted it. This memory pops into his head suddenly; of the ice cracking, or shattering and his falling into a frozen lake and then, black.

“We could try more places too,” she says. She notices he’s taken her hand again even though maybe he doesn’t need to, she lets it go, and he is a sweetheart. A beautiful minded Amerikanski, so rare.

The Bryant Park rink closes and they’re sitting in his battered white Civic sipping tea.

There are these rules the Resistance codified called the ‘Security Culture’ it’s an understanding that you can be recorded almost anywhere, but cars, homes and public places are always recorded. Cell phone microphones are always on, even though most think it wipes out your battery quickly to real time record. Sending anything electronically is all recorded. Searching for anything unorthodox is flagged. Public libraries are all flagged. You basically can’t have a secure conversation except on a hike, with no phone, in a bathhouse, except the ones already wired up, you can have one by passing had written notes. Was he going to pass her the note that he wrote, not this time. 

    All smiles and tea, all free loving and also quick to block him out for months on end with no explanation other than she was busy, or a family emergency. What were they going to do with each other.

    He offered to drive her home, and she said simply, “I’m not sleeping at my home tonight.” And that broke his heart a little that that was so overt. 

    Boyfriends and husbands never stopped him much before, but it was 2016 soon, it was time to have a higher opinion of oneself. He’s never even thought to try and kiss her, it just hadn’t been appropriate, and wasn’t now. They sipped more tea.

    Waited to part company soon, the white bent up, economical Honda Civic faced East on 42^nd street, parked next to the Grand Library where he used to study medicine with Ariel Elmallay. Just several clicks ahead was the United Nations building whose big white tower could be hit by almost any errant rocket fired from the coast of Breuklyn Soviet, visually speaking but in reality to hit that tower would require Iranian fire power, not made in Brooklyn basements; because it was an illusion that the World Trade Center, the UN Building and Empire State building could be seen from places like Dumbo or Williamsburg; an illusion! Rockets couldn’t easily hit these edifices because they were high above, higher than third dimensional perception allowed. He knew that to be true, like he knows he is a lefty.

    Maybe he’s drifting so far away because he knows there isn’t anyone to center him back, no one who cares to take the risk to do that work. Certainly not her.

    “I wonder what you’re doing with me,” he says.

    “I enjoy your mind a lot.”

    “What if I didn’t want to see you again?”

    “I would discourage that, we have fun don’t we. Don’t cheat me out of clean fun.”

    “You make me feel marginal you know, you’re real busy. I for the very first time have too much time to know what to do with. But I don’t have anything to offer you, I have dirty job, a shitty car. No money.”

    “You have a lot more than most. Your mind is exciting and I would never encourage you to not see me, but you need to respect my time and my; shall we say circumstances.”

    “I think I will develop feelings for you and ruin the little magic you might feel.”

    “Take whatever risk you must.”

    “What am I good for?”

    “Remains to be seen.”

    “Do you remember the last time we were together?” he asks her.

    “Live in the moment Sebastian, droog, wake up, this is all real. I go to Brazil in 5 days, there will be no time to see you before I go, it’s not personal. I’m working on a complex structure at work, something like was always talked of; a hanging garden above central park! Exciting right, as we always talked about.”

    They had been on four or five or six dates, some were not really dates some were just sweet palavers, maybe they all were since she had a boyfriend or a husband or a patron or a keeper and they’d not even done more than barely hold hands on ice.

    The second date he told her an idea of building a floating pleasure garden above central park and it stuck in her head and now she had done it; she had found the backers to erect such a thing and political will bought to uphold that plan.

    “You’re so impressive,” he tells her.

    As long as he’s known her he’s though so.

    “Wonderful that you think so, I think so too, about us both.”

    “Well what now?” he asks, “when again will I see you?

    She hands him a little envelope and inside it is a picture of her looking blonde and ravishing shot by a professional photographer. There is a red lip stick kiss on it. Some numbers are written on the back. There’s a lot of reason to believe he shouldn’t call those numbers. But he will.

    “I’m worth so much to so many, just go slowly,” she says.

    “I don’t know when you’ll see me again, but I know you won’t forget me,” she says. 

    “You’re sweet,” he says.

    “Don’t get a cavity,” she replies.

    A great Rabbi once said ‘in love don’t ever come empty handed’, but he did. He didn’t have anything to give her before she left, just a letter he wrote in the glove compartment, but he wasn’t gonna open it now. It wasn’t even sentimental like her photo, although a few guys probably had that photo for Christmas, whoever she was going to Brazil with something better still. Maybe, but maybe that was all a story in his head. Maybe she was sweet. Honestly, who knew?

    The things I might do, he thinks.

    “The things you might do, is why I keep coming back to you,” she says.

    “Can I take you on a real date after Brazil?”

    “You can try.”

    “I’m going to think about you a lot when you’re gone,” he says.

    “Not too much,” she says, “just enough so a smile forms on your lips and then it passes. Not like your other girls, not like anything before. Think about me until it hurts, and stop there. Think about your future.”

“When you come back from Brazil, it will be the future.”

    “That’s true. I must go, please know that I have never had any intention of hurting you.”

    “Good bye, have fun in Brazil.”

“I will. Have fun wherever you are.”

    And they kiss professionally on the cheek only one time, and she get out of the car and takes of briskly into the streets and the night.

    And he is sure he will never see her again. But he’s thought that before. The Civic takes off down 42^nd street heading to the FDR where a bridge, an illusionary bridge between two words or a tunnel, a paid tunnel will take him back to the tiny Brooklyn safe house he is staying on Avenue J and Coney Island Ave. His body hurts, he’s uncomfortable in his own skin. 

The New Ground Rules: Ending the politics of international doublure

Haitian Development Authority Plan 2020-2030

Policy Briefing for the Office of the President

Walter Adler, Ministry of Planning   

Republic of Haiti

“The NGO sector in Haiti is best described as an uncoordinated mass of organizations de facto unaccountable to any governing or regulatory institution, i.e. no accountants, no auditors, no reviews, and no publication of poor or dishonest performance.”-Schwartz Report

Introduction and Background 

We submit a policy package designed to restore our national sovereignty, assert control over our resources, ports and airspace, and forge a pathway whereby the citizens of our nation will know dignity, human rights, hope and opportunity.  The aim of our proposed policies are to dismantle the ‘Republic of NGOs’ and restore in its place an empowered, socially, environmentally and economically sustainable Republic of Haiti.

A series of human and environmental catastrophes have befallen the Republic of Haiti since the moment of her independence. It has repeatedly been stated that Haiti bears a certain ‘uniqueness’. We assert that this ‘uniqueness’ is artificially enforced to the detriment of all our citizens and must be corrected by political action. We are the most disaster casualty prone nation in the Americas (UNOHA, 2014). We are the absolute poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and second only to India the highest perceived ratio of NGOs/to population on earth (Clinton Global, 2012). Perhaps more striking is that our income inequality is seventh most unequal on earth (2012 GINI is 0.61). We are also the only nation on earth with a peacekeeping operation presiding over our military jurisdiction without a ceasefire in place between warring factions. 

There are now 10.32 million citizens now living in our Republic and they are living with daily existential threats to their welfare. Currently our HDI is 168 (0.417). Haiti has an adult life expectancy of 63.1. A full 50.16 % of our population is living in multidimensional poverty (UNDP 2014). A 2012 World Bank survey places 6 million Haitians (59%) living below $2 (90 HTG) a day while 2.5 million (24%) are living below $1(45 HTG). Therefore 83% are below our own domestic poverty line. Adult literacy is at 48.7% (UNDP 2014). Only 5% of the population can functionally comprehend our language of education and administration (MIT, 2014).

This proposal will recommend policies in the following strategic arenas; State Capacity, NGO Regulation and Investment.

Literature Review 

On State Capacity: Only 10% of the population are employed in a taxable sector (WB, 2014). Our state does not currently have the capacity to exert full sovereignty (Farmer & Schwartz, 2014). This is derived from a combination of stressors; a) having no substantial tax revenue base; b) donor circumvention of state structure in delivery of aid via NGOS; c) the sensitive nature of our domestic politics; c) ongoing MINUSTAH presence; e) our lack of an armed forces and underdeveloped police force; d) and NGO proliferation (Schwartz, 2014)(CFPS, 2014). If we examine USAID development policies ranging from HAVA to subsequent newer incarnations, we observe not only several generations of clusters that paid only lip service to the authority of the state, but also demonstrated non-coordination facilitated by USAID subcontracting to both NGOs & Beltway contractors (Schuller, 2012).

A range of capacity building priorities will require both management training and eventually take over of NGO facilitated services (NORD, 2014). MINUSTAH policies which once urged ‘clusters’ now suggest a firmer hand in regulation of NGO actors in Haitian soil. On either end of this extreme are polices of India v. NGO policies of Sudan (Oxfam, 2012). UN OCHA 2014 policy recommendations involve development of command and control over NGOS, public-private partnerships, extension of microfinance sector; new tax identity cards, direct taxation of remittances and transfers, as well as extension of sales taxes on items in the large informal economy (World Bank, 2014). According to the GAO Congressional policy studies in the US; of $631 million allocated to our post-2010 reconstruction: 0.7% went to our government, businesses or organizations; 43% was routed to NGOs and a full 56% was reinvested via contractors. 55% of obligated pledge has evens been delivered (GAO, 2013)

On NGO regulation Policy: The NGO sector remains unaccountable. As of March 31, 2013, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has obligated $293 million (45 percent) and disbursed $204 million (31 percent) of $651 million in funding for Haiti from the Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2010: less that 1% has gone to our government (USIP, 2010).

  While officially, there are 560 registered NGOs, there may be at any given time upwards of 5,000 formations (missionary, humanitarian, and domestic) dispensing services illegally in our territory. Perhaps not with malice, but with total disregard we have been reduced to predatory dependency, regulating them will be highly complicated (Chafetz, 2006)(Schuller, 2012 )(USIP, 2010). Reduction of duplication and overlap most coincide with thorough monitoring and evaluation.

On Investment Policy: ‘Open for Business’ legislation has allowed a degree of exploitation of our labor force and further destruction of our environment (Johnston, 2013). Investment policy should shift away from garment assemblage (Titus, 2012). It should absolutely enforce state ownership of resources especially in light of the recent discovery of gold (HGW, 2014). Note the Dominican Ministry of Tourism’s Dual Track; segregated all-inclusive hotels on the coast and islands used to pay to more culturally sensitive development open to all within the interior. Investment garment assemblage at Sai Ah Industrial & export-processing zones is not a proven model for development (NY Times, 2014). Through U.S. legislation such as HOPE I & II as well as the Help Economic Lift Program (HELP) Acts we retain duty free access to the US. (Chandler/ Clinton Global Initiative).  Capital inflows from the diaspora are estimated to be $1.5-1.9 billion a year (23-30%) of our 2010 GDP Most of the existing policies in place to empower the diaspora to reinvest financial and human capital are only proving partially effective (Titus, 2012). Allowing dual citizenship (Maretlly, 2011) was critical but needs to be expanded (Zéphir, 2004). Dual citizenship in the information age should facilitate the ability to monitor, evaluate and participate not only invest (Stepick, 2001). This investment is not just a question of capital; reengaging Haitian youth in diaspora through a type of Birthright program was invaluable to Israeli policy and would be valuable to us. Studies of diaspora migration yield a durable pattern of either reclamation or interference (Newland, 2004) According to the CFIC briefing, we must shore up our massive brain drain (80% of degree holding Haitians living abroad). Critical studies of diaspora mobilization policy convince us of the critical need not empower, not simply extract remittance support (Newland, 2004). 

Policy Recommendation: 

    Parcel 1: (State Capacity) Increase federalization by sub-dividing governance to the departmental (10), arrondissement (42) and commune (140) levels in a similar scheme as the United States to allow participatory involvement in development. Not all at once, two departments at a time beginning with Grand’Anse & Artibonite. The President’s office will maintain control over MSPP, HNP, and key ministries, which will remain centralized along with an executive veto of department senate proposals. Power will be divested from the existing Senate/CoD and into the new department units.  We thereby allow greater federal autonomy as each sub-federal will establish its own department senate, arrondissement house of deputies, and commune council in pattern similar to post-genocide Rwanda. All NGO/ missionary activity will revolve around meeting policy objectives set by Department Senates and the office of the Presidency. This new state architecture composed of elected party officials will submit all service provision, public safety, and development plans to the President’s office. Fiscal centralization with more operational incentive going to sub-units. 

Lifting bans on all political parties will be contingent on participation in the Haitian Development Plan. Pursue confidence-building measures that realistically address concerns of G184/Lavalas. Politically enfranchise the Diaspora by giving them administrative, voting and business incentivization via supra-territorial departments. Formally enfranchise the Middle Eastern community, NGO class & diaspora with varying political representation. 

Progressively Tax anyone residing in Haiti for over 3 month. Issue tax ID/ driver licenses to population. Encourage use of the ID for virtually all civic functions. Require digital monetization via cell phones to procure social services from licensed state providers or NGO. Utilize ID for benefit and social services dispersal. Increase professionalization of Civil Service on all levels via mass capacity trainings. No Development Aid or foreign assistance can be routed to an NGO operating in Haiti without reporting the amount to our Development Authority. Registered and Compliant NGOs such as PIH-ZL with be given high levels of autonomy as long as they operate within the sector goals of the government. All procurement activities, HR and contracted services must prove there was an adequate domestic bid where applicable. The effect of the policy will be regaining state control.

Parcel 2: (NGO Regulation) NGO Proliferation Control must begin with a rigorous census and designation. NGO Registration will be followed by NGO taxation. Waiver of taxation will be granted by voluntary enrolment in a newly constituted Haitian Development Authority and subsequent enlistment in a corresponding governmental sector. All foreign NGOs must follow standardized design, monitoring and evaluation of projects. All foreign NGOs will form strategic partnerships with Haitian CBO/NGO/ government agencies. NGO fines will be levied for noncompliance of regulations. Harmonization of all NGO work to fulfil government strategies will begin Department-by-Department beginning with Ouest. The effect of the policy package will be to couple regulation & harmonization with purge. NGOs that will not enable the state to accomplish development goals have no place operating inside Haiti.

Parcel 3: (Investment) Concentration of high-end tourist development on Ile a Vache and Southern coast. Focus on Ile Gonave for all inclusive tourist development coupled with deep-water port along lined of LGDA/ICA master plans. Focus all-inclusive development of North Coast. Expand international airports to Cap Haitian, Jacmel, and La Caye to enable direct airport to resort passage. Prohibit foreign land ownership including natural resources and beaches. Make export processing zones/ industrial zones buy into vocational training schemes. Pursue 51% state ownership in overall ventures, preferential access to Haitian diaspora.

Restore high import tariffs on foodstuffs produced outside of Hispaniola to discourage agricultural dumping.
Critical Synthesis:   

Newmont and Eurasian Corporations have invested $30 million in exploratory digging. The Sai-Ah Industrial park received $224 million of the funds earmarked for reconstruction. We have not signed the international Safety and Health in Mines convention or the voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, both of which offer some protection to our citizens. We have no good record of observing textile assembly trickle down or anywhere else. It is time we make an investment in our human resources. To do so we require the funds to implement the health, educational, and vocational restoration needed to secure our future. Ending Doublure, the long accepted politic of rule through proxy and reclamation of our social service sector capacity is the beginning of that process.

References:

Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) (2012) Evaluation of Donor Response to Haiti Earthquake Shows “Building Back Better” Nothing But a Sloganhttp://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/evaluation-of-donor-response-to-haiti-earthquake-shows-building-back-better-nothing-but-a-slogan(Accessed on May 16, 2013).

Chafetz, M. E. (1996). The Tyranny Of Experts: Blowing The Whistle On The Cult Of Expertise Author: Morris E. Chafetz, Publisher: Madison Books.

Chandler, A. (2014). The Role of the Haitian Diaspora in Haiti Building Back Better. Center for Strategic International Studies-CSIS (2014). Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.

Dolisca, F., McDaniel, J. M., Teeter, L. D., & Jolly, C. M. (2007). Land tenure, population pressure, and deforestation in Haiti: the case of Forêt des Pins Reserve. Journal of Forest Economics, 13(4), 277-289.

Feinsilver, J. M. (2010). Fifty years of Cuba’s medical diplomacy: from idealism to pragmatism. Cuban studies, 41(1), 85-104.

Farmer, P. (1994). The Uses of Haiti (Vol. 3). Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.

Farmer, P. (2001). Infections and inequalities: The modern plagues. University of California Press.

Heinzelman, J., & Waters, C. (2010). Crowdsourcing crisis information in disaster-affected Haiti. US 

Jenson, D. & Szabo, V. (2011) Cholera in Haiti and Other Caribbean Regions, 19th Century. Duke FHI Haiti Humanities. Laboratory Student Research Team1. 2130 Emerging Infectious Diseases. http://www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 17, No. 11, November 2011

Johnston, J. & Main, A. (2013). Research Breaking Open the Black Box: Increasing Aid Transparency and Accountability in Haiti. Center for Economic and Policy. April 2013. Retrieved from:  http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/haiti-aid-accountability-2013-04.pdf

Katz, J. M. (2013). The big truck that went by: how the world came to save Haiti and left behind a disaster. New York: Palgrave. Macmillan.

Kristoff, M., & Panarelli, L. (2010). Haiti: A Republic of NGOs?. In Peace Brief(Vol. 23). United States Institute of Peace.

Morton, A. (1997). Haiti: NGO sector study. Washington, DC: World Bank, 52.

Newland, K., & Patrick, E. (2004). Beyond remittances: the role of Diaspora in poverty reduction in their countries of origin, a scoping study by the Migration Policy Institute for the Department of International Development. Migration Policy Institute.

Palma, G. (2003). National Inequality in the Era of Globalization: What Do Recent Data 

Tell Us? in Johnathan Michie, Handbook of Globalization, Cheltenham, UK and 

Northampton MA: Edward Elgar, 2003. 

Pan American Health Organization: Epidemiological Update on Cholera (27 June 2014) Situation summary of cholera in the Americas

Ramachandran, V. & Walz, J. (2012). Haiti: Where Has All the Money Gone?”  Centre for Global Development (CGD) Policy Paper 004 May 2012,

Schuller, M.  (2012). Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid and NGOs

Schwartz, T. (2014). History of NGOs and Disaster in Haiti. Retrieved from: http://open.salon.com/blog/timotuck/2013/02/09/ngos_and_disaster_in_haiti

Shamsie, Y., & Thompson, A. S. (Eds.). (2006). Haiti: hope for a fragile state. Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press.

Stepick, A., Stepick, C. D., & Kretsedemas, P. (2001). Civic engagement of Haitian immigrants and Haitian Americans in Miami-Dade County. Haiti–Immigration and Ethnicity Institute of South Florida Retrieved November 16, 2006.

Titus, R. F. (2012). Roadmap to Haiti’s Next Revolution: A Plan for Diaspora Haitians to Contribute to a Peaceful Turnaround. iUniverse.

Zéphir, F. (2004). The Haitian Americans. Greenwood Publishing Group.

Motherfuckin’ Desert Person

    I’m a motherfuckin desert person. And I like to wander as long as it’s on a strict timeframe. Because when you’re out in the desert you lose track of how long you’ve been walking and if you don’t budget your water right this can be a serious problem. The desert is place to go to lose yourself in exile but it is a better place to be hardened for a future purpose. You move with as little as possible and what you carry is calculated; (weight) vs. (necessity towards your survival). Like a water canteen, like a pistol, like a blanket or a law degree. You grab and go, you move by night, and you think long and hard about the path that got there in the wasteland.

    It’s a misconception that everything in the desert is dead. At night time it is always quite alive. At night you hear rabbits or small dear scurrying across the dunes, and there are snakes and birds; kill the birds and eat them and leave those snakes alone. All manner of the toughest creatures alive thrive out in the wasteland. At night its freezing cold and the wind rips dust across the wilderness. It’s best to wrap yourself a white sheet underneath and black cloak on top. And cover your face. The moon is very bright, bright like you’ve never seen before. Overwhelming is good word to describe it. It is better to move at night for obvious reasons but you have to careful not to lose your path, losing your sense of direction can be quite fatal out there. You have to cover as much ground as possible in fridget conditions and you have to calculate destination such that you can end up in a wadi or a spring to pitch your tent come the break of dawn. The freezing cold rips right to the bones and you wonder what is worse the blazing heat or the frozen nights. You’re stuck with both. You will never see stars like this; there are no city lights or suburban sprawl in a thousand miles to dull their brilliance. You’ll see your first shooting star and then someone will tell you it was an air force exercise; until you see your first shooting star you won’t know the difference. 

    And you’ve already got your notions about desert by day. When you are in the desert your eyes play tricks on you. It is like sensory bombardment resulting from subsistence deprivation. You’re running on a near empty tank at all times. Out there in that desert; it’s you, and whatever name you call your god, and the freezing cold nights, and the dead by dusk heat that makes you sweat even when you aren’t building pyramids. People have the wrong conception of a mirage. It’s not so much that you think you see a lake or some body of water elusively situated upon the horizon. It’s a twinkle of salvation that stays just as far away each time you move towards it. The mirage represents some supposed place of destination generally always off the path. You could tell yourself it looks like water because water begins to occupy most of your waking consciousness out there; but it’s not water; it’s just another stretch of land you halfway died to get to that yielded oh so little in return. If the cold will end this life by night then yes; it will be the heat that does you in by day. But the reason you let it do so, the reason you wasted all that water; was chasing some mirage that wasn’t on your path at all. And no, this is not a metaphor. I’m just telling you common sense to uphold when you’re out there.

    The desert is also a place of extremes and it breeds extremists. It’s not just the night’s cold and burning hot days and animals or mirages or bandits and death. It is that when you take away all those creature comforts, those flashing neon signs, those places to buy some so called happiness; you begin to see. The Misson, the Cause, the Struggle, (the idealized purpose of ones life) become a little more focused; your role in it all becomes more defined. And the profit margins, the cost benefit analysis, your sophomoric, college influenced conception of human nature; none of those things come out here with you. Your family is across an ocean, your friends don’t know where you are, and the cute ethnic Albanian girl in Law class can’t send you adorable text message smiles. When that’s all gone. When the water runs out. When you go off path following a mirage. When you’re out there without anyway to reach your destination, when you have been stripped of all distractions; you learn absolutes, you learn extremes, and you universalize our condition.

    When the water runs out you have to think quickly about what matters. You have to conserve your strength, even conserve your thought process. You have to focus on getting out of the desert alive, but this is secondary on ascertaining what you came into the desert to learn. Desert people quicken their process. Time is never on their side. The absolutes are the lessons we’ve learned that translated into righteous action. The extremes are idealized conceptions of your beliefs brought into focus so one might take a stand. And the final realization of a desert person is that out there in the wasteland no matter what nation, what religion, what race, or what people; without water everyone in the desert on a long enough timeline is going to die.  

    Desert people are out there for a whole lot of reasons. There are whispers in that desert that might give a person a semblance of a plan. We didn’t go out to that desert to fuck a whore in a casino, build a golden calf, or take ecstasy and watch a fifty foot man shaped idol burn. Desert people do not engage in those activities. Not when they want to be right with whatever they call god. It’s place to go when you have to make a decision, it’s a beginning point or an end based on what path you follow; it’s not a weekend retreat or a three hour tour. 

    I’m proud to be a desert person. It has made my people very strong. I learned things out there that one doesn’t see when restricted to a temple or a mosque. Out there in that desert when the water runs out you and whatever you call your god can take the precious time left to calculate what you’ve been doing with your life.

An Endless Walk

Written by Adler S Walt 

 – Begun 3/11/17 –

“A hero or a hooligan, well that part’s never clear.”

It was the cold night of Purim, 5777, the full moon was huge and it was brick as shit. That means harshly cold in the Ebony peasant vernacular. I knew that were I so inclined there would be multiple places to fete and masquerade, but I was conserving my finances, and hording up my comfortable sleeps on the big Queen sized mattress made in Brooklyn.

    The safe house wasn’t so bad, except for no drinking which annoyed me and the German intelligence officer greatly. She never admitted to being such but this is what my associate Alan Medvinsky told me, and he knew about such things. We co-habituated the domicile, a medium spacious loft on the third floor of Broadway across from the J & M above ground rail line and, I can’t say any more precisely where; I can’t tell you; it’s a safe house.

    The man who set up this little shop was none other than the infamous small time publisher and writer Sander Hicks, who for a lesser intellectual was wild eyed and somewhat muscular, and vigorous from being straight edge, being Zen and believing that “God is Good”. 

He took me in when the safe house before got too, hot.

    Natasha Salzano, that was just her passport name; Natalia Khiterova had fled almost overnight back to Russian Federation and left me and poor confused Tanya Drozdova, basically squatting a lovely grand place on Eastern Parkway with the rent supposedly 8,000 plus dollars in arears. I made off with a fancy mirror and my gear in almost the dead of night. 

    A couple things about a good safe house, it’s hard to find. And, frankly the Russians have too many rules and idiosyncrasies. Like if you live with a woman and you keep leaving the seat up, or water on the floor after you shower; a god fucking or not fucking or two, some talk it out and you can be socialized. In a safe house; whoever is on the lease is the boss.

    So Natasha’s whole thing was always “touching her stuff” which was all over the place, but even a slight movement of the cutting board, or moving the walk in storage closet around; she’d flip. She was tall and bleached, she was stern. She claimed she had gotten a Masters in International Communications, but who knew.  

    She left Tanya and I with a flat where the rent hadn’t been paid in months, the land lord was threatening to evict us; and she took off back to Russia. There was Mongol in her, I could sense it and she never smiled but the now defunct safe house on Church & Eastern Parkway was really quite luxurious for my tastes. She had basically turned the entire living room into my room and with it came actually really, really nice stuff which incrementally she sold, and the Mirror well I guess I stole. Her last words in an email were, “calm the fuck down you’re acting like a stupid fucking American! Everything is gonna be fine!”

    And I didn’t pay her last month’s rent because Tanya said she’d just rob it and leave us high and dry anyway. But if one day I bump into her in Russian and she has a tough guy kill be over $735, well, that’s life.

    Sander Hicks had written and gotten published two books on 9/11 Truth and was maybe the figure head of that rabble band of conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites. Anti-Zionists, excuse me. His first book was that the government did it, the second was that the Saudis were in on it too and after a recent trip to Iran, well his third book is about the Zionist angle, which I’m sure will go over great here and get rave reviews.

    Moving on, it was so damn suddenly cold. It had been jeans and t-shirt weather in March. It had been the most limp, listless Winter ever, or maybe I was still traumatized by the two year Winter of Boston and the Blizzard of 2010. Shudder, anyway there I was about to deploy and never even got to wear my tough, beige winter coat I bought second hand, cause it looked like something Elena wears, a little less yellow. I haven’t heard from her in over a year. She visited my father for dentistry and maybe it was November on my way to meet David Smith in DC for a palaver and she called me or I called her advice about the negotiations. I pulled my white Honda Civic into a truck stop and she was so sweet and precise.

    “Do not let them talk you out of your intellectual property making token gesture of collaboration, this is business not a movement. You have to be less Communist.”

    And really I never heard from her again, like someone maybe her conscience ordered her not speak with me. I tried quite hard to break that, get friendship or something. No dice, legally speaking I’ve left her 33% of this new shell company if I’m killed in the coming deployment. I’m rambling my existential fist world concerns to my lap top, I’m comparing gear I’ll expropriate with a fabricated credit card; about 2,000 worth. Maybe I’ll even get a new lap top. If anyone manages to rob me on the road from Erbil to Qamishlu, well it would be a good haul.

    Sanders is out first every night, Brit and I are night creatures. Once I was fired from my slave job about three weeks ago I immediately reverted to my preferred biological clock, wake up at 1 to 2pm go bed at 5am to 6am; I just like working at night, less witnesses? I’m sitting at the big long wooden table Sander built; he’s a carpenter by trade, like my man Jesus was. It’s pretty ok this safe house, even if we can’t drink. I think Brit does heroin in her room or at the very least smokes dope on the roof, she’s great.

    We were imprisoned in a detention facility in 2013, now the year is 2017. She had handed me her email address on a green paper with a Walt Whitman quote, ” “, well anyway many years later like six months ago I found it and when Sander subdivided the loft into three room I social engineered her in, but she was my second choice.  I’d really wanted to live with Erin Moore who is dark and fun and can cook her ass off, but frankly Sander sketched her out too much. The subdivide room was also not such steal ever for $600 USD, and maybe a little firetrap hazardous.

    The thing about a safe house is that you don’t tell anyone where it is, you don’t have your name on it, you pay cash and don’t sign anything, and everyone in it is super hero in their own mind. How do I say that again, the people living in a safe house are gypsies? The people living in safe houses, like me have something to hide? Or for people just too unstable in credit and finances to sign a lease. It could be a number of factors.

    But, Brit was supposedly German intelligence, Sander a well-known brilliant crack pot; undisputed leader of a 16 year effort to uncover 9/11 Truth; most things seemed to tick back to that. His father is famous IMF economist. He single handedly helped push an unauthorized biography on George W Bush to market via his printing house, and then that man “killed himself” and that seemed to weigh on Sander, and behind the hippy Zen retreats, the walls of books that he had in fact read, he was always reading, behind the chirpy banter was a killer.

    I say that still having shared Rosh Hashanah with him, that means Hebrew New Years; and we cooked for each other the cuisine of vegetarian poverty goulash, and yes once he threatened to throw me out, and yes like Natasha he was a tyrant, but I played several times with his dorky little scientist son, he was precocious, I don’t mean to talk so much shit, I’m working on it. I’m in shit talking recovery!

    Sander Hicks was a zealot, and about ten years my senior was in many ways what I worried a failed version of myself might look like complete with child and broken marriage. Fuck, I just did it again. I like him, he likes me, and he’s really not a bad guy in fact, he’s a hero of this story I’m about to tell.

    I am one to think every other high powered person living in the darkness is whore, killer or spy. It’s true. It’s baseless. God only knows what they whisper about me back in the station or worse, the home office. They probably just say I’m crazy.

    So this plane is gonna take off from an airstrip on the south coast of Brooklyn near Queens border and it’s gonna fly me to Cuba, and pretty much I’m gonna sit on a beach and meditate after a meeting with Cuban intelligence about my training system and how it works.

    And then I’m gonna fly back to Brooklyn, and trade tropical white linen clothes for Spring in Russia clothes and I’m gonna fly to Finland then Moscow and check into the hotel Metropol to meet my new editor and confidant Polina Mazaeva, who I’ve never met but have written to for six months and seen naked many times, more on that later. And she will take me by the trains to Nizhniy Novgorod, check me into a hotel with an Irish Pub, a Sushi restaurant and Strip Club, all a New Yorker really need, and we’re gonna be working on a few things.

    A translation of book about Haiti into Russian, a joint collaboration called Endless Walk which you are now reading; and how we can pose as a family with her seven year old Son Yazan and secure work visas for Dubai, in the heart of the United Arab Emirates. And then, we fall in love.

    But mostly my heart is col, but I still know how to talk soothingly to a woman and I am governed by both the Code of the Haitian Gentleman, Hebrew tribal law and the desire to be a good communist; so whatever happens between is of course, or course based on consent and mutual admiration for the work of the other. She is talented singer, a painter and really too much and artist for Russia’s third biggest city she should be in Moscow, London or New York; her son has her pinned down though and wages are low in Russia. She make her pittances as graphic designer. They pay her jackbumsquat, which is gibberish for fucking nothing.

    And I’m looking forward to May Day in the Capital and Victory Day in Nizhniy, which according to my research survived the Mongol hoard invasions nicely, combatively speaking. Those savage fucking Mongols.

And then I’ll load into a plane at GOJ Nizhniy fly to Istanbul, then provided I am not arrested and detained, head into Iraqi Kurdistan as we like to call it; Erbil City. And wait for Roj Zalla my colleague and fellow card carrying D/U associate to arrive a week later so we get to Sulymania, contact the resistance and be smuggled into Syrian Kurdistan, over the border into the Rojava free zone. It’s very exciting to me anyway, I’ve wanted to see all these places for years, but for two years I’ve been an ambulance slave. My operational budget is a lot leaner than last time, I am trying to get a good price for my car, but all the prices have sucked; I did too much damage to it using it like an ambulance.  $2650 is the best price so far for a no-frills 2009 Honda Civic with paramedic plates and 58,000 miles, which Brit says is low, like I only drive in circles in this dark city rat race, with a two year little exile in Boston.

    So there I was making a procurement list and seeing how I could raise a little cash here and there without breaking too many laws, and safe house, the high ceilings with pipes running across was so quiet only the pitter patter of my key board, and, Sander was asleep since 11:43pm and Brit was out not long after and I just felt compelled to get my inventory logs sorted, my deployment budge square, file the logs; transcribe some poems I found in a little note book to Elena, send them to her, no response. Svetlana her confidant messaged me on the book face that she did wish me luck, I pretended Elena was there with her watching me type.

    Tonight, just after midnight the man who helped the most to train me as a paramedic Mikhail Kreminizer messaged me. His wife had just died, would be cremated in the morning.

    You have to understand this man is tank. A big Russian-Israeli storm trooper who used to torture people, may or may not be a Mason, has killed man with his bare hands and now operates an ambulance in midtown Manhattan trying to save his own soul which he barely believes in.

    After the secret police broke up our attempt to hold the 9^th Congress of the Association & Union in North Brooklyn, after they raped my Liana and tortured me for 5 weeks until the underground could force my ransom; after we bombed the five Strip clubs on Victory Day, after we kidnapped the Satmar Rabbi, well I was too hot for a lot of people in 2016 and Michael had to distance himself from me and withdraw his orbit of protection, which was as vast as he is tall.

    “Yulia is dead”, he wrote.

“She and I never had that great writing are collabo moment yet.

So much lifetime left I guess.”

“She died on Tuesday.”

“Fuck.

I’m so sorry.”

Thank you.

No that’s horrible. I’m so sorry Michael.

I know how much you loved her.

Yup. Just came from NJ. She will be cremated tomorrow.

I remember maybe two summers ago we were on the phone and I was so manic, and we were talking about her illustrating my book.

Well. That won’t happen.

Not in this life, no.

Agree

In the world to come maybe she will be willing.

I’m so sorry.

I’m going to get some rest. Good night buddy.

Good night

I’m leaving the states April 12^th.

I’m sure maybe you prefer suffering in silence.

But if you’d like to hang out.

I’ll come to where ever you are.

She loved you so much.

We’ll see. Where are you going?

Cuba, Russia, Iraq then Syria.

I leave on the night after Passover.

Be careful.

Yeah

That’s what they say

I have a good team.

Only reason I’m alive so far.

Good night my friend.

I told him;

   
I’ll try and get you to see more than usual.

I do not feel your pain, but I know it like I know my own face.

    And he didn’t reply because he doesn’t have to pretend to be strong, but I felt a small cry in me, this man had patiently precepted and apprenticed into paramedicine, my secondary trade, but first love trade; he had shown me how to put IVs in the dark with feel, while in a moving vehicle at high speeds, he’d talked me through heart blocks, and my own blocked heart over Daria, and always treated me like an Israeli, not an American even though I’m really from here, wink. He taught me how to interrogate traffickers with the EKG monitor, how to start or stop the human heart, he was patient with me, he didn’t have to take that time I was on the black list I’d never be allowed on a good truck, a 911 truck again. 

    I felt this great knot of sadness because Michael Kreminizer suddenly had nothing to live for and not fearing god or devils; his self-destruction was frankly inevitable.

    You have to always be ready for suicide watch dealing with out kind, dealing with high energy people, empaths, bipolar ones, bonobos; whatever. We feel too much and frankly get a little self-destructive which is why so many join the service and why so many die off the job where no one can see it happen.

    Michael is hard. And maybe he killed so many people he has to stay working to balance it out, but I know, I know he loved her, loves her so much. And this could be the one thing. I have to stop. Stop, the archangel won’t die tonight or tomorrow, and you haven’t even seen him in a year? Two years? Three years? Four years? Stupid time, like a lot of people he said he’d be my reference, but worried about me. And didn’t have time for the hootenanny I get into. He called me Chechen once, ‘cause he could read into me and see my past lives.

    I felt so sad, like I hadn’t been sad in so long and I thought about Elena. What would I do if she took me back and we made a life and then died?

    Suicide rates are actual low in Israel. And I was born in Trinidad and Michael was born in Lithuania, but we’re both Ivory. We’re both paramedics. We’re both parapsychologists. We’re both a lot crazy. We both love Russian woman. And he’s the size of a killer robot made of steel from the future, but this could kill him. If anything could, this could.

“One by one having fun tonight, if she only knew what I did for life, it’s a endless walk of dreams versus nightmare.”

Don’t leave me alone.

2

    We were sure looking off the safe house roof, the city visible 5 miles out, the evil stack house of Woodhull hospital within rocket range and the tallest city project on Myrtle Ave, the sniper nest in days to come, we were sure it was jeans and t-shirt day, because Brit Tully and I were wearing jeans and t-shirt, well I was.

    Brit almost always wore black and on top a black overcoat which had seen its prime days some time ago, like my ideals. We were smoking some of her American Spirit dark greens and I hadn’t slept in 24 hours. And it was real nice out for mid-March it had never gotten cold in December, January or even February.

    “They are conserving the weather machine for when it matters,” Brit said, and I agreed.

    Let’s talk about Chanel Chantal Rossi, shall we.

Adler,

I apologize for not responding sooner. As you can imagine, I was quickly drowned in work once I got back. Your letter touched my soul in so many ways. First, your awareness and choice of words and how you articulate them together, are mesmerizing. You are a truly gifted artist with strong depth. 

The journey you are about to embark on is one of great respect and inspiration. I know you will touch many lives, however slight, but most likely grand as you have done so far, and I am sure of that. Without knowing you in a material physical aspect (as in only speaking with you for a brief 30 seconds), you have already impacted my life in which I will never forget.

With that being said, I would love to be your pen pal and hear all about the moments you experience. I have so much respect for you, people like you are those who make a difference in our world for the greater good. Even if it is to put a smile on a strangers face.

Send me your address,

We will be hand-writing letters to each other very soon.

Yours truly,

Chanel 

Chanie,

Such is the hard work of studying law, and surely it will be daunting but you will persevere). Your words are quite kind and make me feel quite appreciated. It is a very complex task ahead and it makes me glad you will allow such correspondence. Although after 12 April I will be abroad more a year or more and with often a wholly unreliable postal system, we can alternate pen and email as you see fit, and of the letters you send to the address below can be pony expressed or scanned and sent. Any art I make out there, same route. Cuba and Russia will be short wonderful extremes before I get into Iraq in late May and soon after North Syria; a place called Rojava.

I make drawings, and paintings, I make long rhyming poems and I’ve written 5 novels, but I suppose it just makes me very happy to have a chance to put my mind before a stranger and see yours as you reveal it. As said the idea of you was a strange magic, but I long to know the actual you as well and make you the subject of my art. It will also be surely relieving to sometimes hear of Boston, and your woes of scholarship, and your loves and losses and all. I thrive on the attention of strangers and can only be well informed via their impartial critiques. But, as stated, you were fascinating to me.

My permanent address is:

Sebastian Adon

140 Nassau Street #7c

New York, NY 10038   

Best wishes, Happy International Woman’s Day. I look forward to our exchange.

Sebastian,

Sebastian, 

Words cannot describe, the appreciation I feel. I’ve always felt as if I was maybe underestimated by my looks and at times maybe overestimated in this judgmental society we live in. Everything is based on how you look and not what you offer as a human. 

Yet,

You made me feel like although that does come into play, you made me feel  much more than that with eyes beyond the physicality of objects of this world with your attention to detail. It is not the mere creation of technique, but what it intends to portray with the story it wants to tell.

I am so thankful to the universe for that day, in so many ways, and one being our casual, brief and meaningful kindle.

Funny story; my over protective brother thought I was giving you my phone number & got a little mad. I explained to him and told him it was okay, he trusts my judgment.  And to be honest… it was your old-school way of a note pad and pen that really played well with my instinct. I am an old soul too. 

I love candles, how did you know? 

I cannot wait and look forward to hearing about your future endeavors. 

You will be receiving something from me by early next week 🙂 

Again, THANK YOU!

Yours Truly,

Chanel 

The Constitution of the American Cantons 

The Social Contract of Cantons in the Americas

Preamble

We, the people of the Democratic Autonomous Regions of North, Central and South America, a confederation of communities, freely and solemnly declare and establish this Charter.

In pursuit of freedom, justice, dignity and democracy and led by principles of equality and environmental sustainability, the Charter proclaims a new social contract, based upon mutual and peaceful coexistence and understanding between all strands of society. It protects fundamental human rights and liberties and reaffirms the peoples’ right to self-determination.

Under the Charter, we, the people of the Autonomous Regions, unite in the spirit of reconciliation, pluralism and democratic participation so that all may express themselves freely in public life. In building a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs, the Charter recognizes national territorial integrity and aspires to maintain domestic and international peace.

In establishing this Charter, we declare a political system and civil administration founded upon a social contract that reconciles the rich mosaic of the Americas through a transitional phase from corporate oligarchy, to avoid civil war and destruction, to a new democratic society where civic life and social justice are preserved.

I General principles

Article 1

The Charter of the Autonomous Regions of Cantons in the Americas, [hereinafter “the Charter”], is a renewed social contract between the peoples of the Autonomous Regions. The Preamble is an integral part of the Charter.

Article 2

a- Authority resides with and emanates from the people of the Autonomous Regions. It is exercised by governing councils and public institutions elected by popular vote.

b- The people constitute the sole source of legitimacy all governing councils and public institutions, which are founded on democratic principles essential to a free society.

Article 3

a – We encourage the genuine development of free, sovereign and democratic states, governed by a congressional systems based on principles of decentralization and pluralism.

b – The Autonomous Regions are to be composed cantons of who have implemented viable structures of democratic autonomy, social services and sustainable economies, forming an integral part of existing national territories. The administrative centers of each Canton are to be established by popular election in cities and towns wishing to organize into Canton governance.

c – The Canton administrative unit is to be ethnically and religiously diverse, with communities peacefully co-existing in solidarity. The elected Legislative Assembly represents all Cantons of the Autonomous Regions.

The Structure of governance in the Autonomous Regions

Article 4

The largest administrative unit of democratic autonomy is the Canton, each with a city or town designated to hold a People’s Congress, appoint and Executive Council and establish a local High Commision of Elections.

The Canton’s Peoples Congress is the highest Canton level administrative unit for governance and legislative matters. It is composed of elected delegates who will appoint the Executive Councils of each Canton.

Every Canton is subdivided into Communes, municipal or provincial units each with an elected council.

1- Legislative Assembly

Highest elected body governing the Democratic Federation of American Cantons.

2 – Executive Councils

Canton Level governance of eligible delegates from the parties, councils and committees elected on the canton and commune levels.

3 – High Commission of Elections

Responsible for all levels of elections.

4 – Supreme Constitutional Courts

Judicial bodies for legal redress at village, town, city and Canton level.

5 – Municipal/Provincial Councils

Commune level deleted authority appointed by the General Assembly of each commune.

6 – Peoples Congress

Highest elected authority of the commune and Canton level governance. 

7 – General Assemblies  

Municipal and provincial assemblies open to the entire community to address community issues and elect Commune and Canton level delegates.

Article 5

The initial administrative centers of each Canton are to be autonomously declared through registration of individuals and associations into localized General Assemblies. Each general assembly will establish a Commune level of governance and then based on expansion of registration a Canton level. There or more Cantons can then move to establish a Federation through Legislative Assembly.


Article 6

All persons and communities are equal in the eyes of the law and in rights and responsibilities.

Article 7

All cities, towns and villages which accede to this Charter may form Cantons falling within Autonomous Regions.

Article 8

All Cantons in the Autonomous Regions are founded upon the principle of local self-government. Cantons may freely elect their representatives and representative bodies, and may pursue their rights insofar as it does not contravene the articles of the Charter.

Article 9

The official languages of the Cantons are English and Spanish. All communities have the right to teach and be taught in their native language.

Article 10

The Autonomous Regions shall not interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries, and it shall safeguard its relations with neighboring states, resolving any conflicts peacefully.

Article 11

The Autonomous Regions have the right to be represented by their own flag, emblems and anthem. Such symbols shall be defined in a law.

Article 12

The Autonomous Regions form an integral part of the states in which they have been formed. It is a model for a future decentralized system of federal governance.



II Basic Principles

Article 13

There shall be a separation of powers between the legislature, executive and judiciary.

Article 14

The Autonomous Regions shall seek to implement a framework of transitional justice measures. It shall take steps to redress the legacy of chauvinistic and discriminatory State policies, including the payment of reparations to victims, both individuals and communities, in the Autonomous Regions.

Article 15

The People’s Protection Units (PPU) are the sole militia force of the Cantons, with the mandate to protect and defend the security of the Autonomous Regions and its peoples, against both internal and external threats. The People’s Protection Units act in accordance with the recognized inherent right to self-defense. Power of command in respect of the People’s Protection Units is vested in the Body of Defense through its Central Command. Its relation to the armed forces of the central Government shall be defined by the Legislative Assembly in a special law.

The Community Guard forces are charged with civil policing functions in the Autonomous Regions.

Article 16

If a court or any other public body considers that a provision conflicts with a provision of a fundamental law or with a provision of any other superior statute, or that the procedure prescribed was set aside in any important respect when the provision was introduced, the provision shall be nullified.

Article 17

The Charter guarantees the rights of the youth to participate actively in public and political life.

Article 18

Unlawful acts and omissions and the appropriate penalties are defined by criminal and civil law.

Article 19

The system of taxation and other fiscal regulations are defined by law.

Article 20

The Charter holds as inviolable the fundamental rights and freedoms set out in international human rights treaties, conventions and declarations.



III Rights and Liberties

Article 21

The Charter incorporates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as other internationally recognized human rights conventions.

Article 22

All international rights and responsibilities pertaining civil, political, cultural, social and economical rights are guaranteed.

Article 23

a – Everyone has the right to express their ethnic, cultural, linguistic and gender rights which includes explicit freedom of sexual orientation and right to one’s personal formulation of gender identity.

b – Everyone has the right to live in a healthy environment, based on ecology balance.

Article 24

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; including freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Freedom of expression and freedom of information may be restricted having regard to the security of the Autonomous Regions, public safety and order, the integrity of the individual, the sanctity of private life, or the prevention and prosecution of crime.

Article 25

a- Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person.

b- All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

c- Prisoners have the right to humane conditions of detention, which protect their inherent dignity. Prisons shall serve the underlying objective of the reformation, education and social rehabilitation of prisoners.

Article 26

Every human being has the inherent right to life. No one within the jurisdiction of the Autonomous Regions shall be executed.

Article 27

Women have the inviolable right to participate in political, social, economic and cultural life.

Article 28

Men and women are equal in the eyes of the law. The Charter guarantees the effective realization of equality of women and mandates public institutions to work towards the elimination of gender discrimination.

Article 29

The Charter guarantees the rights of the child. In particular children shall not suffer economic exploitation, child labor, torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and shall not be married before attaining the age of majority.

Article 30

All persons have the right

1. to personal security in a peaceful and stable society.

2. to free and compulsory primary and secondary education.

3. to work, social security, health, adequate housing.

4. to protect the motherhood and maternal and pediatric care.

5. to adequate health and social care for the disabled, the elderly and those with special needs.

Article 31

Everyone has the right to freedom of worship, to practice one’s own religion either individually or in association with others. No one shall be subjected to persecution on the grounds of their religious beliefs.

Article 32

a)- Everyone has the right to freedom of association with others, including the right to establish and freely join any political party, association, trade union and/or civil assembly.

b) – In exercising the right to freedom of association, political, economic and cultural expression of all communities is protected. This serves to protect the rich and diverse heritage of the peoples of the Autonomous Regions.

c) – The all religious and ideological creeds and their adherents’ rights to freedom of association and expression is explicitly protected. The protection of diverse religious, social and cultural life may be guaranteed through the passage of laws by the Legislative Assembly.

Article 33

Everyone has the freedom to obtain, receive and circulate information and to communicate ideas, opinions and emotions, whether orally, in writing, in pictorial representations, or in any other way.

Article 34

Everyone has the right of peaceful assembly, including the right to peaceful protest, demonstration and strike.

Article 35

Everyone has the right to freely experience and contribute to academic, scientific, artistic and cultural expressions and creations, through individual or joint practice, to have access to and enjoy, and to disseminate their expressions and creations.

Article 36

Everyone has the right to vote and to run for public office, as circumscribed by law.

Article 37

Everyone has the right to seek political asylum. Persons may only be deported following a decision of a competent, impartial and properly constituted judicial body, where all due process rights have been afforded.

Article 38

All persons are equal before the law and are entitled to equal opportunities in public and professional life.

Article 39

Natural resources, located both above and below ground, are the public wealth of society. Extractive processes, management, licensing and other contractual agreements related to such resources shall be regulated by law.

Article 40

All public infrastructure in the Canton directly funded by an existing national authority is to be strengthened in a legal framework. Where inadequate it calls as a primary responsibility of Commune and Canton governing bodies to implement alternative systems to provide improved social services.

All buildings and land in the Autonomous Regions are still considered owned by the title holding authority of the national authority or are the private property of an existing owner.

Administration of public property rests with the national authority. The use and distribution of land and buildings shall be determined by law.

Abandoned land and property should be considered property by use of organized Commune authorities who buy or repossess it.

Article 41

Everyone has the right to the use and enjoyment of his private property. No one shall be deprived of his property except upon payment of just compensation, for reasons of public utility or social interest, and in the cases and according to the forms established by law.

Article 42

The economic system in the provinces shall be directed at providing general welfare and in particular granting funding to science and technology. It shall be aimed at guaranteeing the daily needs of people and to ensure a dignified life. Monopoly is prohibited by law. Labor rights and sustainable development are guaranteed.

Article 43

Everyone has the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence within the Autonomous Regions.

Article 44

The enumeration of the rights and freedoms set forth in Section III is non-exhaustive.



The Democratic Self-rule Administration Project

IV Legislative Assembly

Article 45

The Legislative Assembly in the Autonomous Region is elected by the people by direct, secret ballot, and the duration of the course is four (4) years.

Individuals may run for delegate positions alone or as a representative of an association or party.

Article 46

The first meeting of the Legislative Assembly shall be held no later than the 15th day following the announcement of the final results of elections in all Autonomous Regions. Such results will be certified and announced by the Higher Commission of Elections.

The President of the Transitional Executive Council will convene the first meeting of the Legislative Assembly. If compelling reasons dictate that its first meeting cannot be so held, the President of the Transitional Executive Council will determine another date to be held within fifteen days.

Quorum is met by fifty + one (50+1%) percent attendants of the total. The oldest member of the Legislative Assembly will chair its first meeting at which the Co-Presidents and Executive Council will be elected.

The sessions of the Legislative Assembly are public unless necessity demands otherwise. The movement of the Legislative Assembly into closed session is governed by its rules of procedure.

Article 47

There shall be one member of the Supreme Legislature Council per fifteen thousand (15,000) registered voters residing within the Autonomous Region. The Legislative Assembly must be composed of at least forty per cent (40%) of either sex according to the electoral laws. The representation of undocumented persons in a community, as well as youth representation in the election lists, is governed by electoral laws.

Article 48

1- No member of the Legislative Assembly may run for more than two consecutive terms.

2 – The term of the Legislative Assembly may be extended in exceptional cases at the request of one quarter (¼) of its members or at the request of the Office of the President of the Council, with the consent of two-thirds (⅔) of the members of the Council. Such extension shall be for no longer than six (6) months.

Article 49

Every person who has reached the age of eighteen (18) years is eligible to vote. Candidates for the Legislative Assembly must have attained the age of twenty-two (22) years. Conditions for candidacy and election are stipulated by electoral law.

Article 50

Members of the Legislative Assembly enjoy immunity in respect of acts and omissions carried out in the function of official duties. Any prosecutions require the authorization of the Legislative Assembly, with the exception of flagrant crime. At the earliest opportunity, the Office of the President of the Council shall be informed of all pending prosecutions.

Article 51

All members, during their term of office, is permitted any public, private, or other profession that is not a direct conflict of interests with Commune or Canton level governance. Such employment is suspended once he makes the constitutional oath.

Article 52

Local Councils in each province of the Autonomous Regional shall be formed through direct elections. These General Assemblies support the Canton level Peoples Congress and executive.

Article 53

The functions of the Legislative Assembly are to:

– Establish rules and procedures governing the work of the Legislative Assembly.

– Enact legislation and proposed regulations for the Local Councils and other institutions, including permanent and ad hoc committees, under its purview.

– Exercise control over administrative and executive bodies, including use of powers of review.

– Ratification of international treaties and agreements.

– Delegate its powers to the Executive Council or to one of its members and thereafter to withdraw such powers.

– Declare a State of war and peace.

– Ratify the appointment of members of the Supreme Constitutional Court.

– Adopt the general budget.

– Establish general policy and development plans.

– Approve and grant amnesty.

– Adopt decrees promulgated by the Executive Council; and

– Adopt laws for the common governance of the Provincial Councils of the Autonomous Regions.



Part V Executive Council

Article 54

Canton Premier

A- The Canton Premier, together with the Executive Council of the Autonomous Regions, hold executive authority as set forth in this Charter.

B- The candidates to the post of Canton Premier must:



1- Be over thirty-five years of age;

2- Be a resident of the canton; and

3- Have no convictions or conflicts of interest.

4 – establish one Male and one Female co chair to the position for each canton.

C- The procedure governing the candidacy and election of Canton Premier:

1- Within 30 days of the first session of the Legislative Assembly, its President must call for the election of the Canton Premiers.

2- Requests to nominate candidates for the position of Canton Premier must be made, in writing, to the Supreme Court which shall examine and accept or reject not later than ten (10) days after the close of nominations.

3- The Legislative Assembly shall elect the Canton Premier by a simple majority.

4- If no candidate receives the required simple majority, a second electoral round is initiated, with the candidate receiving the highest number of votes, being elected.

5- The term of Canton Premier is four (4) years from the date of the taking of the Oath of Office;

6- The Canton Premier makes the Oath of Office before the Legislative Assembly before commencing official duties.

7- The Canton Premier appointed one or more Deputies, approved by the Legislative Assembly. The Deputies take an Oath of Office before the Canton Premier, after which specified functions may be delegated to them.

8- Should the Canton Premier be unable to fulfill his or her official functions, one of his Deputies shall replace him. Where the Canton Premier and the Deputies are unable to fulfill their duties for any reason, the tasks of the Canton Premier will be carried out by the President of the Legislative Assembly; and

9- The Governor must address any letter of resignation to the Legislative Assembly.



D- The powers and functions of the Canton Premier:

1- The Canton Premier shall ensure respect for the Charter and the protection of the national unity and sovereignty, and at all times performing his functions to the best of ability and conscience.

2- The Canton Premier shall appoint the President of the Executive Council.

3- The Canton Premier shall implement laws passed by the Legislative Assembly, and issue decisions, orders and decrees in accordance with those laws.

4- The Canton Premier must invite the newly elected Legislative Assembly to convene within fifteen (15) days from the announcement of the election results;

5- The Canton Premier may grant medals.

6- The Canton Premier may issue amnesties as recommended by the President of the Executive Council.

E- The Canton Premier is responsible to the people through his representatives in the Legislative Assembly. The Legislative Assembly has the right to bring him before the Supreme Constitutional Court for charges of treason and other forms of sedition.

The Executive Council:

The Executive Council is the highest executive and administrative body in the Autonomous Regions. 

It is responsible for the implementation of laws, resolutions and decrees as issued by the Legislative Assembly and judicial institutions. It shall coordinate the institutions of the Autonomous Regions.

There is one Executive Council for the Legislative Assembly, one for each Canton Peoples Congress and corresponding committees of its bodies formed by each Commune level General Assembly.

Article 55

The Executive Council is composed of to c

bi-gendered Co-Chairman, representatives and committees.

Article 56

The party or bloc winning a majority of seats in the Legislative Assembly shall form the Executive Council within one month from the date of assignment, with the approval of the simple majority (51%) of the members of the Legislative Assembly.

Article 57

The Head of the Executive Council shall not serve more than two consecutive terms, each term being four (4) years in length. Article 58 The Head of the Executive Council may choose advisers amongst the newly elected members of the Legislative Council.

Article 59

Each adviser shall be responsible for one of the bodies within the Executive Council.

Article 60

The work of the Executive Council, including the Departments, and their relation to other institutions/committees is regulated by law.

Article 61

After the formation and approval of the Executive Council, it shall issue its prospective Program for Government. Following its passage through the Legislative Assembly, the Executive Council is obliged to implement the Program of Government during that legislative term.

Article 62

Senior civil servants and Department representatives shall be nominated by the Executive Council and approved by the Legislative Council.

Provincial Administrative Councils [Municipal Councils]:

1- The Cantons of the Autonomous Regions are composed of Provincial Administrative Councils [Municipal Councils] and are managed by the relevant Executive Council which retains the power to amend its functions and regulations;

2- The powers and duties of the Provincial Administrative Councils [Municipal Councils] are founded upon an adherence to a policy of decentralization. The Canton’s supervision of the Provincial Administrative Councils’ [Municipal Councils’] authority, including its budget and finance, public services and mayoral elections are regulated by law.

3- Provincial Administrative Councils [Municipal Councils] are directly elected by the public, using secret ballot.



Part VI The Judicial Council:

Article 63

The independence of the Judiciary is founding principle of the rule of law, which ensures a just and effective disposition of cases by the competent and impartial courts.

Article 64

Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until and unless proved guilty by a competent and impartial court.

Article 65

All institutions of the Judicial Council must be composed of at least forty per cent (40%) of either sex.

Article 66

The right to defense is sacred and inviolable at all stages of an investigation and trial.

Article 67

The removal of a Judge from office requires a decision from the Judicial Council.

Article 68

Judgments and judicial decisions are issued on behalf of the people.

Article 69

Failure to implement judicial decisions and orders is a violation of law.

Article 70

No civilian shall stand trial before any military court or special or ad hoc tribunals.

Article 71

Searches of houses and other private property must be done in accordance with a properly executed warrant, issued by a judicial authority.

Article 72

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 73

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedure as are established by law.

Article 74

Anyone who has been the victim of unlawful arrest or detention or otherwise suffered damage or harm as a result of the acts and omissions of public authorities has an enforceable right to compensation.

Article 75

The Judicial Council is established by law.



VII The Higher Commission of Elections

Article 76

The Higher Commission of Elections is an independent body competent to oversee and run the electoral process. It is composed of members, representing all cantons, who are appointed by the Legislative Assembly.

1. Decisions in the Commission require a qualified simple majority of votes.

2. Member of the Higher Commission of Elections may not stand for office in the Legislative Assembly.

3. The Higher Commission of Elections determines the date on which elections are held, the announcement of the results, and receive the nominations of eligible candidates for the Legislative Assembly.

4. As stated in paragraph 51, the Higher Commission of Elections verifies the eligibility of candidates seeking election to the Legislative Assembly. The Higher Commission of Elections is the sole body competent to receive allegations of electoral fraud, voter intimidation or illegal interference with the process of an election.

5. The Higher Commission of Elections is monitored by the Supreme Court and may be monitored by observers from the United Nations and civil society organizations.

6. The Higher Commission of Elections, together with the Judicial Council, shall convene a meeting of all candidates seeking election to the Legislative Assembly to announce the names of eligible candidates.



VIII The Supreme Constitutional Court

Article 77

a)- The Supreme Constitutional Court is composed of seven (7) members, all of whom are nominated by the Legislative Assembly. Its members are drawn from Judges, legal experts and lawyers, all of whom must have no less than fifteen (15) years of professional experience.

b)- No member of the Supreme Constitutional Court shall not be eligible to serve on the Executive Council or in the Legislative Assembly or to hold any other office or position of emolument, as defined by law.

c)- A member’s term of office runs for four (4) years. No member may serve more than two terms.



The functions of the Supreme Constitutional Court

Article 78

1. To interpret the articles and underlying principles of the Charter.

2. To determine the constitutionality of laws enacted by the Legislative Assembly and decisions taken by Executive Council.

3. To judicially review legislative acts and executive decisions, where such acts and decisions may be in the conflict with the letter and spirit of the Charter and the Constitution.

4. Canton Premiers, members of the Legislative Assembly and Executive Council may be brought before the Supreme Constitutional Court, when alleged to have acted in breach of the Charter.

5. Its decisions are reached through simple majority vote.

Article 79

A member of the Supreme Constitutional Court shall not be removed from office except for stated misbehavior or incapacity. The provisions and procedures governing the work of the Supreme Constitutional Court shall be set out in a special law.

Article 80

Procedure for determination of the constitutionality of laws as follow:

1- The decision for the non-constitutional of any law will be as follow:

a)- Where, prior to a law’s enactment, more than twenty per cent (20%) of the Legislative Assembly objects to its constitutionality, the Supreme Constitutional Court is seized of the matter and shall render its decision within fifteen (15) days; if the law is to be urgently enacted, a decision shall be rendered within seven (7) days.

b)-Where, following the rendering of the Judgment of the Supreme Constitutional Court, more than twenty per cent (20%) of the Legislative Assembly still objects to its constitutionality, an appeal may be lodged.

c)- If, on appeal, the Supreme Constitutional Court rules the law to be enacted as unconstitutional, the law shall be considered null and void.



2. If an argument is raised in a court concerning the constitutionality of a law as follow:

a)- If parties to a case raise a challenge to the constitutionality of a law and the court so holds, the matter is stayed while it is referred to the Supreme Constitutional Court



b)- The Supreme Constitutional Court must deliver its judgment within thirty (30) days.



IX General Rules

Article 81

The Charter applies within the Autonomous Regions. It may only be amended by a qualified majority of two-thirds (⅔) of the Legislative Assembly.

Article 82

The Charter shall be laid before the Transitional Legislative Assembly for review and ratification.

Article 83

Citizens holding dual nationality are barred from assuming leading positions in the Office of the Canton Premier, the Provincial Council, and the Supreme Constitutional Court.

Delete

Article 84

The Charter sets out the legislative framework through which laws, decrees, and states of emergency shall be formally implemented.

Article 85

Elections to form the Legislative Assembly shall be held within four (4) months of the ratification of the Charter by the Transitional Legislative Assembly. The Transitional Legislative Assembly retains the right to extend the time period if exceptional circumstances arise.

Article 86

The Oath of Office to be taken by members of the Legislative Assembly

“I solemnly swear, in the name of the community, to abide by the Charter and laws of the Autonomous Regions, to defend the liberty and interests of the people, to ensure the security of the Autonomous Regions, to protect the rights of legitimate self-defense and to strive for social justice, in accordance with the principles of democratic rules enshrined herein.”

Article 87

All governing bodies, institutions and committees shall be made up of at least forty percent (40%) of either sex.

Article 88

National criminal and civil legislation is applicable in the Autonomous Regions except where it contradicts provisions of this Charter.

Article 89

In the case of conflict between laws passed by the Legislative Assembly and legislation of the central government, the Supreme Constitutional Court will rule upon the applicable law, based on the best interest of the Autonomous Regions.

Article 90

The Charter guarantees the protection of the environment and regards the sustainable development of natural ecosystems as a moral and a sacred national duty.

Article 91

The education system of the Autonomous Regions shall be based upon the values of reconciliation, dignity, and pluralism. It is a marked departure from prior education policies founded upon racist and chauvinistic principles.

Education within the Autonomous Regions rejects prior education policies based on racist and chauvinistic principles. Founded upon the values of reconciliation, dignity, and pluralism,

a)- The new educational curriculum of the cantons shall recognize the rich history, culture and heritage of the peoples of the Autonomous Regions.

b)-The education system, public service channels and academic institutions shall promote human rights and democracy.

Article 92

a)- The Charter enshrines the principle of separation of religion and State.

b)- Freedom of religion shall be protected. All religions and faiths in the Autonomous Regions shall be respected. The right to exercise religious beliefs shall be guaranteed, insofar as it does not adversely affect the public good.

Article 93

a)- The promotion of cultural, social and economic advancement by administrative institutions ensures enhanced stability and public welfare within the Autonomous Regions.

b)- There is no legitimacy for authority which contradicts this charter. Article 94 Martial law may be invoked and revoked by a qualified majority of two-thirds (⅔) of the Executive Council, in a special session chaired by the Canton Premier. The decision must then be presented to and unanimously adopted by the Legislative Assembly, with its provisions contained in a special law.



The Executive Council Bodies

Article 95

1. Body of Foreign Relations

2. Body of Defense

3. Body of Internal Affairs

4. Body of Justice

5. Body of Cantonal and Municipal Councils and affiliated to it Committee of Planning and Census

6. Body of Finance, and affiliated to it a)-Committee on Banking Regulations. b)- Committee of Customs and Excise.

7. Body of Social Affairs

8. Body of Education

9. Body of Agriculture

10. Body of Energy.

11. Body of Health

12. Body of Trade and Economic Cooperation

13. Body of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs

14. Body of Culture

15. Body of Transport

16. Body of Youth and Sports

17. Body of Environment, Tourism and Historical Objects

18. Body of Religious Affairs

19. Body of Family and Gender Equality

20. Body of Human Rights.

21. Body of Communications

22. Body of Food and Agriculture



Security Article 96

The Charter shall be published once ratified by participating members and associated groups invited to form a Confederation. 

ACT ONE:

“Toussaint”

Prelude

Croix-des Bouquets, Haiti 

4 June 2014

I ask you now friend, in whose reality do you live?   

We all dedicate our actions to the future. But, what is it that we claim to do with our little lives as that future narrows? Have we all lost our faith in outer generations or a glorious world to come? Of course, all lives are both great and also quite little, but it was a matter of sure and soulful pretension; crossed of course a bit with the “sollidaritous” desire to teach a nation of certain newly freed slaves to fish. Allegorically speaking. The fishing and the slaves. More to the sharp of the point, we were training quietly amidst the dust and rubble the fourth detachment of a growing underground medical battalion, to aid a coming Great Revolt. A guerilla army of young rescue workers and student teachers preparing to accomplish the basic yet audacious task of combatting meaningless death and diseases of poverty pandemic on the island of Hispaniola.

The effects of 210 plus years of chattel servitude, rancorous massacre, ceaseless uprisings and putdownings; quarantines, blan occupations and an induced poverty inflicted upon this people, mostly from the outside. 

      In short, we are the latest reinforcements penetrating a long besieged slave revolt.

These long abused stalwarts, there are believed to be eight million poor unfortunate souls on the Haitian side of the line, but the number is truly anyone’s guess; no realistic census has been taken since the last coup against President Aristide in year of 2004. 

Which was ten years ago. The date is presently 4 June, 2014. Thus 210 years and six months since the declared success of the initial rising.

Year Zero, After Revolt (AR).

I will tell you now where power comes from. It comes from any grouping of people that can devise a just means to secure ones Maslow hierarchy of needs and elevate then a given population toward their droits de moun, human rights. The power is not in any violence or coercion and fear but in the bravery of provisioning hope. Ah, yes indomitable hope. Hope for the rights of man are an issue of freedom and freedom is well and good but what is freedom to misery and deprivation. What say I on due process when I must mix dirt with my flour to watch my family starve at a decreased pace! Or, watch my fallow fields yield nothing as my children die not long after birth of .Or, when my parents perish in a brown and vivacious filth of their own vomit shit and piss from contaminated water. What are our rights when we cannot read and we cannot flee and we cannot work and there are no schools and we die by the age of mid fifty. 

Thankless faceless and unknown niggers. Statistics the UN tallies on we slaves. Power comes from control of the means of development! To those who run the schools the clinics or the farms the means to secure basic things so that hope is alive again and then once fed clothed housed secure I can wonder on about my so-called “rights”.

The trouble with the utilization of stranger volunteers in any operation of stress and seriousness is tri-part for vast complication. Since there is no material compensation it is hard to prevent adventurism and privateering. Since they are all mostly strangers it is hard to enforce the chain of command flat as it may be. And since they are often multidisciplinary; a linguist, a paramedic, a marine, a fire commissioner, a spook and an inner city transport e.m.t. they are all mostly unfamiliar with the dynamic of free association based two tiered consensus utilized by the People’s Army. The third part of the problem beyond privateering and command control is loyalnost. Sebastian and Adelina are lovers living together for the last nine months in the exile of Massachusetts so despite it, or her total lack of interest not one shit given not a shit of a shit on the subject of politics or dialectics, she does truly love him and he loves  her as well and therefore she controls him. Abstaining from the politics of the coming operation she can dispassionately suggest the common sense approach.  

This approach is hardly common for here if you wonder about the chicken and the egg you are working often with a sea of self-proclaimed experts that expertise on shells or eggs or how they crack. Or chickens and how to raise them. Or which comes first. But all the local people the Haitians on the street are not concerned with theories like this. They are concerned with survival for themselves and their families. Once everyone has survived peaceably for some time then maybe there would be time for speaking of the perfect egg the just economy or the chicken the functional state. If that’s what chickens and eggs are really about. And all these experts these NGO technocrats speaking English or Portuguese,  Spanish or French they don’t trust governments and seeing nothing in the economy to so easily carry off. For there is nothing; they devise ways to raise chickens from broken eggs from sick diseased chickens. Then they blame the Haitians in languages they don’t speak. But they are still just fighting to survive. 

The quarantine, such as we call it is 210 years old. It began the day the revolution was declared victorious with the separation of the tri color into the red and blue bicolor ripped by JJ Dessalines. The revolution which had begun by the Jacobins in France whose ideas spread to the blood soaked paradise of St. Domingue purged the entire island of foreign rulers, resulted in a loss of life of an estimated 500, 400 inhabitants and 60,000 soldiers from France, Spain and Greater Britain. It began in 1791 and culminated in the only victorious slave uprising in 1804. Shortly after the quarantine and civil war between blacks and mulattos began; JJ Dessalines signed a purge order of all whites of the island which remained. And by 1805 there were less than 300 blan alive in greater Hispaniola, mostly female, Polish or medically trained. White physicians and Polish conscripts had also fought for newly freed Haiti. The quarantine was not about race or racial antagonism. Whites Negs and Mulats fought on both sides of the great revolt. The issue for Napoleon and other leaders of European powers was that of newly freed slaves. With weapons and armies cannons and turf proclaiming rights of man that had been defeated in the cradle of the uprising France. The issue was still that in the Americas in Europe, Africa, Asia and most of humanity remained a type of slave and this revolt might spread rapidly. 

To the other islands of the Wild West Indies; to all of Latin America; to the USA and reverberating out back to Europe and the surfs of Russia and China. In fact the defeat of the Haitian revolution was one of the greatest foreign policy objectives shared by nearly every power. And since the armies of Spain, France and England had not been able to re-impose the hated regime of chattel servitude the new policy was containment. 

They had by 1802 captured, tortured and killed the only man Toussaint L’Ouvature who had the moral authority and military genius to secure a multi-racial Hispaniola as a rebel base. He was the father of the revolution. The great powers stirred racial tensions inside and lock Haiti off from the world. And by 1806 JJ Dessalines had been assassinated and rebel Generals Petion a Mulatto in the south was at war with Christophe in the north and these exhausted former slaves were freed to a country mostly burned to the ground in 13 years of violence. Most of the people functionally illiterate content to retreat to tiny plots allotted to them and world their own land staying away from the intrigues and civil conflict between Cap Haitian and Emperor Christophe and President Alexander Petion in Port-au-Prince. And the outside world whispered sedition and tightened the quarantine. The revolt which could not be suppressed had to be buried. Economically this was a success. Haiti no longer had her sugar infrastructure or the means to export anything. So Alexander Petion in a historic meeting with Simon de Bolivar in Jamel the southern port city agreed to export the revolution. In exchange for Haitian guns and fighters bolivar agreed to liberate Latin America and free all the slaves there. By 1820 both colonialism and slavery in Latin America were finished. But newly freed slaves and revolutions do not always quickly make chickens eggs or democrats and by the time Bolivar was dead there were new oligarchies laying claim to all of the newly freed turf. By 1822 Haiti was unified under Haitian President Boyer who surrounded by French war ships signed the indemnity. These freed slaves would pay back France. 21 billion USD between then and 1947. To end the quarantine the economic blockade Haiti would impoverish herself further. And there would be coups. 22 coups until 1915 when the US occupied Haiti with troops until 1934. Imposing a new slavery. Building roads and new plantation infrastructure. And an army which a man named Francois Duvalier would use to come to total power in 1957. And he and his son Jean Claude would rule until 1986 with vile secret police the Maccoutes supported by us money and CIA support for the killing of communists. And a revolt from the peasants and church brought to power a priest. The liberation theologian Aristede. Toppled in 1991 after serving 9 months. And then more bloodshed and coup and more us occupation. And then came a quake which killed 300,000 perhaps. Or 220,000 or 100,000; no one actually knows. As rounded numbers suggest. But, it leveled the capital and the technocrats descended and missionaries. And now four years since the quake a pop singer and Duvalierist is president. A UN occupation is in its tenth year and there are still over 10,800 small, medium and international NGO taking about chickens and eggs and such. The quarantine never really ended. And now 98 percent of the trees are gone. Life expectancy is 56. Half the population cannot read. And a cholera epidemic introduced by the UN troops has killed 9,000 and crippled over 600,000. And yet still people speak of building back better with the Sai Ah Industrial park mega sweat shop or the tourist build up in Ile-a-Vache or new plans to link Haiti into the globalized economy.

     But the typical Haitian wonders about the power which goes on for two hours day for the world cup. Or the water supply. Or how to afford two meals a day. It is not so much that one must believe in this narrative but one must listen for a narrative. Or the quarantine succeeds. It succeeds by painting these newly freed slaves as savage primates unable to have a country. Haiti instead of being a triumph of will for human rights and freedom is used then as a cautionary tale. For the long suffering Haitian people do not always get their new except by radio. And since most cannot read French there are only irregular reports in Haitian Creole about the success of failure of this revolt they began. That it spread to Russia, China, and Cuba and then to Algeria, Congo, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Iran and dozens of others plantations. That for those with the ability to read history and current events it seems to be spreading like fire into the Middle East.

    This revolt is an apolitical desire to enjoy the human rights codified by the UN in 1945. It isn’t about government or economic organization. After the abolitionist battles and legal end of slavery there are still 37 million slaves worldwide. The great powers and their oligarchies propagate the race hatred and then utilized the quarantine of the Soviet Union as blackest proof this socialist modal was unsound. But there remain bastions. And again it is not about the politics or the economy but about justice. About no spending a half-life fighting only to survive like an animal. 

       We have broken the quarantine the physical quarantine with ease because our passports are blue and we have 15 USD and a base of operations in this dusty old fort. But perhaps we will have to spend the rest of lives breaking the secondary quarantine. The false consciousness. The separation of fakeness and real imposed by the oligarchy telling us who is white and who is black. Man and woman. Haitian and foreigner. Capitalist and communist. It is a matter of knowing that all of these divisions are lies. Separating us from our human rights. Rights such as healthcare, education, food water, living wages unions, the right to speak or write our opinion without being put in a bag by masked men. Raped. Cut into pieces. And dumped by the roadside at night. 

       Sebastian and Adelina, shortly joined by the Marine Peter Reed and e.m.t. and Jean Louis a Haitian American e.m.t. and Eric Admen a fire fighter paramedic from Seattle Soviet none shared a simple identity or view. If such labels were too imposed about nationality all were card carrying Americans. And it was this exploitation of privilege that we hoped to use to win. The oligarchy of any country relies on division. And therefore our greatest strength is not our nationality or privilege but that we are forcing an opening. Haitian leadership in Haiti. A simple objective; teach more 40 Haitians to save lives. But we have a narrative though not agreed to by all of this ad hock unit; it forms the underpinning. If there is to be change here and abroad we must control our own means to human development. As a means to human rights. 

       Covered in dust and baked by heat and surrounded by endless miles of corrugated shanty dwellings and walled compounds no will pay much attention to us. The revolution began by murdering the oppressor. For 210 plus years that fight has been fought to a stalemate. And the resulting rights have been transient and largely un-won.

     So we are switching the tactic in accordance with orders from rebel leadership here and abroad. We are internationalists. We are willing to travel country to country to go where needed to most remote jungle or mountain. The oppression is real. The violence is real. The slavery is still real. Our oppressor will still stick a gun in our face and drag us away in a sac and torture us over rights. The way we win is make our oppressors irrelevant. For they wish to read us some Machiavelli or Hobbes and tell as we are but violent little monkeys. That without them wed eat each other. I will say that when men and women can fish; can educate heal and keep roads open and trash free then we will not need them. We will not pay them taxes. We will not let them use our money or hard earned money to buy guns and kill people just like us over their ideas on chickens and eggs.

        We are not alone on this island with this idea. My place in the chain of command is that of a staff sergeant. They day we got here we were but five more reinforcements. We have broken the first level of the quarantine by penetrating the siege. And now with but a few devices carried in supported by the local arm of the resistance we train 40 more souls how to save a life. The insurgency began with weapons and ideas. I will not survive this war to see Zion. But that is not my role. Nor Adelina or Pete Reed or Eric Admen or Jean Louis. You give a slave a gun and say freedom and you will wash the blood of an entire generation onto the sea and streets. You give a    slave training to heal and save and the blow to the oppressors on the mountain is fully sustained. We are but an army of newly freed slaves who have choose to build the world we wish to see, rather than again set on fire a world already burning.

       Within the confines of a dusty but patriotic fort barely held together by cinderblocks rebar pillions and chipped paint; partially over run by cats a small internationalist unit composed of but five volunteers who will garrison the outpost beginning 3 June, Gregorian Year 2014. Behind a mammoth red iron door is the concrete skeleton of a school called “Ecole Shalom des Frères”, which means a ‘school of the brothers of peace’ being intermittently erected, year by year and brick by brick. And in the adjacent courtyard is a two story maze of chalk board dimly lit classrooms, a small mess hall and some ten second floor rooms worth bunks to accommodate the inbound reinforcements.

There is a water tower that supplies clean chlorinated water to the locals at 5 goudes a liter. There is a parade ground field covered now completely in debris an impassible dumping ground occupying half the forts enclosure. There is a field kitchen and a wrangle of mangy creatures that when bled or squeezed make what passes as food. Or, eggs. There is a small partially compensated staff of locals. There are two former restoviks one 12 and one 22. They accomplish various tasks of carpentry banditry plumbing an electric work. Three female cooks live in town. One is old women is young and the third of medium age. There is transporter named Colbert; a former taptap driver on staff along with several other useful quasi useful or only vaguely advantageous adjunct personnel with vague if not wholly nepotistic function. And the ground commander gong on his business card as a “country director” is one Mr. Avinadav DeBuitléirs educated at the University Of Stony Brook in Long Island who affiliates himself with the diaspora aspirations of various movements in Brooklyn. But, he directs little outside the walls of this miserable fort; and even here he often prefers delegation.

And, Avinadav was directly support by a petit blan named Laura Levi, but since she was on some business in Ethiopia she had been replaced by a temperamental wench a Quebecois from Montréal named ‘lady Catherine’. Her last name was completely unpronounceable except by the haughtiest of francophone so we said Lady or ‘Madam Catherine’, or Catherine Q because there was universal contempt for her amongst the volunteers. She has too well assimilated into the habit of barking orders at Brown people. 

And that is as we say “what it was”.  

On 3 June two members of this unit crossed the rocky road called a National Highway from Santo Domingo to the City of Port-Au-Prince on the Capital Cruiser armored bus service which showed the movie Fast and the Furious part 5, at least five times. At first, it was quite loud but by the third run it was silent as no one on the bus spoke anything besides Spanish, French or Haitian Creole, and the initial plot points of the rock and Vin Diesel the most famous of Mulat action heroes had been grasped. And now it was all tits giggling and exploding cars. And the road fell apart right after the Jimani checkpoint crossing. They served us a ham sandwich a bottle of cold water. Sebastian Adon could see the color slowly leave Adelina Blazhennaya’s pretty and petit face as the border was crossed. He could see and via the omnibus rattling feel the road become not road. The structures of the country side become not structures. The lush foliage become barrens. And as the color of his partners face fades Sebastian also wonders how she will react to what is to come. Jostling jolts hit the bus and traffic slows to a trickles pace as the driver forms a one lane convoy behind mac trucks build in East Asia shuttle merchanting goods from Dominican Republic into Haiti. Sneakers and such. Also cocaine or people sealed a valise. 

      In the mind of Sebastian Adon whose hair was brown and heart was neg. He imagines this infiltration as a patriotic duty for there was some Haitian blood in him for once we took an oath. 

     The trappings of normal human development crumble each kilometer the bus rumbles into Haiti and the endless dust. A cloud of whirling particulate swallowing the charmless and desolate environs. 

At the border, there was nothing to buy except Pringles. In addition, soda of every kind. The customs agent asked Adon in Creole what was his business in Haiti; tourism.

    Adelina Blazhennaya and Sebastian both crossed the border in black boots and blue uniform pants and black shirts and therefor the customs agent knew that tourism wasn’t really what they were doing in Haiti. But, no one cared. The Brazilians, Chileans, Argentinians, and a poperee of other lesser nations were running the functions of the disbanded military. The Americans were subsidizing the state. The Cubans were running the hospitals and several thousand NGOS perhaps as many as 10800 were the only economy besides transshipment, allegedly of bulk packaged cocaine.

         No cares given in a meaningful way. Much less an under compensated customs agent. They both had blue American passports. Crisp and newly issued. Who cared what their intention was if they had such blue passports and fifteen USD a piece. The two enormous satchel valise roller bags went completely unexamined. As did their two green voodoo tactical rucksacks. Who cared?

      The omnibus continued two hours west down the national highway. There was corrugated tin shack after shack. Contrasting the anything to D.R. is an exercise in futility. One can simply see that this the same island and anthropologically speaking that is where it ends. Without a lengthy discourse on history colonialism and superficialities of cultural antagonism well honestly it’s night and day except they both like cock fighting.

       Three months ago the president of the Dominican Republic signed an executive order denationalizing of over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent. 

    They had the tenor of slightly over fed happy slaves noted Blazhennaya. Not the Haitians. Neither happy nor well fed. At each juncture of slow down as she grew more pale seeing the descent into some land before time some utter desolation. Naked children drooling covered in flies. Tents and shanties. Everywhere unfinished construction sites and partially erected edifices. And the cloud of dust hovered over the endless misery.

      When they finally reached Port-Au-Prince it was just before tusk and Avinadav DeBuitléir accompanied by Marco Balan the light skinned apparatchik and Colbert the driver loaded them in and shuttled them both away to Croix des Bouquets down the unlit impasses to 808 Rue Double Barrel They were given a choice of three rooms all very dusty and Spartan. Settled a little before midnight. Adelina Blazhennaya sat on their twin bed in a room with no window coverings just a window space with sheet nailed to cover it. 

And then she cried heavily.

    Not at the overwhelming poverty; the blight scorched earth of the quarantine. Not for fallen friends and those surely to fall. The quiet tears of Adelina Blazhennaya were for herself. For to protect the man she loves and is so devoted she will lose everything and everyone she has ever known. This was a dying place. A ruined pocked and parched Island at or near the bottom of the mountain. Horror has exhausted tears, thinks she. She cries because what hope have they or humanity in general to win. There enemies are hunting them. She is so far from Chelyabinsk Tank City. She cries and Sebastian holds her. Darkness seeps in. They take their place in the trenches joining the reality, the tragic ranks of newly freed slaves. 

    It was one thing to follow a man into hell, it was another thing all together to fight your way from that hell to the heights of Mt. Olympus if not higher! No part of the stated American dream included any of this.

    But before there was a Haitian Emergency Group, before there was a resistance movement winning ground in both Haiti, Syria and the United American States; there was a mighty quake which took the lives of somewhere between 100,000 to 316,000 men, women and children, which struck the county on the morning of 12 January, 2010. 

    Round large disparate numbers which revealed a great unknowing and uncaring. For when the oligarchy cannot crush, kill or discredit a thing they quarantine it.

    It was a spirit of solidarity that brought us from Brooklyn to stand beside our Haitian brothers and sisters in their darkest hour; it was the Haitian defiance of empires and the world system itself that made us stay in Hispaniola and continue the battle for freedom beside them.