Blogolitical Sean

On Facing Race and becoming visible in the Oregon Legislature

2012-01-22T21:52:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

“Facing Race”, a racial equity report on the 2011 Oregon Legislature has just been published, a rare accomplishment in itself in this state intentionally created to be an exclusive white paradise.

Produced by a coalition of several community-based organizations, the Facing Race report does provide some valuable insights and could prove to be useful over time if the coalition can continue its work, expand its own knowledge and learn from its shortcomings.

Facing Race begins by stating, “Oregon has a deep history of racial inequality and exclusion. It is largely untaught in schools and it is not a part of our civic dialogue. A brief review of Oregon’s racial history can help us begin to understand our current challenges.”

The report’s review of Oregon’s racial history is all too brief, a missed opportunity to educate its audience, most of whom were truly untaught in school, legislators and advocates alike, serving or influencing a largely ignorant electorate that too often in this state raises its ugly head from a largely ignorant general population.

It was, after all, barely 12 years ago that Oregon voters approved the amendment to the Oregon Constitution that removed its original racial exclusionary language, with some 300,000 Oregonians voting to keep the language in. When the Ku Klux Klan was operating in plain sight, Oregon was a stronghold, with members openly serving in the legislature and other public offices.

And it was only eight years ago that the 50-year anniversary of the passage of Oregon’s first civil rights bill, banning discrimination in places of public accommodation, was celebrated in the Capitol.

Prior to the Public Accommodations Law, Oregon was as blanketed with “Whites Only” and other racial exclusionary signage barring entry to restaurants, hotels and motels, and access to restrooms, department store dressing rooms and drinking fountains as any part of the Deep South.

A small group of NAACP members traveled to the state Capitol for 18 legislative sessions—36 years—before Senator Philip Hitchcock and Representative Mark Hatfield successfully—and heroically—led the bill to passage in 1953. Few Oregonians are aware of these facts.

A large photograph of that historic moment now hangs just outside the entrance to the House chamber, where it was placed in the 2003 legislative session at the insistence of then-Senator Avel Louise Gordly, a major figure in the history of Oregon civil rights, who was also the chief petitioner for the amendment removing the racial exclusionary language.

The photo can hardly be missed, one of the few photographs of Oregon citizens in the entire building that isn’t all white, and yet it was not included in the Facing Race report.

You can bet that most legislators and their staffs, and most visitors to the Capitol, have no idea what this photograph signifies. 18 legislative sessions…36 years of advocacy in the face of open hostility…Freedom! The freedom to enjoy a meal in a white person’s restaurant!

Public Accommodations Bill passes Oregon House 1953

Yet another missed opportunity was the story of how the photograph traveled to where it now hangs. That’s a good story for another day. The all-white group that controls such matters first hung the photo in an obscure corner of The Galleria, behind a coat rack used by lobbyists.

Note that I said that the photo was hung behind a coat rack, not above it. You could see the photo if you moved the lobby coat rack, which was on rollers.

Here is the report’s entire summation of Oregon’s racial history, and in it the key defect in the study (italics added):

“In 1843, the Oregon Territorial Legislature voted to ban slavery in the state, not because of a strong anti-slavery sentiment, but because early Oregon settlers wanted to create an all-White society that would be free of the “racial problems” threatening to cause civil war in the rest of the United States. Early settlers drove many Native American tribes from their villages in search of gold or other resources; meanwhile, the Oregon Territorial Legislature banned the sale of ammunition or guns to Native Americans, deepening their disadvantage in the face of outright violence and land grabs by early settlers.

“Throughout the early 1900s, cities throughout Oregon adopted “sundown laws” that required Black people to leave the city limits by sundown. During the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, the Portland Expo Center became a temporary detention center used to hold more than 3,600 people. And in 1948, the Vanport flood left thousands of Black Oregonians without homes and forced them into low-income areas in north Portland. The limited recognition and rights of communities of color during Oregon’s early history provides the context for our current racial inequities and disparities.”

The major flaw in the report is the short shrift given to the Native American perspective, and the foreshortened view of Oregon history, beginning with the arbitrary start in 1843.

Oregon had been settled for thousands of years by people with their own names, their own cultures, long before the arrival of Euro-Americans or any of the other minority groups identified in the study. None of those Native names included the words “Indians” or “Oregon.” There were no places named Mt. Hood, Mt. Saint Helens or Astoria; there was no Salem, no Portland, no Vancouver, no river named Columbia.

With them the newcomers brought new diseases, and repeated epidemics of smallpox, measles, etc. killed off as much as 90% of Native populations, old and young alike, wiped out entire villages. That ought to be worth a mention in any history of the state. Biological terrorism on a continental scale….

It is not a stretch to state that had diseases even ten percent of this deadly attacked any other racial group, the account would have a prominent place in any narrative of race relations.

In this respect, however, the general population continues to buy into the assumption that the Indians were—and mostly still are—a vanishing race, and that no fault lies with those who poured into the state with murderous intent and genocidal result.

The dominant culture likes to use the bland terms “settlers” and “pioneers” to describe the swarms of Euro-Americans who invaded the territory they called Oregon in order to grab the free land that the U.S. Congress was offering to its white citizenry.

This was the largest free land giveaway in the nation’s history, and they took two and a half million acres of the very best land before the surviving tribes signed any treaties at all. These facts should be fundamental to any discussion of the history of the state, much more so in any analysis of racial equity.

Only the Native American population suffered the wholesale forced removal of its children to boarding schools (as recently as the 1960s), enough trauma in itself to drive any person to drink, to despair, to an early death. Historical trauma….

Chemawa Indian School is a short drive but a world away from the Oregon State Capitol, a world as far away from the minds of the 2011 State Legislature as it is from those who haunt its lobbies, even as well-intentioned as most might be.

While Facing Race is inclusive of Native people in the statistics contained in the report, it effectively glosses over the reality of the Native experience throughout the entire history of the state, the vigilantism, the forced marches of women and children, the elderly and the frail to lands that would again be taken by still more white people. Even the coalition fails to grasp these painful realities….

Perhaps the most shocking statistic of all is the percentage of Native American children in foster care relative to every other race. This is the direct result of decades of institutional public policy towards Indians, the shattering of families as a matter of popular will, all joining in whether ignorant or uncaring, all nonetheless collectively responsible for the atrocities committed on innocent families.

Every discussion of racial equity should begin with an acknowledgement that the Native population is the only race that has faced actual extinction, and continues to exist in a Diaspora today, even as the 2012 Legislative Assembly prepares to meet, remaining largely untaught, even by this report, in respect to the Native community.

More than 90% of the Native population in the Portland Metro Area trace their indigenous ancestry to tribes and places elsewhere, the legacy of race-based forced relocation after forced relocation after forced relocation….

And the whites flooded Celilo Falls….

Facing Race asks the question: “WHAT IS RACIAL EQUITY?” in all caps, and provides this answer:

“Proactive racial equity policies seek to eliminate racial disparities and advance equitable outcomes for all communities. Policy that supports racial equity targets the institutional and structural barriers that lead to poor outcomes for communities of color. Race-neutral or color blind policies, whether intentional or not, can widen existing or cause new racial inequities.”

As it pursues its work, the Coalition will find firmer moral ground when it internalizes fully the distance that separates Native Americans from others in the pantheon of communities of color. And it will find itself reaping real rewards in legislative action when it articulates its newfound knowledge to the legislators, to the electorate, and to the general population, with a refocused commitment to real racial equity.

As deplorable as unjustified police brutality is, it wasn’t so long ago that every white Oregonian could brutalize and even murder any Indian they chose to, even on a whim. Those pioneers and settlers wouldn’t even blink an eye. All of Oregon was theirs by the right of Manifest Destiny, and the Natives were just going to have to go away, to disappear. That was the official policy of the state, to make Indians invisible on all the land.

Oregon’s Native American population is changing, however, has survived the American holocaust, and is done with being invisible. These are survivors, moving beyond survival, healing, gathering strength and becoming focused, and they have the moral high ground.

The Invisible are becoming visible:

http://www.oneskycenter.org/documents/MakingVisible_FINAL.pdf

“Here come the Indians
Comin’ real fast
Here come the Indians
Gonna kick you in the ass”
--Custer Gets It, by Jim Pepper

==========

Read the full report, Facing Race: http://www.westernstatescenter.org/

==========
Sean Cruz is Executive Director of 1000 Nations, a public policy research and consulting firm. He is a co-founder of The Friends of Celilo Falls, a new non-profit organizing to secure the recovery of Celilo Falls under the stewardship of the Columbia River Tribes, and co-author and editor of The Militarization of Indian Country with Winona LaDuke (2012). He is the survivor of the abduction of his four children, who disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction in 1996.

He served in the Oregon legislature as Senator Avel Louise Gordly’s chief of staff for six years (2003-2007) and led the workgroup that produced Oregon’s landmark child abduction statute, Senate Bill 1041, in 2005. SB 1041 is also called “Aaron’s Law” in memory of Sean’s late son Aaron Cruz, who died in the course of the Mormon kidnapping. He is a Chicano, of Mexican and Irish ancestry, Raza, mestizo, a descendant of ancient people who thrived on this continent long before any son of a bitch named Christopher Columbus or that Spanish bastard Cortes arrived.

Rivers flooding, highways closing, a Mormon kidnapping underway

2012-01-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Rivers are flooding, highways closing.... These are the same weather conditions as when the Mormons took my four kids out of their schools and vanished, during the Great Storm of 1996.

They shuttled my kids among themselves from place to place in Oregon, Washington and finally to theocratic Utah, all in violation of the joint custody order that had protected my children for five years, keeping their lives orderly and secure.

You would never do this to children you actually loved.

Today’s Oregonian headline reads:

Oregon winter storm: Mother and child die; 17 rivers at or near flood stage; more rain on the way

http://www.oregonlive.com/weather/index.ssf/2012/01/oregon_winter_storm_mother_and.html

Takes me all the way back to the Great Storm of 1996, and a lonely, desperate search for four missing children, children I love with all of my heart….

Law enforcement, the courts and the media take little interest in missing children when family members are involved.

The U.S. Department of Justice tallies more than 200,000 cases of parental and family abductions taking place across the country each year, every year, year after year….

I’ll have more to say about this later, just talkin’ about the weather….

The first places the Mormons hid my children in Utah were organized by Mormon zealots Chris and Kory Wright, in the mountains east of Ogden.

Years later, kidnapping bastard Kory Wright moved his family back to the Portland Metro Area, working for a Mormon-owned company, Columbia Ultimate, where he's on its management team:

https://www.columbiaultimate.com/about-us/management-team.aspx

More about this later, and later still....

On the future of the U.S. military and (American) Indian Country

2012-01-09T10:15:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

The release of Winona LaDuke and Sean Cruz’s new book, "The Militarization of Indian Country", could hardly be more timely.

As the war in Iraq comes to an end and that other war over there in Afghanistan winds down, the U.S. military prepares to reverse-deploy tens of thousands of veterans home to join the ranks of unemployed veterans already standing in line for jobs that largely do not exist.

Wounded veterans, of which there are more than 30,000, including amputees in record numbers, and more than 100,000 veterans who suffer various degrees of lifetime consequences of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), the Signature Injury of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, already languish in failing VA medical delivery systems, overwhelmed by the numbers for more than a decade.

In “The Militarization of Indian Country”, Winona points out that America’s Indian Country suffers the highest rates of unemployment and poverty in the nation at the same time that Native Americans serve in the U.S. military in higher percentages than any other race or ethnicity.

As the Pentagon prepares to downsize and modernize the modern military, the impact in Indian Country will therefore be deeply felt, and Winona suggests strategies to repurpose the military going forward to achieve true homeland security, and to ease veterans’ transitions to civilian employment.

According to Winona, true homeland security involves food sovereignty, protecting the land and everything needed to sustain life. The future US military’s role, therefore, should include protecting supplies of clean, potable water, such as the vital Oglalla Aquifer that is currently being threatened by the Keystone XL pipeline.

In “The Militarization of Indian Country”, Winona speaks to the US military’s habitual descriptions of any hostile or enemy territory anywhere in the world as “Indian Country”, the military’s use of Native American imagery and naming (Tomahawk missiles and Apache helicopters), and its shameful code-naming of Osama bin Laden as Geronimo.

The Honor the Earth edition of “The Militarization of Indian Country” sold out in a flash, but will soon be released by Michigan State University Press, in its prestigious Makwa Enewed Series, with much new material. The book goes to typesetting in February.

“Makwa Enewed is a sub-imprint of the American Indian Studies Series, at Michigan State University Press. The series stands dedicated to books that encompass the varied views and perspectives of people working in American Indian communities. In that light, books published under the Makwa Enewed imprint rely less on formal academic critique, argument, methodology, and research conventions and more on experientially grounded views and perspectives on issues, activities and developments in Indian Country.

“While work published in Makwa Enewed may resound with certain personal, speculative, conversational, political and/or social concerns of individuals and groups of individual American Indian people, in a larger sense such concerns and their delivery reflects the import, strength, uniqueness, and potential viability of the series.

“The series will gather its strength from the voices of tribal leaders, community activists, and socially engaged Native people. Thus, each publication in the Makwa Enewed will call forth from tribally based people and places, reminding readers of the varied beliefs and pressing interests of American Indian tribal people and communities.”

In the meantime, Hoopa Tribal Radio KIDE FM in Northern California has produced a fantastic reading of the Honor the Earth edition of “The Militarization of Indian Country”, here:

Hoopa Tribal Radio KIDE FM

http://www.kidefm.org/fileserver/index.php/files/listing/Downloads/NA%20Heritage

The Militarization of Indian Country reviewed

Georgianne Nienaber’s perceptive review is here:

Winona LaDuke Explores The Militarization of Indian Country From Geronimo to Bin Laden

By Georgianne Nienaber, Huffington Post Books, May 12, 2011

“Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist and twice Ralph Nader's Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate , has written a dramatic and prescient book, The Militarization of Indian Country (Honor the Earth)…. Which brings us to the timely publication of LaDuke's book. In it she uses considerable scholarly prowess to examine how and why Native culture has become inextricably entwined with military institutions….”

“Those who disagree might say that LaDuke is relying upon "political correctness" to make her point, but read the book and what emerges goes straight to the heart and soul of the militarization of not just Indian culture, but mainstream American ethos as well….”

“The Militarization of Indian Country examines in dreadful detail how the military has poisoned, murdered, and exterminated parts of indigenous populations. It is carefully organized into sections examining the deep ties between the military and indigenous people, how the economy drives the military and vice-versa, the military's appropriation of Indian lands, and a somewhat hopeful prognosis for future relations if America rethinks her priorities.”

“In this well-researched, critical, and historical analysis, LaDuke at times takes the stance of a spiritual teacher, redefining and correcting the common interpretation of what it means to be a "warrior." LaDuke uses both a scholarly and soulful process; reclaiming the breadth and depth of Native spirituality on behalf of her people, and giving the reader concise insight into a belief and honor system that is unique in its interpretation of war, its responsibilities, and its consequences.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/georgianne-nienaber/geronimo-bin-laden-_b_860532.html

Bunky Echo-Hawk

Cover art by Bunky Echo-Hawk….

http://www.bunkyechohawk.com/

I've seen fire

2012-01-01T17:19:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain
I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end….”

James Taylor’s timeless1970 masterpiece “Fire and Rain” speaks to the universal soul of human experience, connects us in the most intimate ways to the grief we share individually and collectively at different times in our lives, recalls for me the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who wrote in Anna Karenina that “Every happy family is exactly alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

None of us are exempt from the pain and loss that life brings: the death of loved ones, betrayals of trust, forces of nature, random acts of violence and deliberate criminality, catastrophic indifference and just plain stupidity. Whether tsunami or house fire, public and wholesale or private and intensely personal, we all cross paths with one or more of his lines, sooner or later. We are human.

“Lord knows the cold wind blows it’ll turn your head around….”

There are few songs that say so much in a line, and Fire and Rain has become for me a song that captures my uniquely unhappy family’s experience in the wake of the abduction of my four children, a Mormon kidnapping now entering its sixteenth year.

“The plans they made put an end to you….”

At this time, in January 1996, Mormon officials in three states were putting the finishing logistical touches on their plans to cause my four children to disappear into a series of remote Mormon enclaves in Utah, deliberately causing them to suffer the loss of their father and all of their Cruz family, in order to impose a full-on Mormon indoctrination despite the order for joint custody that had kept their lives orderly and secure, their personalities whole and beautiful, for five years.

These Mormons, you see, wanted to exact a price from me for speaking in opposition to Mormon dogma. They wanted to enforce a shunning, and force my own children to participate, first by isolating them and then by creating both physical and emotional distance. No mail would get through, no phone calls, no contact, and a squad of Mormon lawyers in three states fully engaged to enforce the shunning.

In fact, mail sent to their mother’s last known address in Hillsboro, Oregon, was not forwarded to wherever my children had been taken, a step the Mormons had taken to make it more difficult for me to find them. I later learned that the desperate letters I wrote to my children were forwarded instead to the Hillsboro home of Evelyn Taylor, then the president of the Mormon Relief Society, the highest office a woman can aspire to in the Mormon universe.

My son Aaron did not survive his forced immersion into concentrated Mormonism, isolated and surrounded, under constant pressure to reject his non-Mormon father.

Indeed, the Mormons wanted to kill off anything in my children that would remind them of me, and Aaron was just about exactly like me. They even noted that his skin was “slightly dark”, and Mormon dogma preaches that a dark skin is “the mark of Cain”, a sign of an evil nature.

(Explain that fact to the voters, about the dark skin, Mitt Romney, Mormon Bishop Mitt Romney)….

For my other three children, the key to survival was to adapt themselves into the new regime, and they did. This is where they remain today, still caught up in a religious war between Mormonism (“Good”) and everyone else (“Evil”).

“Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone….”

No one had to let me know that the children were gone. I could feel it! They had been removed from their schools in violation of the joint custody order and their mother’s house had been emptied. They were gone, just like that, no information at all about where they had been taken!

Kidnappings are always ambushes. Stealth and surprise, whisperings in Mormon congregations....
I wake up every morning knowing that you are gone….

“I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song
just can't remember who to send it to….”

I’ll write about these lines sometime soon, but not now, about the walking, about the writing, about the remembering and the sending….

“Well, there’s hours of time on the telephone line
To talk about things to come….”

And I’ll write about the hours, about the time, about the end of time on the telephone, about the end of talking, of planning, of dreaming with my children, about the things to come….

“Won't you look down on me, Jesus
You've got to help me make a stand
You've just got to see me through another day
My body's aching and my time is at hand
And I won't make it any other way….”

By the time the first kidnapped year came to an end, now aware of the Mormon forces at work, even to the names of some of the criminals, I had slipped into a crushing clinical depression. I had lost all hope of seeing my children again, and these were “lonely times when I could not find a friend….”

Just as I was preparing to end my life, in January 1997, a pastor from Victory Outreach, an inner-city church in Northeast Portland, invited me to move into their Men’s Re-entry Home, a sort of halfway house located upstairs over the building the church met in, a former neighborhood movie theater.

In order to live, I had to find reasons to live every day, day after day, and from there I became involved in community and public service, receiving an appointment by the US Attorney to a crime-fighting steering committee, and later a founding board member of a national program for the US Department of Justice, representing the Pacific Northwest.

The battle to find and recover my children became more intense once I became involved in a church, because the Mormons believe that all other religions are false, even “whore(s) of a church” in Mormon dogma. They are an American Taliban....

I would live there at Victory Outreach for the next five years…where I asked Jesus to look down on my children and protect them every day, every single day, counting each day, day after day….

“But I always thought that I'd see you again….”

I will never give up, thinking that I will see you each and all again, even knowing that the entire Mormon church is organized to protect itself and its members from any negative disclosure.

But Mitt Romney is in the news now, and will be throughout 2012, and we are going to take on the subject of Mormonism and its rampant evils, all…year…long.

My son Aaron waits for me in the afterlife, my son who rejected Mormonism just like his father, and there is not a thing the Mormons can do about it. I will see you again, Aaron…and you too, Natalia, Tyler and Allie, I will see you again, when you are free once more, free to be who you really are….

And here is James Taylor himself, to send our spirits soaring….

Fire and Rain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOIo4lEpsPY

------
Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone
Suzanne the plans they made put an end to you
I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song
I just can't remember who to send it to

I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you again

Won't you look down on me, Jesus
You've got to help me make a stand
You've just got to see me through another day
My body's aching and my time is at hand
And I won't make it any other way

oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you again

I’ve been walking my mind to an easy time
My back turned towards the sun
Lord knows the cold wind blows it’ll turn your head around
Well, there’s hours of time on the telephone line
To talk about things to come
Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.

oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you, baby, one more time again, now

Thought I'd see you one more time again
There's just a few things coming my way this time around,
Thought I'd see you, thought I'd see you fire and rain, now
Thought i'd see you just one more time again.

Another Day that Will Live in Infamy: Wounded Knee, Hotchkiss guns and the My Lai Massacre

2011-12-29T20:37:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

On this day, December 29, 1891, the U.S. 7th Cavalry committed the outrageous genocidal cold-blooded murder of more than 150 defenseless Lakota men, women and children at a place called Wounded Knee.

A force of some 500 U.S. 7th Cavalry terrorists equipped with four Hotchkiss guns surrounded the Lakota camp in the early morning as families slept in their tipis, and opened fire. Most of the Lakota men died in the first few minutes, and were mostly unarmed. After that, it was mostly a matter of slaughtering women, children, babies and anything that moved.

7th Cavalry butchers pose with three of the four Hotchkiss guns they used

at Wounded Knee massacre

“(The Hotchkiss guns were) used with devastating effect at San Juan Hill and Wounded Knee.”—narrator, The History Channel

Thanks to modern technology, you can see for yourself the damage a Hotchkiss gun can do:

Top Shot: Hotchkiss mountain gun, pt 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=aQNE6pkuf5E

Top Shot: Hotchkiss mountain gun, pt 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRHSzHknqME&feature=related

Among the 51 wounded Lakota who survived the massacre were 47 women and children, but only 4 men. Many of the wounded died later, on the cold ground or on the floor of the church where they were taken. Several babies were found alive in the snow days later, wrapped in their murdered mothers’ shawls.

7th Cavalry butchers pose with massacred Lakota corpses, men, women and children

The American public mainly supported the slaughter, and the Army awarded Congressional Medals of Honor to twenty of these terrorists. L. Frank Baum, who later became the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer several days after the massacre:

“The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.”

The atrocities at Wounded Knee were described by a number of witnesses:

American Horse (1840–1908); Chief, Oglala Lakota:

"There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce...A mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing...The women as they were fleeing with their babies were killed together, shot right through...and after most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys...came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there."

Edward S. Godfrey; Captain; commanded Co. D of the Seventh Cavalry:

"I know the men did not aim deliberately and they were greatly excited. I don't believe they saw their sights. They fired rapidly but it seemed to me only a few seconds till there was not a living thing before us; warriors, squaws, children, ponies, and dogs...went down before that unaimed fire."

Hugh McGinnis; First Battalion, Co. K, Seventh Cavalry:

General Nelson A. Miles who visited the scene of carnage, following a three day blizzard, estimated that around 300 snow shrouded forms were strewn over the countryside. He also discovered to his horror that helpless children and women with babes in their arms had been chased as far as two miles from the original scene of encounter and cut down without mercy by the troopers. ... Judging by the slaughter on the battlefield it was suggested that the soldiers simply went berserk. For who could explain such a merciless disregard for life?... As I see it the battle was more or less a matter of spontaneous combustion, sparked by mutual distrust....”

Three weeks after the massacre, there were still unburied Lakota men, women and children

The U.S. Army committed a similar atrocity on the other side of the world on March 16, 1968, when soldiers rounded up more than 500 unarmed civilians, men, women and children, and gunned them down at a place called My Lai.

Seconds after this photo was taken, these terrified civilians were slaughtered.

Although no medals were awarded for the My Lai massacre, only one soldier, Lt. William Calley, was tried for the crimes. Although found guilty of 26 homicides, he was sentenced to just three years of home confinement and released.

Not much distinguishes the two events from each other, mostly warmer weather, color photography and much more efficient weaponry in Vietnam, but the Wounded Knee massacre was an act of genocide, an overt expression of long-accepted U.S. policy towards Indian populations wherever they were found on the American continent.

=======

Source: photos and quotations: Wikipedia

The last Christmas gift, the Story of Abduction Eve

2011-12-23T17:30:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

We were three generations gathered together, my mother, my four children and I, that Christmas Eve so long ago. A fire burned in the hearth against the winter night. Love and tradition making up for what we lacked in money, we exchanged gifts for what we did not yet know would be the last time, our last holiday together, this Eve of Abduction, the night before Christmas, 1995.

I had become my medically fragile mother’s sole caregiver, and had maintained this home for us and for my children under an order for joint custody. My former wife and I had shared the children for the holidays for the five years that had followed the divorce, but that was about to come to an abrupt end, vicious and cruel, a cold-blooded kidnapping in the making, a Mormon shunning in the first degree.

Mormons in three states were planning to cause my children to disappear into a series of secret locations in Utah, were in fact finalizing their plans during this very Christmas holiday, furtively arranging housing, employment and a rousing Mormon welcome for my former wife and her four freshly abducted children with Mormon zealots Chris and Kory Wright.

But my mother, my children and I were unaware of all of this at the time, and the video we shot of ourselves that Christmas Eve captured some of the last moments of childhood innocence the Cruz family would ever experience. After this evening, there would be no more holiday gatherings, no birthdays, no communications at all to record. Only the Mormons knew what was about to come, criminally complicit and firm in their fucked-up self-importance.

My mother would live for four more years, without seeing or hearing from her grandchildren again. That’s the way the Mormons roll, separating families into Mormon and non-Mormon contingents, among the most intolerant, controlling and hypocritical of religious sects, the American Taliban, some of them.

My eldest son, Aaron, 14 years old at the time, surprised me with a wonderful gift, a wrist watch. He had saved his money for some time to pay for it, and I asked him “How did you do this?” when I opened the box. He had just smiled, enjoying the moment even more than I did.

The Mormons caused my children to disappear on Monday, February 12, 1995, a day when they should have been in school with their friends. They were taken by a roundabout, circuitous route to the home of Chris and Kory Wright, I would later learn, in the mountains east of Ogden, Utah.

When my son’s 15th birthday came around on March 21, I had no address to even send him a card. And later that year, he would begin carving up his arms with a knife, isolated and depressed, held captive in Mormon Utah.

The watch Aaron gave me that last Christmas Eve has become perhaps my most treasured possession. It stopped running years ago, and a piece of clear tape holds the crystal together. I have never taken it off since that night, now sixteen years ago, other than to keep it dry. I keep the clasp closed with another piece of tape, so that it stays on my wrist always.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night….

Reflections on an unsaved life and the last day of the Iraq War

2011-12-18T23:11:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

The last day of the war in Iraq has finally arrived, although the Nation will be stuck to the Iraqi tar baby for generations to come. The US was the first of the “Coalition forces” to invade Iraq, and the last to leave, its partners’ token contributions long removed.

The longest war in its history has ended, and yet the Nation sleepwalks through the day. Victory dances are scarce. Only those who are coming home, and those that won’t have to return to Iraq, dance the victory dance. The public shops.

The last U.S. soldier risks loss of life and limb, risks the Signature Injury of the war and of the era, Traumatic Brain Injury, risks PTSD and a lifetime of pain and loss. This alone ought to be cause for celebration, but the Nation looks for bargains in this the holiday season. We are a nation of shoppers.

Those that still have jobs look forward to holiday vacations and glad tidings, as a new tide of veterans reverse-deploy their way to unemployment, homelessness and failing medical support systems. Hoo-Rah!

The death and destruction is winding down in the region, a problem for the locals now, as it has always been, from the beginnings of civilization, as it will always be….

Iraq and Iran are, after all, neither much more than a hundred years old, political lines drawn on a map by the British and French, carving up the Ottoman Empire.

The infinitely more important lines are those that have existed since the great schism in Islam, separating the Sunni and the Shiite, and those before that, as the story of Jerusalem makes clear.

Those differences will last forever, while no permanent political boundary has ever existed anywhere, not in the history of the world.

And then there are the numbers.

Co-Presidents Bush and Cheney, having persuaded themselves that Iraq had something to do with the September 11 attacks and was developing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction despite all the evidence to the contrary, and rendered impotent in their failure to find Osama bin Laden, spent more than a trillion dollars and the lives of about 5,000 US soldiers and 100,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, not counting the wounded, just to kill Saddam Hussein.

Osama bin Laden, and his Saudi and Yemeni highjack teams, killed about 3,000 people on September 11, 2003.

That same year, more than 16,000 Americans died from homicides committed by other Americans.

During the span of the war in Iraq, 2003-2010, 129,964 Americans died from homicides committed by other Americans, proving that you don’t need WMDs or airplanes to kill a lot of Americans. They do it themselves every day, and they are getting even better armed.

It is important to note that this was a war fought in Iraq, not against Iraq. The Nation ostensibly went to war in Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein, as friends of the Iraqi people. The GOP Tea Party complains that the Iraqis are ungrateful….

I remember this period of my life with great pain, with acute sorrow. Dreading the start of the invasion came early in the war for me.

From the beginning, it was clear that the lying bunglers in the Bush/Cheney White House had little understanding of the region, and were lashing out half-blind, setting things in motion that they could not hope to control.

From the beginning, it was clear that Rumsfeld was trying to fight the war on the cheap, with too few troops and resources, and would have to rely on the states to supply National Guard soldiers in great numbers to save his arrogant ass, and both of my sons were thus at risk.

My sons’ Utah National Guard unit had been among the first put on alert for deployment to Iraq, in early 2003, but that is only part of the story.

They had disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction in 1996, had become estranged under tremendous pressure from their mother and her Mormon friends, and I was just starting to connect with my son Aaron, through a cell phone I had smuggled to him, as the Shock and Awe campaign unfolded.

In August of 2003, I recovered Aaron from Utah, and only then realized that he was desperately ill and in need of medical attention. I learned that he had suffered terribly during his years of isolation among the Mormons, had been assaulted by his 2nd stepdad, his mother’s fourth husband, and had been force-fed Mormon dogma to the point that he had begun cutting his arms with a knife when he was just fifteen years old.

I spent hours every day, caring for my son. He was too sick to drive anywhere on his own, through August, September, October, into November.

And every day I felt the pain of separation from my still-abducted and estranged other three children, still in Utah, fully enveloped by Mormons and Mormonism.

Then came the day his deployment orders arrived. His unit was going to Iraq, and he was determined to join it, to serve alongside his brother, Tyler.

I pleaded with him not to go, but there was no stopping him.

On Thanksgiving Day, I watched him pack. We ate our last meal together. The next day he was gone, in no condition to drive, and with a suspended license.

When he left our home here in Portland on his drive to Utah, reporting as ordered, his access to medical care ended, although we did not know it at the time.

He picked up tickets for speeding and driving with a suspended license. I paid those fines, as he was too ill to work, and I supported him until the end of his life.

The Army sent Tyler to Iraq for two tours, but provided no medical care for his brother.

The Army held Aaron back for medical review, and then discharged him honorably, but without providing treatment.

And he died there in Utah, sick and alone, when he could have been here, home with me, and receiving the care he so desperately needed, that he had needed for years.

We are also casualties of the Iraq war, my sons and I, although we will never be counted as such.

We are among the 1% who paid a price, the invisible ones.

And so the day comes to an end….

On the Mormon core of Mitt Romney

2011-12-03T15:38:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

“Instead of obsessing over whether an element of humanity might disqualify Gingrich with some Iowa voters, the media would be better served focusing on whether out-and-out lying should disqualify Romney with all voters.” –Arianna Huffington

The Romney and Huntsman presidential campaigns will draw a level of public scrutiny to Mormonism unlike anything the secretive, polytheistic, mock-Christian sect has ever experienced heretofore, and the Mormon church is ultimately not going to like the results.

Although his campaign portrays him as a businessman, Mitt Romney, a former bishop, is a product of the Mormon institution, and in the social values of the church is the only place where he can be counted on to have a core, the loci of his few absolute values.

The problem for shape-shifting Romney is that Mormonism itself waves in the wind, has a particularly loose grip on facts and is packed full of hypocrisy and some of the weirdest ideas on the planet.

The Mormon church is as against polygamy and the raising of child brides today as it was for its practices not so long ago, and its officially racist doctrine about people with dark skin tones was changed in just the past twenty years, to cite just two examples of major flip flops on fundamental values.

The Mormon church has a gigantic investment in erasing its own past. It’s future growth (and cash flow) is nearly entirely dependent upon teams of skilled missionaries working one on one in their prospects’ homes, feeding information in a carefully controlled program, not out in public in group settings. You never hear the details until you’re in.

Through the nomination process, the public is about to learn much about the details of Mormonism and how it controls its members, particularly women and children, who have no real power in the organization, and who hold no positions of authority in the church.

Romney’s attitudes toward the place of women (it’s in the home), is fundamental to Mormon society, as is the Mormon church’s antipathy towards independent-minded women.

But Romney is going to tell you that he can be on both sides of these issues at the same time, with no sense of hypocrisy.

As chameleonesque Mitt Romney pursues the GOP nomination, many ponder the question “Is the country ready for a Mormon president?”

But that’s the wrong question. A better, more-informed discussion would be had should we consider whether the country is ready for a president whose beliefs and character are based in a white-male-dominated, highly secretive, polytheistic, mock-Christian sect with extreme right-wing social views that is openly hostile to all other faiths and that comprises less than 3% of the US population.

That’s a long question, but it gets to the real heart of the matter. Romney’s success depends on the public remaining largely ignorant of the tenets and practices of Mormonism, and tolerating its hypocritical weirdness.

My views were formed by direct experience, including the abduction of my four children and the death of my son Aaron in the course of a Mormon kidnapping.

Oregon’s landmark 2005 anti-kidnapping “Aaron’s Law”, Senate Bill 1041, is named for my son. The statute addresses the failures of both the criminal and family law systems to protect my family, and with Aaron’s Law Oregon is the only state in the nation where kidnapping a child creates a civil cause of action.

You can thank the Mormon church for inspiring the law….
------

Posted on Arianna Huffington’s blog, Nov 29, 2011:

Mitt Romney Brazenly Lies and the Media Lets Him Slide

By Arianna Huffington

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/mitt-romney-ad_b_1117288.html

On child abuse, Mormonism, Mitt Romney, the Penn State Scandal and the People of the Lie

2011-11-22T22:48:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

That Jerry Sanduski loved to play grabass naked with children not much taller than his crotch in the Penn State athletic department showers (he calls it “horsing around) is not in dispute. Nor is the fact that many adults had some awareness of Sanduski’s “problem”, and kept silent or otherwise minimized his criminal conduct in order to protect their own careers and their respective institutions, Penn State mostly, but the web of guilt and the repercussions will not end there.

The combination of power, greed, vast sums of money and valuable perks, an organization that commands and rewards loyalty in a climate of religious fervor, and a culture financially and otherwise dependent upon the public stature of iconic individuals and the continuation of fabricated legends, has led to this end.

Religious fervor and sports zealotry are very similar, and how individuals think and act within institutions that strive to increase levels of fervor and zealotry (and the financial rewards that ensue) within its manufactured belief system exactly alike. Where do people exhibit more raw, emotional zealotry as a group than in church or sports settings?

The behavior of Penn State as an institution and as a collective of individuals in the Sandusky scandal is similar to that exercised by the Mormon Church and its TBMs “True Believer Mormons” as everyday practice, as the norm. This explains in large part why the mock-Christian sect is so secretive, shielding itself from scrutiny concerning the rampant domestic and child abuse so thoroughly ingrained in its white-male-dominant, female-submissive culture.

In his book “People of the Lie”, examining the psychology of evil in everyday life and in how the roles of individuals within groups operate in such situations, Dr. Scott Peck called these persons exactly that, the People of the Lie, describing a mechanism he termed “the fragmentation of conscience.”

“Whenever the roles of individuals within a group become specialized, it becomes both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. In this way, not only does the individual forsake his conscience but the conscience of the group as a whole can become so fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent…The plain fact of the matter is that any group will remain inevitably potentially conscienceless and evil until such time as each and every individual holds himself or herself directly responsible for the behavior of the whole group—the organism—of which he or she is a part.”

The coming legal process will reveal the names of many whose inaction, while not strictly criminal, served to enable the continuation of heinous crimes against defenseless children fallen into the Penn State-Sandusky orbit. We will learn the identities of those who kept a lid on clear evidence of child abuse in order to protect the system and their place in it. The investigation will follow both the money and the amorality and cowardice.

The same processes were at work in the Mormon abduction and long-term abuse of my four children, in the series of crimes that took place beginning in 1995, when the kidnapping was planned, and after February 12, 1996, the day my children vanished into Mormon enclaves in remote areas of Utah.

Mormon officials, bishops and the like, in three states were criminally involved in the abduction, and that fact created powerful incentives to protect themselves, each other, and their institution once the kidnapping had become a fact. Like at Penn State, these were crimes of great shame, and reputations and prison sentences were at stake, and thus the People of the Lie conspired to sustain a kidnapping, and the systematic abuse of four innocent children.

Bob Schaeffer had these words to say on the Penn State scandal, in his commentary on Face the Nation, broadcast November 13:

“It is hard to believe that anyone who had an inkling of what was going on at Penn State did not understand its significance… As the Catholic church learned, when protecting the institution is put ahead of those it is intended to serve, it is eventually the institution that is put at risk. That is unfortunate, but let us remember those the institution forgot, the victims, children who may have been scarred for life (italics added).

“They deserve to know that those who wronged them and those who knew about it are being brought to justice; and, yes, that includes the icons.”

There were Mormons who knew in advance that my children were to be abducted, and there were Mormons who became involved later, that worked to protect the first group, and thus themselves, as the crimes metastasized through the church organizations, all well aware of the significance of their actions, these People of the Lie.

To deliberately cause a child to lose a beloved parent, a beloved grandparent, is an act of child abuse as cruelly destructive as any other form, and has lifelong consequences. Each of the perpetrators understood this fact perfectly well, and would have considered the treatment that they were happy to give the Cruz children as child abuse were it applied in their own families. They were knowingly People of the Lie.

And thus, I will identify them, as I have many times over the years, again in this essay. Lifetime consequences for the victims must be balanced by lifetime consequences for the perpetrators; even if they are never brought to justice, their conduct must be brought out into the open and kept there, as both punishment and deterrent.

The statue of limitations has probably long expired over many of the Sandusky crimes, as it has for the crimes of child abuse perpetrated in the Mormon kidnapping of the Cruz children. The passage of Senate Bill 1041, named after my late son Aaron Cruz, whose death is directly attributable to the abuse and isolation he endured during his years in Mormon captivity, did not pose any threat of justice against his abusers. The law applies only to those cases that originated after its passage in 2005.

These People of the Lie, complicit in the Mormon kidnappings, individually and institutionally, often acting in their official LDS capacity, and bearing a share of responsibility in the death of my son Aaron, include:

Kory and Chris Wright; bishop Donald Taylor; bishop David Holiday, Evelyn Taylor, Tony Micheletti, Cynthia Anderson, Steve Nielson, Ben and Gina Foulk, Barry and Connie Dunford, Edwin Poyfair, James Rulli, and others whose names I do not know or who escape recall at this writing.

The presidential aspirations of Mitt Romney is bringing new attention to Mormonism and how the church operates, how it controls its members, particularly women and children, who have no real power in the organization.

The fragmentation of conscience is far more potent a path and cover for evildoing in the Mormon church than it is in collegiate sports, as would be expected in any secret society.

Although his campaign portrays him very effectively as a businessman and a moderate (despite his crazy talk on the stump), Mitt Romney, a former bishop, is a product of the Mormon institution, and the social values of the church are the only place where he can be counted on to have a core, the loci of his few absolute values.

“As bishop, Romney exercised great power over his congregation. Besides appointing staff members, from the local church librarian to choir master, he interviewed people in the congregation to determine fealty to the church. He decided who could carry a ‘recommend,’ a physical card that serves as proof of a person’s good doctrinal standing and suitability to enter the sacred temples. --“In Boston, Mitt Romney ‘evolved’ in Mormon leadership, some churchwomen say”, By Jason Horowitz, The Washington Post

Mr. Horowitz delved into the “evolution” of Romney’s attitudes toward the place of women (it’s in the home), concluding that he shares the Mormon church’s antipathy towards independent-minded women.

These temple recommends are an effective tool for keeping the people in line, and any Mormon who commits an act of child abuse is sure to lose it and much more, should the crime become known.

Therein lies the incentives and the path for child abuse, Mormonism, Mitt Romney, Penn State, the Cruz kidnappings and the People of the Lie….

----------------

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/campaigns/in-boston-mitt-romney-evolved-in-mormonleadership-some-churchwomen-say/2011/11/17/gIQAMOoWjN_story.html

On Faith, Religion, Mormonism and Presidential Politics

2011-10-21T00:58:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

The candidacies of Mormons Mitt Romney and John Huntsman have put the issue of religion on the Presidential debate stage, which is where it belongs.

The President is the nation’s Decider-in-Chief.

We should be concerned with all of the factors that will influence the future President’s decision-making. When the candidates identify a particular school of thought, worldview, religion or set of beliefs as central to their lives, then the public should vet those aspects. This is no place to grant a candidate a pass.

It’s one thing to have faith in a given creation story or adhere to a given religious tradition. It’s another thing entirely, however, to believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, or that a person rapped a stick on a rock and the sea actually parted, or a story about golden plates, the Lost-Tribe-of-Israel origins of Native Americans and real rocking, talking angels. Do we want a Commander-in-Chief who is convinced that any of this is factual?

If the next Decider-in-Chief has crazy beliefs in his or her head, we need to know about it. Does the candidate believe that God drawls in his or her ear? Like George W. Bush? Have we forgotten how that worked out already?

(sound track: The Who: “Won’t Get Fooled Again!” is playing right here)

I don’t much care what church they do or do not go to, but I do want to know--long before election night, long before the anointed one ascends—if they are spending way too much time in an imaginary world, measured in cubits. That’s not the problem-solver I want to see in the Oval Office.

The Mormon church is powerful, enormously wealthy, highly secretive, and amounts to about 3% of the US population. These are well-established facts that have nothing to do with the theology of the sect or its relationship to Christian points of view, or with the First Amendment, for that matter.

Mormonism is controversial for many reasons, not just whether it meets the dictionary definition of a cult or is a bizarre form of polytheistic Christianity, or for its polygamist and officially racist recent past.

One of those reasons is the Mormon practice of shunning, and how Mormon shunnings are enforced, which speaks to how the Mormon Church operates as if it were a cult. That’s a different issue altogether, and should be part of the discussion.

Another issue is the position of women in the Mormon Church and in the Mormon worldview. All of the higher positions in the church organization are reserved for men only. Mormon women belong in the home, not the workplace. Mormon women and girls are expected to be subservient to men, and are trained to be “meek and mild” as part of everyday practice.

I would never vote for a candidate that held this set of beliefs, not for any public office.

One of the issues that stood between me and unwelcome Mormonism in my family story was the status of its women and girls. I did not want my daughters to grow up believing that their roles were to be subservient to men, or my sons to believe that either.

If your child marries into the Mormon church, you can say goodbye to any plans you ever had to see your child’s wedding. You will be forbidden participation, an outsider to one of the most important events in your life. That is official Mormon policy, and it is enforced without exception. Voters need to be clear on this.

The Mormon notion of the family unit and the church’s willingness to sever families based on their membership status or fidelity to hard core Mormonism should be part of this public policy discussion, as the candidates debate their notions of family values, an essential component of each of their platforms.

My four children disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction more than 15 years ago. This is the story of a Mormon shunning.

Mormon officials in three states conspired to abduct and conceal my kids in a series of remote Mormon enclaves in order to immerse them in a completely Mormon environment, despite an order for joint custody. And they got what they wanted, too, although it cost the happiness and then the life of my son Aaron.

Oregon's landmark 2005 kidnapping law is named "Aaron's Law" after my late son Aaron Cruz, who died in Payson, Utah from long-term medical neglect, emotional abuse and abandonment. Aarons Law (Senate Bill 1041) is designed to remedy several common failures of the criminal and family law systems in preventing and resolving cases of child abduction.

Aarons Law provides abduction victims tools to hold their abductors, and those who provide financial, planning or logistical support to the abduction, accountable financially, including religious organizations that engage in shunning, like the Mormons, like the Mormons who abducted my children.

With Aaron’s Law, Oregon is the only state in the nation where the abduction of a child creates a civil cause of action. The law recognizes that the abduction of a child by any person is child abuse, as serious as any other form of abuse.

The provisions of Aaron’s Law arise from the failures of both the criminal and family law systems in the interstate kidnapping and concealment of my children, but these failures are commonplace, with more than 200,000 cases of parental and family abduction taking place in the United States each year, and increasing numbers of children disappearing into foreign countries forever.

Personally, I’m glad Romney’s in the race. The more people understand the ins and outs of Mormonism, the more will reject it. Bring it on, Mitt! You too, Mr. Huntsman. I didn’t buy the story about the golden plates, so your church destroyed my family. Now let’s talk about who you hypocrites really are.

Every candidate for public office has the right to believe whatever he or she believes, to belong or not belong to any religious organization. That is guaranteed by the First Amendment.
But the public does have a legitimate right to know the specifics of those beliefs, and to vote accordingly with a complete set of facts.

There is far too much at stake in the election of a President to give the candidates a pass on such a fundamental part of their character and how they view the world, particularly since they express such strong feelings about it. Let's talk it all out. There's plenty of time. I've waited for 15 years.

On Mitt Romney and the Mormonism controversy

2011-10-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

My four children disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction more than 15 years ago.

Mormon officials in three states conspired to abduct and conceal my kids in a series of remote Mormon enclaves in order to immerse them in a completely Mormon environment, despite an order for joint custody.

Oregon's landmark 2005 kidnapping law is named "Aaron's Law" after my late son Aaron Cruz, who died in Payson, Utah. Aarons Law is designed to remedy several common failures of the criminal and family law systems in preventing and resolving cases of child abduction.

Mormons divide the world into "Members" (Mormons) and "Non-Members" (everybody else), and they carry a huge thin-skinned “Us vs Them” persecution complex that influences their relationships with non-members unlike any mainstream religion in America.

Mormonism’s essential tenets put it at odds with every branch of Christianity on the planet, along with the Mormon doctrine that every other church or belief system is fundamentally evil.

If your child marries into the Mormon church, you can say goodbye to any plans you ever had to see your child’s wedding. The Mormon notion of the family unit and their willingness to sever families based on their membership status should be part of this public policy discussion.

Personally, I’m glad Romney’s in the race. The more people understand the ins and outs of Mormonism, the more will reject it. Bring it on, Mitt!

On Sarah P.T. Palin

2011-09-04T16:29:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Sarah Palin is the 21st century political epitome of P.T. Barnum’s classic dictum “Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.”

In this sense, and to paraphrase the great huckster and circus master Phineas Taylor Barnum, Sarah Palin is never going to a lose a dollar by underestimating the intelligence and common sense of a diminishing percentage of the American public.

The moose-fed former half-term governor of Alaska is having way too much fun and making way too much money to ever want to have a real job with real responsibilities ever again.

And, in the real world, the only set of circumstances in which Sarah Palin could ever be elected President of the United States would be if she happened to be the last person surviving the apocalypse. Even she understands this fact.

And, even if she does eventually enter the presidential race, it will be all part of the riff.

She doesn’t need the job; in fact, Palin doesn’t want the job. The job means work; and she hasn’t had any of that to do since she quit the governorship mid term. What she is doing right now is much better than actually being President, where she would have to think and read actual books and stuff. You can’t lead a nation by “going rogue” day after day, after all, even if God is drawling in your ear (this is a note to Bachman and Perry as well)….

She’s getting paid real well, crazy well, just for talking, and that is where she has found her niche, talking, nattering really, about practically anything that falls into her mind, anything that sets her dim bulb to gleaming, to gatherings of nitwits, and no one attending is any the wiser; that, she can (and does) bank on….

While it is likely that Barnum never said “there is a sucker born every minute”, he appears to be stuck with it in the collective American memory, and this is where Sarah Palin really shines, because there is definitely at least one sucker born-again in this country every minute, which is where Bachmann and Perry come into the picture. For all of their glaringly obvious faults, Bachmann and Perry
actually want to put in a day’s work, although not necessarily good or sensible work. This may be their one actually positive quality….

Sooner or later, the crowds she draws will find something better to do back at the trailer park, but Sarah P.T. Palin is going to milk this baby to the last drop of tea.

On the City of Portland's proposed Office of Equity

2011-08-31T16:26:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

My name is Sean Cruz. I am a resident of NE Portland. I am openly Mexican-American, Chicano to be more specific, the descendant of Meso-American aboriginal people.

I do not self-identify as Latino or Hispanic because those are colonial labels of convenience that refer to no particular race, culture, ethnicity or nationality.

I am the grandson of Mexican farm workers, who came to serve Portland communities and the state of Oregon as former state senator Avel Gordly’s chief of staff for six years.

The first two bills that Senator Gordly assigned me to draft in the 2003 legislative session addressed the lack of equity for Oregon’s farm workers, who under state statute had no rights to meal and rest breaks during the work day or to overtime pay for overtime work. Every other worker in the state has those rights.

Neither bill received a hearing, but Senator Gordly and then-BOLI Commissioner Dan Gardner worked together outside of the legislative process to successfully change Oregon statutes, granting farm workers the right to meal and rest breaks, effective February, 2004.

Oregon’s farm workers still have no right to overtime pay for overtime work, the only class in the state bearing that burden.

I recently met with Francisco Lopez of CAUSA and Ramon Ramirez of PCUN, and I asked them who was the farm workers’ best friend in the legislature now that Senator Gordly has retired.

They answered “zero.” There is no one.

Every person in the City, in the County and in the State is dependent upon food produced by Oregon’s mostly Mexican farm workers, yet there is no equity for this population.

The fact is that no legislator or any other public official has wanted to touch farmworker issues since the street renaming fiasco, supposedly to “honor” Cesar Chavez, that fed not one hungry child nor kept one young person in school.

During the two years that the City was torn over renaming a street that to this very day has no connection to Portland’s farm worker population, there was much hate speech and invective directed specifically at Mexican people, yet during that entire period the Office of Human Relations, the Human Rights Commission and the Hispanic Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce stood silent and let the invective fly.

"Working toward equity requires an understanding of historical contexts, and active investment in social structures over time so that that all communities can experience their vision of success.”—From the Office of Equity draft plan

My question to the Council is: How will things be different in the new Office of Equity; will you still be taking advice from the same people who advocated for renaming a street; and, in the future, in the interests of accountability and transparency, will you require similar groups as the street renaming committee to publicly identify their membership, beyond the self-appointed chairs?

------

These comments were emailed to the Portland City Council and posted on The Oregonian, here:

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/08/can_an_office_of_equity_succee.html

On the GOP target-rich lineup of Squirrels, Near-Imbeciles and one very dangerous SOB

2011-08-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

In all the years that I’ve been interested in politics and elections, I’ve never seen the Republican Party offer such a target-rich lineup of squirrels and near-imbeciles, even multiple Mormons, and yet there is still time for more candidates to join the fun, particularly with the line has grown so blurry between candidates, former candidates, non-candidates and maybe-candidates.

Was it only four years ago that the GOP Laff Riot Comedy Team had just two players, moose-fed Sarah Palin and the utterly unselfconsciously stupid Joe the Plumber? Where the heck is Joe and his plumber’s butt these days, anyway? So fickle were his supporters, where did they go?

This election cycle, the characters are coming so fast and opining so frequently that it’s hard to keep up.

We owe this phenomenon in large part to the proliferation of cable TV and radio “news” channels with 24 hours to fill each day, and about 45 minutes of actual information to give the padding a veneer of topicality, and the extreme partisanship that dominates GOP primaries.

The rancor on the right is so extreme that the killing of Osama bin Laden is as swiftly forgotten as the fact that it was the Bush administration that set the nation into economic freefall just two short years ago. These people are not going to let themselves become confused by either facts or history. There’s less than a 50% chance that what the GOP candidates say is in the Constitution is actually in there, not that their base can tell one way or another.

For example, GOP “No-longer-a-witch” and soon-to-be-perennial cable nutball Christine O’Donnell is getting some national cable TV face time over something she calls a “book,” that ought to come bundled with crayons, like Sarah Palin’s.

Herman Cain is running a vanity campaign with absolutely no chance of success, attempting to make a direct transition from right wing cable TV commentator to president of the United States and, when you think about it, that’s pretty funny. Everything he says evaporates into thin air the moment the words come out of his mouth, but his presence on the debate stage masks the racism that inhabits the Republican base.

Although not officially campaigning, former Alaska half-term Governator Sarah Palin (aka “The Quitter”) has found life if not intelligence on cable TV, where she fills those spots when they have run out of actual news. I look forward to another Palinesque lesson in American history like her take on the famous ride of Paul Revere, who warned the British that we colonists have guns and so on and so forth. A camera and a microphone are like crack cocaine to Palin, which brings us to….

Michelle Bachmann’s bright-eyed declaration that she is going to bring back $2-dollar-a-gallon gas stirred some interest for half an afternoon, and the more she talks, the more she will take her campaign into Wackyville, where, to be fair, she will not be alone….

Ron Paul isn’t an actual Republican. He’s a Libertarian, but none of those nutballs ever get elected as a Libertarian, only as a Republican, and most hard-line Republicans can’t tell the difference anyway, because that would involve reading actual books….

Newt Gingrich is understandably mostly an embarrassment to the rest of the field, and this just 13 years after his run ended, ruling the Republican roost. Most of the GOP electorate has long forgotten whatever it was that he did back then that they liked the sound of so much, something about a Contract with America….

Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy was doomed when he demonstrated that he didn’t have the cojones to confront Mitt Romney to his face on national TV. Whenever the USA gets around to electing a woman president, she’ll have pa-lenty more cojones than Pawlenty ever dreamed of, let that be a lesson to somebody out there….

Mormons Mitt Romney and John Huntsman are keeping their heads down, avoiding public exposure even at this stage in the race and the questions about their Mormon magic panties and why God loves Salt Lake City best, and which planet do they plan to rule over in the afterlife, and do they think that their experience as President of the USA will make them a better God, that will surely be coming their way, better later rather than sooner….

The 2012 GOP presidential bench is as deep in numbers as it is shallow in brainpower, with this list of declared candidates that you probably never heard of, and with this writing probably the first and last time that you will ever see their names in print. I will boldface them so as not to give the frontrunners yet another advantage: Jon Greenspon, Gary Johnson, Fred Karger, Andy Martin, Thad McCotter, Jimmy McMillan, Tom Miller, Roy Moore, Buddy Roemer and Vern Wuensche. You’ve probably heard of Rick Santorum. He’s in there too, and just to prove that I didn’t make any of this up, here’s the link:

http://2012.republican-candidates.org/

While it is easy to laugh at the inane antics of much of the GOP field, some candidates warrant attention for the potential dangers they pose to the nation, for the way they animate the lunatic fringes, none more so than Rick Perry.

Rick Perry’s blustery suggestion that Texans might treat Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke “ugly” recalls the ugly way they “treated” JFK down in Dallas or the “good old days” when Texas justice was meted out with a nearby tree and a rope.

There is no question that sort of talk appeals to the Timothy McVie’s out there, the gun nuts and White Power crazies. Even the Bible-thumpers out there on the religious right are drawn to this line of thinking, Old-Testament blood and slaughter, and a world only about six thousand years old, ruled by God’s Chosen People, who have formed the Tea Party….

Perry’s Texas swagger channels George W. Bush just when the former Moron-in-Chief was disappearing into the history books, if not the trillions of dollars of indebtedness and thousands of grief-stricken military families he saddled the nation with in eight very recent years….

The last thing this nation will ever need is another president who believes that the sun revolves around Texas and that God drawls into his ear….

The most valuable fish in the Columbia River

2011-08-16T17:40:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

The most valuable fish in the Columbia River will be one that looks exactly like this: Wild, dipnetted from a platform at Celilo Falls by a supremely lucky Native fisherman, on its way to restock an endangered species somewhere upriver from the dam at The Dalles.

Celilo Falls resides in their DNA as surely as their ancient places of origin and their anadromous journey of life, death and rebirth.

The absence of Celilo Falls is confusing to the salmon, goes against the grain of their DNA, and contributes to their decline as well as to the cost of recovery and restoration.

No single event could be more beneficial to the recovery of endangered species throughout the entire system everywhere above the dam at The Dalles than the rebirth and preservation of Celilo Falls, under the stewardship of the Columbia River tribes, who had done so successfully for more than ten thousand years, more than 42.53 times longer than the United States has existed as a nation.

The Friends of Celilo Falls is forming….

Fundamentalist Mormon Warren Jeffs and LDS Hell on Earth

2011-08-07T08:03:00.000-07:00

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Mainstream Mormons may not grow their own child brides like Warren Jeffs, but Mormon zealots can be just as dangerous, and a non-Mormon has little chance to find justice in Utah (read Mormon) courts.

My four children disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction more than 15 years ago, eventually suffering life under a series of three Mormon step dads in three states.

My late son Aaron Cruz died in his mother’s empty house in Payson, Utah, from “undetermined causes”, and a phalanx of Mormon lawyers hired by 5^th-husband Ben and Gina Foulk, who now live a country-club, Rotary life in El Dorado Hills and Cameron Park, California, are determined to keep it that way, with the circumstances of his death unknown and uninvestigated.

My son Aaron Cruz is memorialized in Oregon's landmark anti-parental-and-family-kidnapping Senate Bill 1041 "Aaron's Law", passed in 2005.

Oregon is still the only state in the nation that offers its children this level of protection from parental and family or other non-stranger kidnappings. Under Aaron's Law, taking any abducted child out of the state of Oregon creates a civil cause of action, and you should really think hard about how you want to protect your child from abduction by religious zealots, your ex or any other criminal.

Mormon mystery company slips a million mystery bucks to Mitt Romney

2011-08-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

Mormon mystery company slips a million mystery bucks to Mitt Romney and then dissolves, recalling the pre-Watergate era of secret campaign finance.

From the Huffington Post:

“A mystery company that pumped $1 million into a political committee backing Mitt Romney has been dissolved just months after it was formed, leaving few clues as to who was behind one of the biggest contributions yet of the 2012 presidential campaign.

“The existence of the million-dollar donation — as gleaned from campaign and corporate records obtained by NBC News — provides a vivid example of how secret campaign cash is being funneled in ever more circuitous ways into the political system.

“The company, W Spann LLC, was formed in March by a Boston lawyer who specializes in estate tax planning for “high net worth individuals,” according to corporate records and the lawyer’s bio on her firm’s website.

“The corporate records provide no information about the owner of the firm, its address or its type of business.

“Six weeks later, W Spann LLC made its million-dollar donation to Restore Our Future — a new so-called “super PAC” started by a group of former Romney political aides to boost the former Massachusetts governor’s presidential bid. It listed its address as being in a midtown Manhattan office building that has no record of such a tenant.

“The Boston lawyer, Cameron Casey, dissolved the company on July 12 — two weeks before Restore Our Future made its first campaign filing of the year reporting the donation from the now-nonexistent company, the corporate records show.

“I don’t see how you can do this,” said Lawrence Noble, the former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission, when asked about the contribution from the now defunct company.

“Last week, Restore Our Future filed its first report of 2012, disclosing that it had received $12.2 million during the first six months of the year. Among the contributors: four donors who contributed $1 million apiece, including John Paulson, the Wall Street hedge fund kingpin who made billions betting against the housing market, and two corporate partnerships listed at the Provo, Utah, address of Steven J. Lund, a former chief executive of Nu Skin Enterprises and a longtime Romney backer who has been a leader in the Mormon Church.

Read the complete article here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44011308/#.TjrBZ2Fn6Sp

The last Columbia River barge

2011-08-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—Sooner or later, the last barge will pass through the series of navigation locks that compartmentalize the Columbia River into a series of stepped slackwater ponds.

The scene will look something like this, much the same as on any other sunny day in the Columbia Gorge, with just a single barge plying its way; in this series, heading upriver towards the Bonneville navigation locks:

In the final analysis, barge traffic will die off for economic reasons, which can largely be explained by the simple fact that the Columbia River is not the Mississippi.

The Columbia lacks significant traffic, far short of what would justify the cost of maintaining the lock infrastructure; and the Mississippi lacks the salmon, which have evolved over thousands of years to thrive in the fast moving environment that preceded the construction of the dams.

The fact is that just about half of the barges that move up and down the river are empty. This one is loaded, but most of the barges that travel upriver are empty.

That tiny speck moving off into the distance is that same lonely barge….

It will pass through the navigation lock at Bonneville Dam, and it will do so for free. It may surprise you to know that there is no cost charged to the barge operators for using the navigation lock.

The Columbia River economy supports only one barge company, an effective monopoly on commercial and industrial traffic along the length of the river, and that company enjoys subsidies that few are probably aware of: free travel through the locks; no charge for lock maintenance; and, probably most significant, a slackwater subsidy that keeps the river at a level that best suits the occasional barge, like this one, to the detriment of the salmon and Celilo Falls, which costs the public tens of millions of dollars a year.

While commercial operators enjoy free use of the entire river, the public is faced with charges at the handful of places where there is public access, like this one:

Ironically, public access to the navigation locks is closed off, an issue of Homeland Security. When I arrived at the security kiosk to visit the Bonneville visitors center, the guard wanted to look into my trunk to see if I was carrying any weapons.

Geez, if I wanted to create a big mess at the dam, I think I’d just take a barge full of fertilizer and diesel fuel up into the lock. That ought to do it.

The Columbia River is not the Mississippi. It is time we recognized that fact.

The Friends of Celilo Falls is forming….

Nightmares of an abducted child, Terri Horman and the Casey Anthony trial

2011-07-25T16:44:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Some minutes after I woke from the nightmare this morning, I wrote some lines while the memory was still fresh. I’ve had several hundred of these since my four children disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction more than fifteen years ago, but there was something about this one that felt different, and it took some time for me to put it together….

This, I came to realize, was the first nightmare to trouble my sleep since the conclusion of the Casey Anthony trial, the young mother who couldn’t find the time to report the disappearance of her 3-year-old daughter Kaylee, whose skeletal remains were found months later, her lips and nose duct-taped shut, packed into a plastic bag and dumped by the side of the road.

What was different about this dream was that where my ex-wife Gina Foulk was in it, she had that emotionless Casey Anthony/Terri Horman demeanor, was indifferent to the fact that a small child was missing, although clearly unhappy with the inconvenience resulting, and aggravated at the notion that she might be thought somehow lacking in her role as a mother, an epic of pathological self-absorption….

Nicole Kidman had that look, too, in two of her movie roles: To Die For, and The Others. She was a dead ringer for my ex in those movies, almost like she’d studied scenes from our lives, watched home movies, in preparing for her parts.

Seeing the images of Kaylee Anthony over the course of the search, arrest and trial was always painful for me, and I never lingered on any of them or the horror story itself, but it was always there, has been there since July 2008, when Kaylee’s grandmother contacted the police and the media took an interest….

I saw my baby girl in every one of those pictures of Kaylee Anthony…so many memories triggered…Allie was a week past her eighth birthday on the day the Mormons took her away from the father who loved her, and set her on a path of three Mormon stepdads in three states. Memories of her early childhood were still very fresh.

These are the lines I wrote earlier this morning:

“Nightmares of an abducted child...struck early this morning....

“Sometimes they are focused on a single child, sometimes all four...

“This one was about Allie, missing with her mother for days in the dream, and I was reporting this to the police, over and over...feeling all the shock and horror...over and over...desperate...talking to the police, over and over...then I woke up, exhausted...and the nightmare is real....”

In actual fact, when my four children disappeared from Oregon in February 1996, they were driven more or less directly although by a circuitous route to the home of Mormon zealots Chris and Kory Wright, somewhere in the mountains east of Ogden, Utah, who had been in on planning the abduction for months beforehand.

While all of their friends were in school and safe at home, the Mormons were shuttling my children from place to place, knowing that they were violating a joint custody order that had been in place for five years, which is a serious felony, worth five years in prison, but infrequently and very poorly enforced.

The statute of limitations expires on these crimes after three years, even if the child is not recovered. Try to make some sense of that reality….

My children never recovered from the trauma academically or emotionally; and, of course, Aaron is dead, left behind ill and alone in that crappy little Mormon town on the edge of the desert, Payson Utah….

Years later, after many fruitless online searches, one panned out… I located kidnapper Kory Wright right here, where he works at Columbia Ultimate in Vancouver:

https://www.columbiaultimate.com/about-us/management-team.aspx

I counted coup….

But today my thoughts are still buffeted by this most recent nightmare…and that look in these eyes….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/contact.nxg

…the look of pathological self-absorption, epic…. You would never know there was a child in distress from these people.

On America's Foreign Wars and the Debt Limit Ceiling

2011-07-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Over the past several years, as news of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have mostly faded to the back pages, the American public has largely forgotten that wars cost vast sums of money and have bankrupted countless empires, nations and regimes since the dawn of civilization.

Since the federal government does not keep a bottomless pot of money on hand with which to finance its foreign wars, those expenses must be covered either by raising taxes or borrowing money, or both.

Congress created the debt ceiling in 1917 with the Second Liberty Bond Act, which helped finance the U.S. entry into World War I.

The debt ceiling was raised each year of World War II, but the Korean War was mostly paid for with higher taxes.

Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the selfish and shortsighted, canonized by the religious right, the unread, and the Fox-fed talk-radio masses, raised the federal debt ceiling eighteen times during his two terms, tripling the nation’s debt in the process.

Reagan outspent the Soviets into oblivion to end the Cold War, but borrowing the funds to do so had an enormous long-term cost, as has maintaining the worldwide military empire created during that period to the present day.

Gross debt in nominal dollars quadrupled during the Reagan and Bush presidencies from 1980 to 1992, and the net public debt quintupled in nominal terms during their twelve years in power.

George H.W. Bush continued the Reagan legacy, raising the debt ceiling nine more times in just four years, driving the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but leaving Saddam Hussein in power, and setting the stage for the catastrophic presidency of his lesser, intellectually ungifted son.

Bumbling George W. Bush, the lesser brain of the Bush/Cheney Co-Presidency,
began squandering the federal budget surplus he had inherited from President Clinton almost immediately after his appointment to the top job by his father’s Supreme Court in early 2000.

By the time the carnival ride came to an inglorious end eight years later, Bush/Cheney had raised the debt ceiling seven times, leaving the nation
engulfed in two wars on the far side of the globe and the economy plunging over the precipice…without finding either Osama bin Laden or WMDs, I might add….

Indeed, on the night of their 2004 re-election, “The Decider” gloated that he and Cheney had accumulated a great deal of political capital, and that he was going to spend all of it, which he proceeded to do, leading the nation, and the American Empire with it, to economic collapse.

Between March 1962 and April 2008, Congress altered the debt ceiling 69 times, not without ideological and partisan arguments, but never on the multi-trillion dollar scale of Bush and Cheney.

Now we are deep in the crisis Bush/Cheney created, a product of unbridled arrogance and Texas swagger, and the logical result of initiating distant wars with no real plan on how to pay for them beyond borrowing the money from China.

I remember them selling the invasion of Iraq to the American people with the ludicrous claim that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the war, and we would be in and out of there before you know it.

Small wonder that they stand silent today, and not a soul in the nation looks to Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld for advice on any matter at all, having left us with the mother of all turds-in-the-pocket and a firm push on the downward slide.

Mormon abduction, self injury and lousy medical care

2011-06-05T09:47:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Self injury became an issue for me when I learned that my son Aaron had been cutting himself with a knife during his captivity in Utah, the victim of a Mormon abduction, his despair and loneliness so intense that he would carve deep wounds into his beautiful arms, like the girl in this story in Indian Country Today:

“When she was 14 years old and living in a boarding school in Arizona, Alex Exendine cut her forearms with everything from broken mirrors to scissors to cope with her grief. The Lakota teen from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation had lost her best friend to a brain tumor, and the grandmother who helped raise her died shortly after.

“’I was so lonely,” Exendine told the Rapid City Journal. “I just never thought anyone understood how I felt.”

“Now 19, Exendine shared her struggle and how she overcame self-injury with Indian leaders and medical experts at the self-injury prevention conference "Wakanyeja Ihawicakta Pi, Looking Out for Our Children: a Cultural Learning Opportunity on Self-Injury Prevention” in Rapid City, South Dakota from May 12-13.

“Exendine told the Journal that her internal suffering and bottled feelings led to physical self-harm. “I felt like I had no emotions anymore,” she said. “I started cutting and I’d at least feel something.”

I first saw the knife-wound scars on my son’s arms while he lay comatose in Payson, Utah, in 2005, stared at them for much of the five days he lay there unresponsive. And then the doctors pronounced him dead.

They looked like those in the illustration, except Aaron’s were all above the elbow, on both arms. Deep, wide scars as much as four inches long. Many scars were laid across other earlier scars, indicating that this behavior had gone on for a prolonged period of time.

I counted 15 large scars.

Abducted children get lousy medical care.

Learn about how Alex Exendine overcame the urge to self-mutilate; see the complete article and illustration by Marty Two Bulls at Indian Country Today here:

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/06/more-than-skin-deep-indian-leaders-address-self-injury-prevention/

Portland's Ethnic Grocery Stores: A Gap in the Diversity Aisle

2011-05-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

In its annual publication titled “Devour 2011, a Hungry Shopper’s Guide” the Williamette Week recently identified 39 “world” or ethnic groceries in Portland, inadvertently exposing a huge gap in the diversity department.

None of these targeted markets feature American Indian foods, even though these foods sustained communities here for millennia and Portland is home to the ninth largest Native American population in the nation.

The WW article states: “There are those who say Portland lacks diversity, that it is little more than a playground for overeducated, underemployed white people, and that the city will never, for all the mayor’s talk of internationalism and manufactured weirdness, outgrow its white-bread personality…. Those people really need to spend more time shopping, because if it is all fair to judge a city’s diversity by its grocery stores (and it is!), Portland is far more cosmopolitan than a walk down SE Hawthorne Boulevard might lead you to believe. In the course of writing this guide, we sampled goods from every continent, amid shoppers speaking dozens of languages, and unfailingly discovered foods we’d never encountered before. The cultural riches of this city are boundless (italics added).”

The city is a long, long way from ever outgrowing its white bread personality, but that is another topic.

The WW researchers “sampled goods from every continent, amid shoppers speaking dozens of languages, and unfailingly discovered foods we’d never encountered before. The cultural riches of this city are boundless (italics added again).”

Yet, there is no Native American market…hmmm….

The sampling of goods…hmmm.

Shoppers speaking dozens of languages…hmmm….

Foods never encountered before…hmmm…..

“The cultural riches of this city are boundless”…hmmm….

That last one is something of a stretch, but there is a plan forming to create a Native American grocery in Portland, with the assistance of the Portland Development Commission, under its “Grocery Store Initiative”, and here’s an opportunity to find out how boundless the cultural riches of this city are…and to fill that gap in the diversity aisle.

Stay tuned on this one….

Here’s the Devour 2011 list, categorized as published:

Asian

G Mart

Caribbean/African

Caribbean Spice

Dutch

Dutch American Market

East African

East Africa Market

East Asian

An Dong

East Indian, Fijian

Fiji Emporium

Eastern European

Anoush Deli
Good Neighbor

Ethiopian

Awash Market
Merkato Ethiopian Music and Food

Greek

Foti’s Greek Deli

Indian (East Indian, like from Asia)

Apna Bazaar
India Sweets and Spices

Italian

Marinotti’s Café and Deli

Japanese

Anzen
Uwajimaya

Latin American

Dashen International Groceries (Central American)

Mediterranean

International Food Supply
Zaky Grocery

Middle Eastern

Barbur World Foods
Bazaar International Market

Mexican

Amigo’s
Fruteria el Campesino
La Tapatia
Mercado Don Pancho
Su Casa Imports
Tienda Santa Cruz
Tortilleria y Tienda de Leon

Middle Eastern

Pars International Market

Pacific Islander

Island Foods

Pan-Asian, Chinese

Fubonn

Pan-Asian, Korean

H Mart

Russian

Roman Russian Market

Southeast Asian

Oriental Food Value

Thai

Lily Market

Vietnamese

Hong Phat Vietnamese Market
Nam Phuong Market
Thanh Son Tofu

Vietnamese, East Asian

Thanh Thao Market

Link to Devour 2011:

http://www.wweek.com/portland/flex-246-devour_2011.html

Celilo Falls, the U.N., World Heritage Sites and Indigenous Peoples

2011-05-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

The Tenth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) is meeting in New York, May 16-27, and anyone interested in seeing Celilo Falls resurrected from its gravesite behind the obsolete and misplaced 1950’s-era dam at The Dalles ought to think about this….

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) “is the official Advisory Body to the World Heritage Committee on natural and mixed World Heritage sites and as such evaluates new site nominations and monitors the state of conservation of inscribed sites.”

The point that I’m going to get to in a minute is that there is a process to nominate new World Heritage sites, and that the time is right to begin the process to place Celilo Falls on the list of World Heritage 'inscribed’ sites.

Gonzalo Oviedo, IUCN Senior Advisor for Social Policy, presented a statement to the UNPFII that included these remarks:

“World Heritage sites are established under the World Heritage Convention; they are key places for the conservation of cultural and natural values of the world.

“As many of these sites overlap with traditional lands, the involvement of indigenous peoples and local communities in the establishment and management of World Heritage sites is paramount. Issues such as land rights, free prior and informed consent, access to resources and benefit sharing mechanisms are of crucial importance.

“We would like to convey to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues the importance we attach to these issues.

“We recognize the long-established indigenous peoples’ stewardship of areas contained in natural World Heritage sites and the associated tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

“We also value the commitment, ecological knowledge and customary practices of indigenous peoples living in and around World Heritage sites. Indigenous peoples therefore represent key actors and logical allies for us in the protection of these outstanding places.

“We believe that to assure realization of human rights gives the local populations long-term security and promotes lasting stewardship of their common heritage.”

The mission of IUCN is stated: “IUCN helps the world find pragmatic solutions to our most pressing environmental and development challenges by supporting scientific research; managing field projects all over the world; and by bringing governments, NGOs, the United Nations, international conventions and companies together to develop policy, laws and best practice. IUCN is the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network. IUCN is a democratic union with more than 1000 government and NGO member organizations, and some 10,000 volunteer scientists in more than 150 countries and hundreds of partners in public, NGO and private sectors around the world.”

Continuing his remarks, Mr. Oviedo stated:

“We consider that the Convention has much to offer in strengthening the appreciation of the heritage of indigenous peoples, but there is also much scope to enhance policy and practice to recognize local and indigenous peoples as key actors in the protection of their sites in full respect of their rights and responsibilities.

“We are keen to identify, with UNESCO and other partners, how best to meet the aim to focus more on indigenous peoples and local communities and promote and apply more inclusive conservation approaches.

“We are also keen to facilitate exchange with other stakeholders in preparation of the 40th Anniversary of the Convention in 2012, themed ‘World Heritage and Sustainable Development: The Role of Local Communities in the Management of World Heritage….”

The dam at The Dalles was the result of thinking and decision making as stupid and shortsighted and as willfully destructive as anything the Soviets did in the same era, yet there it sits….

It is time to form the Friends of Celilo Falls, to gather the Friends together, and to begin the process that will see Celilo Falls recovered and preserved, no less important than any other site the world treasures…hear the roar…the earth trembles…the flash of salmon and there the net….

Winona LaDuke Democracy Now! interview "The Militarization of Indian Country" and the abuse of the name Geronimo

2011-05-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

Winona LaDuke was interviewed on Democracy Now! about her new book “The Militarization of Indian Country” and the abuse of the name “Geronimo”

“Native American activist and writer Winona LaDuke joins us (Democracy Now!) to discuss her new book, The Militarization of Indian Country. LaDuke covers the legacy of the seizure of Native American lands by the U.S. government—which became sites for industrial and military use, including army bases, nuclear testing sites, coal and uranium mining—and how the military-industrial complex is encroaching on native communities. LaDuke lives and works on the White Earth Nation in northern Minnesota and is executive director of the group Honor the Earth. ‘Indian country is not to be assaulted by the U.S. military,’ says LaDuke.” (from Democracy Now! website)

See/hear the interview:

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/6/native_american_activist_author_winona_laduke

A slain son, a father's heartbreak and the end of poetry

2011-05-05T15:52:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Grief-stricken Mexican poet Javier Sicilia read a poem dedicated to his murdered son last Saturday, and then declared that this would be his last, that “Poetry does not exist in me anymore.”

I understand how he feels, find much in common, remember when the poetry died in my life…and how long it took to come back….

24-year-old Juan Francisco was found in an abandoned car along with six other bodies, their heads, faces, hands and feet bound with tape, suffocated to death under that tape, among the latest victims in the ongoing war that has its foundation in American demand for drugs and the many billions of dollars U.S. citizens are willing to export in order to feed their habits.

These seven are believed to be innocent, “collateral damage” in the incessant violence between the gangs, the cartels, for control of the smuggling routes, and the Mexican government, the battle for the soul of Mexico itself “so far from God, so close to the United States”….

More than 35,000 people have been murdered in Mexico in just the last five years, most often with guns supplied by U.S. gun dealers, and by criminal enterprises nearly entirely funded with U.S. dollars, smuggled back across the border or transferred electronically to offshore tax havens by corrupt American banking officials.

And now there is Mr. Sicilia’s last poem:

El mundo ya no es digno de la palabra
Nos la ahogaron adentro
Como te (asfixiaron),
Como te
desgarraron a ti los pulmones

Y el dolor no se me aparta
sólo queda un mundo
Por el silencio de los justos
Sólo por tu silencio y por mi silencio, Juanelo.

El mundo ya no es digno de la palabra, es mi último poema, no puedo escribir más poesía...la poesía ya no existe en mi.

The world is no longer worthy of the word
They suffocated it inside us
Like you (they asphyxiated)
Like you
they slashed your lungs
And pain won’t cleave from me
only a world is left
By the silence of the just
Only by your silence and by my silence, Juanelo.

The world is no longer worthy of the word—is my last poem, I can’t write any more poetry...poetry no longer exists in me. (Javier Sicilia)

I understand the grieving poet’s sentiments so well…nearly fifteen years went by following the loss of my children in a Mormon abduction…and more than five years passed after the death of my son Aaron, a death preventable had he received medical care of minimal competence…before I could find my way to the poetry, to the lyrics, to the music once again….

No one knows how long these things take….

No one knows how much time will pass before Mr. Sicilia finds the poetry in his soul once again….

A year ago, I would have been among the first to say, “Never…it will never exist in me again”….

But today I taste the bittersweetness of life with purpose and compassion…I hear songs, melodies, feel the pulse of the drumbeat in my heart…lyrics close to the surface, where tears used to abide…and down the road, perhaps, another poem will rise for Mr. Sicilia, as it has for me….

I greet the day gladly.

Winona LaDuke releases new book: "The Militarization of Indian Country" on Earth Day

2011-04-26T09:22:00.000-07:00

I am grateful for the opportunity to co-author The Militarization of Indian Country with Winona. This article appeared in Indian Country Today:

LaDuke’s Earth Day Observations Resonate

Indian Country Today

By Carol Berry April 22, 2011

DENVER—Praising a draft United Nations treaty that would confer protections for Mother Earth, noted activist Winona LaDuke, White Earth Band of Ojibwe, also gave an Earth Day plug for indigenous sustainability and “creating something that is post-empire.”

The American Indian activist and author spoke at the University of Colorado Denver for an early commemoration of Earth Day 2011, whose theme this year is A Billion Acts of Green, “our people-powered campaign to generate a billion acts of environmental service and advocacy before Rio +20,” according to the site.

For her part, LaDuke drew attention to some decidedly un-green practices, pointing out that the American economy consumes from a fourth to a third of the world’s resources but that there is “a vast amount of waste” in the petroleum economy that distorts the oft-repeated argument that renewable energy can’t keep up with demand.

“But why try?” LaDuke queried, adding that “empire is inefficient.” She pointed out that 90 percent of energy from the common lightbulb is in the form of heat and only 10 percent is light. “It’s a false argument that we can’t meet demand without buttressing an inefficient system.”

Food security is a problem when food travels an average of 1,546 miles from producer to dinner table, the price of gas goes up and food cultivation may require 15 times more energy to produce than is consumed, she said.

Although she does not hate the military and believes veterans should be treated with honor and dignity, LaDuke does “despise militarization because those who are most likely to be impacted or killed by the military are civilian non-combatants” and because toxins and chemicals have severely impacted Indian lands, she said in the preface of a book she has co-written with Sean Cruz, The Militarization of Indian Country, put out by Honor the Earth, an organization that works internationally on issues of environmental justice and sustainability. She is the group’s executive director.

The two-time vice presidential candidate on the Green Party ticket also said she is considering another run for office—this time for tribal council on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, a move that would be compatible with her belief that change is local—and probably inevitable.

“I’m proud of the casino economy, but if you can’t feed yourself, I don’t know if you can be sovereign again,” said LaDuke.

LaDuke said a study on her reservation showed that 14 percent of spending for food was on-reservation, primarily at convenience stores, but 86 per cent went off-reservation to big-box markets or other food sources; because half of total spending goes outside reservation boundaries, the economy is “systemically flawed” and additional wages would not be a solution.

The answer is “re-localizing food and energy systems to have control over the economy and health in the face of rising food uncertainty,” she said, noting that one-third of people on her reservation have diabetes and half of the children are obese by the eighth grade.

LaDuke recalled that her late father told her, “Winona, you’re a smart young woman, but I don’t want to hear your philosophy if you can’t grow corn.”

Today she grows heirloom varieties of corn, as well as squash and other food crops, and harvests wild rice in an on-reservation food production enterprise that also includes maple syrup.

She touted the nutritional and traditional value of the older corn varieties, which include Bear Island Flint Corn, Seneca Pink Lady Flour Corn (“I grow it because it’s pretty,” she said), and Pawnee Eagle Corn, grown by Pawnee people living near Kearney, Nebraska, before their removal to Oklahoma. The corn, languishing further south, was returned to Nebraska for an indigenous garden at the Gateway Museum, where it flourished.

She also talked about climate change, noting that a two-degree increase in average temperatures in the northern latitudes could mean rising oceans and relocating Native villages, despite the fact that the cost of one such relocation was $400 million.

The U.S. has consumed 60 percent of its known oil reserves, and the vast tar sands in Canada are the “single largest industrial project in world history,” mining a Lake Superior-size area for the oil trapped in sand and clay and then planning to send it via the TransCanada Pipeline to Nebraska, where ranchers and legislators fear pipeline spills and the contamination of a shallow aquifer.

She was introduced by Glenn Morris, associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado Denver, who hosted her appearance, and the presentation itself was sponsored by American Indian Student Services of UC-Denver, Metropolitan State College and Community College of Denver.

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/04/ladukes-earth-day-observations-resonate/

The US economy, Traumatic Brain Injury, and a matter of a trillion dollars

2011-04-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

Only 1% of the cost of the wars is budgeted for medical care for its injured veterans

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Do you remember when George W. “The Decider” Bush, inheritor of a federal budget surplus, gave Saddam Hussein 24 hours to get out of Iraq, lest the U.S. invade to remove him from power by force?

The U.S. was already at war in the wilds of Afghanistan, the place where foreign empires come to die, in a still-fruitless search for Osama bin Laden and those responsible for the 9-11 attacks, before the Cowboy-in-Chief committed the nation to the invasion of Iraq.

At the time, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that the war in Iraq would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues, and fought with minimal U.S. troop levels, and thus minimal consequences.

Perhaps the most arrogant Cabinet member in the history of the nation, Rumsfeld openly ridiculed any person who dared to question his catastrophic policies and decisions that have proved to be as harmful to our own troops as they were to the enemy….

As it turned out, these wars would be “paid for” with money borrowed from China, a strategy that brings us to the present day, facing drastic cuts to domestic

education, health and human services budgets….

The Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld/Rove axis demanded that Saddam turn over weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be non-existent, and so went the budget surplus, with much worse yet to come….

These two short videos document the cavalier attitude with which George W. Bush committed generations of Americans, troops, military families and civilians alike to the costs and consequences of war, not to mention the civilian casualties in Iraq and Aghanistan….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKX6luiMINQ

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5662853583740403796#

As the White House and Congress seek ways to resolve the nation’s dire fiscal crisis amid the ramping up of partisan rhetoric for the 2012 election cycle, it is worth considering the wars’ total cost, in blood, in treasure, in PTSD, traumatic amputations and Traumatic Brain Injury, the Signature Injury of these wars, and the impact of those injuries on the children and families of injured troops.

More than 200,000 US troops have been diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury from mild to severe from combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lifetime medical costs for TBI patients can be well above $ 5 million each, and you can be sure that those long term costs are not accounted for in any version of projected budgets.

TBI is likely to be the signature wound of the wars that will be fought in the foreseeable future as well. The lethality, flexibility, economy and simplicity of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) make their continued use a certainty throughout the globe, and the arms industry is always looking for ways to make a more powerful explosion. Helmets can only offer so much protection.

A TBI victim may suffer a wide range of physical, mental, cognitive, emotional and behavioral problems, with lifelong consequences.

These consequences carry into the lives of the victims’ children and families, with ever increasing numbers of TBI-damaged parents coming home, not the same mothers or fathers, grandmothers or grandfathers who left for the war.

“Stress from personal and family concerns likely played a more prominent role in the Gulf War than in other wars, because it involved a greater number of married personnel and parents. In the Vietnam War, 16% of those deployed were married with children, whereas 60% of service members and reservists in the Gulf War were married with dependents, including approximately 32,000 single parents who had to make arrangements for their children during the deployment

(U.S. Senate, 1998).”

Brain injuries are often invisible to the observer, but not to the victim’s children, whose lives are forever altered by this signature wound, carrying the injury into a second generation of victims, these the absolutely innocent, but co-signers of the wound nonetheless.

In a report titled “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11” the Congressional Research Service puts the known total costs of the Bush/Cheney administration’s decisions to invade Afghanistan in a fruitless search for Osama bin Laden, and also invade Iraq in order to find non-existent weapons of mass destruction and remove Saddam Hussein from power at $ 1.21 trillion dollars.

“With the July 27, 2010 enactment of the FY2010 Supplemental Appropriations Act (H.R. 4899/P.L. 111-201) Congress has approved a total of $1.121 trillion for military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care for the three operations initiated since the 9/11 attacks: Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) Afghanistan and other counter terror operations; Operation Noble Eagle (ONE), providing enhanced security at military bases; and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).

Of this $1.121 trillion total, CRS estimates that Iraq will receive about $751 billion (67%), OEF $336 billion (30%) and enhanced base security about $29 billion (3%), with about $5 billion that CRS cannot allocate (1/2%). About 94% of the funds are for DOD, 5% for foreign aid programs and embassy operations, and 1% for medical care for veterans.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf

The Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center

“In 1992, Congress created the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center (DVBIC) — originally known as the Defense and Veterans Head Injury Program (DVHIP) — during the Persian Gulf War to integrate specialized TBI care, research and education across military and veteran medical care systems.”

From the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center website:

“Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant health issue which affects service members and veterans during times of both peace and war. The high rate of TBI and blast-related concussion events resulting from current combat operations directly impacts the health and safety of individual service members and subsequently the level of unit readiness and troop retention. The impacts of TBI are felt within each branch of the service and throughout both the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care systems.

"In the VA, TBI has become a major focus secondary to recognition of the need for increased resources to provide health care and vocational retraining for individuals with a diagnosis of TBI, as they transition to veteran status. Veterans may sustain TBI’s throughout their lifespan, with the largest increase as the veterans' enter into their 70's and 80's; these injuries are often due to falls and result in high levels of disability.

"Active duty and reserve service members are at increased risk for sustaining a TBI compared to their civilian peers. This is a result of several factors, including the specific demographics of the military; in general, young men between the ages of 18 to 24 are at greatest risk for TBI. Many operational and training activities which are routine in the military are physically demanding and even potentially dangerous.

"Military service members are increasingly deployed to areas where they are at risk for experiencing blast exposures from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), suicide bombers, land mines, mortar rounds, rocket-propelled grenades etc. These and other combat related activities put our military service members at increased risk for sustaining a TBI."

http://www.dvbic.org/TBI---The-Military.aspx

Your child disappeared...then what?

2011-04-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Last night, KATU-TV’s Steve Dunn asked viewers the question “What would you do if your child suddenly disappeared?” and in the broadcast described what Kaine Horman, whose 8-year-old son Kyron disappeared nearly a year ago, is doing this weekend.

315 days after his son was abducted, Mr. Horman told reporter Anna Canzano: “Well, there’s only one day to me that has any significance, and that’s June 4, 2010. Every day after that is pretty much as painful as the one before it.”

I know that feeling well…. When asked over the years about how I felt about missing birthdays and other special days, I would respond that those days are just like every other day, only more so….

My life changed forever on February 12, 1996, when my four children disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction, Mormon zealots and my former wife carrying out a Mormon shunning. This is what can happen when you disagree too openly with Mormon Borg-like intrusion into your family life…the church is very highly organized to sever Mormon family members from contact with non-Mormon members of their own family.

Just ask the grieving parents and grandparents of MormonsHMC (Mormons Have My Child)….

I counted the days, marked out on my calendars, month after month, year after year, 1876 days lived one day at a time, before I finally stopped counting five years and two months after my children were kidnapped….

But enough about me….

Find out what the father of Kyron Horman is doing, and think about what you would do if your child was abducted….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COP0kWJW-kI&feature=player_embedded#at=21

KATU-TV news:

PORTLAND, Ore. - When was the last time you cherished getting your kids ready for school, walking them to the bus stop or tucking them in at night?

Those are the kinds of things - the simple things we sometimes easily take for granted - that Kyron Horman's dad, Kaine Horman, says he misses about his son.

"The days I miss the most are him in one arm and Kiara (his daughter) in the other arm, just sitting on the couch together," Kaine told us.

Kyron disappeared from Portland's Skyline School on June 4, 2010. His stepmother, Terri Horman, has not been named a person of interest or suspect in the case but she has been the focus of the investigation. She is believed to be living in Roseburg with her parents. Kaine still believes she knows something.

While police continue looking into the case and searchers continue heading out to try to find any trace of Kyron, Kaine is keeping his son's name and face out there in the hopes that someday his boy will be found. Kaine was at the Expo Center on Friday and plans to be there throughout the weekend, both at the KidFest and at the Portland Garage Sale.

On counting coup on a kidnapper

2011-04-10T11:01:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—I used to own a .357 magnum revolver, but not long after my children disappeared in what I had come to learn was a Mormon abduction, I gave the weapon away to my brother, lest I be tempted to use it, either on myself while in the depths of hopelessness and despair, or on one or more of the people responsible for the crimes they were inflicting on my children and my family.

I have never regretted this decision.

As weeks turned into months turned into years, fighting through four jurisdictions in three states, with my children’s kidnappers enjoying safe harbor in theocratic Utah and my children suffering terrible abuse, I had many opportunities to think about this single fact.

There were many long, strongly magnetic moments when the grief and pain were unendurable, and I might have found a solution in that holster long ago had it still been in my possession.

And there were many sharp hours of contemplation, my anger grown cold, considering what events might take place should I decide to go out and impose a form of frontier justice on the criminals who were most responsible for the abduction and the subsequent abuse of my children, none of whom was my former wife.

These persons were Mormon zealots Kory Wright and Steve Nielson and my former brother in law Tony Micheletti, and I contemplated this Trifecta for years, but took no action other than to continue to fight through an indifferent and ineffective legal system, compromised by Mormon cronyism and the paranoid, self-absorbed and delusional mindset that is the foundation of that religion.

Outside of these moments, these hours of weakness and vengefulness, I held to my core integrity, passed down to me from my late parents and grandparents, and it was in those reflections that I found the strength to act honorably, and to work to make something good and lasting result from these terrible crimes.

In 2003, I had the great good fortune to be offered an opportunity to work for Oregon State Senator Avel Louise Gordly, a transformational and widely respected leader known as “the conscience of the Senate”, and it was in that year that we began work on legislation addressing the issue of children abducted by family members and persons into whose care the children had been entrusted.

I have written elsewhere and in depth regarding the history of that legislation, the Senate Task Force on Parental and Family Abduction, the death of my son Aaron Cruz, and the passage of Senate Bill 1041 in 2005, known as “Aaron’s Law” in his honor, and will not repeat it here, other than to make these points:

Aaron’s Law is designed to address the failures of both the family law and criminal law systems in preventing and resolving child abductions that involve known perpetrators, a crime that continues to take place at the rate of more than 200,000 cases each year.

An abduction is a continuing crime, an offense that has a beginning but no real end, a fact in conflict with the reality that law enforcement and the courts take little interest in these cases, hence the large annual numbers.

I am often contacted by parents whose child or children have been taken into concealment by the other parent, looking for advice, running out of hope. Their painful stories all have points in common with mine: law enforcement is apologetic but does not act; they cannot find a lawyer who is willing to listen; when and if they do get before a judge, the judge is indifferent, even judgmental; every avenue burns up precious time, time scalding hot, in weeks and months, and yet there is a child missing….

This adds up to more than 200,000 cases of child abduction a year, every year….

Several years ago, I became aware that Kory Wright, after having concealed my children in his home in Utah, their first stop in Mormon Country, had moved into the Portland area, and was employed at Columbia Ultimate across the river in Vancouver, where his ugly, criminal face was displayed on the company website.

Without Kory Wright, the abduction of my children would not have taken place. Senate Bill 1041 was deliberately written with his actions in mind, criminal acts that Aaron’s Law is designed to prevent, and here he was, having suffered no consequences for his crimes….

I chose October 6, 2009 as A Good Day to Die….

In the days and weeks leading up to the day, I reflected on all that had taken place, thought about a wide range of options, a very wide range….

President Bush had recently been pelted with an Iraqi journalists’ shoes, and I thought of that option, too, the night before the day…but tossing my shoes at Kory Wright would have been poorly understood in American culture….

I decided to count coup, to count coup with a copy of Aaron’s Law, written for Kory Wright and for people like him, as the honorable course…only one criminal in this confrontation…a non-violent but pointed confrontation….

I began the dialogue, in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, with this statement: “My name is Sean Cruz. You kidnapped my children, motherfucker.”

An abduction is a continuing crime, and a criminal is responsible for all the damage that ensues from his or her criminal act….

Many a grieved parent would have brought a weapon, would have made the news for a couple of days, maybe…I brought the law instead, Aaron’s Law….

Here is the series of essays that described the incident and the ensuing trial (note that the “slap” was a rhetorical slap, not physical; the rhetoric created some confusion at trial):

Sean Cruz confronts man who kidnapped his children

http://blogoliticalsean.blogspot.com/2009/10/sean-cruz-confronts-man-who-kidnapped.html

Kidnapper confrontation earns commendation from judge

http://blogoliticalsean.blogspot.com/2009/10/cruz-kidnapper-confrontation-earns.html

Not guilty!

http://blogoliticalsean.blogspot.com/2010/02/not-guilty.html

The Grammys buries Best Native American Music category

2011-04-07T15:43:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

The Recording Academy, which produces the annual Grammy awards, has announced a major restructuring in how the organization will recognize accomplishments by musicians across North America, reducing total categories from 109 to 78.

This development underscores the importance of the Native American Music Association (NAMA) and The Nammys as the nation’s most vital resource serving the musicians and the audiences of Indian Country, second to none in its mission to provide greater opportunity and recognition for traditional and contemporary Native American musicians, and linking to indigenous cultures and audiences the world over.

Press releases issued by the Recording Academy indicate that someone over there thinks that this is good news for musicians, for the listening public, and for the cultural traditions that generate the new music.

For Indian Country, the blockheaded recategorization is particularly offensive, marginalizing Native American accomplishments into a category freshly titled “Best Regional Roots Music Album.”

The new “Best Regional Roots Music Album” Grammy is a catchall category where former candidates for “Best Hawaiian Music Album”, “Best Native American Music Album”, “Best Zydeco or Cajun Music Album” will compete for the “Roots” Grammy title.

A note appended to the release adds: “NOTE: This category is intended to recognize recordings of regionally based traditional music, including but not limited to Hawaiian, Native American, polka, zydeco and Cajun music.”

In essence, the Grammys consider “regionally based traditional music” an apt descriptor for the vastly fertile and complex grooves streaming up from the lands and cultures of Indigenous peoples.

In contrast, the Native American Music Awards (the Nammys), currently recognizes 30 distinct genres of music emerging from Indian Country, and plans to add more as strength in other musical styles grows with time and accomplishment.

The Grammy announcement includes this load of hooey from the President:

"Every year, we diligently examine our Awards structure to develop an overall guiding vision and ensure that it remains a balanced and viable process," said President/CEO Neil Portnow. "After careful and extensive review and analysis of all Categories and Fields, it was objectively determined that our GRAMMY Categories be restructured to the continued competition and prestige of the highest and only peer-recognized award in music. Our Board of Trustees continues to demonstrate its dedication to keeping The Recording Academy a pertinent and responsive organization in our dynamic music community."

This decision by the Recording Academy underscores Alex Haley’s maxim that “History is written by the winners.”

Clearly, this development underscores the importance of supporting the Native American Music Association and its awards program, The Nammys.

Link to the Nammys:

http://www.nativeamericanmusicawards.com/home.cfm

Grammy announcement is here:

http://www.grammy.org/recording-academy/announcement/press-release

Reflections and resolve on Aaron's birthday 2011

2011-03-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Today, March 21, is/was, could have been, should have been, should be my son Aaron’s birthday, a day for celebration and a sharing of love and companionship, with my beautiful boy and my three surviving children, the Cruz family gathered together like we did before my children vanished fifteen years ago in a Mormon abduction.

Like most parents who have suffered the death of a child, or, as I have also, the disappearance of a (four) child(ren) in a kidnapping, I find special calendar days are an emotional obstacle course, a test of coping skills, and a time for reflection and resolve….

There is a law on the books now in the state of Oregon, an important, landmark piece of legislation designed to deter and resolve non-stranger child abductions that bears my son’s name, called Aaron’s Law, passed on a unanimous House vote shortly after his death in 2005.

Had Aaron’s Law been in statute in 1995, my children wouldn’t have been abducted in the first place, and today would be one of those marvelous days of celebration that instead ended so abruptly so long ago.

The U.S. Department of Justice counts each year more than 200,000 cases of children abducted by a parent or family member, of parents themselves generating more than 200,000 child victims in this country, year after year.

While most of those abductions are of short term duration, the harm to the children lasts far longer, and some six per cent of the child victims are never recovered. This fact suits the Mormons who abducted my children just fine. Even as adults, my children are prohibited from having free contact with me or with other members of my family. That’s how a Mormon shunning works….

March 21 is no longer a day for celebration in the family of Aaron Cruz. The date instead has become a time for reflection and resolve, and I am ever more determined to see the principles of Aaron’s Law embedded in statute across this nation, to see that justice is served, to see that parents and family members (and religious fanatics) are sufficiently deterred from causing their own children this terrible, completely senseless suffering.

This is for you, my beautiful son, with all of my love,

Dad

Report to the Oregon Senate on Parental and Family Abductions

2011-03-19T15:00:00.000-07:00

Report of the Oregon Senate Interim Task Force

Parental and Family Abductions

To: The Honorable Peter Courtney, President, Oregon State Senate

From: The Senate Interim Task Force on Parental and Family Abductions

The Senate Interim Task Force on Parental and Family Abductions (“The Task Force”), chaired by Senators Gordly and Morse is pleased to report to the President of the Oregon State Senate, the Honorable Peter Courtney, that it has completed its assigned task of reviewing the current state of Oregon law as it relates to the serious problem of parents abducting their own children in order to negate the lawful orders of Oregon courts regarding child custody and parental visitation rights. We have enclosed a list of the members of your Task Force, with biographies, and labeled it attachment “A.”

Since June of this year, The Task Force has conducted four hearings and during these hearings has taken testimony from witnesses concerning the extent of the problem, reviewed current federal and state law, reviewed current state policy, reviewed and debated possible changes to state policy and law and has made recommendations concerning changes to this policy and law.

Furthermore, The Task Force finds that often parents involved in a divorce, or parents of children born out of wedlock who are involved in custody disputes, often take out their anger with each other through their children; some retain or flee with their children to ensure the access and control that has been denied them, or they fear will be denied them; others even abduct their own child in order to interfere with the other parent’s right to custody or parenting time.

We further find that this is extremely detrimental to the emotional and mental well being of the children, and at time may even put the life of the child in danger.

In order to lessen the incidence of parental abductions and to lessen the damage done to these children who are the victims of parental abductions, your Task Force has taken the following actions and makes the following recommendations:

1. We have asked that the Joint Interim Judiciary Committee introduce, on behalf of The Task Force, LC 847 and LC 858 and recommend their enactment into law. We have attached copies of each LC and labeled them attachments “B” and “C” respectively.

2. We recommend that the Commission on Children and Families continue to work with Take Root, King County, Washington, the Oregon mental health treatment community and the Oregon law enforcement community to develop a better understanding of the trauma victims of parental abduction suffer and how best to treat this trauma. And, as part of this process, develop with the Oregon State Bar a symposium for the legal community, the mental health treatment community and the law enforcement community.

3. We recommend that you, on behalf of The Task Force, encourage the Judicial Branch and the Oregon State Bar to assist in educating judges, prosecutors and family law practitioners concerning the problem of parental abduction, its impact on children, and the need to better understand and utilize current statutory provisions relating to the prosecution of the crime of custodial interference and the enforcement of parenting plans and orders.

4. We recommend that you, on behalf of The Task Force, inform the Oregon Congressional Delegation of our support of the Polly Klaas Foundation’s proposed federal legislation, “The Family Abduction Prevention Act of 2005.”

Legislative Recommendation 1

LC 847 would extend the statute of limitations for the crime of custodial interference in the first and second degree from four years to six years after the commission of the crime or, if the victim at the time of the crime was under 18 years of age, anytime before the victim attains 24 years of age or within six years after the offense is reported to a law enforcement agency or other governmental agency.

This would mean that the statute of limitations for custodial interference would be the same as it is currently for sex offenses. Your Task Force believes that the rationale for doing this is the same for the statute of limitations on sex crimes. A child who is removed from the lawful custody of one parent by another is a victim. That child is similarly situated to many underage victims of sex crimes. The perpetrator of the crime is the child’s parent. Too often, at the time of the offense, the victim is unaware that they have been abused or that they have a right to seek redress. LC 847 would give a person, who as a child was a victim of a parental abduction, the ability to seek prosecution when the person is an adult and better able to understand the ramifications of the abduction.

Legislative Recommendation 2

LC 858 amends the current definition of what is an “injury” within Oregon’s Victim’s Compensation Act to include the injury a child incurs when that child is the victim of custodial interference. Currently, the injury a child receives, when the child has been abducted by one of the child’s parents, does not necessarily include physical injury. The injury is more in the nature of mental trauma or mental injury. Nonetheless, the injury is real and may be even more long lasting and damaging than physical injury. LC 858 is intended to include this injury within

Oregon’s Victim Compensation Act so that children who have been abducted by their parent, in violation of Oregon’s custodial interference statutes, can be compensated.

Task Force member, and Executive Director of the Oregon Commission on Children and Families, Mickey Lansing, on behalf of The Task Force, met with the Board of Social Workers and the Board of Psychologists concerning the current training their respective professions receive regarding the treatment of victims of parental abduction. What she found was a general lack of awareness of the problem.

With the assistance of Task Force member Liss Hart-Haviv, of Take Root, an advocacy group for victims of parental abduction, Ms. Lansing contacted Take Root’s Law Enforcement Consultant, Officer David Barnard of the Missing Children’s Unit of the King County, Washington sheriff’s office. He described the King County program where a mental health provider accompanies sheriff’s deputies when retrieving a victim of a parental abduction. Ms. Lansing added that Take Root, as part of its program for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in King County, is developing a curriculum to train law enforcement and mental health workers and would share it with us.

Ms. Lansing stated that, although parental abduction was not within the Oregon Commission on Children and Families purview, she would continue to work with Ms. Hart-Haviv, the mental health treatment community, and the law enforcement community to develop a program similar to that which King County has developed. Ms. Lansing has volunteered to report back to the Co-Chairs of The Task Force, Senators Gordly and Morse concerning the progress of her

endeavors even after your Task Force has completed its work and gone out of existence.

We applaud her for her efforts and look forward to her report. Furthermore, we recommend that you, on behalf of The Task Force, encourage the appropriate Senate committee to receive this report during the 2005 legislative session.

Recommendation 3

The Task Force heard testimony from the Oregon Department of Justice and the Oregon State Police, Missing Children’s Clearinghouse on the Federal Parent Locator Service, a federally mandated program operated through the Oregon Department of Justice, Division of Child Support, that assists in locating missing children. The service is available for use by the courts and the law enforcement community.

The Department of Justice stated that it will promote greater awareness of the service through articles in the Oregon State Bar Bulletin, a publication distributed to all judges and attorneys in Oregon. The department added that a similar article will appear in the Oregon District Attorney Association publication. The two agencies stated they will work together to educate law enforcement officers about the locator service.

At one point, The Task Force considered legislation that would have required that all local law enforcement agencies report missing children to The Oregon State Police, Missing Children’s Clearinghouse. However, after the State Police and the Department of Justice met and discussed the issue, they determined that the State Police could obtain this information by an administrative process that will automatically notify the Missing Children’s Clearinghouse of all reports of missing children made by state, county and local law enforcement agencies.

Consequently, The Task Force decided this legislation is not needed (Seven years later, the State Police has not kept its promise to the Task Force).

The Task Force heard testimony that one of the leading causes of parental abduction is the failure to enforce parenting time orders and agreements. Some parents take children to ensure the access and control they feel they are entitled to pursuant to their parenting plan that, in their opinion, is not being enforced.

The Task Force considered a legislative proposal pertaining to judicial authority to enforce parenting time orders and agreements. However, after reviewing existing legal remedies, The Task Force is of the opinion that current law is adequate to address failures of parents to abide by parenting agreements.

In particular, The Task Force is of the opinion that parental abduction, by either the custodial or non-custodial parent, may constitute “immediate danger” to the child and warrants a change of custody pursuant to ORS 107.097 or ORS 107.139.

What is lacking is an understanding of how current legal remedies can be used to more thoroughly enforce parenting plans and orders. In order to rectify this, The Task Force asks you to communicate with the Judicial Branch, the Oregon State Bar and the Oregon District Attorneys Association on the need to make judges, prosecutors and family law practitioners aware of existing remedies and the need to enforce these provisions.

Furthermore, we suggest that the Oregon State Bar be encouraged to develop, in conjunction with the mental health treatment community and The Commission on Children and Families, a symposium on the legal and mental health aspects for the prevention of parental abduction and the treatment of its victims. To assist you in this endeavor, we have attached a draft letter to the State Court Administrator, Kingsley Click, and to the Executive Director of the Oregon State Bar, Karen Garst.

Recommendation 4

The Polly Klaas Foundation is a national nonprofit corporation that is dedicated to finding missing children and helping to prevent them from being missing in the first place. It accomplishes its goals by promoting public policies, educating the public, and providing families, law enforcement and communities with the ongoing support and expertise needed to protect our children. Since its founding in 1993, The Foundation has helped more than 4,500 families find missing children.

The Polly Klaas Foundation will reintroduce before Congress, “The Family Abduction Prevention Act of 2005.” This bill was developed in consultation with Take Root and would fund grants to states for programs that:

(1) Extradite individuals suspected of committing a family abduction back to the state from which the child was taken;

(2) Investigate family abduction cases;

(3) Train state and local law enforcement agencies in responding to family abductions and recovering abducted children, including the development of written guidelines and technical assistance;

(4) Conduct outreach and media campaigns to educate parents on the dangers of family abductions; and

(5) Flag school records.

The Task Force urges you, on behalf of The Task Force, to inform the Oregon Congressional Delegation of our support of this legislation.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, in 1999 an estimated 203,900 children were victims of family abductions with 20 percent of the abductions involving more than one perpetrator.

Although there are no numbers for Oregon regarding parental abductions, The Task Force is of the opinion that the rate of parental abductions in Oregon mirrors the rate for the country. In other words, there appear to be at least 5,000 parental abductions in Oregon every year.

These abductions are illegal; they cause a tremendous amount of grief and anxiety for the parent or guardian with legal custody, and they cause immeasurable damage, both psychological and sometimes physical, to the abducted child.

We hope, Mr. President, that your Task Force has not only made you more aware of this very much-ignored problem, but has made others also aware. We believe that your Task Force can confidently say that, through its efforts, those responsible for tracking missing children have developed a more efficient process for doing so. We hope that you will ensure that the legislation we are proposing is given due consideration during the 2005 legislative session, and

we urge you to communicate with the Oregon State Bar and the State Court Administrator’s Office to urge them to inform their respective constituencies regarding parental abduction.

Finally, we, once again, urge you to inform our Congressional Delegation of the need to enact “The Family Abduction Prevention Act of 2005.”

Date: December 2004

Father-sense, a missing daughter, earthquake and tsunami

2011-03-12T21:50:00.001-08:00

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

No noise woke me early morning yesterday; no bathroom urge stirred me, no dog moving around in here, but a sense that something was wrong somewhere….

My father-sense had been activated….

I looked at the clock, where 3:00 am or thereabouts glowed in the dark; no reason to get up other than to turn on the news, the bad news….

Major earthquake in Japan, tsunami, nuclear power plants in harm’s way, and somewhere in that country my baby girl, Allie….

I actually have no direct knowledge that my daughter is in Japan, little information about her since she disappeared in a Mormon abduction 15 years ago, a week past her eighth birthday, but I heard a rumor that she had been sent to some Mormon missionary operation in Japan about eight months ago….

(The Mormons are well-organized to make children disappear, to sever families forever, just ask the bereaved parents and grandparents who make up Mormons HMC “Mormons Have My Child.”)

But now, my father-sense was confirming my earlier suspicion, that my child is in fact in danger, amid falling buildings, chaos, tsunami, and as the hours have worn on, clearly in a place where lack of clean water, food shortages, sanitation and disease crises loom for the survivors….

Is my daughter among them? Where is she? Is she injured, frightened? Is she alive? When and how will she be safe? When will I see her again? When will I hear her voice?

If the Mormons who have controlled her life for the past fifteen years have anything to say about it, then these questions will never be answered, not in my lifetime.

There is news of winter cold, fuel shortages, transportation links broken, people buried alive, nuclear plant supercrisis, aftershocks, more buildings coming down, endless heartbreak….

My father-sense hit crisis mode also nearly six years ago, and the following morning I learned that my beloved son Aaron had fallen into a coma and died in his mother’s empty house in Payson, Utah, a Mormon stronghold in the desert, a place where the Mormon system smothers non-Mormon children to death, spits them out unwanted and unloved, but that is a different story.…

The Sendai Earthquake, as this disaster is now known, caused the main island of Japan to move eight feet, and shifted the Earth on its axis…and somewhere in there is my baby girl, her name is Allie (Alexis) Cruz, and she is more beautiful than all of the stars in heaven….

My father-sense is at maximum alert, calling her name….

The people who could tell me where and how my daughter is are the same people who caused her and my other children to disappear:

Chris and Kory Wright, the Mormon zealots who concealed my children in Utah:

https://www.columbiaultimate.com/about-us/management-team.aspx

And Gina Foulk, here with husband #5:

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/contact.nxg

Mormon abduction of Cruz children passes 15 year mark

2011-02-13T09:52:00.000-08:00

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

It was fifteen years ago, on February 12, 1996, that my four children vanished from Oregon, taken into concealment in a series of remote Mormon enclaves in theocratic Utah. They certainly take care of their own, those Mormon ideologues do. Mormon officials in three states were involved in planning, carrying out and maintaining the kidnapping.

No independent thought is permitted among Mormon children. My son Aaron had a strong independent streak in him, however, and they punished him for that, eventually wearing him down, taking away his hopes and dreams in that ratty Mormon town where he died in 2005, in Payson, Utah.

In 2005, I watched Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski sign Senate Bill 1041 into law, named "Aaron's Law" after my son. With Aaron's Law, Oregon is the only state in the nation where child abduction creates a civil cause of action.

If Aaron's Law had been on the books in 1995, no abduction would have taken place, my family would have remained whole, healthy and happy like we were, and my son would still be alive today.

A message in a bottle

2011-02-02T13:18:00.000-08:00

Today is my baby girl’s birthday, and life beckons anew

A message in a bottle

Allie, my baby girl, was just a few days past her 8th birthday when the Mormons made her disappear, fifteen long years ago. She has lived in a succession of Mormon enclaves ever since, surrounded by Mormon ideologues, some with criminal culpability in the abduction of my children. They have focused their energies on severing every connection she might have to her birth family, on keeping her within the confines of the Mormon church, in part because that’s the way they do things in the Mormon world, but also to hide their crimes, especially from her.

The statutes of limitations have run on their crimes long ago, but not their consequences.

Any abduction of a child has lifelong consequences; no one is ever the same again. Some victims die as a result, like my son Aaron, who never had a chance at happiness again, after vanishing with his siblings into concealment in a succession of remote locations in Utah on February 12, 1996.

We live in a world where some parents can suffer the loss of a child and barely notice, a world where far too many children have been left behind by the very two people who gave them life, where far too many young people know this is what they can expect from their mom and/or their dad.

It is a world where some parents will sacrifice their children for a fix, for a snort, for two dollars, to chase after a man or a woman, or to satisfy some religious craving or mandate, or for reasons that defy understanding on any level at all.

Some religious organizations—like the Mormons—are very effective at carving families into pieces, dividing them into Mormon and non-Mormon factions, and the church has institutionalized a culture of separation, even to the point of forbidding a non-Mormon parent from attending his or her own child’s wedding, if the family is unfortunate enough to have that circumstance arise.

I had the terrible bad luck to have a wife that well into our marriage woke up one day and decided she was going to commit her life to Mormonism, though she didn’t say that at the time, and there was no way to see this coming at all. Not a hint before the fact.

But I digress….

It took me fifteen years, from the day of my children’s disappearance, to get beyond mere survival, to arrive at a point where I can celebrate life once again.

That is what I am going to do today, I am going to celebrate life. I am going to live and be happy to be alive today, February 2, 2011.

And every day thereafter….

So I am putting this message into a bottle and sending it out on its way, and maybe someday it will arrive where you can find it, baby girl, and know that your daddy never stopped loving you…never ever stopped loving you…never stopped loving you…never…ever…to infinity…love you forever, Dad….

Here she is early in life. Photographs of her or my other children after February 12, 1996 are very rare.

To you, baby girl, on your birthday.

Love, Dad

I can eat fire --an essay

2011-02-01T15:36:00.000-08:00

I can eat fire
by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon --Professor Tom Holm’s essay, “Patriots and Pawns: State Use of American Indians in the Military and the Process of Nativization in the United States”, goes far to explain why American Indians have enlisted and served in numbers that far exceed their percentage of the US population, despite the racist and hostile experiences that characterize the history of Native American peoples and the US military.

Native Americans volunteer for military service for the same array of reasons that non-Natives enlist, such as: family tradition, financial reasons, a desire to get away from home, to learn new skills, as a test of courage or to join battle with a specific enemy; i.e. Osama Bin Laden or Adolf Hitler. Professor Holm identifies several other factors specific to Native Americans to explain the phenomenon.

He also writes about the attitudes that shape military perceptions of Native Americans and that influence the roles that Indians are often called to serve in military operations, in how they are used.

Some Indian nations and Native American individuals have seen military service as a treaty obligation, a matter of honor; even though the US has rarely honored its own treaty commitments, their sense of honor requires their service.

Institutional factors, such as active recruitment efforts by the BIA and in Indian boarding schools, and discriminatory practices by local draft boards contribute to the enlistment numbers.

Holm briefly examines the relationships of ethnicity, political elites and the military. Throughout history, ethnicity has always been a vital part of the equation:

“In general, militaries not only protect the nation from foreign invasion, but promote the causes of and provide security for the hierarchical apparatuses of the state. In plural societies or imperial systems, state elites, both in uniform and out, have to judge which national or ethnic groups can serve in the military without turning the guns around and posing a threat to the state.”

Throughout history, ruling elites and nations have adopted many different strategies to incorporate vanquished peoples into their militaries, shaped by the dominant culture’s view of the subjugated ethnic groups, and by their perception of the potential threat. Holm suggests that an important reason that the US military has not felt threatened by its Native American service members is because the population is so few in number, such a small percentage of the total force.

Holm observes that incorporating Native Americans into the military is a method of assimilating them into the melting pot, of maintaining colonization.

From pre-Colonial times, Euro-American views of Indians as possessors of mythic stealth and courage, qualities that were promoted in popular fiction, Holm writes, “…whites were infected with the ‘Indian scout syndrome.”

He cites as example Colonel James Smith’s 1799 description of a battle where a Delaware chief and some warriors, surrounded and trapped in a cabin, chose death rather than surrender. When Smith threatened to burn the cabin down, the chief replied defiantly that he could “eat fire.” When the fire was set, the Indians came out fighting and were all killed.

“Whites apparently believed,” Holm writes, “that these mystical traits, to the extent that they existed at all, were genetically inherited rather than learned.”

Holm provides several examples of Indian scout syndrome operating in WWI, WWII, Korea and Viet Nam, at the highest national and military policy levels as well as at the unit level, stereotypes determining that the Indian soldiers are naturally best suited for certain types of combat roles, those that are likely to get them killed.

Euro-American forms and purposes of warfare were and are drastically different from those of Native Americans (and of many other indigenous societies throughout the world).

While people were certainly killed in wars fought between tribes, killing the enemy was generally not the goal. Death often brought open hostilities to an end.

The British introduced the practice of scalping and Native Americans responded in kind.

The European nations had created armies and navies who fought to annihilate their enemies, however, and introduced that form of warfare to the American continent.

As the British and French forces fought for control of the continent, tribes were forced to choose sides and inflict harm on each other in ways that they had not done before. Body counts replaced counting coup.

“Placed in the position of fighting for survival for the first time, increasingly equipped with the lethal technology of their ‘allies,’ and faced with a serious erosion of their territories because of expanding European ‘settlement,’ Indians began to kill both the European interlopers and each other in ever increasing numbers,” Holm writes.

Holm observes that the wars thus fought have taken terrible psychic tolls on its Native American veterans:

“…it would be well to emphasize the significance of ceremonies to the maintenance of Indian identity and the individual’s sense of peoplehood. Indigenous nations are holistic societies. That is to say religion, land, language, ceremony, and kinship structures are all part of an organic whole on which rests the continued well-being of the particular society.”

The psychic injuries continued, as veterans returned to Indian Country to find that their collective service to the nation is unrewarded by improved conditions for their People, writ large with the termination and relocation policies of the mid 20th century.

The American Indian Movement (AIM) arose in the course of the Viet Nam era, led by a number of combat veterans, intensely politicized by their experiences in Viet Nam and the “cognitive dissonance” they encountered between the national rhetoric and the realities of colonial life on the reservation.

Lastly, Holm calls for a new model: “Sustainable and truly Indian alternatives to US military services must be found. Otherwise, the next century will find us continuing in the mode developed for us during this one, not as free and self-determining peoples, but as patriots and pawns of the North American colonial order.”

Clearly, the answer lies in improving living and working conditions across Indian Country to more closely match those found off the reservation, and in implementing strategies to end the colonial relationships in this Land of Broken Treaties.

In this vitally important sense, nation-building should begin at home.

----------------------
All quotations in this essay: Tom Holm, Patriots and Pawns: State Use of American Indians in the Military and the Process of Nativization in the United States, Chapter XII of "The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance", South End Press, M. Annette Jaimes, editor, a collection of essays, 1999

Oregon Representative Dennis Richardson's "Modeste Proposal" to send Oregon inmates to private prisons in China

2011-01-21T19:58:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—You read about it here first! Another scoop for Blogolitical Sean!

Oregon Republican State Representative Dennis Richardson is promoting the idea that the state can save money by sending inmates to private prisons in China, where they can make stuff for Wal-Mart at 2 cents an hour, and ship it back to the US, where Oregonian shoppers can save money! Everybody wins!

You have to credit the good representative for having the golden touch as far as timing is concerned, with the US press currently full of stories about human rights violations embedded in China….

Representative Richardson describes his idea as “thinking outside the box”, and it certainly is that….

The state could save even more money by having the inmates row to China in open boats, chained to their oars. This might have the effect on recidivism that the Representative is looking for….

There ought to be a way to actually turn a profit off his idea…continue thinking outside the box…we need a way to sell tickets…might make a popular spectator sport among the Tea Party crazies…some kind of demolition derby/Mad Max/Water World scenario….

Read it for yourself, here’s the excerpt…

Rep. Richardson's Newsletter
January 21, 2011

PUBLIC SAFETY. By Representative Dennis Richardson (R)

“Incarceration is always the challenge. Promoters of Initiatives have had great success in convincing voters of the need to “get tough on crime.” Unfortunately, they forget to discuss the costs involved or the alternatives available.

“The successful use of modern technology in other jurisdictions should be an inspiration for Oregon’s future incarceration strategy. In addition, there are ideas floating that could save millions. You might laugh, but in the spirit of “thinking outside the box” some are considering unique ways to deal with illegal alien inmates differently than legal residents.

"For instance, how about considering the affect on both cost and recidivism for Illegals who are sent to do their time in a private prison in China. With contractual agreements regarding care, treatment, nourishment, basic living conditions, etc., Illegals could be incarcerated for less than $10,000 per year—a fraction of current costs in Oregon.

"Plus, it would free up bed space and thereby avoid having to build or expand Oregon prisons. California contracts with Tennessee prisons, so why how about Oregon contracting with its number one export partner, China. (Certainly there might be federal issues with moving prisoners across international borders, but creative thinking is about “what if” and not “no, because.”)

NOTE: I received Rep. Richardson’s Jan 21 news letter by email. It may or may not be posted on his website yet:

http://www.leg.state.or.us/richardson/div

Senate floor speech on the Oregon Education Budget

2011-01-11T08:24:00.000-08:00

By Avel Louise Gordly, State Senator
Senate District 23

Salem, Oregon--

Mr. President, colleagues, fellow citizens of our beloved state of Oregon….

I want to begin my remarks today with an African proverb that has guided me throughout my career in this institution. There have been times when these words marked a happy occasion—a victory for Oregon and for Oregonians—but far more often in recent years the words have described our state as a lament:

“The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people and in the halls of its government when the needs of children and the most vulnerable are not cared for.”

We have convened today to vote on an education budget that is by all credible measures inadequate to meet the needs of our children.

The reality today is that the budgets for pre-kindergarten, for our k-12 schools, for community colleges, for higher education, for public safety and for human services are all inadequate. They do not meet the needs of our citizens and of our state. They do not meet the needs we face today, and they do not prepare us to meet the needs we know we are going to face tomorrow.

All of these budgets are inadequate. They are inadequate because revenue is inadequate, and revenue is inadequate because our revenue system is inadequate.

Our revenue system is incapable of meeting the needs of our state and the growing needs of our people. We all know this. It is one of the few areas in which there is near-universal agreement. A recent study ranked Oregon’s revenue system as one of the two worst state revenue systems in the nation. Only Oregon and California received “D” rankings in the study.

This is not news. We received the same rankings two years ago, during the 2003 session. The Oregon revenue system was broken then, we knew this, it was not news, and we—Oregonians both within and without this legislative body—did nothing to fix it.

These studies, these rankings are important. They are not intellectual exercises. They have a direct impact on our state’s bonding rating, on our state’s credit report, on the cost of doing business in Oregon, and attracting new businesses to our state. They have a direct impact on the cost of raising your family, of educating your children, of ensuring that you will live in a safe neighborhood, of seeing that your grandparents have adequate housing and access to services and medications to meet their needs, and that our senior citizens and our most vulnerable citizens can live with the dignity and respect they deserve. These are plain facts.

The flaws in our revenue system ensure that our budgets will be inadequate to meet the needs of our citizens. We are facing a budget crisis today because Oregon’s revenue system is broken and the Legislature—elected to serve the people of this state—has lacked the will to do the hard work it will take to fix the system.

Before my time here in the Oregon Legislature, more than twenty years ago, the Oregon Legislature made a commitment to meet the needs of our children, to meet the needs of the poorest of the poor among our children across our beautiful state. Urban. Rural. Northern, Southern, Eastern Oregon, Western Oregon and every place in between.

The Oregon Legislature made a commitment to these children, establishing a state policy to create a Head Start program for our most vulnerable children. The Legislature then promised to fund Head Start programs to meet the needs of all of our eligible children.

That promise, that commitment, has not been kept. And that is not the only unkept promise. The education budgets circulating in this building today break promises made to every child in this state.

I believe that we as a state must move beyond a patchwork approach to funding our schools and the other state services that Oregonians need and deserve. Even if the lottery commissions were adjusted to 15%, there still would not be enough revenue for schools, including pre-kindergarten through higher education, and it would still not provide the degree of stability that we need to position Oregon for success in the global 21st century economy.

I also believe that funding for education and for other state services must not depend on our raising a new generation of gamblers! Surely, we can do better than this, and we must!

We are here in this session to do the People’s business, and the People need to see our revenue system reformed and restructured.

Our job description is to serve the needs of our people, not to serve the demands of an ideology or a partisan party line, Democrat or Republican. Our people need to see tax reform and restructuring enacted now! In this session!

Our job description is spelled out in the Constitution that each of the ninety members of the Legislature swore to uphold upon taking office. Article 9, Sections 2 and 6, of the Oregon Constitution states that—when there are insufficient revenues to pay for government services, the Legislature shall levy a tax. That mandate in our Constitution was enacted to ensure that we legislators would do our job to meet the needs of our citizens should change need to come. Change needs to come! Now!

This constitutional mandate to provide for the needs of our people does not direct the Legislature to simply enact a new tax on top of everything else. That is not what I am suggesting, and I want to be very clear about that. This constitutional mandate requires the Legislature to enact tax reform so that there is sufficient revenue.

Article 9, Sections 2 and 6. I encourage you to look it up.

These Constitutional mandates require the Legislative Assembly to undertake tax reform and restructuring to provide revenue that is both sufficient and stable. Otherwise, Oregon will continue to pit the needs of children against the needs of seniors, the needs of our most vulnerable against the needs of those less vulnerable, and all without the needed sense of security that stability provides. And that is exactly what is happening in this building today, in both chambers.

Mr. President, colleagues, fellow Oregonians, I will be voting in support of this budget today, but in the form of a lament:

“The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people and in the halls of its government when the needs of children and the most vulnerable are not cared for.”

Thank you

Avel Louise Gordly, State Senator
Senate District 23

Senator Gordly delivered this floor speech on May 13, 2005

Avel Gordly and the late Ben Westlund

2011-01-07T22:48:00.000-08:00

Oregon state senator Avel Gordly and the late state senator and Oregon State Treasurer Ben Westlund came for a visit a couple of years ago. I took this photo in my garden.

In the Garden of Intergenerational Love (for W)

2010-12-31T11:42:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

My grandparents lived at the edge of town, in a wood frame house in the Sacramento valley that they had surrounded with flower and vegetable gardens, trellises, grape vines and cactuses that thrived in the California sun, a chicken coop in the back, where the rooster roamed.

They had planted fruit trees, apricot, peach, plum, walnut, almond, fig and olive, long before I was born and they all easily bore my weight and that of my brother, our cousins and friends, significant chunks of childhood spent up in those trees or throwing figs at each other, racing around the house and barn or into the fields across the street. I never acquired a taste for figs, but they made superb missiles, much better than the other fruits and vegetables near at hand, and the seasonal fig fights began as soon as they were large enough to throw, still green on the tree.

My grandparents grew corn, grapes, tomatoes, peppers and chilies, cucumbers, squash, beans and peas, all destined for the kitchen table, where my grandmother made fresh tortillas every morning, where a pot of beans was always steaming on the stove, never so warm as the love she gave us children, memories of my grandmother and her red and white checked tablecloth….

My father also kept a vegetable garden in our backyard, where he spent many an hour working his stress into the earth, a facet I did not understand until later, after he was gone, and I had become an adult working in my own garden, the soil absorbing my own stress, clearing my mind, building a life for my own young family, tomato plant by tomato plant.

My father suffered a series of heart attacks, two of them while working in his garden amid the corn stalks and jalapenos. There were tears in his eyes when he told me that he would no longer be able to work out there, his heart going bad in those days before bypass surgery was available, the technology that would have saved his life not quite invented yet, and he was gone in 1975 at a youthful 52 years of age, far too soon.

My grandmother passed in 1980 at the age of 80, at least 50 of those years spent in that house, in that kitchen, in the gardens. After the house was sold, the new owners allowed the property to sink into neglect, and within a couple of years the entire garden was dead, most of the trees cut down, a tragedy, an affront, a paradise lost.

When I work in my own garden, I think of my father and my grandmother mostly. I think about the life they built for me, the foundations they laid, the garden paths they designed. I understand how valuable gardening time was to my father, and I know that I honor him when I work out there. I speak to my father in my garden.

In the eight years that I have lived here in this house, I have put hundreds of plants into the ground, all with thoughts of my parents, my grandparents and my children, all with reflections on the past, the present, the future. Plants, you see, are often not just plants….

I put fruit trees into the earth, cherry, peach and apricot, in part to connect me to those California gardens I grew up in, but the climate in Portland does not favor these varieties, and after having only one good crop, I’ve taken out the peach and apricot. I'll replace the cherries this spring.

I planted an olive tree a few years ago. It’s about eight feet tall now, and I’m going to learn how to cure the olives pretty soon.

I have a remnant of my grandmother's garden, an old concrete birdbath on a pedestal, a frog figure on top, that part broken decades ago, standing in an honored place under my olive tree, shaded, protected, priceless....

I’ve planted strawberries, blueberries, cactus, bamboo, sage, all the common garden vegetables, potatoes to tomatoes, and built a greenhouse from recycled glass doors and windows and assorted found objects, painted up in many bright colors, a couple of murals on the fence.

I like to think that after I am gone, the garden will endure, will live on, that someone will work it, knowing the linkage and the history, that the connection between this garden and my father’s garden and my grandmother’s garden will be unbroken, a legacy of fruit and vegetables and the earth to be sure, but most importantly a legacy of love, of intergenerational love, born in a grandmother’s heart, and shared on a red and white checkered tablecloth.

Before my four children disappeared in 1996 in a Mormon kidnapping, I used to work my garden with my children, like my father before me.

My grandparents names were Victor and Dominga Cruz; my parents names were John and Olive Cruz; my children’s names Natalia, Aaron, Tyler, Allie…. Honor to you, love always….

I tend a garden of intergenerational love. Sometimes it tastes like cucumbers, sometimes like snow peas, today it tastes like unfrozen strawberries, Oregon strawberries from the east side of the house….

It always tastes of love….

US to end holdout status on UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People

2010-12-16T20:47:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

"I want to be clear: what matters far more than words, what matters far more than any resolution or declaration, are actions to match those words," President Barack Obama said today, opening the White House Tribal Nations Conference in Washington, D.C.

President Obama stated that the US will sign the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, becoming the last major nation to support the nonbinding agreement, which was endorsed by 145 countries in 2007.

The United States, New Zealand, Australia and Canada were the lone “No” votes at the time.

While one could hardly have expected the Bush-Cheney regime to support any pesky UN document, binding or nonbinding, that would suggest there was a problem with the title to land stolen from indigenous people, the 2007 vote was a spectacular failure of the US federal government to match its “Champion of Human Rights” rhetoric with even symbolic action.

The key question will be, as President Obama noted, what actions will be taken to match the rhetoric.

This is a far more dicey proposition now than it was a year ago, with the rise of Tea Party nativism and Reaganistic fundamental selfishness, the election-surge of a House likely to be as hostile to Native people as the Andrew Jackson administration, and a nation still locked in the death-grip of the Bush—Cheney economic and foreign policy catastrophes.

Here is the link to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, and below that, the Preamble to the original United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted unanimously on December 10, 1948, suggesting, I suppose, that it is better to be late than to never get there:

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People:

Link to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

PREAMBLE

“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

“Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

“Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

“Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

“Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

“Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

“Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

“Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.”

…and better late than never. –Sean Cruz

America under siege: the four directions

2010-12-15T09:03:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

While the threat of economic collapse in developed nations looms on all sides in this second decade of the 21^st Century, the United States faces certain threats from all four directions of the compass, each as distinct as the directions themselves.

From the East, there is the threat of random physical violence through terrorism and Islamic extremism, although distance and the Atlantic Ocean serves as a wide moat, channeling potential attacks into the skies through civilian air carriers, carried out by small groups or cells, or persons delivering a bomb alone. The economic cost of defending US air travel from our own citizenry due to a single underwear bomb ensures that someone somewhere is taking it to the next level, developing a suppository bomb, and you do not want to think about how the TSA will defend against that threat. Invest in latex gloves, a growth stock for sure, spectacular returns on the near horizon.

From the West, there is China, where the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean as a physical barrier is largely irrelevant in the global economy. This is nothing like Japan in the 1930s. The sheer size and entrepreneurship of the Chinese people, where the number of students studying English today is greater than the entire population of the United States, signals a day when its imperviousness to US “We’re Number One” braggadocio will become clear to even the diehard Cold Warriors still fighting the illusions described in Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book.

Our dependence on China to finance our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on credit is more than a double-edged sword held at our throat. The “full faith and credit” of the nation dictates that we will make good on the Bush-Cheney promises to pay principle and interest to China for generations to come; the wars are enormous sinkholes of money, military personnel and national morale that no amount of economic development can compensate for; and, the wars create motive and financing for continued attacks on the US from the East.

Some day, books will be written titled The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, with photographs of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on the cover.

From the North, the principle threat to the nation comes in the form of massive environmental destruction on a scale heretofore known only in China and in the Soviet destruction of the Aral Sea: the Alberta tar sands catastrophe.

Most Americans think of Canada with disinterest, as a benign neighbor, but the US-Canadian border is little more than a line drawn on a map, and we are in the same boat together when the large North American ecosystems are considered.

“It (the Alberta Tar Sands) is the most evil project on the face of the earth, and I want to do my part to stop it,” Winona LaDuke said recently, mincing no words in her description of the damage that the process of extracting oil from the Alberta tar sands inflicts on the land, the air, the water, the boreal forest, the wildlife and on the people who live in close proximity.

Our Canadian friends are willing to sacrifice vast expanses of Canada to feed our bottomless addiction for oil at any cost, and no other type of oil extraction is as costly or as dirty or as harmful as that which comes from tar sands. Americans largely measure their interest in energy by the price they pay at the pump, where periodic uproars generally die down when the cost of fuel drops a few cents a gallon.

We are linked to the Alberta tar sands also by pipelines that carry the oil wrung out of the earth.

There are battles currently underway to stop the construction of the1700-mile Keystone XL pipeline under the nation’s heartland all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and to stop the “heavy haul” shipments of mining extraction equipment across the Northwestern states. This equipment, it should be noted, is manufactured in Asia.

“In the upcoming months, more Native Nations, in Montana, the Dakotas, and Oklahoma, will be asked to open their right of ways to the pipeline…. Tar Sands are ecologically considered the most destructive projects on the earth. The impact is devastating in northern Alberta and to the Native nations. The pipelines will not only link our region to an unsustainable set of projects, but threaten the ground water in our region.”—Winona LaDuke

http://www.laprogressive.com/the-environment/winona-laduke/

http://allagainstthehaul.org/the-haul/the-heavy-haul/the-alberta-tar-sands/

From the South, the threat comes through Mexico as much as it comes from Mexico, but it comes largely by way of invitation. It is a threat that we buy, that we invest in, that for some pays well.

As cash-strapped as most of us are in this economy, Americans still send billions of dollars of cash, bales and suitcases and truckloads of cash, across the southern border, and along with them rivers of American-manufactured guns and ammunition to fuel the violence that has killed more than 30,000 Mexican people in the last four years alone.

Author and poet Benjamin Alire Saenze wrote: “Wealthy people are welcome anywhere in the world. Borders exist to keep out the poor.”

This is the only direction where Americans use the word “invasion” to describe a threat to the nation. It is not an invasion of armies, however, but a migration of the poor, in large part driven out of their homes by desperation that can be traced to US foreign policy, corruption fueled by the drug trade, and the colonial practices of international corporations.

Among the guiltiest of parties to the violence are the gun dealers protected by US laws who supply the cartels with weapons and ammunition that no Mexican citizen can legally purchase or possess.

====================

Author and poet Benjamin Alire Saenz spoke about violence and life along the US-Mexico border on PBS Newshour recently.

GWEN IFILL: Finally, another in our series on poets and poetry -- tonight, Benjamin Saenz. He lives on and writes about a part of the U.S.-Mexico border beset by violent crime in recent years. Saenz has authored numerous books of fiction and poetry. His latest collection is called "The Book of What Remains."

BENJAMIN ALIRE SAENZ, author, "The Book of What Remains":

“My name is Benjamin Alire Saenz. I live on the Juarez/El Paso border on the U.S. side. I'm a Latino writer, poet, artist, children's book writer.

“I really actually like to identify myself these days as a fronterizo, someone who lives on the border. This is the place that really defines me, because it is such a difficult terrain to negotiate, because there are no sense of certainties, the fixed ideas of one's identity, of one's natural boundaries, the way one uses words, that they come from all sides. And, sometimes, they come at you like bullets.

“It's not a comfortable place to live. And, if you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.

"Meditation on Living in the Desert No. 11"

"I am looking at a book of photographs. The photographs document the exodus of Mexicans crossing the desert. I am staring at the face of a woman who is more a girl than a woman. She is handing her documents to a government official. I know and you know and we all know that the documents are forged. The official is not in the photograph, only the frightened eyes of the girl."

-- Benjamin Alire Saenz

“I think the reason I started writing these odes to Juarez is that I feel a profound connection to that city and to the people of Juarez. Juarez used to be a place where you could go and have a drink, meet people for dinner. It used to be a playground, if you will, of some sort, to become -- it's become this dangerous place, which is the opposite of a playground, really.

“Murder happens with impunity. There is no institutional system of justice that's working. And, to me, that is not only terrifying, but profoundly sad.

“So, some people leave. Some people have to stay. Some people still come back and forth. Some people try to live as normal a life -- most people try to live as normal a life as they can. Some people do move if they have the means.

“This is when borders do become fluid. Wealthy people can move anywhere they want. Wealthy people are welcome anywhere in the world, which then we have to say then borders are really to keep out the poor. “ –Benjamin Alire Saenz

"Ode to Juarez No. 5."

"This is where we live. The old man sits. There is nothing to do but remember. He is too old to work, too healthy to die, too rich to starve, too poor to leave the city. He hears a rumor. El Cartel de Sinaloa has defeated El Cartel de Juarez. If the war is over, then why is there still killing? We will be dead and buried before the killing stops. The killing will go on for an eternity, killing our new addiction, our new cocaine.

"People are leaving. The old man and his wife, Elena, will stay. This is where they were born, where they have always lived. The words they used to speak are disappearing. It hurts too much to talk. Sometimes, it hurts too much to breathe. Sometimes, it hurts too much to wake. There is no other place but here. There is no place to go. They have to stay and wait, but wait for what?"

-- Benjamin Alire Saenz

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june10/saenz_06-30.html

American guns, Mexican violence

2010-12-13T12:29:00.000-08:00

American guns, Mexican violence

“Federal authorities say more than 60,000 U.S. guns of all types have been recovered in Mexico in the past four years, helping fuel the violence that has contributed to 30,000 deaths.”

See this important story in the Washington Post:

By James V. Grimaldi and Sari Horwitz, Washington Post

No other state has produced more guns seized by police in the brutal Mexican drug wars than Texas. In the Lone Star State, no other city has more guns linked to Mexican crime scenes than Houston. And in the Texas oil town, no single independent dealer stands out more for selling guns traced from south of the border than Bill Carter.

Carter, 76, has operated four Carter's Country stores in the Houston metropolitan area over the past half-century. In the past two years, more than 115 guns from his stores have been seized by the police and military in Mexico.

As an unprecedented number of American guns flows to the murderous drug cartels across the border, the identities of U.S. dealers that sell guns seized at Mexican crime scenes remain confidential under a law passed by Congress in 2003.

A year-long investigation by The Washington Post has cracked that secrecy and uncovered the names of the top 12 U.S. dealers of guns traced to Mexico in the past two years.

Eight of the top 12 dealers are in Texas, three are in Arizona, and one is in California. In Texas, two of the four Houston area Carter's Country stores are on the list, along with four gun retailers in the Rio Grande Valley at the southern tip of the state. There are 3,800 gun retailers in Texas, 300 in Houston alone.

"One of the reasons that Houston is the number one source, you can go to a different gun store for a month and never hit the same gun store," said J. Dewey Webb, special agent in charge of the Houston field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "You can buy [a 9mm handgun] down along the border, but if you come to Houston, you can probably buy it cheaper because there's more dealers, there's more competition."

Link to full article

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/12/AR2010121202663.html?wpisrc=nl_pmheadline

The last days of Aaron Cruz: Interlude 1: Quality Time

2010-12-06T21:56:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Anyone with a large family would know how difficult it is to have quality time alone with each of your children separately, times when it is just the two of you and the time and experience together is genuinely “quality” time for everyone.

As a divorced single parent with two boys and two girls and an order for joint custody, time with my children was always at a premium, and how to satisfy each of their differing interests, wants and needs simultaneously always a balancing act as the months and years went by.

Aaron created a way for him and me to share some regular quality time together, and he made it happen on his own initiative during the year before he and my other children disappeared into Utah.

During the school year, the joint custody order stated that the children would reside with me immediately after school on Fridays and through the weekends at varying lengths.

Every Friday, after picking up my children, we would stop at a grocery store on the way home, so each of the kids could have input into what foods we would have for meals and snacks during our time together. The kids and I would negotiate our preferences as we walked through the store so that everyone left happy about something.

This is how grocery shopping became part of our quality time together as a family, except for my mom, who was housebound from her chronic illnesses. I was my mother’s sole caregiver in those days.

Aaron hungered for something more than food, however. He hungered for more time with me, just the two of us, and he developed a plan to carve that time out every Friday. I was skeptical at first, but he worked his plan to perfection.

He found out what each of his sisters and his brother wanted from the store, and he asked them for backups if their first choices weren’t available. Aaron put a lot of effort into his interviews with his siblings, because he wanted to eliminate each of their desires to go shopping with us, this week and every week.

These could be very complex arrangements, fascinating to listen to their negotiations, how they planned their snacks, with much bartering and swapping and sharing after the grocery run.

Under his system, Aaron and I would drop the other kids at home with my mother, where Natalia and Tyler would generally make a beeline for the video games and Allie would play with my mom’s dachshund Sox, and all of the kids together would provide love and companionship for their grandmother, and he and I would make our grocery run for my family, for our family. Everyone was content at the very same time.

Our last grocery run together was Saturday, February 10, 1996. Aaron, Natalia, Tyler and Allie disappeared two days later, on their way to the home of Mormon zealots Chris and Kory Wright in a remote area in the mountains east of Ogden, Utah, I would later learn. This was the first place that my children were concealed.

I think about Aaron every time I set foot in a grocery store, ever since those days we were together as a family.

I miss his companionship and how he would explain to me in exquisite detail what item was for which child as he placed things into our shopping cart.

I could enjoy this time with Aaron free of anxiety for the other kids and for my mom, because they were home together and they were all safe. I would hold off shopping for myself until Fridays, so I could go with Aaron. I also hungered for that time.

Aaron would distribute the snacks and treats to the other kids when we got back to the house, and there was never a disappointed word.

All was good under the sun, dependably good, every Friday afternoon, without fail. I still have the grocery receipts.

When I recovered Aaron from the abduction in 2003, he was too ill to go shopping, and then he was ordered to return to Utah for deployment to Iraq, and then he became more ill there in Payson, and then came his Last Days.

To this day, I never enter a grocery store without thinking of Aaron, without feeling his absence, without remembering that last day that my family was safe, together and at home.

And then the Mormons entered the picture, and with them an abduction and a program….

The last days of Aaron Cruz, pt 4: A terrible feeling...a note to mom....

2010-12-02T20:21:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

I awoke that April morning with a terrible feeling, with a sense that something dreadful was taking place. I was worried about Aaron, who was living in his mother’s empty house in Payson, Utah. He hadn’t answered his cell phone in several days, which happened from time to time and always caused me worry, and I considered calling the Payson police department to ask them to do a welfare check on my son.

There was an unknown element of risk to Aaron in getting the Payson PD involved, however, as I had little confidence that they could check on a person in crisis and not make matters worse, one way or another. There was much history where they had gotten things wrong in the past, this small-town Mormon police department on the edge of the desert, a story for another day.

I decided to try to get help from the Veterans Administration instead of the police, and when I arrived at my desk in the Oregon Senate that morning, I called Jim Willis, Director of Oregon’s Department of Veteran Affairs and told him about my worries. Jim assured me that they could help, that they could contact the Utah VA, that the VA does welfare checks on veterans in all sorts of crisis circumstances and that they do so frequently.

I was far more comfortable with the notion that my son would get a surprise visit from soldiers than from armed Mormon police officers, the same ones who had targeted Aaron for arrest in the past, more stories for another day. Payson is a small town with an infamous, lurid history, scene of non-Mormon settlers massacred by Mormons, polygamous horror stories, child brides marrying middle-aged Mormon men in the shadow of a powerful church.

Aaron did not fit in here, nor did his circle of friends, all rebels against the Mormon order, rebels without plan or leadership and bereft of resources, the local throwaway kids, every single one, some dying young from suicide and/or drug overdose, all sharing the same bleak shrunken vision of their own potential.

The local police were notoriously hostile to these kids.

Like any other parent, I was in the habit of worrying about my children whenever they were out of my sight, which in this ninth year since their 1996 abduction meant that worry was my constant companion, present in every breath of air, in every pulse through my heart, but today the worry was very strong and it was difficult to concentrate on my work. We were deep into the 2005 legislative session, but my mind was in Utah.

My fears were confirmed the following morning, when I received a call from the Payson Police Department. A friend of Aaron’s had grown worried about him and broke into the house, where he found my son lying unconscious on the floor.

This officer speaking to me had answered the 911 call, had found Aaron comatose in his mother’s house and as we spoke my son was in an ambulance on its way to the emergency room.

The officer told me that Aaron was unresponsive. I understood what that meant. He said that Aaron had apparently been there alone for three days, had not answered the door or his phone, and one of his friends had broken in and called the police.

He told me that they were unable to locate my son’s mother, so they were calling me. He gave me the hospital’s phone number.

The first time I called the ER, Aaron was in the elevator on his way up to that floor, the nurse said, to ICU, and she asked me to call back in 15 minutes.

When we spoke again, Aaron was in ICU, hooked up to the machines, but remained unresponsive. She gave me no cause for optimism.

I was on a flight to Salt Lake City early the following morning, paid for with money I had to borrow from friends. I had spent out all of my savings, leveraged all of my resources keeping Aaron alive over the past two years, and was now down to living from paycheck to paycheck.

I spoke into my son’s ear when I arrived at his bedside in the intensive care unit, “Aaron, it’s your Dad. Your daddy’s here, son,” I told him again and again. I don’t know if there was enough life left in him to hear me, but I know that hearing is the last sense to go, and I spoke into his ear. “I’m here, son, your Dad’s here, I will not leave you….”

I stayed with him for the next five days, sleeping either in a chair in his room or on a couch down the hall. I didn’t check into a motel until after they pronounced my beautiful son dead. Although he was on life support and technically alive in ICU, his fingers were stiff and his flesh hard, and I held no illusions about how this nightmare would turn out.

Hospital personnel met with Aaron’s mother and I on April 25. Aaron’s heart was strong, but there was no brain activity and no hope, and we agreed to end life support. Aaron was an organ donor, so they would need him for a couple of more days while they figured out what parts they could use to give life to someone else.

I clipped a lock of hair from the back of his head then and said goodbye to my son.

I left the hospital to see the place where my son had died.

The house was on a residential street near the center of town. No one was there. I saw where the door had been broken, and I walked inside.

The house was smaller than I had expected, with just two bedrooms on the main floor. A third room in the basement had apparently been used as a bedroom by my sons, but it was not up to code, with no fire egress. The walls and ceiling down there were painted black. It would have been a horrible place to live as a child, as a teenager. It was like a dungeon, this place where my children had been forced to live. The toilet in the basement bathroom had turned completely black. I’ve never seen anything like it. It must have taken months to get like that.

The only furniture was a bed and a couch, just stuff his mother had abandoned when she eloped with her fifth husband and moved out to El Dorado Hills, California, leaving Aaron behind. Years later, I would learn that Ben and Gina Foulk own and operate a string of senior care homes there.

There wasn’t much food in the house, and little to suggest that it had been a home recently. Cardboard boxes were stacked here and there, car parts and tools, clothes.

Wherever Aaron’s body had been lying when he was found had been cleaned up. There were no prescription bottles anywhere. Aaron would have had dozens of empty RX bottles. He never threw them out. He was a chain smoker. All traces of smoking were gone, too. No alcohol present. I was sure that Aaron had run out of his anti-seizure meds, but his mother had gotten there ahead of me and tweaked the scene.

I found a note in there, however, two pages long, written in Aaron’s hand on a yellow pad, and it read:

“In my hour of need, NO your not there
and though I reached out for you
you wouldn’t lend a hand.

“Through my darkest hour, grace did not shine on me
it feels so cold, so very cold, No one cares for me!

“did you ever think that I get lonely, did you ever think that I needed love,
did you ever think to stop thinking you’re the only one that I’m thinking of.
You’ll never know how hard I tried to find a space to satisfy you too.

“Things will be better when I’m dead and gone.

“Don’t try to understand, knowing you, I’m probably wrong.

“But oh how I’ve lived my life for you, still you turned away.
Now as I die for you, my flesh still crawls as I breathe your name.

“All this time I thought I was wrong, now I know it was you.
Raise your head, raise your face, your eyes tell me who you think you are.

“I walk, I walk Alone into the promised land, there’s a better place for me,
but its far far away.

“Everlasting life for me in a perfect world, But I Gotta Die first!
So please God send me on my way!
Time has a way of taking time. Loneliness is not only felt by fools.

“Alone I call to ease the pain of yearning to be held by you.
Alone so Alone I’m lost consumed by the pain!
I begged, I begged won’t you hold me again? You just laughed
My whole life was work built on the past, the time has come when all things shall pass
This good thing passed away….

“Don’t remember where I was when I realized life was a game.
The more seriously I took things the harder the rules became.
I had no idea what it’d cost, my life past before my eyes.
I found out how little I accomplished all my plans denied.
So as you read this know my friends, I’d love to stay with you all
Please smile when you think of me, my body’s gone that’s all
If my heart were still alive, I know it would surely break.
And my memories left with you there’s nothing more to say.
Moving on is a simple thing, what it leaves behind is hard
You know the Dead feel no more pain,
And the living all are SCARRED!”

On a third page, Aaron wrote:

“I heard somebody fix today, there was no last goodbyes to say
His will to live ran out, I heard somebody turn to dust
Looking back at what I left, a list of plans and photographs
Songs that will never be sung these are the things I won’t get done
Just one shot to say goodbye, one last taste to mourn and cry
Scores and shoots
The lights go dim, just one shot to do him in.
He hangs his head and wonders why, why the monkey only lies
But pay the pauper, he did choose
He hung his head inside the noose

“Ive seen the man use the needle, seen the needle use the man
I’ve seen them crawl from the cradle to the coffin on their hands
They fight a war but its fatal, It’s so hard to understand
I’ve seen myself use the needle, seen the needle in my hand”

Aaron’s notes were undated and unaddressed. With all of the changes to the scene, it would have been impossible to tell whether he had committed suicide, suffered some kind of overdose, or died from complications related to his seizure disorder, or through some other chain of events. The toxicology report had indicated no illegal substances were in his system, but he had lain there alone comatose in his mother’s house for three days, time for some metabolization to take place.

Two days after the end of life support, Aaron’s mother told her story about the last time she had seen him alive, about how he was sick and feverish and she had left him alone with a sack of groceries in that deplorable, ugly house, with some Heavenly Father stories to keep him company. The following week, at his grave site, she spoke about how she didn’t think Aaron would live long enough to move to Hawaii, but reassured the gathering that she had made him aware that Heavenly Father loved him, and I am still reeling from these disclosures.

The medical examiner would be unable to determine a cause of death. His mother wanted no further inquiry, and she and her new deep-pocketed husband Ben Foulk hired a law firm to prevent my access to Aaron’s medical records.

Reading my son’s last writing is heartbreaking, and five and a half years have gone by since his death, time when I could not bring myself to write a word about this part of the story of my son’s last days.

Aaron and I were very much alike. These notes show that he had a talent for writing and a willingness to write about very personal issues, about pain itself, that he was unafraid to reveal himself in a world where many people live in closets.

His reference to scarring could have meant the physical scars on his arms, the self-inflicted knife wounds that he had carved into himself not long after he had been taken into concealment in Utah, but could also have referred to the emotional scars that he and his entire circle of friends shared, living their lives of rejection in that isolated Mormon enclave, or both. He could have become a writer.

Although his note was addressed to no one in particular, there are a lot of people who put Aaron in this place and kept him there. A well-understood principle of the consequences of a criminal act is that a person who commits that act is responsible for every harm subsequent to the original crime, which was the abduction of my four children and their forced immersion into Mormonism in Utah.

For that reason, I will name each of those persons known to have participated in the abduction, a continuing crime with permanent consequences. These names are all permanently attached to the cause of Aaron’s death:

Mormons with no relationship to my children by either blood or marriage: Chris and Kory Wright, Bishop David Holliday, Bishop Donald Taylor, and Relief Society President Evelyn Taylor.

Micheletti family members and relations: Gina and Ben Foulk, Tony and Connie Micheletti and Cindy Anderson, and former step dad #2 Steve Nielson, the man who slapped my children around in Payson, Utah.

Those that consider committing the crime of child abduction need to understand that the consequences of “taking, enticing, keeping or concealing” a child are permanent. If you join in the plan, you are responsible for all that follows, until the end of time.

If you plan to take a child from Oregon, Aaron’s Law is waiting for you now….

To be continued….

Jazz at the Native American Music Awards? Join the discussion!

2010-11-28T20:23:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

My friend Marc Bowlegs Anderson, a jazz guitarist of Oklahoma Seminole descent, has instigated a spirited discussion regarding the absence of separate categories for jazz and classical recordings at the Native American Music Awards, now in its 12th year.

The Nammys currently place all jazz and classical nominees in a catch-all category labeled “instrumental,” although there are probably as many jazz and classical recordings with vocals as there are without.

The Nammys require a minimum of six nominations in each of the 28 categories that they currently recognize. They haven’t received the minimum six, they say, six this year, six last year and six next year to create the category.

Marc wrote to the Nammys: “The NAMMYS should take a proactive approach…and foster participation in jazz and classical music by offering these awards without regard to the number of entries in any year. This can only enhance the diversity and visibility of the NAMMYS and will certainly serve Native Classical and Jazz musicians well, thereby benefiting the entire Native American music community.”

The Nammys replied to Marc: “In our earlier years, we actually had a combined jazz/blues category. Over time, the jazz recording submissions vanished and were non-existent and thus gave way to a complete Blues category, as evidenced today. We are still attempting to hold on to the classical field through our Instrumental category.

"However, we continue to honor jazz and classical musicians with special awards as we have in the past with artists as Frederick Whiteface with a Lifetime Achievement Award, Jim Pepper - Hall of Fame, etc. and allow all jazz and classical artists to submit their recordings in whatever category they feel they are qualified to enter.

"We did not ask the Grammys to "break their rules", when we submitted the Native American music category proposal and sought their approval. In fact, we had to prove a marketplace existed five years prior and five years ahead showing hundreds of recordings each year in both the traditional and contemporary fields just to create ONE category for our genre. The same obviously does not apply to suggesting new categories in the Nammys, but to maintain our credibility among the mainstream music industry and media and keep the fairness among all competing categories - we require a minimum number of entries of six recordings for that year and continuous years just like any other national music awards show."

It’s a complicated subject. I intend to return to it several times over the coming months, any number of times going forward.

The argument is only in part about which should come first, the chicken or the egg, six entries each year for the foreseeable future or the category.

Music is often not easy to categorize or label, and that fact points to a separate but related issue, the arbitrariness of the nomenclature itself.

Coming off the stage after his set at the Isle of Wight music festival, Miles Davis was asked the name of whatever it was that his band had just performed. Miles said, “Call it anything,” and that’s how its labeled on the album.

There’s art, and then there are labels and categories.

Then there is the much larger issue of how Native American music and musicians are perceived and categorized by the recording industry and recognized by the Grammys, its annual self-promotional showcase. The Grammys bestows awards, prestige and other support to artists in 109 categories.

In each of the past 12 years the Nammys have demonstrated the broad diversity of Native American music, while in an entirely separate process the Grammys distills all of Native American music down to one performer per year, regardless of genre.

This discussion reaches to how Native American music is categorized and marketed in record store bins, often clustered with “World Music”, irony noted….

The six-entry rule bars recognition of a lot of Indian talent. Robbie Robertson is an easy example. Among his accomplishments are movie scores for “The Departed” and “Gangs of New York”. The music itself was not “Native”, but regardless, the Nammys are not likely to get six Best Score or Best Song Soundtrack for Motion Picture or Television any time soon. The only option was to award Robbie a Lifetime Achievement Nammy, which he earned for his time with The Band and Bob Dylan alone.

There should be a way to recognize the accomplishment for the accomplishment.

It’s not like there isn’t any Native American jazz or classical music close at hand….

Gabriel Ayala, the Yaqui guitarist, won the 2010 Best World Music Nammy with a recording of Spanish classical guitar music. Most record stores consider World music to be synonymous with indigenous music, not the Spanish classical canon.

On awards night, Gabriel performed a medley of Concierto de Aranjuez (as popularized by Miles Davis) and Chick Corea’s Spain, and that was jazz played on a classical guitar. Gabriel Ayala plays classical and jazz guitar on the same instrument, in the same performance.

His Nammy performance included this duet with Skylar Wolf. Feel free to put a label on it, to place it in a single category. Is it Indian music? Sure, but then what…?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g6Bd3codYA&feature=related

Here are some thoughts going forward:

Muskokee Creek poet and musician Joy Harjo, last year’s Female Artist of the Year at the Nammys, has a new multimedia show titled “We were there when jazz was invented,” featuring her band, three Oklahoma stomp dancers and video.

The Nammies could make a powerful statement about Native Americans in jazz by featuring Joy Harjo’s program at the 2011 Nammys, I’m just saying….

And while we’re at it, let’s nominate Choctaw brother the late Don Cherry for the Native American Music Awards Hall of Fame, to join his soul mate Jim Pepper there….

And then there’s the late Don Pullen, whose “Sacred Common Ground” with the Chief Cliff Singers (Kootenai) is just as astonishing a concept today as it was when recorded shortly before his death….

I’m just saying….

Oregon Indian wars to be continued? You can bet on it!

2010-11-24T08:44:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Some sell snake oil, some sling the venom….

The two shiny-suited Lake Oswego hucksters fronting the recent attempt to build a foreign-owned private megacasino at the former greyhound track in Wood Village have announced that they—like the clap—will be back.

A 2-to-1 defeat at the polls would usually kill off most expensive, grandiose political schemes, particularly one as poorly thought out as the Measure 75 campaign was, but the Wood Village Casino zombie lives.

The promoters smell the sweet scent of hundreds of millions of dollars in the distance, even if nearly all of that fortune is money siphoned off from existing businesses and that comes at onerous social cost.

They are counting on a single element to work eventually in their favor: Indians. To be precise, they are counting on attitudes towards Indians and the threat of more Indians to motivate voters to choose to make the promoters rich.

The key lesson learned in the recent Measure 75 campaign was that no privately owned casino can possibly be built in Oregon without mustering up the votes to pass multiple constitutional amendments and to force other substantive changes in state law, although many voters probably misunderstood these prohibitive legal realities.

Since the Wood Village Casino complex creates nothing of new value to Oregon beyond the short-term construction jobs needed to build it, the promoters realize that they can make no compelling argument to persuade Oregon voters to grant them an exclusive license to enrich themselves on fiscal grounds alone.

As the M75 campaign demonstrated, their strategy in the future will be to mount an organized effort to dredge up anti-Indian resentments and to leverage that hostility into votes.

There is no other path to the place they want to lead Oregon.

The core of their business plan will continue to depend upon instigating and increasing hostile attitudes among the general public towards Oregon’s indigenous populations in general, against its nine Confederated Tribes in particular, and by conjuring up the threat that other Indians might build a casino north of the Columbia River in Southwest Washington.

This strategy is shamefully consistent with the history of the state.

The Oregon Territory was founded as a whites-only paradise. The Oregon Provisional Government authorized land claims to white settlers of 640 acres apiece for free, while early law and actual practice barred non-whites from land ownership and even from residing in the Territory.

The pioneers swarmed into Oregon and took all of the best, most productive land, destroying food sources that had sustained Native people for thousands of years in the process, introducing lethal new diseases and murdering any Indians who stood in the way.

Congress passed the Oregon Donation Land Act in 1850, offering free 160- and 320-acre tracts of land to white settlers only, years before the tribes were forced at gunpoint into treaties ceding the land. By the time the Act expired in 1855, white settlers had laid claim to 7,437 patents covering two and a half million acres of free land in Oregon.

These patents formed the foundation of many Oregon family fortunes, and the state’s founding fathers enshrined those racially discriminatory practices and attitudes in the Constitution itself.

Later generations passed the Dawes Allotment Act in 1887, the Surplus Land Act of 1901, and the Termination Act of 1954, all for the purpose of transferring Indian land and resources into white ownership. During this entire period, the federal government subjected Native American children to forced removal from their families and sent them to boarding schools en masse.

Extermination of the race was seen as a side benefit to these policies.

But reciting these facts merely annoys many people, nearly one third of the electorate in the last election cycle, as the M75 vote illustrates.

We can expect to see a lot of money spent on snake oil, on misinformation and on the usual mudslinging when the Wood Village Casino promoters ramp up their next campaign, but what will characterize their efforts more than any other single aspect will be the venom.

The last days of Aaron Cruz, pt 3: Aaron's Law: A very personal piece of legislation

2010-11-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

We were standing near the top of the hill, where my son’s gravesite lay waiting, that sunny day in May, at a place called El Dorado Hills, California.

I had never seen this place before. It was a field of strangers. No friends or family relations were buried here, the cemetery itself no more than 12 years old. There were no connections here, no family traditions, no history here, he was alone here. It was his mother’s choice to bury him here, to park his body here alone. My son was about to be parked here in this place.

I listened dumbfounded as my son’s mother continued her tearless matter-of-fact story, speaking about Aaron, about how he was sick back there in Payson, Utah, seriously ill; about how she had hoped he would agree to move to Hawaii and live with his sister, that maybe living in Hawaii would be good for his health; “But,” she said, “I didn’t think he was going to make it.”

She didn’t think he was going to make it? Did she just say that she didn’t think he would live? Yes! I was stunned and sickened. Again. Only a few days earlier, she had described the last time she had seen Aaron alive, about how he was sick and feverish and how she had left him alone with a sack of groceries and some Heavenly Father stories so she could join her new Mormon husband—the fifth time is the charm they say—who was waiting impatiently across town to get back to his dental practice in—El Dorado Hills!

So they had left Aaron alone, sick and feverish, that part was clear, and we were here in El Dorado Hills because it was convenient, because it was a good place to park, but most of all we were here because Aaron had died from lack of medical care….

My son’s mother plainfaced told the gathering on this grassy knoll that she did not think Aaron would live to board a flight to Hawaii, he was acutely ill, he was desperately ill. She thought he might die before he got out of Payson, Utah, where she had left him behind, and she was telling us all about it.

“I didn’t think he was going to make it”, she said, and what was not said was that she had made no effort at all to get my son medical care, not in Utah where she had left him behind, and not in El Dorado Hills, where she was busy with her new life now, in El Dorado Hills where there was no room for Aaron, not while he was alive, just this patch of hillside….

Aaron had needed hospitalization, urgently, and this was no secret, he had been ill for years, suffering there isolated in that rat hole in the Mormon desert, where they had drained the life out of him rather than let him be happy and free to be with me, to be himself, that’s the real Mormon way….

“I didn’t think he was going to make it”, she said, and then she assured us all that she had seen that Aaron knew all about Heavenly Father before he died, she had done her job you see, shedding no tears, she was devout, and that’s what counts….

Gina had told me that her new white-haired husband number five Ben Foulk had a dental practice but that he was mostly retired, that he had sung with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which must have made him a real catch in Mormon country I suppose, and that his ex-wife was putting a lot of pressure on his wallet, and this was the general impression I had at the time, which turned out to be only a partly true story….

I was angry with her, could not understand why her husband had taken no interest in his new wife’s son, in obvious critical need of medical care, didn’t this man have a medical degree?

She did not want to get her new husband upset over Aaron, she told me, speak-his-own-mind unMormon non-Mormon Aaron. She had told me in the hospital that Ben Foulk wouldn’t have understood Aaron, would have been impatient with his drug history and she did not want to upset the great man, former singer in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir….

This explained why Aaron had received no invitation to travel to El Dorado Hills.

Years later, a couple of years ago, I learned about the string of senior care centers that Ben and Gina Foulk own and operate, offering skilled medical care to those in their tender years….

El Dorado Hills Senior Care Village

Oak Haven Senior Care Village

Oak Creek Senior Care

Oak Grove Senior Care

Oak Hill Senior Care

Oak Ridge Senior Care

"Located in beautiful El Dorado Hills, California"

24-Hour Responsive, Compassionate Care
Fresh Healthy Home Cooked Meals
Private Rooms with Private Bathrooms
Enjoyable Social and Recreational Activities
Music, Arts, Crafts, and Games
Assistance with Bathing, & Personal Hygiene
Medication Management & Assistance
Manicured Landscaping with Paved Walkways
Scheduled Transportation to Appointments
Personal Housekeeping and Laundry Services
On-Site Salon Services

“Please take time to visit us and see for yourself why El Dorado Hills Senior Care Villageis considered one of the best resident care facilities for the elderly in the El Dorado Hills area,” so the brochure reads….

She had hoped that someone else would take care of Aaron, someone besides herself, had hoped he would just get on that plane to Hawaii and be his sister’s problem. That’s the way she was, our children having spent their entire lives making the world happy for their mother, no relief from that burden once they were taken into concealment in Utah, not then, not since, not now. They are locked into the Mormon world, keeping the world safe for Mom, fighting against evil non-Mormons….

Aaron Cruz suffered a seizure and died in Payson Utah after having run out of his prescription meds, his anti-seizure meds, alone in his mother’s left-behind empty house. He had also probably been unable to get to the methadone clinic a dozen miles away in Orem, adding to his suffering. His mother grabbed all of Aaron’s medical records, where they remain concealed behind a wall of Foulk lawyers.

I was back at my desk in the Oregon Senate Monday morning following the burial, where I led the workgroup on Senator Gordly’s landmark child abduction bill, SB 1041.

Senate Bill 1041 had its first hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 25, National Missing Children’s Day, where I testified on the abduction of my children and the death of my son.

Senate Bill 1041, creating a new path to prevent and resolve child abductions through a civil process outside of both the family law and criminal law systems that routinely fail to protect children from non-stranger abductions, would require ten major rewrites and would benefit from the near-record length of the 2005 legislative session, would need every hour of that time. No other state in the US has a law like this….

On August 1, 2005, the Oregon Senate passed SB 1041 on a 26-3 vote, the same day that I received the Utah Medical Examiner’s report on Aaron’s death, from “undetermined” causes. It was waiting in the mail for me when I got home that night. The report identified my son as “white.” That would need correction.

Passing the Senate was an important step but we were only just arriving at the legislative halfway point, and it had taken months to get here. SB 1041 would yet have to get through the entire House process, and the end of the 2005 session could come at any time. We were entering the session’s final week. There were only a handful of bills still alive in the building, and I held no realistic hope that the bill would see the House floor this biennium.

The following evening, however, as Senator Gordly and I prepared to leave the building, we received a call from staff that the House State and Federal Affairs Committee would hear SB 1041 in just 15 minutes. Another two minutes and we would have missed the call and the hearing. We put our briefcases down and walked across the Capitol building to testify.

Representative Linda Flores, a member of the HSFA Committee, took a particular interest in the bill as the hearing unfolded, disclosing that her grandchild had disappeared into Mexico in a parental abduction and had been missing for a year. Her support was crucial, and the bill was voted out of Committee with a “do pass” recommendation.

After the hearing, we first started referring to SB 1041 as Aaron’s Law. It was a very personal piece of legislation. But the session was coming to an end and time had run out….

The next morning, on August 3, in a stunning surprise, Senator Gordly and I arrived at the Capitol to learn that SB 1041 was scheduled for the House floor. Carried by Representative Flores, the Oregon House passed SB 1041, now called “Aaron’s Law”, named for my son Aaron Cruz, on a dramatic unanimous end-of session vote, 59-0 with one member absent.

I stood in the side aisle and received the congratulations of many of the House members. It was a good day for justice, for children at risk of parental and family abduction, although the legislation did not cover children who had already been kidnapped, like my own.

The legislature adjourned the following day.

To be continued….

=======================

Sean Cruz led the workgroup on Oregon’s landmark anti-kidnapping statute Senate Bill 1041 “Aaron’s Law”, named for his late son Aaron Cruz.

The provisions of the bill resulted in large part from the multiple failures of both the family law and criminal law systems in the wake of the abduction of his four children.

With Aaron’s Law, Oregon is the only state in the nation where abducting a child creates a civil cause of action.

Under Aaron’s Law, any victim can hold his or her abductor(s) accountable in civil court, including those who provided logistical, financial or planning support to the abduction or who otherwise participated materially in the crime, “enticing, taking or keeping” a child in violation of felony Custodial Interference I.

The civil process requires proof “by a preponderance of the evidence” instead of the much stricter “beyond a reasonable doubt” requirement for conviction in criminal court.

Local law enforcement agencies rarely invest the time and resources required to reach the higher evidentiary standard in parental and family abduction cases, and there the investigations usually end, opening the door for the kidnappings to take place, for the actors to escape justice.

This fact applies in every state in the US, where each year more than 12,000 parental and family abductions lasting longer than six months take place, with lifelong consequences for all of the victims.

The system itself enables the abductions.

Aaron’s Law anticipates that defendants will lawyer up and that their lawyers will use every legal means to protect their clients, to buy time, to keep justice at bay for as long as the system permits, which is indefinitely, as the Kyron Hormankidnapping currently getting some national attention demonstrates fairly conclusively.

I had to fight against a dozen lawyers in three states, mostly representing myself, year after year, losing every time, as the lawyers won delay after delay, buying long stretches of time for my children’s abductors, despite an Order for Joint Custody that had been in effect for five years at the time my children vanished.

Aaron’s Law provides for the appointment of mental health and legal professionals to protect the abducted child and authorizes the judge to assign the costs to the party or parties who are the cause of the problem.

Aaron’s Law takes the additional step of authorizing the judge to order the parties into counseling sessions directed at educating the parties to the harm that their
conduct is causing the children, at their own expense.

These provisions are designed to address the real-life consequences of parental and family abductions and to deter the parties from carrying out the kidnapping in the first place.

Had Aaron’s Law been on the books in 1995, the Cruz family abduction would not have taken place and Aaron would be alive today. The Mormon non-family members, the Mormon Bishops and other officials who participated in the abduction would not have risked the consequences of Aaron’s Law.

Chris and Kory Wright, Bishop David Holliday, Bishop Donald Taylor and Relief Society President Evelyn Taylor would have all been subject to Aaron’s Law, all ordered financially liable for the damages, all subjected to the public humiliation of counseling directed at educating them to the harm their Mormon absolutism was causing my children and my family.

Aaron’s Law would have been a significant deterrent.

Once the Cruz kidnapping had begun, however, there was no way for them to end it without consequence, and my children’s conversion to Mormonism became their most important line of defense. I would never see my children again except under circumstances under Mormon control. They would never leave Utah except under Mormon supervision.

Aaron was too independent-minded to buy into their force-fed Mormonism, too much like his father, and they made him pay for that in Utah, where his despair became so complete that he began slicing up his arms with a knife at the age of fifteen.

Sean hopes to see the provisions of Aaron’s Law applied nationwide, that it might help reduce the number of parental and family abductions from its rate of more than 200,000 child victims a year to zero. More than 12,000 of those abductions last longer than six months, with lifelong consequences for all of the victims.

He also believes that Aaron’s Law provides the legal means for victims of child sex trafficking to hold their pimps and other abusers financially accountable for their crimes, having violated the Custodial Interference I statute.

No information about Senate Bill 1041 currently appears on the Oregon State Police Missing Children Clearinghouse website, five years after its passage.

There is much work yet to be done on this issue.

Oregon's Museum of Missing Children and the child sex trade

2010-11-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

You are probably not aware that the Oregon State Police maintains a Museum of Missing Children.

Created in 1989, it maintains such a low profile that I did not learn it existed until the summer of 2004, eight long years after my four children had disappeared from Oregon, on their way to concealment in a series of remote Mormon enclaves in Utah.

I discovered the OSP Missing Children Clearinghouse website while preparing my testimony for the Senate Interim Task Force on Parental and Family Abductions, which held four meetings that year.

It was a shocking discovery, my first clue to the fact that no Oregon law enforcement agency maintains a list of missing or abducted children, not then and not now (see “Abducted child vs stolen car: A problem of priorities” for further discussion).

One would think that the OSP Missing Children Clearinghouse would have such a list, collected from and shared with local law enforcement agencies throughout the state, but that is far from the case.

The site contains a scant 41 names. Some have been missing for decades. The only name added in the past three years is Kyron Horman, last seen in the company of his stepmom, Terri Horman, in June.

Yet Portland has been making the national news recently for its prominence in the child sex trade trafficking business.

In September, Sharyn Alfonsi reported on ABC World News:

“Though Portland, Oregon is considered one of the most livable cities in the U.S., it also has a reputation as the national hub for child sex trafficking.

“In today's Conversation, ABC's Diane Sawyer and Sharyn Alfonsi talked about Alfonsi's trip to Portland and why middle-class children are getting recruited in a city with the largest legal commercial sex trade (per capita) in the U.S.

“Alfonsi visited the 82nd Avenue strip, also known as "The Track," where there are more than 100 massage parlors and strip clubs. She interviewed child victims their parents and even the pimps.”

These reports are clearly at odds with the OSP list. It is not known what set of circumstances would cause a missing or abducted child’s name to appear on the OSP website, but it would begin with a report from local law enforcement.

Most of the photographs of the 41 missing children on the OSP website appear to be school pictures, and there is a nostalgic sense of looking at old yearbooks, at moments frozen in time, as one gazes at these faces, all but one, Kyron Horman, completely forgotten by all but the once-child’s surviving family members.

There is no cold case squad for missing or abducted children; for most, there isn’t even a warm case squad. If they are still alive, most of these faces belong to adults now, and one can be sure that law enforcement isn’t looking for children-now-adults.

These are photos for a museum, with little effective purpose other than to underscore the fact that abductions are forever, that these are continuing crimes, crimes without end, regardless of the ages of the victims.

To be sure, the OSP Missing Children’s Clearinghouse suffers from inadequate funding, a condition made permanent by the voters themselves when they amended the Constitution in the 1980’s to shift funding from the State Highway Fund to the General Fund, and then made a habit of continually underfunding the agency, biennium after biennium.

Efforts to recover Oregon’s missing and abducted children and to make a dent in the child sex trade that is currently flourishing here are surely hampered by the failure to prioritize the children, a fault shared by state and local law enforcement agencies and by successive legislatures.

The most recent OSP Annual Performance Progress Report posted on the agency website makes no mention of missing children, nor does its proposed Key Performance Measures for the 2009-2011 biennium.

The OSP and the Department of Justice assured the Task Force on Parental and Family Abductions in 2004 that they would implement a rule requiring that all Oregon local law enforcement agencies report all cases of missing or abducted children to the OSP Missing Children’s Clearinghouse, because they were not doing so on their own.

They never implemented the rule, making this a good time to remind the Oregon legislature and law enforcement agencies around the state, as they plan for the coming 2011 budgeting bloodbath, of the mission of the Oregon State Police Missing Children’s Clearinghouse:

“The mission of the Missing Children Clearinghouse is to receive and distribute information on missing children to local law enforcement agencies, school districts, state and federal agencies, and the public. In 1989,the Oregon legislature mandated that OSP establish and maintain a missing children clearinghouse.

“The goal of the Missing Children Clearinghouse is to streamline the system, serving child victims and their families by providing assistance to law enforcement agencies and the public.”

Lest they continue to be forgotten, the names of Oregon’s 41 missing children:

The earliest name on the list is Brian page, missing since 1975

Christi Farni and Edward Nye comprise the Class of 1978

Jerry Johnson has been missing since 1982.

Joan Hall vanished in 1983

William Gunn disappeared in 1984

Jeremy Bright and Duane Fochtman have been missing since 1986

Walter Ackerson, Kacey Perry and Rachanda Pickle, Class of 1990

Thomas Gibson made the list in 1991

Ashlyn Wilson vanished in 1995

Annalycia Cruz was an infant weighing 14 pounds when she disappeared in 1996

Aryssa Torabi and Derrick Engebretson, Class of 1998

Five children disappeared in 2001: Shausha Henson, Yuliana Escudero, Kami Vollendroff, Eugene Hyatt and Shaina Kirkpatrick

Carlos Cortez-Leon vanished in 2002

Five more children disappeared in 2004: Karla Coronado, Miriam Cruz-Torres, Schnee Bedford, and siblings Takoda and Tiana Weed

Narcisa Bernadino has been missing since 2005

Five children made the list in 2006: Samuel Boehlke, Nieves Izquierdo-Olea, Esmerelda Salazar-Penaloza, Luis Adrian-Olea, and Yeni Fuentes-Garcia

Seven children vanished in 2007: Jesus Marina-Mendoza, Keely Gigoux, Maria Hidalgo, sisters Savanah and Sierra Ontiveros, Jamie Wiedeman and Jacob Thorpe

According to the OSP Missing Children’s Clearinghouse, no Oregon children were reported missing in 2008, 2009 or 2010, until Kyron Horman was abducted in June 2010.

Tell that to Diane Sawyer and Sharyn Alfonsi….

===========

Sean Cruz led the workgroup on Oregon’s landmark anti-kidnapping statute Senate Bill 1041 “Aaron’s Law”, named for his late son Aaron Cruz. The provisions of the bill resulted in large part from the multiple failures of both the family law and criminal law systems in the wake of the abduction of his four children.

The bill was sponsored by Senator Avel Gordly and passed on a dramatic end-of-session unanimous House vote in 2005.

With Aaron’s Law, Oregon is the only state in the nation where abducting a child creates a civil cause of action.

Under Aaron’s Law, any victim can hold his or her abductor(s) financially accountable in civil court, including those who provided logistical, financial or planning support to the abductor(s) or who otherwise participated materially in the crime.

Sean hopes to see the provisions of Aaron’s Law applied nationwide and reduce the number of parental and family abductions from its rate of more than 200,000 child victims a year to zero.

He also believes that Aaron’s Law provides the legal means for victims of child sex trafficking to hold their pimps and other abusers financially accountable for their crimes, having violated the Custodial Interference I statute.

No information about Senate Bill 1041 appears on the OSP website.

On election to the Oregon Native American Chamber Board

2010-11-07T11:00:00.000-08:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—Members of the Oregon Native American Chamber recently elected me to its nine-member Board of Directors.

I am thrilled and honored to have this opportunity to make a contribution to ONAC’s mission and to the People the organization serves.

I am grateful for the friendship and support that ONAC members and friends of ONAC contributed to our work to establish the Jim Pepper Chair, the Jim Pepper Remembrance Scholarship Fund and the Jim Pepper Arts Festival at Portland State University. Their support was vital to our success.

I look forward to working alongside my fellow ONAC Board members on issues of significance to Native American populations statewide and throughout the NW region.

The Portland Metro Area is home to the ninth largest Native American population in the USA, with more than 380 tribes identified in the urban area alone.

ONAC’s mission is:

“We are dedicated to working with all members of the community to advance the educational and economic opportunities for Native Americans in Oregon and Southwest Washington.”

ONAC promotes and supports:

“The education, training and cultural understanding of Native Americans, ONAC members and ONAC partners through access to economic development programs, services and resources.

“The development, growth and advancement of Native American businesses, professionals and students in Oregon and Southwest Washington.

“Networking to increase business opportunities among Native American businesses, professionals, ONAC members and ONAC partners, thereby strengthening and growing economic opportunity for all communities in Oregon and Southwest Washington.”

I want to invite you to become a member of ONAC. You can thank me later. Find out more here:

http://www.onacc.org/

Abducted child vs stolen car: A problem of priorities

2010-11-04T17:53:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

“Guns drawn, everyone out and down on the ground!”

That’s how the officer described what would happen if the police encountered whoever was driving my freshly-stolen car, just last week.

He wanted me to know this because, although finding the car myself would be extremely unlikely, it does happen, and if I did happen to find it, I should report that fact before driving it anywhere, because I could also find myself facing an abrupt out-of-the-car-and-down-on-the-ground-at-gunpoint situation, and however unlikely that might be, it would be good advice to keep in mind.

Less than two hours after I had reported it stolen, information about my recently-departed red Subaru was already in the Law Enforcement Database and police agencies had been alerted from the Canadian border down to Mexico, and from the Oregon coast eastward to the Mississippi River.

As I listened to the officer, I reflected back nearly fifteen years ago, when I had reported the disappearance of my four children to local law enforcement, taken in what I would learn was a Mormon abduction as much as it was a parental and family abduction, and how differently law enforcement handled the case.

The bottom-line point I want to make here is that while Oregon law enforcement agencies maintain and share lists of stolen vehicles, there is no comparable list of abducted children anywhere throughout the state.

This dichotomy exposes one of the major gaps that abducted children fall through, particularly if the suspected kidnapper is a parent or family member.

The structural problem lies in the fact that local law enforcement agencies handle each case of abducted or missing children in their own way, with little or no sharing of information with other agencies or with the Oregon State Police Missing Children’s Clearinghouse.

The OSP Missing Children’s Clearinghouse has added only one new name to its short list in the past three years.

The Senate Interim Task Force on Parental and Family Abductions became aware of the problem in 2004 and considered legislation to correct it, but was dissuaded as reported to the Senate President:

“The Task Force considered legislation that would have required that all local law enforcement agencies report missing children to the Oregon State Police Missing Children’s Clearinghouse.

“However, after the State Police and the Department of Justice met and discussed the issue, they determined that the State Police could obtain this information by an administrative process that will automatically notify the Missing Children’s Clearinghouse of all reports of missing children made by state, county and local law enforcement agencies. Consequently, the Task Force decided that this legislation is not needed.” –Final Report, Senate Interim Task Force on Parental and Family Abductions, 2004.

It is important to understand what is being stated here:

1. The Task Force wanted to require that all Oregon local law enforcement agencies report all cases of missing or abducted children to the OSP Missing Children’s Clearinghouse, because they were not doing so on their own.

2. The OSP stated that they could get the information from local law enforcement by administrative rule, convincing the Task Force not to press legislation.

3. The OSP never implemented the rule, which would have created a list of all cases of abducted or missing children reported in Oregon.

The Task Force determined that Oregon has its per capita share of the more than 200,000 cases of parental and family abductions that take place in the USA each year, yet the Oregon State Police has added only one name, that of Kyron Horman, to its Missing Children’s Clearinghouse list in the past three years.

A few months ago, a father from southern Oregon whose 3-year-old daughter went missing with the child’s mother in July contacted me. Local law enforcement had told him that his missing child did not “meet the criteria” for any actual action by law enforcement, including adding his missing child to the State Police list of missing Oregon children, or notifying law enforcement in other jurisdictions of the missing child…and yet there was a child missing….

The phrase “does not meet the criteria” struck me when I took the call, because I was already planning to write about the subject, which came up during a press conference on the Kyron Horman abduction on July 23, when Sheriff Dan Staton
responded to a series of questions, including this one:

Q: How many other children are considered missing/endangered in Multnomah County at this time, aside from Kyron?

“There are no other cases that meet this criteria,” he said.

“This criteria” may have included the fact that one of Kyron’s close family members is a police detective, giving the family instant credibility with law enforcement.

Coupled with the fact that Kyron’s disappearance was originally thought to be a stranger abduction (since no one else was missing), the family’s call to 911 quickly led to the largest search for a missing child in the history of the state.

The OSP could hardly ignore that.

The Oregon State Police Missing Children Clearinghouse maintains a list of abducted or otherwise missing children, which stands currently at 41 children.

More than half of these children have been missing for decades, and the only child that has “met the criteria” to make the OSP list in the past three years is Kyron Horman….

The US Department of Justice has reported no decrease in the number of abducted children, tallied at more than 200,000 annually for more than a dozen years, signaling that not enough is being done to address the problem.

People abduct their own children or other family members in large part because they are likely to get away with it, to suffer no consequences for their part in the crime, partially explaining why the number is so high.

The failure of law enforcement to utilize the same technological resources that enable them to instantly notify agencies across every jurisdictional level or locale about my stolen Subaru, to reach the same agencies with reports of abducted or missing children is difficult enough to understand.

The Task Force report documents the fact that OSP and the Department of Justice became aware of both the problem and the solution through the course of the Task Force’s work, and yet have done nothing to correct it.

We all live complicated lives. Imagine for a moment how complicated your life would be if your child was abducted, and you found out that your child’s’ name wasn’t on the list, because there was no list.

It is not a question of knowledge or awareness; the Task Force report and the OSP’s addition of just a single name in the past three years indicates that this is a problem of policy, a problem of priorities, a matter of choosing to value stolen property over stolen lives.

--Sean Cruz, November 2010

Celilo Falls: Time to start the clock ticking, time to light the fire....

2010-10-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

We live with the consequences of many disastrous public policy decisions, arguably none more plainly evident than the flooding of Celilo Falls, radioactive sites aside….

The flooding of Celilo Falls is the American equivalent of the Soviet decision to drain the Aral Sea, taken in the same era, the wrong people in charge, all thinking in the very same way….

This US Army Corp of Engineers movie was shot in 1956, one year before a confluence of short-sighted idiots at the state, local and federal levels deliberately destroyed all that you see here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5Ku9HIyQNQ

The Army film documents the fact that there was no shortage of information available to the decision-makers. They knew what they were about….

Another video, “See Through the Water”, tells the Celilo story in the words of the Celilo people themselves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXFYu7l_rNk

The rock structure of Celilo Falls lies intact below the surface of the pond that now covers this place.

Someday, a study will be taken, weighing the costs and benefits of reclaiming Celilo Falls and all that it stands for, versus the costs and benefits of maintaining the dam at The Dalles, and a decision will be made in favor of Celilo Falls and the salmon, someday….

It is only a matter of time until we get to that place, as these two videos make plain. There are costs and benefits either way. It’s time to do the math.

No reasonable person living today would consider building a dam to flood Celilo Falls. The notion, just like draining the Aral Sea, would be unthinkable….

There is a way to engineer getting the occasional barge up and down the river, and a way to generate power and a way to bring Celilo Falls back to life as surely as there is a way for a man to walk on the Moon….

Were it not for the terrible decisions of a previous generation, were Celilo Falls flowing today, this place would be regarded as one of the world’s greatest heritage sites, and every effort would be made to preserve the Falls and the cultures it sustained forever, to the last human breath, we would all stand together….

It is time to start the Celilo Falls clock ticking, time to do the math, time to stand vigil for the day that the waters roar and the earth shakes anew….

It is time to light the fire that will still be burning when Celilo Falls reappears, when the salmon leap and all the world celebrates, it is time to light the fire….

On the M 75 Wood Village Casino: Who will carry The Monkey?

2010-10-13T21:21:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Who will carry The Monkey?

Beyond the Good For Oregon rhetoric, the budget numbers claimed, the short-sighted appeal for construction jobs, the multiple constitutional law and legislative issues, the anti-Indian sentiments, the Tea Party fundamentalism, beyond the Disneyland-of-the-North picture that the Wood Village casino promoters are attempting to draw, is the question of who will carry The Monkey….

Who will carry The Monkey?

The project is being designed to function as a gigantic cradle-to-grave honey trap, where every activity on the premises is “fun”, and stepping into the Wood Village Casino becomes a rite of passage for every child upon reaching legal age, the last stop in the Rossman-Studer Continuum of Fun, where every child will someday meet The Monkey….

The business case that Matthew Rossman and Bruce Studer are promoting on behalf of their foreign investors is based on their assertions that the Wood Village Casino complex will increase local spending on gambling.

The complex is in fact expressly designed to encourage that behavior over the next several generations, hence the Tot’s Pool, the Children’s Wave Pool, and the Kids’ Fountain Pool, built close by where The Monkey lives….

They see a lot of future Casino customers swooshing down those water slides, enjoying all of that "fun family entertainment" throughout their childhood and adolescent years, so the pro forma proclaims, a Place Where One Step Leads to Another….

These two shiny-suited part-lawyers/part-carnival barkers imagine a bright future for Oregon.

They want to create an environment where casino gambling is as familiar, as close-at-hand to Oregon children, as is any other form of public entertainment.

The Rossman-Studer plan under Measure 75 amounts to an exclusive 30-year run at every family in the Portland Metro Area.

The 2010 Oregon General Election Voters Pamphlet is out now, signaling that the ballots will soon be in the mail.

Among the several Arguments in Favor published in the pamphlet, eight are signed by Rossman and Studer alone. They are hoping to pick up votes from some who might not notice the overselling.

To their everlasting shame, a couple of trade unions have submitted statements in favor of passage, but their interest does not extend beyond jobs for their own membership, even though some percentage of those union families too will become Monkey-bearers.

The Canadian firm bankrolling the Wood Village Casino is putting $ 250 million into the deal, and they are planning to get that back and more by stimulating “increased spending on local gambling.”

Long term, they've got their eyes on your children and on your child’s children, and it is them who will one day carry The Monkey, The Monkey on their backs that will make two Lake Oswego lawyers and their foreign investors rich beyond rich.

Vote NO on Measure 75.

Chris Dudley's assault on Oregon's minimum wage

2010-10-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Chris Dudley's campaign continues to promote a "training wage", which is an assault on Oregon’s minimum wage, while claiming that Dudley didn’t really mean it when he said that Oregon’s waitresses and other tip-earners are making too much money.

To Chris Dudley, a "training wage" is a new idea, but this issue has been fought over in the legislature for years, supported by the same Republicans who want to cut Oregon's minimum wage.

If he had been paying any attention at all to Oregon affairs, Dudley would know something about the history of the ongoing battle over Oregon's minimum wage, and the mess he stepped into when he brought the subject of a "training wage" and what he believes are Oregon’s overpaid waitresses into the discussion.

The same people, the same organizations, which have fought to cut Oregon's minimum wage over the years are bankrolling Dudley's campaign, and they are counting on their boy to come through for them. A “training wage” is their best shot at rolling back Oregon’s minimum wage, and they have been putting money into that battle for years.

Governor Ted Kulongoski and Governor John Kitzhaber have both been stalwart defenders of Oregon's minimum wage throughout their terms in office.

Every family with a minimum-wage earner or a student entering the workforce has a direct economic interest in the outcome of the race for Oregon Governor.

Chris Dudley's supporters are looking to recoup their investment by taking dollars out of your wallets. No one else stands to gain from a “training wage” exception to Oregon’s minimum wage standards.

Every working family in the state should stand behind John Kitzhaber for Governor in this election.

Looking at the numbers: Analyzing Chris Dudley's Point/Budget Ratio

2010-10-09T16:43:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

Oregon GOP candidate for Governor Chris Dudley has articulated several different long lists of things he would like to do if elected, all of which cost money, which means that numbers are important in this election. A simple Point/Budget Ratio analysis can provide valuable insights into the numbers.

As a public service, recognizing that it can be difficult for the average voter to ascertain what the numbers mean, here are the lists, along with the budget information the Dudley campaign has provided to show how each item would be paid for, and a 2-step process for analyzing Chris Dudley’s Point/Budget Ratio:

18-Point Plan called “Education for our Economic Future”

20-Point ”Plan to Create Private Sector Jobs and Stimulate the Economy”

26-Point “Plan to Control Spending and Reform Government”

67-Point “Plan to Make Everything All Better in Oregon’s Corrections System”

= 131 Total Points

Two-Step Point/Budget Ratio analysis:

1. Total points = 131
2. Total budget information provided = Zero

Chris Dudley’s Point-Budget Ratio is therefore 131/0.

I hope this information is helpful for the Undecided in this race.

John Kitzhaber proves he's ready to lead; Dudley offers mumbo-jumbo

2010-10-01T23:23:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Former basketball player Chris Dudley confirmed throughout his debate with former Governor John Kitzhaber that, while he can manage a mouthful of rhetoric, he cannot manage it over the course of an entire hour without a prepared script.

He did especially poorly when he took questions from the audience, such as this one:

Q. “Where do you stand on taxation of food and beverage and also tobacco and liquor?”

Dudley: “Well, we have, I mean, in addition to what we already have in place?"

A. “Yes.”

Dudley: “So, what we have, I have not brought up changing what we have in place and, uh, so I think we should continue it, and that is something, by the way, that our cities and counties rely on as well, uh, for their funding and so, it’s not something that I’ve talked about changing.”

I listened to Dudley’s response to this question in semi-stunned silence, because not only is it complete gibberish, but one of his big “new ideas”, championed on his website and in his several multiple-pointed Plans to Make Everything All Better in Oregon, is his determination to privatize the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, and “put a fee” on the sales and distribution of liquor in Oregon.

It’s his own plan, it’s right there on his website, been there for months, that he wants to “put a fee” on the sale and distribution of liquor to make up for the loss of revenue supporting local governments that privatizing the OLCC would cause.

The more Dudley spoke, the worse it got, and it is appalling to think that we could possibly have to listen to this mumbo-jumbo beyond the first week of November.

If this was a boxing match, they’d have to ring the bell every fifteen seconds to keep this man on his feet.

KGW could perform an important public service by rebroadcasting this debate at different times and dates. If this is the only debate we've got, then it won't hurt to see it several times.

We all have too much at stake to allow Oregon to fall victim to the Tea Party mentality that is at the root of the Dudley campaign.

John Kitzhaber is clearly ready to lead the state through this critical time.

Oregon needs a leader ready to come to work, not a person whose principal accomplishment is being tall and reasonably athletic, and certainly not a candidate who cannot remember his own rhetoric.

Kyron Horman, the List of Abducted Children and "Meeting the Criteria", part 1

2010-09-30T16:47:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Every now and then a child is abducted somewhere in Oregon, and some weeks or months later, I receive a phone call from the child’s parent….

Their story is always the same: It has been weeks or months since they last knew the location of their child…the child disappeared with the other parent, who has fled the state…they’ve been to the police…they’ve been to the courts…they cannot find anyone in the system who is willing to help…the media doesn’t see a reason to get involved…and yet their child is still missing….

They contact me because they have been searching for help on line, and their search has led them to Aaron’s Law, Oregon’s landmark 2005 anti-kidnapping statute, named for my late son Aaron Cruz, and to my blogs, and they’ve read about the law, and they are calling me because they are desperate for advice….

Most don’t have the money to hire a lawyer, much less the resources to hire a private investigator to go out and find their abducted child, and they are mostly men, men who are trying to keep their lives steady while facing the reality, the horror, that they may never see their child again….

Some, like the most recent case, a father who called me a week ago from southern Oregon whose 3-year-old daughter went missing in July, have been told by local law enforcement that their missing child does not “meet the criteria” for any actual action by law enforcement, including adding their missing child to the State Police list of missing Oregon children, or notifying law enforcement in other jurisdictions of the missing child…and yet there is a child who is missing….

The phrase “does not meet the criteria” struck me when I took the call, because I was already planning to write about the subject, which came up during a press conference on the Kyron Horman abduction on July 23, when Washington County Sheriff Dan Staton responded to a series of question, including this one:

Q: How many other children are considered missing/endangered in Multnomah County at this time, aside from Kyron?

“There are no other cases that meet this criteria,” he said.

The Oregon State Police Missing Children Clearinghouse maintains a list of abducted or otherwise missing children, which stands currently at 41 children.

More than half of these children have been missing for decades, and the only child that has “met the criteria” to make the list in the past three years is Kyron Horman….

The Oregon State Police website has a “spotlight” featuring five of these missing children, with Kyron’s name at the top of the list:

Samuel Boehlke has been missing for just over four years.

Jeremy Bright has been missing since 1986.

Karla Coronado has been missing for more than six years.

Carlos Cortez-Leon has been missing for eight years and two weeks.

Samuel Boehlke

Missing Date
10/14/2006

Jeremy Bright

Missing Date
08/14/1986

Karla Coronado

Missing Date
07/26/2004

Carlos Cortez-Leon

Missing Date
10/14/2002

http://www.oregon.gov/OSP/MCC/index.shtml

At the bottom of the Spotlight feature is a link labeled “Click here to see all of Oregon’s missing children” that takes you to the page where 41 children are identified, where 40 of those children are the same children, year after year, where the Oregon State Police declares that these are all of the missing children, there are none other to be worried about….

But that list does not come close to identifying “all” of Oregon’s missing children, and it never has…it contains only the names of those children who have “met the criteria”….

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a list of missing Oregon children, but it is a different list....

At the same time, law enforcement is aware that Oregon has its proportional share of parentally and family-abducted children, a number that the US Department of Justice calculates at more than 200,000 children a year, nationwide; you can do the math….

The fact is that no one has a list of all of Oregon’s missing and abducted children, no one…. No law enforcement agency in the state is required to keep or maintain a list, and so no list of missing children exists….

Only the list that “meets the criteria”….

End part 1

Chris Dudley's 67-Point Plan to Make Everything All Better in Oregon's Correctional System

2010-09-28T12:04:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

As soon as Chris Dudley heard that Oregon’s correctional system was experiencing a budget crisis, he immediately set to work, just last week, creating another plan with nearly as many points as vowels, and if there is anything Chris Dudley knows about his multiple-numbered plans, is that a lot of people like them, and he’s in the business of telling people what they like to hear….

He was particularly glad to have this opportunity to slap a plan together, even on such short notice, because this is the one area in which he has some actual experience for the job he's applying for....

Dudley's years in the NBA put him in constant contact with a broad assortment of criminal elements, rubbing elbows both on and off the court, you can just about name your poison in that mob....

His lengthy experience in helping a handful of basketball players leverage endorsement deals may not mean much as far as qualifying Dudley for the job of Governor, but it must mean something, and that's good enough for a lot of people....

Dudley has a proven track record of creating multi-numbered lists of Things To Do While in Oregon that sound really smart to a lot of people, though it's not clear why Oregon piqued his interest at this time instead of the states he has closer ties to....

...and he's just about tall enough to be his own watch tower; there ought to be some savings there....

These points all add up to a lot of reasons that are just as good as any other to vote for Chris Dudley....

Here are all of the issues Chris Dudley has considered so far, as of Tuesday, September 28, 2010, as evidenced on his campaign website:

Dudley Issue Overview

Job Creation
Taxes
Spending Control/Budget Reform
Public Employee Health Care and Retirement Benefits
Privatizing State Liquor Sales
"Rainy Day" State Savings
Higher Education
K-12 Education
Land Use/Property Rights
Rebuilding Public Trust
Energy
Natural Resources
Health Care
Transportation

Don't see the issue most important to you here? Email Chris at Chris@chrisdudley.com

Somehow Oregon’s correctional system was left off of the website list, but Oregon voters can sleep well knowing that very soon, Chris Dudley will have a new list, and that list will have more numbers than all of his other lists combined, and even if they aren’t budget or revenue numbers, the numbers will be right there in the title of the plan where they are easy to see, and that’s what counts anyway….

Here are the first ten points in Chris Dudley’s 67-Point Plan to Make Everything All Better in Oregon’s Correctional System:

1. Let’s have a discussion about this
2. We need to plan carefully
3. This will be all better by 2014
4. Yet another reason to lower capital gains taxes
5. Oregon needs a more business-friendly climate
6. Right after privatizing the OLCC, we’ll privatize the prisons
7. I will appoint a new Correctional Director in the Office of the Governor
8. I will appoint a new Corrections Commission to figure this one out
9. PERS is the problem, and I’ve already solved that problem in one of my other plans
10. The Corrections budget problem has no impact on any of my other plans; they are all still as good as they ever were.

The last days of Aaron Cruz, pt 2: "Dad, I will never be well."

2010-09-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

2. “Dad, I will never be well.”

My son spoke these words to me, a thick vein of despair in his voice, and I felt at once a heartburst of pain for him, for all those years that had been stolen from him, those last years of adolescence, those years in which he was forced to become a man without his dad to guide him, those years he had been held in remote Mormon enclaves in theocratic Utah, those years he had suffered through the emotional chaos of dealing with his mother’s life, her boyfriends plus three step dads, including the step dad who often slapped my children around their house in Payson, Utah, a heavy-set angry bastard named Steve Nielsen….

Aaron said these words to me in the early fall of 2003 just a few weeks after I had recovered him from the abduction, the only one of my four children that I was able to recover, and he was filling me in, telling me about how the damage came about, that look in his eyes telling me how severe his suffering had been during those years….

“Dad”, he said, “I didn’t want to tell you over the phone”, he said, “I wanted to see you in person and tell you myself,” he said; that’s the kind of young man Aaron was, an honorable son, his best years already gone forever….

“Dad, I will never be well!” he declared. I had just gotten him enrolled into the Oregon Health Plan. You had to be very sick to gain entry in 2003, and Aaron was more than overqualified for emergency acute care, with eight years’ worth of experience as the victim of a kidnapping…and in my heart, I knew he was telling me the straight-out truth, his opportunity to live a normal life, the life that I had dreamed of sharing with him, had been taken forever; now we were going to need a lot of medical help to find out what was left, what we could hope for….

Aaron was talking about more than the physical damage, he was talking about the emotional damage that he suffered during his years of 100% forced Mormon immersion….

In all the years that had passed since my four children disappeared into the exclusive control of his mother and her Mormon friends, I was able to gain access to only one medical report, that for Aaron, and nothing at all for my other three kidnapped children, despite an Order for Joint Custody….

The one report that I had seen was the documentation for Aaron’s admission “on an emergency basis” into a psychiatric ward in Provo, Utah, dated December 18, 1997, four months short of his 16^th birthday. It was a miracle that I had been able to obtain this document….

The report described my son: “He is tall and thin…He has a slightly dark facial complexion…He looks sad…His mood is depressed and affect is sad. He speaks with a soft, slow voice. He reports a number of symptoms of depression including suicidal ideation and self injury...The patient’s insight judgment and impulse control is impaired as evidenced by wanting to resolve his problems with suicide and cutting himself…he has numerous large scars on both arms. He reports that when he cuts himself he feels relieved from internal pain. He cuts himself with a knife….”

I did not actually see those scars until Aaron was laying there comatose in Payson, Utah; he was sensitive about his arms and always wore long-sleeve shirts, plenty of time to count them during those five days and nights he lay motionless and unresponsive, to see the way they crisscrossed both upper arms, left and right, scars across scars…no needle marks on those arms, but lots of long scars, four inches long or more, wide scars, I hadn’t realized that a knife’s edge could create a scar so wide until I saw them on my son’s comatose arms….

I wondered how long he was cutting himself, at the tender age of fifteen, his despair so complete, how soon after his disappearance into Utah did the cutting begin, the report described multiple scars but provided no information as to when the self-mutilation began and how long it continued, and absolutely everyone concealed this information from me, most especially his mother and whoever she happened to be married to or otherwise involved with at the time or at any time thereafter….

Now, a few days after Aaron had been pronounced dead, his mother was telling this memorial gathering her story about the last time she had seen Aaron alive, about how he was sick and feverish and at risk of slipping into a coma, about how she had left him without meds but with a sack of groceries, her new husband Ben Foulk waiting impatiently across town, and she in a hurry to get back to California to her newly affluent life, co-owner of a string of high end retirement homes in El Dorado Hills, the new Mr. and Mrs. Ben and Gina Foulk, grumpy Ben, deep-pocketed Ben Foulk, waiting impatiently across town….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/

Gina had also left Aaron behind during his emergency psychiatric hospitalization, had gone on vacation out of state, leaving my 15-year old son to spend that Christmas in the psychiatric ward in Provo Utah with the other patients, while she took a Christmas holiday in Oregon and Washington, including a couple of shopping runs at Lloyd Center….

The report quoted my son at the time he was admitted: “I am very depressed. I want to die. I want to commit suicide. I cut on myself.”

As soon as I learned he was in the hospital, I was able to reach Aaron by phone and we talked about our love for each other. Then he was abruptly released into the custody of stepdad Steve Nielsen, the man who slapped my children around throughout their marriage, and I lost contact with my son, the hospital refusing to provide any additional information, this is Utah after all, and his mother Gina Nielsen refusing to provide any further information about my son, where he was or where Steve Nielsen was holding him…years would pass before I would learn anything more….

“Dad, I will never be well”, he said….

To be continued….

Part 3 is coming soon....

A conversation with Winona LaDuke about Jim Pepper, pt 1

2010-09-21T21:42:00.000-07:00

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon --

Winona LaDuke and I had an impromptu conversation at KBOO 90.7FM that was recorded by KBOO Engineer Liam Delta in May, 2010.

The subjects ranged from the new White Earth radio station that Winona is building (they are looking for engineering help right now--call them if you can help), to the Heavy Haul tar sands project she is opposing, to the great Native American musician Jim Pepper.

The entire conversation will be posted on YouTube in segments, and will be continued....

Here's part 1, about Jim Pepper and Witchi-Tai-To:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-Soll5Su18

Oregon GOP Candidate Chris Dudley offers 20-point Tea Party plan to create one job

2010-09-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--Once again, GOP candidate Chris Dudley tosses out a randomly numbered “plan” that contains no cost information at all, but lots more free ponies!

Throughout its tedious length, Dudley’s “Jobs” plan identifies only one job that the plan would create: the new Budget Manager position that would be part of his super-sized office of the governor. The Budget Manager’s job would be to explain the budget to Dudley.

Chris Dudley's supporters want to put a man who cannot be responsible for his own decision making regarding his personal finances, and who has no experience managing anything at all, in charge of a multi-billion dollar state budget, and at a time when the state and the nation is in grave economic crisis.

They want to put a man who cannot give clear answers about just about anything he's asked, whether personal or political, even about his campaign "ideas" promoted on his own website; a man who cannot be clear even on his residency, into a position that demands transparency and accountability, and real personal commitment to the state of Oregon.

They want to elevate a man whose campaign strategy depends upon his avoidance of any open discussions about the problems facing the state, into a position that requires its occupant to discuss those problems openly and on a full time basis.

They want to support a candidate who says he wants to shrink government and control spending, but whose plans call for a drastic enlargement of the office of the governor, the creation of new state government positions, open-ended new spending, and the imposition of new fees and taxes, all stated on the Dudley campaign's website.

That makes perfect sense to the Tea Party mentality driving the Dudley campaign, the same mentality supporting the fringe candidates haunting GOP primaries in pockets around the nation.

These candidates, like Chris Dudley, aren't offering real solutions, in large part because their supporters don't care whether they do or not.

They can't be bothered with solutions, they just know what they don't like.

The last days of Aaron Cruz, Pt 1: A mother's love and a sack of groceries

2010-09-13T12:45:00.000-07:00

By Sean Cruz

My son’s mother Gina Foulk told the story herself, in words that shock and sadden me even more today than they did at the time of Aaron’s death, more than five years ago….

Speaking before a group of perhaps fifty people in Payson, Utah, gathered together in memory of my son a week after he had been found comatose and unresponsive in her empty house a short distance away, she described the last time that she had seen Aaron alive, and her incomprehensible actions….

He was sick and feverish, she said, and she had left him alone….

He was out of his meds, and she had left him alone, in an empty house cluttered with Aaron’s empty prescription bottles strewn all over, with a sack of groceries and a crazy story….

She had left him alone, sick and feverish, without health care, without a call to a doctor, without refilling his prescriptions, the ones that were keeping him from suffering the very coma in which he died, without driving him to the hospital, without picking up the phone to alert anyone else to look after her son, she had left him alone, and was telling us all about it, without shedding a single tear….

She had told Aaron that Heavenly Father loved him, she said, lying there beside her sick and feverish son, she said, and here are some groceries for you, honey…and then she left him alone….

Aaron was sick and feverish she said, and what she did not say was that her new Mormon husband Ben Foulk was waiting across town, impatient to get back to California, where he owns a string of high-end medical-care-dispensing retirement homes (“Would you like some more cranberry juice with your pills, Mrs Treatednicely?”), and she was in a hurry to get out on the road, no time for doctors….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/

If she had driven him to the emergency room that night, the staff would have admitted him immediately, put him on IVs, and some medical people would have been working with real concern, realizing as they went along, working to save this young man’s life, that there is more to this story than meets the eye, this young man should have been hospitalized weeks ago, months ago….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/

The fact is that Aaron had been sick and feverish for a good long time; this part of his mother’s story was not news; In fact, just about everyone in that room listening to Gina Foulk’s story had known Aaron was sick, my son was visibly ill and everyone knew it, and yet no one had stepped up to get him seen by a doctor, not even Mr. and Mrs. Ben and Gina Foulk.

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/

There’s another way to tell the story of the last days of Aaron Cruz: I had gone broke keeping Aaron alive that year, and when I ran out of money to pay for his anti-seizure and other meds, after I had spent my very last dollar, he convulsed and died, sick and alone, in that empty house, out of his meds…with his mother’s last sack of groceries….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/

Now I was standing here in this other house in Payson, Utah, listening to my son’s mother tell her story, having traveled here on money I had borrowed from friends, having had just gone broke trying to keep my son alive, having just spent five days and nights at his side at the hospital, to the end of life support, I am listening to a story about a sack of groceries and Heavenly Father….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/

My son’s mother told the gathering matter-of-factly that Aaron was sick and feverish, and she described how she had lain beside him and comforted him with stories about how much Heavenly Father loves him…and here’s a sack of groceries for you, honey, she said…but Ben Foulk was waiting impatiently across town, pills to dispense in Northern California, gold in them thar El Dorado Hills….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/

She said nothing at all about his meds, no mention at all in her meandering, incomprehensible story about the empty pill bottles that would have been scattered all over the house, Paxil in gigantic doses, the anti-seizure meds that were the key to keeping him out of a coma, no telling what else, since she grabbed and destroyed all of my son Aaron Cruz’s medical records, no telling at all, Ben and Gina Foulk’s lawyers have built an impenetrable wall behind which my son’s medical records are concealed….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/

Gina Foulk told this crazy matter-of-fact tearless story about how she left Aaron alone that night and turned the page; “I told him all about Heavenly Father”, she reassured this Mormon gathering, and no one said a word….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/

And her story would get crazier still when she told it a few days later on the day we laid my son Aaron Cruz into the earth in El Dorado Hills, California, where the Ben and Gina Foulks own a string of high-end retirement homes, providing high-end medical care to their well-heeled clients…and for you, Aaron, a sack of groceries and some Mormon stories to keep you company; now, here’s a nice piece of stone on a hillside, enjoy the birds….

http://www.eldoradohillsseniorcare.com/

To be continued….