Pastor Fride and his idol

On Palm Sunday of this year, Reverend Edward Fride, of Christ the King parish in Ann Arbor, Michigan, made himself temporarily famous by announcing during the Mass that the parish would be conducting qualifying classes for parishioners to carry concealed firearms. This announcement was met with some resistance from parishioners, to which Fr. Ed responded with a longish letter explaining his position. That letter exploded across the internet, with titles like, “Priest tells flock to pack heat.” This dust-up, in turn, compelled the Bishop of Lansing to issue a (sensible, in my view) cease-and-desist directive to Fr. Ed on gun training in the parish.

Hondo Hillary - 10

The Colonial Surrogates

If you want to understand who is the true power behind the Honduran coup, you need to find out who is paying Lanny Davis.

-Robert White, former US Ambassador to El Salvador

If you begin with the military sector, the Honduran coup makers can be sub-divided generally by tasks: military tasks, financial tasks, political tasks, and media tasks. The old “send guns, money, and lawyers” trope. Just add, “send well-heeled media.”

Hondo Hillary - 9

The Coup in Tegucigalpa

There’s a lot of work to do for a coup to be consolidated.

The consolidation phase had failed in Venezuela – in large part through the strategic error of listening to a few bought Generals telling the coup-makers the armed forces would follow the leader. It didn’t hurt that this is what the coup-makers wanted to believe. The young officers and the rank-and-file stood by the new popular Constitution, and one of the three legs to the coup collapsed.
It’s formulaic in the extreme to break coups down this way, so I’ll declaim early.

The three-leg theory of coup-making is necessary but certainly not sufficient to explain this highly complex enterprise. Those three legs are the three dimensions of destabilization: economic disruption and imposed scarcity, political turmoil, and the willing participation of the most powerful military/security institutions.

Hondo Hillary - 8

Reagan’s Raiders



Beginning with Haiti, we can work back to the Reagan years; and we will see that many of the coup cadre under review on Honduras worked for both Reagan and the Bush dynasty.

Hondo Hillary - 7

Anatomy and Sequence of the Modern Coup

The Murder of Luis Rolando Valenzuela Ulloa

Valenzuela

On July 1, 2010, Adrienne Pine, and American academic and activist working in Honduras, penned her suspicions in an article for the online site “Honduras Culture and Politics,” called “Honduran suspicions of US complicity in the coup.” (Part 2) With the coup still shrouded in official secrecy, she was simply recounting what she heard on the Honduran street. One of the stories on the street was that Rolando Valenzeula had been murdered.

The North American ambassador accredited to Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, did know about the coup d’Etat against Manuel Zelaya Rosales, the ex-minister of the Zelaya administration, Roland Valenzuela, revealed days before his death, in an interview broadcast by the journalist Ernesto Alonso Rojas, in a local radio station of the city of San Pedro Sula.

Hondo Hillary - 6

Another One-Trick Pony (The Coup Cadre)

We have talked about how the Fed has but one trick to command the economy (raising and lowering interest rates).  Recently they discovered one more trick that is a form of temporary trauma management in the wake of 2008, called quantitative easing, which basically puts off the inevitable - making the rich richer in the meantime (the Dow as I write this is soaring past 18,000 as the printing presses roll) - and ensures it will be much worse for the rest of us when the trick hits its limit.  That is not the topic of this series, but there is much being said about it elsewhere.

Hondo Hillary - 5

[A] Hillary Clinton coronation would mean a Democratic nominee with close ties to Wall Street and the neoliberal wing of the party. . ."

-Noam Scheiber

Neoliberalism – A Short History

The notion that a great expansion of the size of ‘capital markets’ is a symptom of positive trends in capitalist production is as false as imagining that a vast expansion of the insurance industry is a sign that the world is becoming a safer place.

-Peter Gowan

In the Beginning…

Hondo Hillary - 4

"If Hillary Clinton is a feminist, I'm a Franciscan fighter pilot.  She's a me-first, mean-spirited male impersonator."

-Philomena Foat

(Last episode, we began our explication of neoliberalism.  Going to motive . . .)

The Neoliberal Theology

Hondo Hillary - 3

Introduction to a Different Story

This is a story, based on some facts… different than the stories we hear from the media.  Facts can be arranged to make a story.  The media had one story.  This is another.

On June 28th, 2009, the legitimately elected and popular President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was dragged out of bed in his pajamas by Honduran soldiers, bound and beaten, flown out of Honduras using the US military’s Soto Cano airfield, and sent into exile. There was immediate and universal condemnation of the coup, including from the United States. President Barack Obama condemned the coup (without ever calling it a coup). So did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The story faded from the news. The Hondurans had some kind of election. Everything is okay now.

Hondo Hillary - 2

This page is incomplete, but we will continue to add the photos and links as we go.  This is simply preparation for the rest of the series, which we will begin immediately.

Cast of Characters

(alphabetical order)

War, Sex, & Yoder

Today's National Catholic Reporter - Online carried an article announcing that the Mennonite Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana has officially apologized (to victims) for its role in evading the issue for decades of pacifist theologian John Howard Yoder's actions as a serial sexual predator.

Study Guide: 'Borderline - Reflections on War, Sex, and Church'

This study guide for Borderline - Reflections on War, Sex, and Church is for two different kinds of people who might study what they read. Some might be obliged to study as formal students in a college or university. Others might study on their own initiative outside any institutional setting. As a result, the book might seem to "talk up" to the average reader with twelve to fourteen years of formal education, even as it seems to "talk down" in its explanations of various ideas and terms to a graduate student in history, philosophy, or theology.  So there is something there to irritate everyone. The intent, however, is not to talk up or down to anyone, but to be accessible enough to both to be a bridge between these two worlds - between those who are very well-schooled and those who are not, but who on their own initiative are raising the kinds of questions that sociology or history or philosophy or theology might raise. So I ask both groups to be tolerant of the book on those accounts. In a sense, the book is intended to be a small contribution to breaking down what a friend once called "the intellectual division of labor."