"It's wrong to speak ill of the dead..."

Can those of you who believe this stupid notion take a running jump at yourselves? Do you pine for the lost lives of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Attila the Hun, Ronald Reagan, Julius Caesar, the Borgias, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Ted Bundy, Quisling, Sidney Reilly, Aleister Crowley, Roy Cohn, Gilles de Rais, Eichmann, Himmler, Beria, Custer (don't get me started), and every asshole that ever lived that drew breath for too long on this rock called earth?

Are you really that stupid? Sadly, the answer is a resounding "yes," you are that fucking stupid, and it shows, like a pregnancy in its sixth month. As stupid as you are, you'd have a mountain of excuses for these bastards while they were alive, and in slave-like manner, in death. You're a bona fide idiot, a moron, and an asshole. How does it feel?

Here's how it works in the real world, with people who are well-balanced and don't possess your superhuman skills of assholism and rationalization: They point-out when someone's been bad.

I know this is somehow a mystery to you, and you usually make excuses that you're "clumsy" when your significant other beats the crap out of you, or you keep voting against your interests, again and again, like an animal (OK, that's unfair to the animals). This is because you don't get it, or much else. I have witnessed the family of the deceased chanting at a funeral parlor that, "Finally, the son-of-a-bitch died, praise God!" Were they wrong to do this? Who the fuck are you to say otherwise? That said, who are you to tell people who have been affected by recently deceased politicians--very negatively--to make it clear what they did to them and what they think of them? Your only care, frankly, are how the comments affect Y-O-U. That's not as enlightened as you present it, but we already know you're full of shit.

In short: who do you think you are?

No, one shouldn't speak ill of living dead either, the real message.

Why did they know, and you did not?

I've written about my grandparents on here several times and what wonderful, homespun Populists they were, and not the wacky right wing kind either. That was for their siblings to take up, they're thickos.

My grandmother was literally from the dirt. Her Scotch-Irish parents were monsters who tried to pump their kids with religion, neglected them, and beat them. They were literally hillbillies living in the Ozarks in the 1920s-30s, and they were poor, very poor. I'm pretty certain that my grandmother had her religious beliefs, but she had a very interesting mistrust of "preachers," as she called them. She was an Ozarks Cinderella who went to a "seeing woman" to guess the sex of her one child, my mother, while she was pregnant.

"A preacher should get a real job," she would insist when we even casually talked about organized religion. Was it just her opinion that swayed me against all forms of organized religion? No, it was the experience of it and how inhuman, uncaring and revolting most of it is. I hate virtually all organized religion and look at it as an abomination before all humankind.

"The preacher man doesn't know any more than you do about what comes after this." she would often follow-up with. I couldn't have agreed more with her then or now. What's interesting is that this is a heretical belief, yet she thought of herself as a very religious and spiritual person; she just didn't trust people to do the right thing in groups, and she certainly didn't trust the preacher man. Neither do I, and never will. In fact, I see just about all of them as hopelessly deluded and corrupt, like most people when they're given just a smidgen of power, and ultimately, that's what this series of observations is all about, power and how it makes people who hold it and the people they hold it over to lose their ability to reason. Most of them came pre-damaged anyway and were budding authoritarians before any boss told them what to do. But others think for themselves, reject their upbringing, and grow-up and out of it.

My grandfather lived in rural Kansas. His father worked on the railroad as an engineer, and at one point, the family owned a hotel that burned down during the 1920s. His father was a patriarchal nimrod who rarely communicated with his children other than with his belt or his ring-festooned backhand. By the early 1930s, this idiot was fired from what was a very good-paying job at a time when there were almost none, and dragged his family to Arkansas to be...a dirt farmer, and at a time when family farms were failing. Father knows best. It was a disaster, but somehow he found other work. As far as I can tell, they were typically religious for the time, and he was a stern patriarch who isolated himself to his den and read all the time, the only thing I can give him credit for. Children were to be seen and not heard. As far as I can recall or ascertain, my grandfather finished high school while my grandmother did not.

What did they do for a living? My grandmother picked cotton to buy her wedding dress. They worked in factories for their entire working lives, first in munitions plants during WWII and the Korean War, then various other industrial occupations over the years. They worked very hard at work and at home and were very industrious people, but they weren't intellectuals and didn't have expansive educations. They were just working-class people who did the best they could and treated others as they would have liked to be treated; they followed the "golden rule" better than any other people I have or will ever know in my life. I was lucky: my immediate family on my mother's side weren't users, manipulators, or liars. But the rest of them were, so my grandparents left Kansas after WWII for the industrial North.

Again, these weren't really well-educated people at all, but they were sharp and smart, and they knew the score when they saw it. They were staunch unionists, and they were generally progressive. This wasn't atypical. The fact is that they were--and still are in their death--mainstream America. This is the real America, the good side. From the 1970s when I was a little kid reading about the Great Depression thanks to a childhood illness and a curiosity for human history, my grandparents continued the same mantra until their deaths during this current decade: "You watch: these dummies [most voting Americans] are going to vote the Republicans back in [as a majority], and we're going to have another Depression all over again, they'll make it happen again, you'll see." So they have, so they have.

My earliest memory of my grandmother saying this comes from 1978. Think about that for a minute. This wasn't an economist saying it, this was an ordinary working-class person who actually lived through the Great Depression (for real, the hard side of it) as a child, and therefore, knew what she was talking about. Why would she understand what caused it (lack of proper regulations, as she often told me herself many times) when she never lived with electricity or running-water as a little mountain girl? She bore witness to her era as her husband, and they didn't have dust in their eyes or shit in their ears, they didn't miss much, if anything. They stayed civically and politically engaged their entire adult lives because they knew that if they didn't, catastrophe for future generations was all-but-inevitable since the business jackapes are always waiting at the gates to abuse government. But their kids weren't carrying their share of the load after them and most were ignorant of how things had been before the New Deal and the accomplishments of organized labor. They were critical even of the "union bosses," but had good words for labor leaders like Walter Reuther of the UAW, of which they were both members.

They understood that you must be eternally vigilant against corruption in all its forms, especially political, since the government at least is theoretically capable of being held accountable, while corporations are not without that reasonably clean and strong government. Yes indeed, they supported the New Deal. If you ask--and you'd better do it fast now--anyone with sense who lived through that era (and I mean really lived through it and can remember it) and they'll tell you what an "idiot" Republican President Herbert Hoover was for his inaction during the worst years of the Depression, and it was common currency with these folks. Most of them used far less polite words for him, even decades later.

Why do you think it took five decades to create a "Republican majority" (that rapidly imploded)?

Why, then, did my grandparents "get" it--that you don't blindly accept authority at its word and that another Great Depression was coming when so many others claim not to have? First off, many of these people today--these "experts"--were part of the corruption on Wall Street, in Congress, the White House, and in our Courts, so they're either lying or were too close to it to see anything except dollar-signs. My grandparents were just working-class people who saw the reality on the ground and knew bullshit when they read, heard, or saw it, and the GOP was always bullshit to them. They learned the lessons of their time. The truth is that the baby boomers lived through unprecedented prosperity and forgot these lessons and were slow learners when it came to constructively taking on an oligopoly that's running this nation into the ground while simultaneously destroying its soul, its spirit. Like any generation, they've overstated their accomplishments.

It didn't take a genius to see all of this coming. The cheap credit, the wholesale deregulation of the business and financial sectors by both major parties, and a runaway corporate crime spree and war profiteering, made the mess we're in inevitable. Only a ten-year-old or someone very old could have seen it--at least someone who wasn't or isn't an old fool. The rest tend to be a glob of self-serving, brainwashed turds. It takes a good education to become indoctrinated by a bad system, just ask the Einsatzgruppen units that slaughtered Slavs and Jews on the Eastern Front during WWII (but do it quick). Most of them were college educated. A fool with a degree is a still a fool, and an criminal sociopath will always be a criminal sociopath regardless of how much you shave and primp them and put them in a nice, new suit. But there are good people in this world. Not only were my grandparents warm and kind to me and my family, they were smart and actually gave a damn about their neighbors and society. This is why democracy works. The average person is smarter than the leadership and the loud-mouths they rook in to drown everyone else out. They are the real threat to America, forget terrorism.

None of this is to suggest that learning is bad. Quite-the-opposite. But you had better learn where you come from if you want to know where you're going. How can you know where you are, when you don't know where you've been? It's not hard to understand why children are so troubled about having an identity: we're not giving them one, we're not transmitting the lessons of the past to them enough. People must know who they are and where they come from to be whole, to be reasonably at peace with themselves. In these areas, we're failing our children again, and again, and again, in our assembly line educational system. We can always do better, and we should always keep trying to make a better world for the babies as well as the adults. What is a society for if not for us all to band together to help each other survive? To suggest, for example, that there's no need for a safety-net for the unemployed is antisocial, sociopathic, so it must come from the business community and high finance. Find yourselves and where you have really been.

GOP Rep. Joe Wilson, douchebag

WWW--You'd think last night's speech took place on April 10, 1861. Huh? Yes, the moronic big health recipient shot his mouth off last night during president Obama's speech on health care reform as though he was Brigadier General G.T. Beuaregard, shelling Ft. Sumter--only this time, he didn't take four long years of fighting to "apologize."

"You lie," he stammered in crackerese, and it was the come shot heard around the world--or at least in the halls of Congress and the boardrooms of big pharma and the hearts of the insurance robber barons. "Render unto Caesar" never meant going down on him--after all--and Wilson's Caesar salad, his masters, are corporate and plutocratic ones. It really had nothing to do with immigrants getting health coverage at all.

A longtime friend said to me a few months ago something that I take to heart and consider very seriously (I'm paraphrasing him) : "Southerners--in general--are intellectually incapable of functioning in a democracy." I agree with this strongly. My family on my mother's side comes from Kansas and Arkansas--they left for a reason, and the aforementioned was a large part of that reason, or the lack thereof. There was nothing to stay behind for at the end of WWII, and it wasn't just about jobs, it was about a backwards culture that doesn't want to change.

Wilson's inappropriate outburst was a pathetic violation of decorum and I believe strongly that its intent was symbolically racialist, not merely because he's a whore who's owned by the insurance and big health care-related corporations and trusts. I believe Wilson was put-up to what he did by his own party because of the state he's from, a place dear to the heart of sundry evangelicals and the emotionally retarded throughout America since it's where the American Civil War stupidly began, and it was over another lost election, what Marx called a "slaveholder's rebellion." The white-trash South is going to be that red-headed stepchild of America for as long as the air is breathable and before the planet really starts hitting back. But Marx was correct: the Civil War was childish, regressive, and anachronistic.

Indeed it was, and there was nothing noble about it, the Confederacy-be-damned. There's a better word for what the firing on Ft. Sumter and Wilson's outburst constitute (or rather, don't): the childish throwing of a tantrum, a fit by the mentally-challenged. Apparently, South Carolingian didn't find their governor Sanford embarrassing enough, so they elected a whole gaggle of losers from the Fellowship. But wait, it gets better, much better.

Wikipedia has had to put a lock on Wilson's page, similar to what happened with Sen. David Vitter's page when I and others were attempting to add pertinent information to it that was factually correct. I know, unfair, especially when someone's powerful, then it's heretical, a travesty. But, never mind, these pages of the unaccountable powerful have hired gatekeepers (some simply acting on their own) who act like sleeper agents to guard them and block further content that might be deemed (by them) "controversial." Before all that, I never cared for Wikipedia, never respected them, and never will, they're redundant, go use academic sites for information.

Wilson is the poster child of a dysfunctional democracy, but then, so is the entire GOP and most of the Democratic Party. Their constituents? A foregone conclusion, but at least most of the dumbbells out there are going to get a very painful civics lesson. No, Joe Wilson never lies, and he never chopped down that cherry tree, since it never existed anyway. To be sure, the GOP and morons like Wilson are speaking in a coded language predicated not only on plutocratic criminality, but also a regressive race-baiting. In other words, Wilson's going to be "out-niggered" before long, expect the language to coarsen. Racism is flushing itself out behind the facade once again, which is a good thing. It's easier to hit it once it's out in the open, the tipping of the hand, the curse of the terminally stupid.

Why do we need Huffington Post at all: top stories today at Huffington Post...

WWW--Besides the fact that Arianna Huffington's incapable of making love to the Hollywood sign or George Clooney (she deserves both jabs, puns doubly-intended, double entendre), or exhibiting as much partisan loyalty towards the Democratic Party as she did the cuddly Republican Party, there is no real reason for Huffington Post to exist at all, it's hardly ever been substantially "progressive."

But it's gotten her lots of attention and new friends, and it's brought her a lot more power and influence. Sad, considering her parents were Greek Communist partisans in the aftermath of WWII...

If you look to-the-right (as Arianna's true self does) of each page, you'll a sidebar that says "Popular Stories on Huffpo," which is almost always a depressing statement on the state of things in American culture and politics.

Today--at this 2:27 PM EST writing--the top stories are:

1. Miss Universe Swimsuit Competition 2009: Who's Hottest? (PHOTOS, POLL)

2. Short Skirts And High Heels: Brit, Miley, Leighton & More: Who Wore It Best? (PHOTOS, POLL)

3. Ashley Greene NUDE PHOTOS: Naked Pics Of Twilight Star 'Unlawfully Displayed

4. James Rucker GEICO Pulls Its Ads from Glenn Beck Show

5. Rufus Lusk Nowhere in Manhattan: Vote On These Unbelievable Photos

6. Howard Dean The Media's Treatment of Palin's Outrageous "Death Panel" Claims

7. Gabrielle Giffords Town Hall: Gun Left Behind

8. Jon Stewart Vs. Town Hall Crazies (VIDEO)

9. Levi Johnston And Kathy Griffin Hold Hands At Teen Choice Awards (PHOTOS. VIDEO)

10. Dr. Andrew Weil The Wrong Diagnosis

11. Olbermann Slams Palin For "Death Panel" Claim, Calls Her Dangerously Irresponsible (VIDEO)

12. GM: New Chevy Volt To Get 230 Miles Per Gallon

13. Target Of Obama-Era Rendition Alleges Torture

14. Women Walk In Fall 2009's Most Punishing Heels (VIDEO)

15. Obamas Visit National Parks: Send Us Photos Of Your Favorite National Park

A good friend pointed-out that (I'm paraphrasing them), "You can look at it two ways: either Huffington Post has assigned the list, or the readers have. Either way, it's pretty sad."

My one act play on social mountaineer, Arianna Huffington (truly, a bourgeois hoot!): http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2009/01/arianna-satirical-play-by-matt-janovic_31.html

The last word on the "9/11 Truth Movement"

WWW--I'd say these folks are stupider than the Republicans, but many of them either once were or are to-the-right of the self-destructing national party. What came into your minds that the Bush II administration were anything but corrupt and incompetent, the two being interchangeable?

Listen: are you stupid? Don't answer, we already know you all are. There's a mountain of empirical evidence to disprove any number of your stupid and paranoiac Sunday-go-to-meetin' speculations, you morons. Grow-up, wake up, and realize how incredibly foolish and silly you appear to the entire world (except a lot of the French who are also over-credulous about 9/11 conspiracies for nationalist reasons).

What's really interesting is the obvious arch-conservative theme in the notion that 9/11 was an "inside job." Your proof? How about going after something that's provable? Right, that would actually require effort, a well reasoned argument, and evidence and accountability for the accusers. Had there been any of this, we'd know about it, and everywhere, its dissemination would be unstoppable just by the sheer force of word of mouth. But it hasn't, and it won't. Why?

Because if you hadn't noticed over the last eight years, the Bush II administration wasn't capable of doing nearly anything right, not even cover-ups, not even firing nine U/S. Attorneys, and so on. I could literally go on for days about what they were incompetent at, it's staggering in its scope. So staggering, it seems, that when you're as paranoid as some people, you miss the elephant in the room that's standing on your toe.

Advice: stop clutching your intellectual cop-out and get serious.


Postscript, 02.20.2009: With all of the obvious elephants in the room (the U.S. Attorney firing scandal, illegal wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, a runaway corporate crime spree that could only have happened through indolence and willful inaction, bribery, the outing of a CIA officer's identity, billions missing in Iraq rebuilding funds, stolen national elections, illegal warrantless surveillance, torture and rendition, cronyism and open corruption, ad infinitum), a 9/11 Truth Movement" only serves the purpose of wasting time, money, and energy that would be best spent of real issues and causes.

I would wager many of these wags would love to have a Big Brother telling them what to do.

From the perspective of some of them, it sure beats having to take a part of the responsibility for some of this mess instead of mounting real investigations and hearings that would accomplish something. I'm sure that if the Pentagon and State Department didn't have them around, they'd have invented these groups to serve the same function. These folks are (barely) closeted authoritarians. Nothing succeeds like failure. Pathetic. Cowardly. Foolhardy.

The silver-lining of the economic crisis: the death of the management class

The Tomb of Frederick Taylor--You can't feel sorry for them. They've worn the brown-lipstick, they've kissed-up, and they've done their best to ensure that American workers have no say in hows and the whys of production or what a business delivers as a product or a service. Why ask the people on the ground?

No, they won't listen to anyone but ownership, and often, they won't even do that, amazing as it sounds. This is why they're all going to be kicked out soon. Apparently, corporations aren't "immortal entities" after all. "Management" is just another word for "overseer" when it comes down to it.

Watching this particular species of social animal croak is a delight, the height of schadenfreude. Any American who's worked under a tyrannical boss knows these bastards for what they are: pea-brained roadblocks to fairness and innovation in the workplace. The most any of them have accomplished is dividing the social bonds between people and running the institutions so badly that they crash. Their time has finally come...to push the mops that have always been beckoning to them to come back home to their true vocations, namely shoveling shit.

These shovels, the sponges, dishcloths, irons, and garbage cans are calling out to them like the Sirens did to Odysseus, longingly. Finally, these little men are going to have to shut-up and have their share of crow as so many former apparatchiki did when the Soviet system collapsed. The public is already beginning to demand accountability, making probes and trials a real possibility.

Will Congress save the day and deflect the forces of law and order from apprehending the Bush II administration? The same with Wall Street's corporate crime wave? Who's going to be the scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb? To be sure, it's going to be someone.

But what's going to be the best is watching the many of these types who were stupid enough to break the law under the duties of their self-appointed jobs being arrested. Certainly, they're going to cling-to their kingdoms in hell for a short time, but then the subpoenas and the criminal and civil suits will come. Most of them will simply be discarded along with the rest of the American working-class, that group they stupidly convinced themselves that they were never a part of.

The only thing management has ever cared about is the perpetuation of management.

That's not a solid platform for any system as we have ample-proof of today. Even bad ideas die hard. Taylor posited the theory that human beings are naturally lazy--indolent--and had to be driven to work if they were going to work at all. This meant the imposition of an authoritarian culture in the workplace, something that wasn't exactly new 100 years ago! Taylor's writings--at best--read like a tract by Ebeneezer Scrooge and Lenin, with a dose of your senile old uncle who drools in the corner at family-gatherings.

Taylor was a High Priest of business Bolshevism; contemporary business/tech/financial elites hold values that aren't especially different from Taylor's and his robber baron "acolytes." Like the phenomena of Social Darwinism, Taylor was just giving a more pointed voice and direction to what was already the overriding spirit of his time. That Americans must work so hard merely to survive is a testament to the anti-humanist and authoritarian nature of forced production in the United States. Why it would behave any differently having its roots in the days of the robber barons, a time when there was virtually no regulation of the economy whatsoever.

Taylorism was adored by the Soviet system's architects, admirers of American authoritarian methods of production.

Lenin and other leaders of the Soviet Union displayed even greater enthusiams for Fordism [standard-parts put together on an assembly line] and Taylorism than the Americans had. When the Soviet Union embarked on a Five-Year Plan that specified mammoth regions of technology based on hydroelectric power and prodigiously rich stores of Siberian natural resources, it turned to American consulting engineers and industrial corporations for advice and equipment. The Soviets constructed entire industrial systems modeled on the steel works in Gary, Indiana, and hydroelectric projects on the Mississippi. (Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis, University of Chicago Press. 2004. P.8)

Work, work, work, and more work, because there's work to be done and nations to be built. Except that that's not the case any more, at least not in the "developed world." Things need repairing and maintenance, but nation building is over in North America.

What happens when the justifications for work are only in-place to perpetuate a hierarchy? That system eventually falls over its own internal paradoxes, just as the Soviet system belatedly did in the early 1990s. But no, the candidates tell us, "Work, work, work--you're gonna have to work harder than ever!" Why? Just to be able to live, to have shelter and be able to eat? That's a violation of a human being's basic human rights.

With a genuinely scientific approach, Americans wouldn't be working the hours they do because there would be an efficient division of the work, making it more manageable with greater rewards for every contributor. Most major industrial production should be nationalized, or more accurately, owned and directed by the American public. A logical distribution of wealth would also make for a more stable economy, a dynamic one instead of the historical pattern of boom-bust cycles.

This isn't how ownership and employers want you to think, but if this economic crisis should teach us anything, it's that they're the parasites, the exploiters of our labor, and that we don't need them. We never needed them, and their claims of ownership are shoddy. Management has been their flesh column to block the progress of everyone else. If anything, management has been an obstacle of efficiency in production in meeting the essential needs of American workers. This class has been a general drain and an authoritarian roadblock to natural change in the workplace, a buffer between ownership and workers.

Now, these individuals have taken their system over the cliff. This was the natural result of dissolution, when ideas and practices that no longer work and rarely ever did, stop working. With the practically inevitable nationalization of Ford and General Motors, we're seeing the end of "Fordism" and "Taylorism" as core principles in production and the structure of private business and financial organizations.

Are we a "body politic" again? It remains to be seen. Society isn't a machine, but an organism, and organisms require that we're flexible to change.

Future social institutions will have to embody a reasonable degree of this flexibility through an expansion of workplace democracy through the support (allowing it to happen) of the federal government, but not necessarily under its direction. Innovation has been repressed for far too long and the road ahead is a high-tech one with a green-lining. The "Socialists are taking over"? Authoritarian ones did long ago in the United States, and the Cold War was just a matter of competing power structures, a game of semantics and straw men. Similar games are being played (badly) today.

Why do so many of us fear freedom and liberty? Because that means more responsibility and accountability for all, and equality under the law. We have only ourselves to blame for not fighting corporatism in America as we should have. That's reason enough to make up for lost time.

Step 1: Attention management! Clear-out your desks, you bums, and get out. You're fired. Have a nice day, m'kay?

Those folks in Chicago are going to win their strike. The world will take notice of this and workers in other nations are going to emulate it, even in China. You have to make a new day in America happen, and the world can change. Make it happen.

On the Chicago sit down occupation at Republic Windows and Doors

Chicago, Illinois--I'm sorry, but I hate this city, it sucks. But it's going to suck a lot worse there if more working-class Americans don't start standing up to power and the banks as these folks at the Republic Windows and Doors plant are.

Already, the comparisons to the 1936-37 Flint, Michigan sit down strike are coming, and they're becoming apt. The time to hit employers and ownership is here, and the fist is beginning to clench again when the options of apathy and complacency are gone. Habits die hard, people tend to prefer to be told what to do, but that's ending anyway. Fear is the great controller, but how many cars was anyone buying during the Great Depression? Who was buying them? The workers struck anyway, for their futures and for their families.

You know, nobody important: just our grandparents and parents, because history affects others, and never ourselves. Americans are also being stripped of this convenient attitude by events.

Most Americans think that in a major economic downturn they're even more expendable, that they have even less leverage. This is, flatly-put, utterly wrong and defeatist thinking that we've all been conditioned to. It's in times like this that employers are most vulnerable, and it's in these kinds of environments that workers must start hitting them where they live and demanding more, much-much more.

In the case of the Republic Windows workers, they're getting shafted by the creditors of the company, a name that should sound familiar: Bank of America, recipient of $25 billion in bailout money. How is any of this going to "fix" the economy?

No, these workers should remain there until this is sorted-out in an amicable way. If it isn't, they have to weigh their options. Drama is a very real possibility.

Most of the workers at the factory are Hispanic-Americans. The majority of them were unionized under the UEW (United Electrical Workers), whose leadership are aiding in the fight and negotiations with the now-bankrupt company. The real problem right now appears to be Bank of America, meaning a very real and dramatic confrontation could be coming between them and the UEW.

The time has come for a new step in the history of the labor struggle, and once again, Chicago is center stage. One Big Union.

Why should we trust former Salomon Brothers banking investor Michael Lewis?

"But what has been the experience of the Russian socialist movement up to now? The most important and most fruitful changes in its tactical policy… have not been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment… In general, the tactical policy of the Social Democracy is not something that may be 'invented'. It is the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward." --Rosa Luxembourg, "Leninism or Marxism," 1904.

New York City, New York--As you can imagine, this guy exists in a strange place as a former investment banker, now turned business journalist and author.

Lewis wrote Liar's Poker in 1988-89, a book that many are now going to say was very prescient upon its release just 19-years-ago. It isn't.

Time flies when you're having fun.

Just a few hours ago Lewis was hawking his newest book on CNN, those scions of bad taste and oversimplification and over-concision. CNN's talking necks were having their lovefest with Lewis over how credible and wise he is. Is he? I don't think so, and as low as my opinion of the public is, I believe we all knew the crisis was coming. That said, I think the feelings that mainstream journalists and writers harbor within their breasts eclipse my own intense misanthropy and ambivalence towards the average American, let alone humanity. These journalists and pundits believe that they have the answers and the rest of us are too stupid to understand things as well as they do because they were educated to think that way.

Their elitism comprises a truly delusional contention: "We have all of the answers, so shut-up and let us drive." Paradoxically, it's "ordinary" people who tend to save the day throughout human history when the politicians, the businessmen, and the intelligensia have failed everyone (as is their wont, they can't help themselves). We clean-up the mess, and we're doing it right now on Wall Street. Listening to the public on-occasion might help.

Those who could have prevented the current economic crisis were the root of the problem and still are, though their own collective fall is coming soon. Instead of just blaming borrowers who defaulted, we should also be asking, "Who allowed it?" and "How many of the loans were even legal?" We know the sales of the bundled securities were not, it was a matter of fraud and deserves further investigation. Some are occurring right now. Many of us raised the alarms, but we know oversight and the enforcement of key regulations over the financial sector weren't going to be expedited under the Bush II administration and GOP dominance.

The financial and business sectors were told that they could do whatever they wanted up-to-a-point and that nobody was going to be watching. Who told them that? The negligence in not enforcing these administrative laws is corruption, contrary to the comments of the apologists. Is Lewis one of them? Like CNN and the rest of the dying media, he won't discuss the corruption, and I'd like to know why.

So, what did Lewis have to say on CNN? That this economic crisis "wasn't the result of corruption" (what else?) or outright dishonesty, but that it was a result of delusional behavior predicated on--don't laugh--everyone "doing the right thing" on Wall Street. This is an incredible statement in the current context, but at least he sees the writing on the wall--things will never be the same and the old Wall Street is dead. However, as you can imagine, the assertion that "everyone did the right thing" made no sense to these eyes and ears, and I predict that these assumptions of his and the rest of them on Wall Street are headed rapidly towards the dustbin of human history.

No, according to Lewis, it was "conflicting interests" that caused the current financial crisis, which again, points to corruption. The banks and mortgage leders have been ripping each other off, and now they won't lend amongst themselves. Right, greed and dishonesty. Lewis seems to be arguing for transparency--granted--but he still clings-to the same old faux-values of Wall Street. Like a lot of people on television and politics, he said a lot without saying much at all, so I switched over to Anthony Bourdain, a man with an attitude I admire, then switched-back again to feel the numbing-pain of boredom for kicks, it's a real rush.

Lewis went on making some bizarre statements that "corruption wasn't a factor" in the crisis--it was generally that the system that ran the financial markets was predicated on illusions and mass-delusional psychology. No kidding? How did that happen? Who made them think they could keep doing the same wrong things without it coming-back to haunt them later? In many cases, themselves, silly. After all, the (wo)man who hears God is usually listening to their own voice.

Additionally, Lewis has written and spoken elsewhere that these financial institutions and their CEOs simply "didn't know what they were doing." Fancy that. No argument here, I don't think that they ever did know what they were doing or ever will. The past economic order and its faulty assumptions were systemically wrong, inefficient and top-heavy with that favorite word of Libertarians, conservatives, and the GOP: bureaucracy. Forget government, the corporate world has them beat on redundancy. The managerial class itself has amply displayed their greed and dishonesty over the last 30 years, therefore it shouldn't surprise anyone that we ended-up where we are today.

It took others to create this mess, there was a lot of enabling from every sector, such as investors who were clamoring for greater and greater dividends, irresponsible borrowers of every class, and so on. But the runaway borrowing was allowed. Like my former employers--a small retail outfit that's sure to close soon--the speculators and financial institutions only knew how to ride an economic boom that's part of the traditional boom-and-bust cycle of our flawed economy, much like a Gold Rush. Eventually, inevitably, the veins run out and the towns die. But a lot of the public was either apathetic from years of being beaten-down, or they bought into it (and boy, didn't they?). Not everyone got on-board, just enough to wreck things.

Let's be honest: this was also fostered by that "invisible hand" of pro-business legislation passed by politicians who know better, not just the misbehavior of Wall Street. This is also known as "deregulation," but far-be-it for anyone to criticize the sacred, the inviolable St. Ronald Reagan and his Maoist cult that hijacked traditional conservatism in the 1980s. That's over now, but this greed-based stupidity allowed the markets to run amok for over two decades because the folks in Washington know who's really boss, and it's not them, it's the business and financial community and ownership.

Like my former employers, these clowns got a taste of power and lost their minds thinking that they were untouchable, that they were God. Their bulging-guts and the fact that they defecate daily (phew! you don't wanna know) should have been all the reminder they needed that they weren't. Now they're all finding-out the hard way, which is where my well-earned schadenfreude comes in...

Beyond my own feelings of glee over the suffering of scoundrels, Lewis isn't saying anything new here at all (which he accuses others of doing in the Conde article). Writer Charles Mackay dedicated three of his sixteen chapters of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" to financial-bubbles titled "The Mississippi Scheme," "The South-Sea Bubble," and "Tulipomania." Mackay's book was originally published in 1841, at a time when Karl Marx was an unknown doctoral student. What did Marx do when he couldn't find a job in academia because of his radicalism? He became a journalist. Life is like that sometimes, and he would be a part of the failed Revolution of 1848 that gripped Europe.

Sure, Lewis is making-the-rounds this week promoting his newest book, and one can assume the crisis will be a windfall for him as some kind of "prophet," but he's not one. Anyone paying attention could have seen this crisis coming, but like all bad relationships, we ignore the problems because we want something out of the deal. I'm no exception. Lewis might be totally sincere about all of this, but he still appears to have held the same assumptions until very recently that the now-fallen Wall Street order would keep going on, almost endlessly. Did he actually believe before October of last year that this could continue indefinitely?

At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system. Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It’s never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash. ...This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying they were stupid. ("The End," Conde Nast Portfolio, December 2008 issue)

The problem is that there is such a thing as insider trading and white collar crime. This sounds a lot like the reactions from mortgage institutions who blamed whistle-blowers and auditors for uncovering the losses they were hiding from the rest of the world. No, Lewis isn't "blaming" Whitney in some malicious way, I just think he still has the same viewpoints that he held (and are still held on Wall Street, even now) when he was an working for an investment bank from 1985-to-1988.

I don't doubt that the main-thrust here is generally correct, but Lewis makes his argument too narrow, and I suspect him of trying to divert attention away from the fact that corruption and the proverbial "cooking of the books" has also played a role in all of this. But there are worse sins that he barely touches-on: the role of authoritarianism within corporate American, never mind just the financial sector.

The real bottom-line that he does hint at in his article is that brings of bad news weren't going to be rewarded on Wall Street, he gets this right. This is authoritarianism-in-action. These private tyrannies are akin to fascism in their internal cultures, playing-off underlings against one another in what's euphemistically referred to as "competition," but what it really constitutes is the Roman practice of "divide-and-conquer." They hold our families hostage for their own ends. Their endless problem? Reality and the spontanaeity of average people, and the eternal desire for liberty and innovation.

While some have done the bidding of their bosses--even to the point of breaking-the-law--we've also had whistle-blowers of every stripe during the Bush II era, an unprecedented wave of them. That doesn't mean fighting these "masters" has or will be easy, nobody ever said it would be. Doing what's right doesn't have immediate gratification if it has any at all.

Who would broach the "conventional wisdom" of a financial boom by pointing-out the inconvenient fact that a company's assets were becoming rapidly-devalued when they're going to be punished for it? Again, while Lewis doesn't necessarily "blame" Ms. Whitney for simply telling the truth about Citibank, he does assign her with the strange credit of causing "the market in financial stocks to crash." That's blaming the messenger, the same argument proffered by the culpable on Wall Street. It's a bizarre viewpoint that probably underscores the general tendency among the "players" to stay as far away from the core realities as possible while pretending that they actually are brave enough to stare into the abyss. Is it conscious? Sometimes, but it's really about the limitations of their own worldview and the fact that they're unable to "step outside of the box."

Lewis was just a low-level drone at Salomon Brothers just 20-years-ago. The next year he was getting a lot of back-slapping over Liar's Poker. At the age of 28, Michael Lewis was a millionaire from his time at Salomon Brothers and a book that sold very well for a first-time author. He was riding a wave of his own, reaping from a post-crash boom. Strangely, he was viewed as a whistle-blower when he wasn't, which he admits in the new article.

His take on the crisis, and the market crash of 1987 is simultaneously right and wrong:

The public lynchings of Gutfreund and junk-bond king Michael Milken were excuses not to deal with the disturbing forces underpinning their rise. Ditto the cleaning up of Wall Street’s trading culture. The surface rippled, but down below, in the depths, the bonus pool remained undisturbed. Wall Street firms would soon be frowning upon profanity, firing traders for so much as glancing at a stripper, and forcing male employees to treat women almost as equals. Lehman Brothers circa 2008 more closely resembled a normal corporation with solid American values than did any Wall Street firm circa 1985. The changes were camouflage. They helped distract outsiders from the truly profane event: the growing misalignment of interests between the people who trafficked in financial risk and the wider culture. (ibid)

To be fair, Lewis doesn't think he was all that prescient back in 1989 and that all he was doing was reporting his firsthand account of his time on Wall Street and its culture. Fair enough. But he's also significantly more well-off than the average American and doesn't hold a lot of the same values as the rest of us because of this. He attended Princeton University before his brief tenure on Wall Street, so he wasn't ever hurting as most working-class Americans have. No, he came from privilege, he got rich in decadent 1980s, and still holds the view that "greed is good." How exactly is this any different from the core cultural problem not only on Wall Street, but one that has crawled its way to Main Street? He holds the same values as the crooks, he's hardly any different from them in his values and attitudes.

Sometimes, you can be so close to the fire, you can't see anything else beyond the leaping flames.

Holding the contention that there was no systemic corruption on Wall Street in the creation of this crisis isn't going to fix anything, and Lewis appears to be just as guilty as the individuals that stopped real reform after the market's crash in 1987, the very period that he came up in.

Is Lewis bullshitting us as he did all those investors he claims to have during his time at Salomon Brothers? No. He's been kidding himself and the rest of us as a result of his own delusions--delusions he still shares with the players on Wall Street. It took a Princeton education to accomplish that and a lot of rationalizing, something he still appears to excel at. Shudder that the new president-elect came to us from Harvard and taught Constitutional law there for a time. These people are simply wrong and don't really know what they're doing to the rest of us, and they don't tend to care either. What they care about is power.

I'm not a Marxist, but he was right that, inevitably, capitalism will fall. The fall might be here, but no man can say with any certainty what hour or what day it will come. The killer awoke before dawn, he put his suit on.

Charles Mackay's Extraordinary and Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852 Ed.): http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=wEoPAAAAIAAJ&dq=Mackay+Extraordinary+Popular+Delusions&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=3IikCBls75&sig=C2_mOnrUQj4h80N38mZJ_4kl948&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=11&ct=result

Karl Marx's 1841 Doctoral Dissertation, "The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature": http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/index.htm

"This is the End, beautiful friend. This is the End, my only friend, the End": http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true#page1

Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) review

Ken Russell is a director you either hate or love--I'm with the latter, and enjoy irritating the same targets Russell does, endlessly. The simple fact that many of Ken Russell's films are hated makes me love them all-the-more. This is arguably his best film, and his only political one.

As a period-piece, this film is stylized, but looks very convincing, and the cinematography by Dick Bush and set designs by late-and-great Derek Jarman (another genius of film) are stellar.

Consider why films like this one aren't made often, and you may have part of the answer as to why this film is still so shocking. Many people dislike Russell's films because of what he reveals about all of us, but that's too bad. People didn't like what Auschwitz said about humanity, but there it is, forever.

Apparently, Warner Brothers has finally-decided to release this film as a director's-cut in 2006, or 2007 [Ed.--2008 and still waiting...]. It is being reported that all footage removed by the BBFC and American censors (mainly at Warners) in 1971 will be reinstated in an "unrated cut" approved by the director. Some very good prints have been circulating around Los Angeles, New York City, and London recently...

The film "The Devils" may have been taken from the Aldous Huxley book, and the 1960s play by John Whiting, but it's squarely Ken Russell's film from-beginning-to-end.

Also likely to be included on a future DVD is the excellent BBC documentary by Mark Kermode ("Hell on Earth"), about the making of the film, and the firestorm it created. The "renegade" DVD by Angelfire is acceptable, and will have to tide us over until then, but there is one by "Trash Palace" that looks even better (though minus the inclusion in the feature film of the deleted scenes). Both the Angelfire version and the Trash Palace edition has the aforementioned Kermode documentary, and a widescreen transfer (1.85:1, the wrong aspect-ratio, the film was lensed in Panavision at 2.35:1) of the film. Only the Angelfire version contains the "Rape of Christ" scene reinstated.

This was a film that Warner Brothers hated after the executives saw the final cut in a studio screening. The Warner pressbook itself even states that it was going to be a hard-sell, with posters marketing the film as horror. It is horrific, but really constitutes a political allegory. Some of the posters warned potential audiences that it was a film "most people won't like"! It did reasonably good business, but wasn't a hit, though it could be assumed that the studio made their money back.

In a film that bombards the viewer with violence, decay, plague, and death, it isn't surprising that people miss some of the film's thematic points: The Devils comments on the eternal threat to individual rights and spiritual liberty from irrationality, social hysteria, and authoritarianism, and that they're often played-out in the same ways in different eras. You can see this in the comparisons made between Oliver Reed's character Father Grandier, and that of the accepted Christology of 17th century France (orthodoxy being represented by the characters of Father Mignon, Sister Jeanne and Cardinal Richelieu--an unholy trilogy?).

Is there much difference in why Grandier is degraded similarly to Christ? Russell (a Catholic)goes radically further: is there any difference between the political scapegoating of Urbain Grandier and Jesus of Nazareth? What's truly degraded is the Gospel of Christ and St. Francis. "The crowd" appears to be swayed in either direction, with a tendency towards hysteria and authoritarianism, making for a grim message indeed. But, this is generally what happened to Loudon, its inhabitants, Grandier, and France, at the time of the story.

Russell tells us that Richelieu's yearnings for theocratic power can only be seen as a threat to liberty, just as they are now in the Middle East and the United States. Russell seems to be saying that these political and spiritual struggles are one-and-the-same, and that they require an eternal vigilance against them. This is not an exploitation film, but it is as dark and horrific as any classic tale of horror. What's most horrifying is that it's true.

Keep-in-mind that not one image is in this film "by mistake," as Russell composes his framing for a specific meaning and purpose just as the old masters did. This film is a warning against the aims of power, and shines a ray of artistic truth on why Christ was crucified to boot. There are numerous tableaux that could have come from Goya or Bosch.

The images of people being tortured, vomiting, acting hysterically--they are not there to merely to shock, but as a warning about social hysterias that have a tendency to recur throughout human history. Repression can lead to greater perversions and tyranny, states Russell, and resoundingly. Set specifically in 17th Century France after the eight Hugenot Wars, "The Devils" should be read as a cautionary tale on how people willingly give-up their liberties during uncertain times...times not unlike our own.

The religious and cultural wars still rage on, and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

Why a restoration is necessary: a long-overdue reassessment will come with the world finally being able see what director Ken Russell intended. World culture might see this film being very influential (it already is), and not just in spawning exploitation fare. Italian genre filmmakers were inspired by this film when they began churning-out "nunsploitation" cinema! Good lapsed Catholics, all, I can assure you. This is what the "Grand Guignol" was based-on, the real deal. From the 1600s-to-now, the threats are essentially the same. Only the technology has changed.

Bother Warner Bros. into releasing this classic at: www.warnerbros.com