ADVENTURES IN WRITING! Operating from Northern Indiana, this blog will cover aspects of culture with a bent on humor and the relentless belittling of the mainstream media, politics, and the syphilitic GOP (both major parties). News analysis happens. Put on your adult diapers, this gwine'-a'-be a bourgeois hoot. Some much needed hilarity for working class North Americans and international readers. I'm the part of this human world that bites back. Let's roll.
Ed.--I'm not sure anything surprises me anymore, and this "new" documentary Monsters & Critics (yet another entertainment media site) is no exception. I was never consulted because I don't (won't) support the ridiculous conspiracy theories peddled by right wing assholes and hungry media assholes who want to massage the facts or ignore them outright to fit their moron-narratives. Why do people want to lie about the DC Madam case? Because it sells. I myself could have sold many more copies of my account of the case had I adhered to these fabrications--and that's what they are, pure fiction, from the very tiny minds of morally-impaired idiots. I also have to say that a large-swath of the American public doesn't care about truth or facts and are also scumbags of basically the same ilk. This is addressed to Harper Hill and her morally-impaired staff:
"Conspiracists and those who claim to know more about 'the list' say it was murder and not suicide." Let me guess--Wayne Madsen, for one? I'm sure Mr. Sibley had a few new dark comments without corroboration as well? Oh, then there's the ever-credulous Infowars who were never players in the case as I was, only on-the-margins. The fact that Hill never contacted me for this "documentary" (safe to assume a bad collection of hastily-assembled clips supporting an erroneous thesis based on a desire for more site hits--money--with a dumb voice-over) speaks volumes for its general lack: lack of an overall array of the primary evidence; a steering very wide-of-the-mark away from contrary evidence (me, the primary records I still possess); and an obvious lacking of a desire for the truth, what really happened. A Safe Prediction: There will be no new information in this documentary, and it will offer no new insights into the case. Therefore, there is no reason for this documentary to exist at all beyond the most obvious economic motivations. In short, one more gaggle of entitled assholes has come and shit upon the late Ms. Palfrey's grave, disrespecting her, her family, and what's left of her memory. Goddamn all of you. You are well-poisoners, the lowest form of human life.
I was going to post this in comments but their site insists that you register an account with Facebook, something I flatly refuse to do.
Hey, fuck if I know. Why you askin'? Because you want answers, right? The key is knowing which questions to ask. Right now, as I write this, the world economy is on the brink once again, the for the second time in under five years. Why? Because we won't change, we refuse to, we're creatures of habit. The yammerers will go on about how we need to "get back on the gold standard and eliminate the income tax," which was all disproved and thrown on the shitpile of human history, gone, over, done. I could say I believe in unicorns, but that gets as many laughs from people with a real education. Good luck on the last one in these here U-nited States.
Does that faze the terminally ignorant and insane? Of course not, and now you know why wars occur, and some very big ones are coming. "There will be wars, and rumors of wars," was perhaps the easiest prediction ever made, human beings are an incredibly stupid species, yes we are. You irrational dummies are really the death of everything, you reactionary fools on the right.
I've been talking about a collapse on this page for the last six years and have seen one coming for far longer. 2008 nearly did the job, or rather, we nearly did it on ourselves letting criminals in DC and on Wall Street to run amok with their thirty year crime wave. Finally, this shit is coming to a head: we either reform our financial and campaign systems, radically scale-back our military, and reinvest in our workforce, or forget, show's over. As horrible as I imagine things are going to get, this is fair, this is just. We should pay for our apathy, our ignorance, and our tendency to fuck everything we touch up. No touching, no more.
South America saw the writing on the wall decades ago and has succeeded in cutting away our influence in the region, which is good, democracy and empire cannot coexist. Neither can democracy and vast, unchecked wealth and influence, power. In less than one generation, America will become a shadow of its former self, and if you think you have, you really haven't, you ain't seen nothing yet. We will become a true pariah state that no one in their right mind will do business with without major conditions. The scales are really going to fall from the eyes of Americans once they realize that all this "freedom" was only the power to buy stupid, plastic crap they never needed so some asshole can get rich and to then take the money to dismantle democratic traditions and institutions, that's where we're at, the final stages of capitalism.
Are we too far gone? I believe so. This doesn't mean there aren't things that can be done to save what's worth saving, but collapse appears to be the only way left out of what's becoming a very ugly, scary place to live. We currently incarcerate more people than Russia, China, and all the other worst human rights offender nations on this earth combined, and we enslave them in what's called "privatized prison labor." The war on terror has eroded so many rights I've lost track, maybe even the surveillance state has too, let's hope so.
Where is the outrage? It's where knowledge would have been in the minds of an ocean of profoundly ignorant Americans, waiting to be informed and activated. Now you know why the Republicans and Democrats are defunding education (who wants to read anyway?). Ignorant people are easily controlled. But enough about the right, Libertarians, and irrational Obama supporters who refuse to criticize him for what is wrong.with his shredding of the Constitution in the war on terror.
For similar reasons, we're going to collapse as the former Soviet Union did a little over two decades ago. It's overdue without reform. What happens in the aftermath is determined by what we do now, and then. It had better be logical, natural, disciplined, united, and constructive. The alternative is everyone killing each other. When the rich have kicked away the social contract, this becomes not only possible, it can become inevitable. Without a sense of a whole, connected polity--a society--there is no point, and all will be lost. All the luxuries many enjoy, perhaps even the ability to feed oneself adequately, the right to vote, to be safe in one's person, to be able to travel without restrictions, to be able to assemble with others for political expression--all this can vanish in the blink of an eye in the current atmosphere.
Will some get richer from a collapse? I don't think so, this is going to be more fundamental a collapse than that, what could have occurred had there been no FDR or New Deal, and that's where we're at right now. Yes: even the rich are going to lose their asses on this one. It will at least be worth it for that one. Everyone with a patch of dirt might consider taking up gardening since that could be all that's going on in the US soon.
WEBERMAN: In a certain position, in a certain position where I can do a number on a cat who’s become a pig man who’s become a fucking sell out ‘ya dig? Like that’s the way it goes man. You write all these songs some jerk is gonna fucking believe them man and he’s gonna get pissed off when finds out you didn’t believe ‘em or don’t believe them anymore.
DYLAN: I believe ‘em. …
--The Dylan/Weberman tapes, January 1971.
As more than a few observers have noted over the decades, to be a Bob Dylan fan is to hate writer/Yippie activist/researcher/chronicler A.J. Weberman. No one likes the bearer of bad news which is human folly. In the nearly four decades that I’ve been aware of the pioneering sing-songwriter there hasn’t been one moment that the cult surrounding the folk singer didn’t seem detached from reality, unhinged from the facts, even after numerous admissions by their icon of his fallibility never mind what the detractors have unearthed over the years. When did I first notice cracks in the edifice? It was in the early 1980s when I saw D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary on Dylan, Don’t Look Back (1969) which painted a portrait of a pompous, arrogant nihilist who didn’t appear to believe in anything but money and fame, a real asshole.
Dylan shot a hole through the Elvis print that Andy Warhol gave to him and gave it away thoughtlessly during that period. This guy was a real creep, yet so many idiots I knew loved this prick ignoring what was obvious. Others took note though early on, one of them was in the film, John Lennon, who needs no introduction.
Weberman was no stranger to either man having spent considerable time getting Lennon’s ear as well into Dylan’s garbage, speaking with him on the phone and so on. His foray into “garbology” of the latter apparently began in the fall of 1970 (he has the pictures and the trash to prove it). Weberman and Dylan had many friends in common at the time as he recounts in the new text. In the case of Dylan, there was physical contact when the folk singer rode up on a bicycle behind the then young writer and punched him in the back of the head, yelling at him to keep out of his garbage. The Yippie had pushed it too far after bringing literally hundreds of protesters of the DLF to the front door of his Greenwich Village apartment on Dylan’s birthday demanding he get involved in the politics of the day. As his account goes, he took his licks feeling that he’d earned them. Fair enough. Some of this sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Indeed, Weberman cites literary history going back to the French novelists and poets of the 19th century, drawing a parallel that’s spot-on. The Yippies have often been called “proto-punks” (or, as the saying went, “A Yippie is a Hippie who got beaten by the cops.”). Looking at Weberman’s actions directed at Bob Dylan it’s hard to argue against it. This is cultural history at its best and the author has made a good contribution to chronicling a lost time in American countercultural history. Dylan’s trash became grist for his mill, say what you want. His fallen idol also earned his licks. You really don’t want to sell a mythology of being a social rebel, a progressive when you’re not willing to live up to, when you only do it for money, something he admitted he was doing to folksinger Joan Baez in the sixties.
Sometimes people like Mr. Weberman—or Baez--will come after you with everything they’ve got once the scales have fallen from their eyes. Hell hath no fury. Dylan is a lie, a Shibboleth for lost people, an ingenuine creature in a false reality in a construct of democracy within an oligarchy, a sick, twisted version of the American dream that’s been copied ad infinitum. This is the horrible truth at the heart of the Dylan myth: Rather than being a genuine radical as Woody Guthrie had been, he was literally the opposite while contending that he was like some kind of dustbowl minstrel, a fabrication.
Ultimately, this was never about money for the author, it was another quest for the truth on his part (with some exceptions that go into the personal). While I and many may not agree with all of his analysis of Dylan’s lyrics his central contentions are rock solid: Bob Dylan has been a fraud the entire span of his career and his fans are delusional people who have projected their wishes onto him. That’s a religion, not unlike Christianity, that Judaic faith created by Jews and appropriated by Anglo-Saxons and other groupings, then perverted as the messages got into the wrong hands. Would you know it, somehow, Weberman was able to obtain mimeographed copies (there had been under 100 copies made, a small run for a select few) of Dylan’s awful unpublished experimental novel, Tarantula which he’d written in 1965-66. Rather than being a sycophantic biographer like so many others, Weberman has taken the path towards uncovering the truth, or his version of it, which has been found to be surprisingly accurate over the intervening years.
In May of 2011, for example, the tapes of the late, sycophantic music critic Robert Shelton which were rummaged through after his death in 1995 yielded the final word on his heroin addiction. This suppressed passage was found in them: "I kicked a heroin habit in New York City. …I got very, very strung out for a while, I mean really, very strung out. And I kicked the habit. I had about a $25-a-day habit and I kicked it." This was recorded by Shelton in March 1966 at a tour stopover in Denver. His biography of Dylan, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, is silent on the subject. The music critic was one of the very first to notice the talent of Dylan in 1961. He promptly wrote a review of a performance in the Village and the singer-songwriter was just as quickly signed to a record contract with Colombia. The rest is false history written by liars.
In August 1962, the “schmuck” would sign with Albert Grossman to manage his career becoming one more willing victim of that deceased criminal. Grossman would become infamous as a con artist who ripped-off his talent roster but also for taking out a life insurance policy on Janis Joplin after he’d found she was injecting heroin. According to writer Ellis Amburn’s biography on the singer, Pearl, he’d told her and the rest of Big Brother & the Holding Company upon signing them in 1967 that he wouldn’t tolerate intravenous drug use. Where did he get that notion from? Because of Dylan? Weberman was the first to contend that Dylan was using heroin and has paid the price for telling this truth ever since 1971. Now he’s been proven correct. I believe that Grossman and Shelton constitute Weberman’s “Devil” in his text in an allegorical sense. This is a story about Jewish identity as well as one about the failure of the baby boomer generation to grasp their place in the world, in history, resorting to fraudulent lifestyles and voting accordingly. Many of these fools—too many of them American WASPs, banal reincarnations of conformist lynch mobs--will continue to ignore the truth about Dylan and America to the grave and to our collective peril. Weberman’s ability to grasp all of this underscores a powerful intellect that has yet to be even remotely appreciated, however rough the delivery might be, however painful. The truth is the truth that fools run away from. The Crowd delights in lies.
The Devil and Bob Dylan is interspersed with thematically-linked excerpts throughout from Tarantula and the legendary songs. According to Dylan biographer Bob Spitz, Weberman took the substantial proceeds from his bootlegging of the text and formed the “Dylan Liberation Front” in 1971, part of a multi-pronged assault to pressure the singer-songwriter into participating in progressive causes for a change. Considering the times, one can hardly blame him. Considering all of the lies, one can hardly blame him.
What he found in Dylan’s garbage went straight into the East Village Other and various underground publications during that painful transition from the sixties into the seventies, a time when so many illusions of the counterculture were being smashed. The reaction to Weberman’s revelations by 1971 ranged from explosive to utterly dismissive, and this is where some of the crux of the story comes into play: there are those who are capable of seeing the hard facts and those who are believers in the mythology of Dylan as an icon of an era. They buy into the lies on many fronts. The Yippies are also part of that iconography, albeit in a different sense, a far more transparent one. The main difference was in their sincerity proven by their adherence to social activism well into the 21st century, something the singer-songwriter ditched decades ago…if he ever truly believed in it at all. According to Weberman’s new book, he never did, a conclusion he seems to have reached before the legendary phone call between him and Dylan in January 1971. Legend has it that avante garde composer John Cage provided him with the means to tap and record the conversation. The entire operation to unmask Dylan should be regarded as an artistic work. The Devil and Bob Dylan is likely the bookending of it, the frame--a conclusion. Others were also ahead of the Crowd and were ignored.
By 1970 John Lennon had reached a point of maturity where he roundly rejected Dylan…as well as an addiction to heroin through snorting it, probably the method that his faltering hero had employed. George Harrison also battled this demon throughout the 1970s and Graham Nash was one more casualty. Harrison also snorted heroin. Was it thanks to Dylan’s influence over them? In his song “God,” Lennon roundly rejects Dylan as a weak man, not a man-god that others had made him and the Beatles into. Who would John Lennon, perhaps the most popular sing-songwriter of that era besides Zimmerman himself, have looked up to enough to have been persuaded to try heroin? That’s right, no one. The myth of Bob Dylan was founded on lies. The lies have begun to come crashing down for good. A.J. Weberman was right all along: you’ve been had and you wanted to be, the talent of the artist aside. Now grow up and get a life.
This is not meant as any kind of a cynical-jab at the Japanese people, looking at them as some tool for change. The earthquake and subsequent nuclear accidents that are unfolding are a horrific reminder of how tenuous modern life is: in a matter of just five minutes, everything on the Japanese mainland changed forever.
At this point, we have no idea how many people have died or will die as a result of what's been reported as an 8.4 to 8.9 scale earthquake, possibly the worst in their entire recorded history.
The most recent one on roughly the same scale occurred in 1923, killing as many as 140,000 people. But the Japanese were better prepared for a recurrence...except that you can never truly prepare for one when it comes to a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power will always be vulnerable to natural disasters, social upheavals, and most certainly, inevitable social collapse since all civilizations end one day.
The half-lives of most radioactive byproducts of nuclear power will far-exceed the lifespan of any civilization, reason enough to begin a general decommissioning of all existing plants, the neutralization of the waste ("byproducts," and to the best of our abilities), and a rapid conversion over to a constellation of clean or cleaner energy sources, mainly natural and renewable ones. This nuclear disaster hasn't even played-out yet, but I see very real opportunities that need to be grasped, and immediately, by the Japanese public as well as the world community, outside of the corridors of power.
As the Japanese people and their rescuers from their government and from around the world are exposed to radioactive contamination, we need to realize that we have yet another opening here: the outrage that's inevitably coming on the mainland--perhaps even from neighboring countries--is going to be profound. As always, there are cultural, and therefore, historical reasons for this.
For those with a short memory, it should be remembered that the Japanese are the only nation on earth to have atomic weapons directed upon them. They have not forgotten this by a long-shot, and the terrible irony of this catastrophe-upon-a-catastrophe will not be lost on them as it surely is on most Americans, willfully, since we're the ones who dropped two atomic bombs on them in 1945.
We tend to forget about our own war crimes here in the United States, our victims however, do not.
There will be a very loud cry indeed in Japan to decommission these nuclear plants because they have failed every test. The plants themselves were already strongly opposed, but as it usually happens, times were better and they public will was more neutral and the opposition's warnings were ignored. There was, after all, a lot of money to be made, and power demands were growing and still are. That's fine and well, but events have a way of changing things, and catastrophes borne out of both natural disaster and human incompetence and corruption lead to a perception of misrule. As often is the case, that perception is usually accurate.
Prediction: there will be a major groundswell coming against further development and operation of nuclear power on the Japanese mainland. A call for major, wide-scale investment in clean and renewable sources of energy will be heard throughout the island nation. If it reaches the level of mass-production, it will have a global impact since Japan is the third largest developed economy in the world, one of the world's skilled "workshops," like Germany.
Even with this disaster, Japan could be poised to lead the way towards a new and decisive direction, towards the real world implementation of alternative energy sources that are well outside of the box. With China in close-proximity, production in both nations could point to very affordable solar technologies, as just one example.
This is all a wait-and-see, to be sure, since we don't know how bad this nuclear disaster is going get. But I think there are great opportunities here for Japan and the world, coming out of their worst period since WWII, their (and our) greatest challenge. As fate would have it, Wikileaks has uncovered and released one of the cache of American State Department cables, and they purport to contain a passage of Japanese government officials discussing cover-ups of previous nuclear accidents. When-and-if the smokes clears soon, the Japanese people will learn of this; there will be a wide demand for explanations, with the predictable outrage, perhaps even riots.
All we lack is the will since an outraged citizenry that won't have it anymore is an irresistible social force that cannot be held back any longer.
Friend, n.--A word whose original meaning fell out of use during the late Industrial-technological stage of human civilization while paradoxically growing in use that has made its misuse and misapplication practically universal.
In the second half of the 20th century, human beings decided to dispense with real social-ties and the bonds of friendship and solidarity to replace them with plastic and poorly-constructed consumer artifacts with no real use value to them. Certain scholars say that this development was determinist (inevitable), but nobody knows which came first, consumer goods or the decline in solid social relationships. One thing is certain: people came before them.
Social researchers and anthropologists have yet to explain why human beings would hand over their most cherished and important values and social and familial relationships for toxic garbage, but there you go. The general meaning in post-industrial/post-consumer society has yet to be determined. You're just jealous of our wrecked internal and social landscape.
Any assistance in prearranging the meeting-of-minds (I only promise to utter, "You're full of shit!" the rest should be history) would be greatly appreciated! This is a non-profit deal here, and if there's a story in it, you'll be reading it right here, at this location...well, not this exact location, meaning this post, but this site! Will we discuss Marxist philosophy afterward, or will I get kneed-in-the-groin? I think she's done enough of that to the American public.
But who knows? In the spirit of Gandhi, she might just have someone else kick my ass all over a parking lot. No kisses, though, no tongue, she wears brown-lipstick to hide that ass-kissing of people richer than she is. Mmm-hmm, hanging-out with billionaires, that's really going to accomplish a lot. You know, they're just the core-problem in America, these horrible people she tends to associate with...
Look, either she's a fool or a liar.
She believed that Gingrich and the GOP "would help the poor" in America with the "contract for America," which coming from a Cambridge graduate is bizarre. Had she never read about or experienced the last 80 years of our history? That's crap, and it's back-peddling. She knew they wouldn't do anything to "help" the subproletarian classes anymore than they were going to help the eroding middle-class. Why would she believe them, ever? This is the same kind of flawed-logic that kept the original progressive era from being truly progressive, giving us the Great Depression down the road, this cow-towing. At the very least, this stupid woman owes it to all of us to help clean-up the mess she and others helped create during the 1990s and get her hands dirty. She is not a member of the working-class or the general public. She runs with the rich, the privileged, the connected. Why would she "believe" them, the GOP back in the 1990s thinking they wanted to service the common good (and this is giving her far too much credit)?
The answer is a pretty simple one: she identified with them and thought she was "part of the club." Either she was fooled, partly-fooled and really just cynical, completely cynical and with them 100% (my take), or she's just incredibly confused and probably a dumbass with an Ivy League degree. My feeling is that she's just another social climber, those people who are actually worse than the rich themselves, and trust me, I've seen it in action with relatives in Chicago on a smaller scale, it's nauseating. The worst people in the world are the ones who want to be like the powerful people, the rich people. Scum.
Very little of Arianna Huffington's life speaks well of her, and now, we're supposed to believe that she was "fooled" by the Obama campaign as well. Her biography is a good work of fiction. Considering how cozy she was letting the Brothers Emanuel write on her website, and how much she helped the Obama campaign, it doesn't really matter whether her motives have been pure, misguided, or patently evil and cynical. The results--what results?--speak for themselves. This stupid woman has royally screwed-up and screwed the rest of us and should be booted-out of the progressive constellation yesterday. While millions are starving across the globe, being disenfranchised, losing their homes here in America, being slaughtered in a multi-front war, and while our rights are being rolled-back, this dumbass is sipping champagne and eating canapes with billionaires who don't want to be bothered with paying their fair share in taxes.
She's arch-conservative, she's a fraud, and she's got to change or go, and she's hardly alone. Send me to Los Angeles for one day (won't go until I'm certain I'll find her), and I'll give her exposure to a clue.
GOPland--You can't say they're the party of non-sequitters! Well, OK, actually you can. Like Sarah Palin, they've quit being relevant, human, and a solution to our nation's problems. In fact, they are our nation's problem along with the rest of the two-party non-system, soon to be on the same scrapheap as the former Soviet Union! Soon, very soon, Yakov Smirnoff will begin all of his jokes down in Branson, Missouri with, "In America..."
America gets the politicians it deserves, don't kid yourselves. And soon--sooner than you might think--we'll all be in the streets! Well yeah, because we're already going to be there! Wheeee!!!! Quit believe that the GOP is behind all the problems getting a decent health care system created through actual reform. The Democrats are falling on their own swords in the name of profit, of greed. OK, keep fooling yourselves and wait-and-see.
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.
Oil. Both the DRC (The Democratic Republic of Congo) and Uganda (Idi Amin's former stomping ground) are fighting over Lake Alberta's Rukwanzi island, a region where Ireland's Tullow Oil has been doing geological surveys early this year that have discovered between 400 million-to-1 billion barrels of oil, one of those fossil-based substances that we're supposed to be putting behind us to endglobal warming. Ho hum, there's money at stake, so no dice, the planet stays imperiled so someone can make more money than God. Note the proximity of the Sudan.
The DRC and Uganda have recently stopped their resource/tribal war that raged over most of the last decade and their militaries are now cooperating thanks to...money. The Ugandan military are now stationed in parts of the Eastern Congo fighting against militias there who want autonomy and probably their own piece of the action. In sum, Tullow is just making matters worse and future conflict is all-but-inevitable, like Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's 1874 geological survey into the Black Hills that sparked more Indian wars and rapidly consumed him and many of his own troops.
As I wrote, we know how that ended, he had it coming, and history has a way of repeating itself (rendering reincarnation unnecessary). Once they fought Native Americans and now unaccountable power and their representatives fight and pit Africans against one another over valued resources. Similar dynamics are at play in Nigeria where the U.S. has been constructing AFRICOM for future military adventurism, now training Rwandan troops, but it's all driven by greed rather than actual need, capitalism at its worst.
Yet, Tullow's Business unit manager has recently conceded that Sudan is currently off-limits because of political pressure over human rights abuses. There are limits to power--meaning some have limited power:
Asked if the company would work in countries like the Sudan where oil money is suspected of fuelling the war, he said: "There are certain countries we could not work in because of human rights issues and environmental concerns." (AllAfrica.com, 07.01.2009)
But Tullow is a small, independent firm, not a Chevron or a Shell. Their pull is significantly smaller. However, that doesn't mean that they don't want to meddle or that those other oil firms have any such qualms when the ability to do so is present.
With the ever-shrinking supply of oil and China's and India's ever-increasing demands as the factories of the world, it was time to look elsewhere, although it was known that there were oil-deposits in the region long ago.
"We finally found a location outside the Kabwoya Game Reserve. Another reason for the delay is that we found a lot of oil elsewhere. With the discovery of more oil, we have more options to choose from."
Asked why the oil in Uganda was found so late, he said when it was first discovered by Shell in the 1930s, it was considered not significant.
"They were looking for significant finds such as in Nigeria and Saudi-Arabia. But the world has moved on. Now is the time when oil has become scarce and the prices have gone up. So countries like Uganda come into consideration."(ibid)
Now the world (power) "wants" the remaining oil reserves in these African nations, regardless of the grade. Most of the wars of the 20th century were resource wars. The same is likely to be the case in the 21st century, imperiling the future of the species along with the directly-related effects of global warming.
And now we have the arrest and charges of murder against two Norwegian mercenaries who were in the DRC, ostensibly to set up their own private security firm. Both are former members of the Norwegian military, possibly from an elite unit. Private Military Herald is reporting some very curious facts about the Norwegian duo of Tjostolov Moland and Joshua French:
Evidence seized recently at the apartment the two men shared in Uganda could play a large role n the eventual outcome of the trial. During the police raid authorities found Norwegian military ID cards, counterfeit United Nations hats, employee ID badges with both the correct and false names of the two men. The employee badges are from a heretofore little known security company namedSpecial Interventions Group(SIG)which is owned by and mostly staffed by Norwegians. During the raid on the apartment authorities also confiscated at least one rifle and a camera containing pictures of the two men on their recent travels in Africa. In one grainy image, believed to have been taken by Mr. French, Mr. Moland is seen smiling as he washes the blood believed to be that of Mr. Kasongo from the inside of the hired car.(Private Military Herald, 08.11.2009)
Additionally, Mr. French has been coy about his real identity until recently, allegedly going under the name of "John Hunt," an equally nondescript name. Both men are being charged with murder and it appears the death penalty will be expedited soon. They were apparently scouting the region where the oil is. The Congolese authorities could very well have caught the duo and the Norwegian government (and maybe even forces unknown) red-handed. One thing's certain: Africa is still the frontier of the Wild, Wild West (and China).
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:
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."
Chicago, Illinois--Let the chips fall where they may, I have no sentimentality for the Democratic Party of Illinois, or otherwise.
You have to wonder if Blagojevich knew Fitzgerald was closing in on him when he went down to the Republic Windows and Doors plant to announce his solidarity with them and also stating that he was doing the almost unprecedented act of halting all business with Bank of America in the state of Illinois until they were compensated.
I think he really did know it was over. Yes, I believe he's guilty, but these are also very peculiar times, one never knows.
What Blagojevich didn't know was what else to do but try to appeal to the people directly, it was all he had left, surveying what might have been. He may continue to do so. If he felt this way, it was too late, as it usually is with scoundrels. He leaves a sad legacy.
What does this event tell us? That corruption is a bipartisan affair. And let's be honest--this is Chicago at its finest, this is what keeps the place going. I don't believe Obama had anything to do with Blagojevich's actions.
Why anyone's shocked by his language in the wiretap transcripts is beyond me. Listen to the JFK tapes, LBJ's, and Nixon's. "Cocksucker" is a favorite, including several variations of "fuck." Like everyone else, they're human beings with all of the same frailties. Remember that due process should be honored in all of this. As hard as it might be for us to believe, the GOP didn't invent corruption and they're not the only ones engaging in it. Let the chips fall where they may, although the evidence appears solid.
One thing's certain in all of this: Rod Blagojevich has always had strange hair. His "alliance" with labor will be seized-upon by GOP and Chamber of Commerce cockroaches, but none of it will matter because he's the one who blew it. His visit to Republic Windows must have presented him with a picture of "what might have been" watching the real solidarity of workers engaged in a sit-down strike. Then he went on to his last hours as Governor of Illinois, before his new status as a "perp."
At 6 a.m., the FBI made their courtesy call. "Is this a joke?" he asked. No, no joke, said the FBI. Look, he had to check. Wouldn't you? Will Rod Blagojevich contemplate how it all came to this? All the tireless years of effort to reach the position of governor? Will he reflect on how all of his supporters over the years are going to feel? Nah, but since he's not a Republican, he's going to be intelligent enough to resign shortly.
President-elect Obama appears to be coming out clean in all of this so far. This all has a ring of "Huey Long" to it, just another broken human dream while others emerge into reality, a shadow on cave walls of what might have been. Blagojevich acting Populist at the very end is both sad and tantalizing, and begs the question, "Why not all of the time?" Blagojevich's possible exposure is part of the answer.
Why shouldn't the governor of a state side with the workers of that state for the common good, and why isn't this more common? The answer is in the workers of Republic Windows and Doors--they stood up and demanded just the things they were owed, which sets them apart from the rest of us and Blagojevich. The governor wanted more, much more, than he was due, and now the GOP are having their brief moment where they're not running their cha-cha line into the courts over corruption charges.
Washington D.C.--No kidding? Really? I wasn't aware of this, and neither were all the firms that pushed for it...then crashed, went bankrupt, and are either asking for a hand-out from the government or no longer exist anymore (the latter being the best).
It seems that no matter what this administration does, nobody has any will or desire to hold them accountable. That's because it isn't all about them.
The administration's blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of a philosophy that trusted market forces and discounted the need for government intervention in the economy. Its belief ironically has ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.
"We're going to be feeling the effects of the regulators' failure to address these mortgages for the next several years," said Kevin Stein of the California Reinvestment Coalition, who warned regulators to tighten lending rules before it was too late. ("AP IMPACT: Under pressure, US eased lending rules," AP, 12.01.2008)
Yes, it's a good thing we have AP and the rest of the soon-to-be former scions of this order to tell us this. Notably, it was Allen Greenspan who advocated much of this deregulation--you remember him, the man everyone listened raptly to just a year ago, genuflecting to every utterance he made. They love you when you're making them rich, but they'll think less of you when yours and their ideas don't work anymore.
These are the rewards of getting your way almost every time. The temporal universe has a way of correcting any organism (or institution) when it's running amok, and we're seeing this writ large now in the developed world. Like emotions, stupidity and delusion are highly-contagious in human society.
When people are riding high and making so much money, they falsely presume what they're doing is correct because it benefits them. Academic join-in on this game, playing along and keeping the horrible truths from us as much as they humanly can. We didn't need them to tell us what they're telling us today: "The NBER says its group of academic economists who determine business cycles met and decided that the U.S. recession began in December 2007." ("Panel says US has been in recession since December 2007," AP, 12.01.2008)
Who could have told them that a pre-1929 approach to the American economy would result in a collapse? Besides the few ten-year-olds I know as neighbors, nearly anyone with a clue. But most Americans don't know their history, and the general attitude is that it's irrelevant, unimportant, and--most importantly--a lot of work and boring to explore. Additionally, there is the contention that it's "worthless knowledge." How worthless is it today, and how much would it have saved the public had we all been more informed and vigilant? More than $1 trillion USD.
Is understanding the last Depression so "worthless" today? It took us almost eighty years to forget what led to the last collapse. How long will it take next time? Probably not very long, since we're bound to keep doing the same things that led to this problem, which works for me.
At that point, history isn't going to let us repeat the same mistakes any longer and this order will be permanently dead. Market rule will be over for good. There are forces stronger than the human race, and we should be glad for it. In sum, whether we learn from it this time is irrelevant: the world trumps the powerful and the groundswell is coming, the general strikes are coming, and modest reforms aren't going to cut it.
In that sense, we have little to worry about with President-elect Barack Obama (at least he's qualified and actually won the election legally), because he's not going to have any choice but to create change with substance in America. That doesn't mean we won't be pushing him--we will--but events have a way of pushing everyone out of the narcotized inaction we've all been in for far too long. Now things affect those who always said, "If it doesn't affect me, I don't care." The fun is over, even for the comfortable these days.
Now things affect those who always said, "If it doesn't affect me, I don't care." The fun is over, even for the comfortable these days. Of course the Bush II administration went well beyond deregulation. They told the business and financial sectors that they could do whatever they wanted to, that nobody was watching.
Today is just a corroboration of what we all knew. Regardless of how many exposes, breaking stories, and general revelations of misconduct, nobody's going to seriously go after the members of the lame duck Bush II administration when they're just as guilty, the problems are systemic. Watch--with glee--as the whores run for cover, even when there ultimately won't be anywhere to run.
We're a strange species, but at least we're beginning to confront power again. Welcome to the end of Reaganism.
