Some visits to Zuccotti Park (the Wall Street occupation)

New York City--Me and my girlfriend paid a couple of visits to the Wall Street occupation over the last couple of weeks (on September 30th and October 7th), two days with marked contrasts for the site. September 30 was brimming with occupiers--as many as between 700 to 1,000 core individuals from New York were present (exact numbers are difficult to come by since how one defines an occupier can slippery at best), it was literally standing room only with "visitors" like myself.




It's my opinion that as this is a mostly symbolic action, "visitors" are just as worthy of being counted among the occupiers since we all share the same views about Wall Street and the bailout of the biggest American banks. We have come from all over the nation, from all walks of life and from a variety of age groups, a variety of demographics. What all of us share is that we're working class and that we're getting screwed by the economic sector and the political class. We know that working within the political process isn't going to bring about reform.




This occupation could go on record as the most photographed and recorded political event in American history to date, not even the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.



Contrary to the contentions of early mainstream coverage, the occupiers aren't all twenty-somethings and they have a solid focus on why they're there and what their demands are: radical reform of the financial sector.

Also on that September 30 came some of the first representatives of American labor--the Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100--and we were present, recording the event...along with an NYPD surveillance pod on a crane and nearly everyone else there. The TWU has sued the City of New York for commandeering five MTA buses to arrest Wall Street occupiers crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and lost, the cops can arrest them if they refuse to allow the action. Interestingly, police on the curbside began enforcing pedestrian codes, as if on cue once the TWU showed, but I leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusion. Had the cops not rioted again two nights earlier, beating and pepper-spraying occupiers once again, I wouldn't be so suspicious of their motives.

A number of plainclothes detectives were on hand as well as select NYPD who were photographing and videotaping everyone in the crowd. But many of the cops I've encountered were simply doing their jobs. An "us vs. them" mentality should be applied when brutality and extralegal behavior are present, but not as a default, my opinion.

There have also been unsubstantiated rumors that police planted among the occupiers were arresting individuals on the 5th of October--they have yet to be proven out. It's not the first of such rumors either that has been making the rounds. My own conclusion from both visits is that the core of the occupiers is well organized and know what they're doing. They're resourceful and could be ready for the long haul when the occupation itself ends and the real work of organizing begins, and a beginning is what this is. Right now, the police shenanigans at the Brooklyn Bridge and the resumption of extralegal brutality on the 5th of this month have seemingly thinned the ranks. That's if you only count them and leave out us visitors...

From September 30th:

Above: The TWU arrives on site, Sept. 30.

Above: Speeches by occupiers, not leaders. As no bullhorns are allowed by NYPD, every few words are relayed across the crowd by selected individuals, spaced-apart, so as to reach the farthest boundaries of Zuccotti Park.

All images the intellectual property of Matt Janovic and Isabel Martins. Copyright 2011.

The Infernal GPS

"It never works, that contraption, damned it to hell! Let's just wing it." he said exhausted as they passed Grand Central Station. 49th Street couldn't be very far--noting all of the obvious landmarks--but the device was now telling them to go the wrong way down a one way street, somewhere off of Broadway.

"Beware the Ides of March, seizure!" said one of them, dejectedly, becoming more depressed when they came to realize that it was too far off, and also in the wrong direction. A tiny tear formed in their tear-duct and they began to laugh, being unable to stop for several minutes.

The accursed diode box kept mindlessly sputting out wrong directions: "Take a ninety degree angle up 56th, then right to..." and it continued to drone on in likewise manner.

Finally, he took it upon himself to right their course, to return home after the great war of navigating to the island of Manhattan: "Cover your ears...do not listen to the Sirens, for they shall dash us all upon the rocks!" and they all laughed. Next time, dramamine®. Definitely.

Dude: Don't go to Chicago tomorrow, dude.

Chicago, Illinois--You know, once the home to my father until his family wouldn't pay protection money to "the Outfit" (Capone's former gang continued on without him...), Chicago is a place of ambivalence to me, and it always will be.

I love the town, don't get me wrong. It's an exciting place and I've had my share of great times there, but wow...how are they going to turn away all those people tomorrow? I mean, really, Chicago's closed. Chicago's going to be closed, man, game over, like NYC in 1975--who's going to tell them to drop dead when Gerald Ford still is? Does Rod Blagojevich's hair look so funny now folks? Of course it still does--he sports quite a pate--but that's not the point. Ask any scientist and most philosophers, and they'll tell you that there is no point (eat your heart out Michael C. Moynihan). I concur.

C'mon, Gerald Ford spared us from so much, you know. Like upholding law and order and allowing Nixon to be prosecuted fairly (no favors, no sentimentality, just the letter of the law) so we wouldn't be in the mess we're in right now with the executive branch. But to be fair, the integrity of all three are endangered now, so thanks, Jerry, for saving us from ourselves. Why celebrate Woodstock when you should be reflecting on Nixon's resignation 35 years ago? Pardon me. Where was I? Ah yes, Chicago, home to the water tower that Oscar Wilde loved so much...

So, if you want to go to a library, a city clinic, have your garbage picked-up--crazy shit like that--you're outta luck, babe, the social contract is over, and they put one on you. The cost-cuts (sounds commercial) being done with the City of Chicago only affect non-union and non-sworn union city workers, which to me just illustrates why we should be getting everyone unionized, just a thought. If union bosses had half-a-clue, they'd be unionizing every single illegal alien they could get their hands one, starting yesterday. And strikes? C'mon, people need work, but it's been 90 years since there was a general strike in a major American city, why not have one for yucks?

But don't go to Chicago tomorrow, on Monday, August 17th, 2009, things could go wrong. C'mon, most Chinese restaurants are closed on Mondays anyway! Monday= bad. They get it, man.

Are some serial killers created? An observation, by Len Howlett

I had been to North Miami Beach High (no, but I was sure spaced out by the time I graduated --an old throwaway punchline from Rowan and Martin's "Laugh In") to a seminar on teaching A.P. Chemistry, and there was a lunch break with a convenient little neighborhood deli across the street.

I went into the place and had a seat at a table in the small, almost full dining area which may have had a dozen tables in it. A guy I recognized from the seminar came up to my table and asked if I would mind if he sat in the chair across from mine. I invited him to join me. He was a personable guy and told me that he was from Queens or Brooklyn, or whatever borough it turned out that Dave Berkowitz lived in during his adolescence. The talk was light, and I was a curious figure to him since I was possibly one of the few people that he ever met with a Southern accent who loved Manhattan.

So, the talk went on, and it ranged from topical stuff to teaching and its pros-and-cons. I observed that maybe the best or worst of our tendencies embodied the vast potential that inadvertently plays a part in shaping future lives, which in the end, was more important and long lasting than anything they could possibly retain of the facts of Chemistry.

"After all," I said, "we could influence their view of the academic and the adult world just through example, either for the better or the worse. Then I made a statement--mostly in-jest-- that I didn't want to feel like I had helped make any serial killers or engendered resentment that twisted young psyches. Looking back, I can only believe now that I must have been reacting to some recent news about a case that was still active, and I was regarding my corned beef and half-a-sour pickle when I felt the stillness of a significant pause and a rather sobering, quiet response from him.

"I may have," he said. I looked up to catch the light humor I would expect to see in a satirical reply. It wasn't there. He was somber, like someone who feels the gravity of an act gone bad and the silent record of guilt.

He added, "Not as a teacher, but as a student."

"How so?" I asked.

There was another significant silent space and a measured response. Then he said he went to the same high school that David Berkowitz did and asked if I remembered who that was. "Of course, I did," I replied. He had been in the same class as Berkowitz.

I asked what kind of kid David was: his reply was the expected description of a friendless, lonely boy who ate every meal alone, sitting in the cafeteria at a table by himself. My lunch companion said with detectable guilt that he had been one of a group of four boys who would sit the next table over and ridicule and harass him every day while David sat and wordlessly ate his lunch.

The topic he remembered most frequently was the question, "So what you got planned, Dave? You got a hot date? I hear all the girls taking about you? They really like you. They're crazy about you, Dave." You know, the usual compassion of high schoolers and humanity when it's allowed to distract attention from it's own loneliness and self-doubt.

Then he said, "So, I come home one day some years later and open the paper and who do I see on the front page being led away by the police wearing that frightened smirk that I had watched him walk around with for years in high school?" He said he recognized Berkowitz immediately, even before he read his name, even though he hadn't thought about him in some years. And then, he said that he often found himself wondering--if just maybe--he had played a part in what happened later. "Maybe, maybe not," was all that I could say.

But nowadays, I think about it and the unknown consequences of unthinking actions.

A.J. Weberman's Homothug (2008) review

“My books are worth more unsigned.”

--A.J. Weberman to the author, 2009.

In the hot summer of 1991, and in the midst of an unprecedented crime wave, there was a pogrom in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn that has been called “one of the most serious incidents of anti-Semitism in American history.”[i] The pogrom was over an accidental hit-and-run of a black child named Gavin Cato by members of the Lubavitch Community. Within this racially-charged environment, a Hasidic Jew named Yankel Rosenbaum was murdered by a mob of African-American vigilantes spouting anti-Semitic epithets at the victim. This crime--and countless other events in the city at the time--ignited widespread calls for a law and order agenda from City Hall. 

The rioting took place under the administration of African-American mayor David Dinkins who ran on the race card in NYC’s 1989 mayoral elections, and appearances are everything in American politics. 

According to New York State’s Girgenti Report, Mayor Dinkins allowed the riots in Crown Heights to rage for three long days before doing much of anything about it, and his poor record in curbing crime created a backlash that grew over time. Things hadn’t gotten much better by the next election cycle when Dinkins ran against the Republican Rudolph Giuliani, and the perception was that Dinkins was “soft on crime.” At that time the Republican candidate was known for his record as an aggressive prosecuting U.S. Attorney in the Southern District (NYC region)—if he was known for anything at all. But did New Yorkers really know who—or perhaps what--they were voting for in 1993?

Did Rudy play to the outrage? You bet.

Political biographies are a minefield for any author, and especially when the subject is alive-and-kicking, and kicking his perceived enemies is exactly what Rudy Giuliani does best. As a matter of fact, sometimes it appears that it’s all that he does once in office--besides filling key governmental positions with his criminal cronies. First released in May 2008 on Amazon.com, Weberman’s profile of the former mayor of New York City was abruptly pulled by the online seller (who also printed the book through BookSurge) without much explanation, though it can be assumed there were threats regarding defamation of character. That’s rich considering the subject and the people he’s surrounding himself with over the years. According to Weberman, Giuliani’s own attorneys directed legal threats at Amazon.com, causing the removal of the book (still available @ http://yippiemuseum.org/homothug/ ) .

Was it Giuliani? Weberman appears to believe so.

There don’t appear to be any indications otherwise, but there are a few other characters in the narrative besides Giuliani who might have wanted the book pulled like the “defrocked” Monsignor, Alan J. Placa, an individual with a most peculiar attitude towards pedophilia and its relation to society and the law, and there are others who might have wanted the same. Placa handled charges of pedophilia against the Church on Long Island for several years, and doesn’t have a stellar reputation. Nevertheless, it’s safe to assume that Placa and Giuliani are still close friends and associates, if not two men who are stuck with each other thanks to mutual blackmail of some kind. According to Weberman and others, this is probably because Giuliani and Placa have had sexual relations with one another at some point during their youth, and therefore, they share secrets that are a threat to their power. Placa’s powerful? It helps to have powerful friends…

The author quotes Placa himself about his attitudes towards pedophile priests, and they’re not mainstream ones (the emphasis in the quote is Weberman’s):

“In my own experience, attempts to reintegrate people into the ministry have been quite successful. I have never been involved in attempting to reintegrate a clinically diagnosed fixated pedophile [MJ: he’s being very careful in his wording here] into the ministry, however, similarly, I have never been involved in attempting to reintegrate a person into the ministry after that person has been convicted of a criminal offense and has served time in prison. Such a move would be inappropriate, at the very least, for ‘public-relations’ reasons [MJ: the only real time the Church is concerned], if not also for clinical, legal, and moral reasons. With these provisos in mind, I report that my own experience (in many cases over the last six years) leads me to believe that most people who have engaged in the sort of inappropriate behavior we are describing here can successfully be reintegrated into some useful and fulfilling Church ministry…” [ii]

Yet, as Weberman points-out, and as anyone with any sense knows, you cannot reform a pedophile, making Placa’s written statements not only disingenuous, but bald lies that one would expect to come from a pedophile. For this reason and many others laid-out in the text, Placa has a very important place in Giuliani’s life and in the development of his character and his behavior. The author treats the other players in similar fashion since this is a study of a man’s character and how he came to have it. Assuming that Giuliani has character might be taking a wild leap of logic. 

Logically, Weberman also delves a little into the effects of heredity on sexual tendencies as well as the general effects of environment on Giuliani. Rudy’s father Harold was a convicted exhibitionist, a violent malcontent who consorted with other street criminals, and was a low-level organized crime soldier. What went on in the Giuliani home in front of little Rudy? We’re not entirely sure, but if you grow-up in a milieu of sexual depravity, violence, and organized crime, there’s a good chance you’re going to act in similar fashion later on. It appears that this has been the case throughout Rudolph Giuliani’s sordid adult life.

Certainly, some members of the gay community are going to be offended by the title of this chronicle, but it has a very real urban basis to it, and Weberman didn’t coin the term, nor is he claiming to have. If even a fraction of what he and the Yippie Museum research team have uncovered is true, the term fits, especially looking at the smoke coming from Giuliani’s father, his own official behaviors as a prosecutor and Mayor of NYC, and his other questionable associations. 

In short, he seems to fit most of the definitions of an urban “homothug”:

5. homo thug

A male thug who has [a] sexual interest in both males and females. Lives an ag[g]ressive lifestyle ( a well known result of hood life), mentally unstable (most of the time) and can claim to be of heter[o]sexual orientation (or not); mainta[n]ing a reputation that can be associated with the life of urban minority men (aka thugs) in and around predominantly black neighborhoods (unless they are a celebrity). All the while attempting to remain the alpha male in people's perception of him, therefore having to sustain the life of a straight male, with only or mainly heter[o]sexual intents to be accepted into society without consid[e]ration.

"Tyshawn" is your typical average thug. He's flippin' weight in the hood, got a clique with niggas that don't give Shit about much. On the block all night, having sexual leasions with chicks and even has a 4 year old son. Nigga dresses fly, got a fly ride and is known by people who otherwise would more likely than not, be associated with a homo Thug. Tyshawn has a relationship with a pre-op tran[s]sexual("Tania") who passes quite well and looks and maintains herself better than a lot of females. She herself is also "notorious" in the hood (for her own reasons). "Tyshawn" and "Tania" have a sexual relationship period[i]cally but consistent. And all the while these sexual rendezvous occur[r]ing on the DL [MJ—“on the down low.”] with no knowledge of his actions amongst his family or his crew. [iii]

Giuliani’s social interactions have been described by former NYC Mayor Ed Koch in his contemporary columns as being like “Frankenstein’s” monster. Koch was hardly alone in his use of this word in describing Giuliani’s governing practices, this one coming from Former Deputy Police Commissioner John Miller:

"Frankenstein's monster was a misunderstood character [that] reached out to people and frightened them and they ran away. I don't think the mayor has made that much of an effort. He just kind of frightens them away without reaching them at all."

Miller, a former television newsman, said, "When a police department becomes politicized because it's being run by a shadow police commissioner who is the mayor, you have to question as to whether the department is acting based on what is right and what is lawful or whether the department has become a political arm."[iv]

Did they even know the half of it? Maybe…and maybe not.

Interestingly, the author spends the first one hundred pages of his profile of Giuliani by focusing on his lifelong relationship with Alan Placa and the former Monsignor’s very curious background and tendency to protect pedophile priests. According to Weberman and several sources, were it not for the statute of limitations (and very conscious legal motions by him in several other cases so that it would expire), Alan Placa would be a convicted pedophile. Looking at his sources, he makes more than a good case for it. Worse still, Placa might have been involved in negligence with a victim of a pedophile priest, perhaps leading them into a situation where their suicide was all-but-inevitable. The overall picture of Placa is not only bad, and if even a smidgen of it is true, he’s a dangerous criminal degenerate and a threat to the community no matter where he lives. 

So why hasn’t he run for public office yet?

As a matter of fact, it appears that Alan Placa’s pedophilia is very real and the author cites Suffolk County grand jury proceedings as well as his own interviews with one of the alleged victims of Placa, one Richard Tollner, to support the contention. Tollner’s accounts of molestation jibe with other parts of the public record in so many areas that one has to assume the only reason the former Monsignor is still walking around a free man is because he has friends in high places, such as Giuliani and the Church itself. The main problem for Tollner—and other victims of Placa and his network of pedophiles—has been the statute of limitations, which Placa used as a lawyer (a role he hid from the victims and their families, not to mention the authorities on many occasions).

Yet, Giuliani has been zealous and consistent in defending his lifelong friend, often referring to him as an asset to the community. Is Placa blackmailing him? It’s a good question, and we should remember that there’s no honor among thieves and criminals, generally. It’s even money that Placa got a lot of practice in this area of dodging the law through his little game of protecting himself and other pedophile priests and clerics from accountability. Yet, Giuliani calls him a “friend.” Sometimes, “friends-for-life” takes on a different meaning, a dark one.

Consorting with know criminals and the corrupt, ruling with brutality and an iron fist, and ignoring the law while claiming to uphold it was all part and parcel of “Giuliani time.” To truly know someone, you must judge them by their actions, not merely by what they say. Weberman’s approach to Giuliani is that it’s all about character, a perspective that he shares about the troubled mayor with former NYC mayor Ed Koch, and he’s right in doing it. The man’s background and the people he surrounds himself with suggest that Rudolph Giuliani is a criminal, if not an unimaginably compromised individual, and that he is a fool who’s simply useful to the establishment and the criminal underworld. It’s hard to say what’s worse.

When held against the authoritarian mayoral record of the Giuliani years, the author’s text comes off like a very professional police dossier and will likely become a part of the permanent historical record regardless of the tactics unleashed to suppress it. It is thoroughly researched, indexed, and footnoted, and the author draws on the public record while adding primary sources of his own from interviews with various players in the narrative, like the inimitable FBI informant and City Hall “fixer”, Larry Ray. In other words, Homothug isn’t just some second hand retelling, but a part of the primary record. It’s a chronicling, if you will, of what genuine corruption looks like, how it behaves, and it wisely delves into where it comes from. The sad truth is that it comes from social injustice, that gift that keeps on giving. 

There’s a genuine yearning on Weberman’s part to try to understand why Giuliani and the people he’s surrounded himself with over the years are such irredeemable scumbags, and that’s being charitable referring to them as such here or anywhere. True, there are pointed and personal jibes in the text, but they are well-earned ones considering the targets involved. 

Many of Giuliani’s lieutenants were and are—in fact—career criminals with mafia connections and a skill for gaming the system, even on Wall Street. As Weberman notes, Giuliani himself grew up in an organized crime milieu, and his own father was a low–level mafia soldier as well as a general sociopath. But to Rudolph Giuliani, acute moral degeneracy appears to be that credential for being one of his “wiseguys,” making it a reminder to all that our political system is based on mutual blackmailing, more often than not. That’s not just an epitaph for New York City and Giuliani; it’s one for a very troubled American polity trying to find its way back to the light, and a flimsy sentimentalism isn’t going to fix things.

Perhaps former Mayor Dinkins was “soft on crime,” and there are good arguments for it (according to Weberman and others, Giuliani is “soft” in other areas these days after prostate surgery). But: was Giuliani a better alternative? It depends on who you are. If you’re part of the economic establishment, sadistic lower-level police officers, corrupt cronies, and organized crime, “Giuliani time” was a trip back to Eden and the joys of crony machine politics. Rudy had all their backs, but he didn’t have the backs of the people of New York City. 

Having run one of the most worst presidential campaigns in American history in 2008 wasn’t the only thing that sank his monomaniacal ambitions: It was the intuition of the American public that not only was Giuliani an uninspiring demagogue who used the events of September 11, 2001 to his political advantage, but that he was also corrupt, thanks-in-part to the scandals surrounding people who were close to him. The most familiar name would be Bernard Kerik, when the corruption-ridden Bush II administration chose him to head the Department of Homeland Security. As Weberman makes clear, Kerik was just the tip of the iceberg in the life of a very pathetic, deluded, and crazed individual who should have never held public office.

Homothug will be part of the epitaph of a very sick and deluded individual who should have never held public office. Therefore, it’s also an epitaph for the times he came up in.

---

[i] Shapiro, Edward S. (2006). Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot. Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England. xi.

[ii] Weberman, A.J. (2008). Homothug: The Secret Life of Rudy Giuliani. New York City: The Yippie Museum Press/BookSurge Press. 83.

[iii] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=homo+thug

[iv] http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1995/07/27/1995-07-27_mayor__frankenstein___ex-cop.html. Marzulli, John and Sheridan, Dick. “MAYOR ‘FRANKENSTEIN’ EX-COP BIG CALLS RUDY CONTROL FREAK,” New York Daily News, July 27, 1995.

Do the Wrong Thing: My experience watching Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing"

Michiana--It was twenty years ago this summer that I first saw Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" at a local theater. At the time, I was a pretty big fan of his film, "She's Gotta Have It" (1986), which miraculously came to a local theater, and it was projected in its original 16mm format, a rarity!

I never got to see "School Daze" (1988), it never came to South Bend, and that's probably a good thing since it sucks and doesn't hold-up very well.

Now, it wasn't as though I thought Lee was a racially progressive director by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't yet clear that he was (and I assume still is) a dyed-in-the-wool bigot, possibly even a racist. I'm sure that he still is a borderline racist, but he has bills to pay, so he's shut his big mouth about it over the years and that's good since the largest proportion of his audience is white (as opposed to Tyler Perry).

I went to see Do the Right Thing at a theater I'd seen more than a few great films at, including another one dealing with race titled "Mississippi Burning," and it was a very unique experience indeed. There was an old black couple there who had most definitely lived through the horrors of Jim Crow, the lynchings, the terror of white hate, and all the rest, because in the first lynching they could no longer take it and had to leave. The wounds were still very deep indeed in the late-1980s and it had been less than twenty years since the Civil Rights era as we know it had ended. Talk of the Vietnam War was still common as well, and it was equally contentious.

And so, 1989 rolled-into-place and I was finally going to get to see another "Spike Lee Joint" (a phrasing I still find stupid). I was excited, and the movie didn't disappoint...until the ending. OK, it was bad enough that Lee sloppily copped the "good hand," "bad hand" metaphor from Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter" (1956)--that was pretty close to plaigiarism. And the bigotry of several of the black characters was certainly offensive, with much of it going either unpunished or without much or any comment at all. That wasn't Spike Lee's greatest sin, but it was equally as intellectually dishonest as the ending.

1989 was the very end of the Koch era in NYC, and the allegations of police brutality at that time were flying. Many of them were reasonable. As is often the case, one specific incident is usually enough to spark protests, even riots, in NYC's boroughs, and it's safe to assume that police brutality is an ongoing phenomena not only in the Big Apple, but throughout America at any given political moment. Towards the ending of the film, Lee portrays a choke-hold death that actually occurred in Brooklyn not long before it was written and produced, it's a horror to watch, and it's as ugly as it should be--no arguments here.

The problem rests with the fact that his character "Mookie" (played by Lee himself, the author & director of the film) then decides to throw a garbage can through the window of his employer's Pizza joint because he's thinks they're to blame for the entire mess when they clearly are not within his own narrative. Not only is this wrong, it's dishonest and poor craftsmanship, bad writing.

The reaction by my fellow moviegoers who happened to be African-American was resounding: they cheered-him-on. But it gets worse. A number of young black kids kept milling around as the credits rolled, giving me the evil eye. It gets even worse from there. Outside of the theater, in broad daylight, several of them made motions that they were going to move on me and commit an act of violence. It was clear that they had been emboldened by the message of the film, and there's no excuse for this. To put it bluntly, I looked at them with a stance of, "If you touch me, I'm going to seriously hurt you," and it worked...but barely.

These kids were simply wrong. I had been scapegoated as a child by our educational system and was swept into the same shoddy classes as the black kids. Lee suggested by his act in Do the Right Thing that indiscriminate, racially-based attacks on others in retaliation for acts in-kind by others was and is preposterous, and those kids took his cue.

I know what it's like to be discriminated against, you bet.

The NYC flyover by Airforce One was a test...

New York, New York--It struck me even before there was news of the identity of the plane that this was a readiness test to see how fast the response by interceptor-jets was going to be. By all appearances they got up there a lot faster than on September 11th, 2001.

Small wonder that billionaire Republican Mayor Bloomberg was angry over not being notified. They just made an ass of him and his party again...because they can. Wish them luck making hay out of this one since the mainstream media isn't going to.

Would the administration of George W. Bush have even bothered with a readiness test? No. They were too busy robbing the public trough, that's why the attacks of September 11th, 2001 were such a success.

God Bless Kathy Griffin

tv--Yeah, I was watching this--because I'm aware that CNN producers have a sense of humor and touch of genius in pairing her with the annoying Anderson Cooper™, who referred charitably to an accurate statement someone made that he's "the Carrot top of news journalism." That he is.

But some assholes were heckling Kathy, and she let them have it as any self-respecting seasoned comedienne would have: "Shut up! ...You know what? Screw you! I'm working! Why don't you get a job, buddy? You know what? I don't go to your job and knock the dicks out of your mouth!" Amen.

You have to lover her irreverence, her brutal honesty, and her unwillingness to take any shit from anyone. Her comments on receiving awards and thanking Jesus are spot-on: "A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now."

So mote it be. I would marry a woman like this tomorrow, just without the plastic surgery scars. Kathy would agree, and violently.

But what's so enjoyable about the Griffin/Cooper dyad is that she knows what scares him, likely half the reason she made a comment about oral sex. Yet, he's starting to go along with her, he "gets" it, and I think they're both starting to enjoy the interplay. Yes, he reported rumors in New Orleans as truth--he's no journalist, which is OK--but he at least has a sense of humor about himself. Good show for both of them, and here's to a coming decade of Jacobean irreverence.

America could use more women like her, the kind who stir shit up for all the right reasons. Prudes and Puritans everywhere are running for cover, and you gotta love that.

http://www.kathygriffin.net/

The bailout negotiations, sex-for-contracts, and getting laid in D.C.

Washington D.C.--Why would anyone expect the people who created this mess in the first place to act otherwise? One of the things to appreciate in all of this is that apathetic Americans are finally all affected by the corruption in Congress, the White House, and in the judiciary. There's nowhere left to run and hide, responsibility is coming. Lies won't do it. Threats won't work. Everyone sees-through the manipulations now. For all these reasons, the Spitzer scandal deserves a radical reappraisal in the context of our current economic crisis.

As New York's state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer went a very long way indeed in apprehending white collar criminals on Wall Street. In fact, he was so good that these same individuals and institutions pulled-strings in Washington D.C. to see if someone was already surveilling the attorney general, then known as "the Sheriff of Wall Street." Ah, but they almost always are, as Senator David Vitter discovered in the summer of 2007. Yet, Vitter escaped Spitzer's fate. Why is that? Besides the fact that he's an obvious egomaniac with delusions of adequacy, someone had his back. That doesn't speak well of New York Democratic Party leadership and their own relationship with Wall Street, not at all. What you have here is a bipartisan form of political corruption with numerous compromised players, just everywhere.

Yet it's worse than that for those hoping for some real solution to the problem of corruption on Wall Street. The perpetrators want to blame those who discovered the bad investments in the first place:

"It's easy to blame accounting because it doesn't fight back," said Jack Ciesielski, author of the Analyst's Accounting Observer, a financial newsletter. "Now that there's somebody out there putting some light on the financials, it's shoot the messenger."

Lynn E. Turner, a former SEC chief accountant, said he remembered fielding questions about the accounting provision six months ago from lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

"What the banks are telling everyone is that the accounting has caused the problem," Turner said. "The only thing fair-value accounting did is force you to tell investors you made a bunch of very bad loans."("Wall St. Points to Disclosure As Issue," The Wall Street Journal, 09.23.2008)

But these same elements--again, we'll say that they're "bipartisan" in their corruption--couldn't get Spitzer on anything until his own sexual indiscretions got caught on the FBI's radar. One could even imagine the taps were done as part of the war on terror, a catch-all excuse to spy on one's political enemies, and practiced by both major political parties. When you're doing these things when you're in power, oversight is not desirable, hence we get none with the FBI and other police agencies.

And so finally, someone did answer-back to these unknown business and finance criminals from their field outpost that they had Spitzer on some surveillance logs, cherry-picked with tenderness and care so that the GOP's own wouldn't be caught-up in the net and the inevitable press coverage. Hey, wouldn't you? Why sure you would, quit shitting yourself. So, they--some of whom must surely populate the ranks of the now-dead financial institutions these days, some still standing--got their man, namely Eliot Spitzer. Why? Spitzer wasn't going to stop the investigations into Wall Street, naturally, and he was now governor. Who needs rules? That's for the public. As we know, former Governor Spitzer had a problem over "getcha little somethin' that you can't get at home," like the aforementioned Sen. David Vitter, a Republican. We've had a lot of selective investigation and prosecution under the Bush II administration, but knowing this takes some deduction and investigation on-the-part of the public, never mind the press's coverage and their take on these stories, which was absurdly narrow. None of this is news to this writer.

My own experience with the Palfrey scandal has taught me the hard lesson that the press often don't want to know the details about corruption and that they're being leaned-on heavily not to look too closely into such stories by editors and ownership. In the context of all of this, it should be crystal-clear these days that the prosecution of Deborah Jeane Palfrey was damage control by an already embattled political and economic establishment. The Bush administration were merely the expediters for someone else, and it all could have happened under a Democratic presidential administration that controlled the Justice Department. That's how entrenched the corruption is, and has been for some time.

With the recent revelations of sex-for-contracts at offices of the Interior Department in Colorado and in Washington D.C., Palfrey's stories about Brent Wilkes, Randy Cunningham, and even Shirlington Limo don't seem so wild any more. While it's true that she didn't know exactly what was in her phone records, she did make what I believe was a valid claim to have spoken with Brent Wilkes on a few occasions over the telephone. He's hardly the only shady government contractor in her phone records, however, and there are many others waiting to be discovered.

Some researchers have probably already found all of the realtors that pepper the phone records of Pamela Martin & Associates, making for a charming snapshot of a totally corrupt boom period. The bailout, the bailout, I know. It's the coda to all of this. Had Palfrey waited long enough, she might have lived to see the system that had judged her collapse. What I find surprising is that some of the other members of the Palfrey defense team from the Sibley period are so silent about these possible connections to the financial scandal, and others. I question their sincerity in these areas. Perhaps they're biding-their-time for that big book with HarperCollins, Knopf, Time-Warner (TV rights! coffee table books, Amway product tie-ins!), or some other gargantuan conglomerate that threatens to topple in the current economic climate anyway. Who knows? Better spend that money while it's worth something, a certainty.

The need for a bailout came from this whole mess of corruption surrounding the political process and its intersections with the business and financial world.That's right, the world of lobbying.

Some Democrats still want a provision allowing bankruptcy judges to rewrite mortgages to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. Thune said that would be "a deal-breaker" for Republicans.

The compromise legislation that seemed to be emerging Saturday "is not the proposal that we got from Secretary Paulson," Reid said. But lawmakers said it would be much closer to Paulson's original plan than to the alternative offered by House Republicans several days ago. ("Senate leader: Significant progress on bailout," AP, 09.27.2008)

Why should the public get something for nothing when that's the traditional role of corrupt American business? It's all about the lobbying, and as Brent Wilkes showed, many of these government contractors do their own lobbying which often includes getting people laid.

We need to start asking the question: How widespread are these corrupt practices in the halls of Congress, in the bureaucracy itself in the form of crony appointees, and the White House? The intersections are everywhere in this, and yes, even in the sexual ones. A bailout isn't going to fix entrenched-corruption or a political culture rife with it. This opens-up terrifying implications that most of us suspected all-along about American civilization.

If the system isn't run on merit--something most of us likely knew a long time ago--what holds it all together? It doesn't appear to be business acumen, so what is it? These are the same kinds of issues that appeared in the collapse of the Soviet system. After this kind of connections-based crony-capitalism proliferates to a point, does it implode? How do you "fix" such a system if it's just going to keep perpetuating the same old mistakes over-and-over as part of how it's able to exist at all? At the end, then, it's all based on the belief of the public in that order, and that belief is eroding rapidly. There's every good reason for it to do this, namely from a lack-of-accountability in the halls of business and government. All they're trying to do in Washington is to bail themselves out, ultimately. Being mostly criminals, they will fail in this endeavor, the crisis will deepen, and objective-reality will correct things. The public is part of that reality.

Eventually, certain mechanisms of law and order are likely to kick-in. If this doesn't occur, then the chances of insurrection are substantial, and there is no military force on this earth that's capable of pacifying even half of the American public if they are up-in-arms over the way things are bound to be headed. The examples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and just about every popular uprising prove that it's an unwinnable situation. Welcome back history, we missed you.

"Wall St. Points to Disclosure As Issue," The Wall Street Journal, 09.23.2008: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/22/AR2008092202688.html

"Senate leader: Significant progress on bailout," AP, 09.27.2008:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080927/ap_on_bi_ge/financial_meltdown

The Missing-Thread in Coverage of the Spitzer Scandal

New York City--Soon-to-be former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, has a lot to be proud of and ashamed of. When he was New York State's Attorney General, he was busting many of the same shady lending and mortgage firms who were bailed-out by the fed and J.P. Morgan today. $200 billion was given in-loans to Bank of America (current owner of Countrywide, now under investigation), Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and all the other sub-prime lenders--namely Bear-Stearns--who have run amok in a regulation-free environment thanks to the Bush administration looking the other way. But then along came state Attorney Generals like Spitzer.

Was the federal bust of Spitzer selective--was it payback for all the busts the former "Sheriff of Wall Street" made? We don't know this yet, but it's a possibility. The timing is very curious: just a few days before the bailout, we get the break in the Spitzer story and his name is thrust into-the-foreground.

What about the other clients identified in the investigation? If they're Republicans, we're not going to find-out anytime soon. Recall that Senator Vitter's presence on wiretaps of a 2001 investigation in New Orleans were suppressed for years by the Bush Justice Department. Then there were all the "mysterious" break-ins during 2007 at the campaign headquarters of Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and the offices of Senator Christopher Dodd.

It's a real twilight time. But all that aside, one has to wonder if the newly-appointed Governor Paterson will be initiating any new investigations on Wall Street. Taking-down Spitzer surely had the aim of limiting them, underscoring the stupidity of his actions.

Historians are likely to be stunned at how selective most of the Justice Department investigations were under the Bush administration, and how Congress looked-aside when it was obvious for all to see. Funny how Americans are the last to know their own history. This aspect of the whole story is likely to be neglected into oblivion, down the memory hole, but the questions and suspicions are going to be there, forever. They'll just be classified until all the primary players are dead.

"National Security" will be the tired refrain, which in some respects is accurate: if Americans knew half of what's going-on under the color of authority, they might revolt. With all of the economic-woes created by this unprecedented era of corruption, it's unsurprising that both parties are alright about domestic surveillance--they might need it to survive our wrath when things have gotten so bad from their actions.

But if you look at how the exposure of Republican Senator David Vitter was handled and look at Spitzer's case, the Democratic governor's treatment certainly appears to be selective and blatantly partisan. This is not coming from a fan of the Democratic Party. Not only that, but it should be noted that the Spitzer case has a strange parallel with the blank inaction to impeach the vice president and president for far more heinous crimes. Calls for impeachment from the Republicans was resounding, while we can readily recall the sound of crickets on-their-part when it comes to their own.

Centrally, these would be war crimes, but the scope and depth of the Bush administration's overarching crimes are going to be marveled at for generations. Remember reading about slavery, or the Holocaust? Remember saying to yourself, "Were they stupid? Why did they put-up with that?!" Welcome to why not, your wondering is over. Have fun looking in the mirror tomorrow morning, then write, call, e-mail, and contact your representative and ask them what the hell they actually do there in Washington D.C. Better yet, if you have no ties to the establishment, why not run for office? Do what you do best.

Michael Alig's mom is in my area and zip code (last I knew!)

Michiana--I keep threatening to do this, but it might have to come-to-pass: an interview with Michael Alig. Michael's mother--Elke Blair--lives just miles from our home here. In watching the documentary, "Party Monster," I was stunned at how similar our experiences living around here were.

I'm not gay, but it makes me shudder to think of the abuse that Michael had inflicted upon himself by others in the area. It makes for a better understanding of why he did what he did. Living here, I am completely unsurprised that Michael's life ended-up the way it did, and look at the entire story as a tragedy. You couldn't find an uglier place for real outsiders than this region.

It could have worked-out differently, though I have to wonder if he would have had the drive to accomplish what he did with the club kids without the rage that began here in the South Bend/Mishawaka area.

Being a kid around here in the 1970s-80s was a extremely violent time for a lot of us. It was another era entirely, and if you didn't fit-in you were a target. There was no escape from this existentialist hell, and like today, adults were unwilling to take any responsibility for this atmosphere. Many of them actively encouraged the hunting-down of the "others" who were "different." The violence was rife, ubiquitous, and everywhere as a daily-occurrence.

What constituted that difference usually didn't matter. I can recall a memory from those times of watching in horror as a well-known family of young malcontents literally enslaved neighborhood children into building a kid's "fort" for them through violence and intimidation. The examples are numerous and similar. It was like a war zone.
There is a theme of revenge, or a desire for it, in Alig's life that must surely spring from this context. Who were his predators during his childhood, the individuals who victimized Michael Alig? "Party Monster" outs a local preacher, but also hints at homophobic tormenting and bullying by other children in this area (as well as general climate of violent bullying). This should be examined more thoroughly.

What Michael did was wicked, evil, and wrong by any standard, but I don't think the surface was remotely scratched by documentarians Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. They should have gotten more of a feel for where Alig grew-up. It's probably the shortest-part of "Party Monster-The Shockumentary" (1998). Watching it on its original broadcast, I nearly fell off of my couch! I never saw it coming. But how does one summarize a life?

That's not entirely their fault, it's a tall order. James St. James has done a good job in these areas, and I agree that the filmmakers were probably a little too enamored with their subject, being too seduced by the glitz and glamor they were party to. It's not unlikely that Michael Alig became his oppressors in some way through dehumanization and constant humiliation. We should find-out who these people were, because they could be doing things that are far-and-away worse than what Alig did, even today. I believe the preacher is deceased, but what of Alig's peers from those early-years before his move to NYC?

Who are they? What are they doing today?

For myself, the club kids were something you saw on Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael, or Geraldo. They were a visually interesting and bizarre part of an ugly and boring decade. I liked them in their Kabuki-style poses, though I would learn later that much of it was copped from UK designer Leigh Bowrey. But there was also something very intriguing about their androgyny and free-spiritedness, it was interesting and appeared very fresh. The ladies attached to the scene were pretty hot. It all looked very sexy and subversive.

Hilariously, I once received a Richie Rich single in the mail for a little zine' I was doing during that period--there was no context for it at all! Frankly, the single was hilariously bad dance techno with helium-vocals. The Club Kids weren't exactly talented, they just became very famous overnight. What's amazing is how long it all lasted. Where it all went wrong was that many of the participants couldn't face that these scenes only last a for a time, and then they're gone. Normally, they don't last more than a couple years, which is what made this countercultural scene so unique. But holding-on to something that must inevitably end is when the demons arise from their hiding-places.

Add tons of hard drugs, and stir! There are so many rumors and allegations surrounding this story, and while I would trust James St. James over Michael Alig in most areas, it would be healthy for Michael to finally finish that autobiography ("Aligula"), and in a shorter form than he's been promising (a staggering 5,000 pages). It should be clear and manageable for readers, and direct. My hope is that he finds someone to help him edit it into something readable and accessible (paging Michael!).

Some very bizarre rumors and allegations surround the murder of Angel Melendez, and the government's investigative role in Gatien's clubs doesn't add any clarity. One is that Alig and his roommate "Freez" cannibalized Angel's body. This sounds very hard to believe. What's certain is that Gatien's clubs were teeming with law enforcement who were incognito.

If the Feds knew the answer to this question, they certainly were keeping it secret, as it appeared they intended to use Alig as a Prosecution Witness against Peter Gatien. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office surely knew also, but they have a long history of hiding from the public information about crimes involving the Occult. Further investigation proved that Michael Alig and Freeze were involved with the Occult; Michael being a ‘dabbler’ whereas Freeze was heavily involved. (Americanmafia.com, 'The Agony Of Ecstasy: The Fall Of Sammy Gravano And Peter Gatien, James Ridgway de Szigethy. September 2002)

Peter Gatien's story is also basically untold, and by all appearances, he was probably railroaded by the federal government in all of this. Consider that for a long-time, they didn't even care about Angel Melendez's murder, and that they just wanted to take down Mr. Gatien and the Limelight club, the Palladium, Club USA, and other venues he owned during the 1980s-90s. Gatien is now living in Toronto (2008).

Law enforcement even ignored an early confession of Alig to Melendez's murder and allowed him to roam free for weeks. Sound familiar? But what Gatien and Limelight, and his other clubs, can be seen as are victims of former NYC Rudolph Giuliani's campaign to "clean-up" the city (for organized crime?). The murder probably was--and is--unimportant to law enforcement at all levels. None of this is in-defense of Michael Alig. Four-years-ago this 21st of August, Peter Gatien was deported to his native Canada. He currently resides in Toronto, sans his distinctive eye-patch.

Again, there could also be a much larger and untold story in this area known as Michiana regarding Alig's background. Remember that Michael grew-up around Penn High School (a place swarming with rednecks), the very same stomping-ground as that of "Heathers" (1989, written just a couple years after Alig left for NYC) scribe Dan Waters. Watch that film, and you'll see that the connections to Alig's life are there.

My own experiences in the educational system around here echo the movie in many respects (no, not literally in what Christian Slater's character does to his tormentors), so I know that Michael's environment was almost identical to my own, and that of many others.

Waters was an astute social observer: he really nailed the rage and anger experienced by outsiders around here. It's all about the pecking-order. Such are the roots of Columbine, and all the other tragedies, the elephant in the room that everyone's afraid to acknowledge. Part of the reason is that many parents and other "trusted" authority-figures would be going to jail for life.

That elephant is how horrible we all allow others to treat one another, and the price of tolerating the pathological bully, the pederast, and the child abuser. That price is too high for our society. How many murders were there in the Haight Ashbury district after the Summer of love? A lot. It would dwarf the body count of the club kids, and handily, yet that's not the picture we usually get of that scene.

The whole thing about these scenes is that it's an ongoing tragedy about young people wanting to have acceptance and to escape from the alienation of the modern world by creating their own space. They just wanted to create another life, a better life, and as wrongheaded as many of them were, it's not an evil motive at all. As these ersatz Edens crash, the hard drugs strat playing a role. But someone had to provide the drugs, and that brought in the criminal-elements and the cops.

Alig was one of the "two Michaels" hired by Gatien in the late-1980s to promote the Limelight, the other being Michael Caruso. Caruso became a DEA informant after being popped sometime during the early-1990s.

A May 2000 Village Voice article offers some clarification of his role in the club kids scene:

Two years ago, as he sat on the witness stand at Limelight owner Peter Gatien's drug-conspiracy trial bawling his eyes out in a badly fitting blue suit, Michael Caruso's life seemed effectively over. The big-time promoter—the man who first brought techno music to Manhattan and turned Staten Island on to Ecstasy—confessed to a string of brutal crimes: bank robbery, home invasions, extortion schemes, kidnapping attempts, wholesale drug trafficking, and more. These should have put him behind bars for 20 years. But in exchange for leniency, he became the centerpiece of the government's case against Gatien [Ed.-Instead of Michael Alig?], betraying a man who he'd told associates was closer to him than his own father. Caruso's testimony about the inner workings of the Limelight's drug network, which he himself created, not only provided a glimpse of the seamy underbelly of club culture—the violent demimonde of dope peddlers, gangsters, professional party-goers, and police informers hidden behind the superficial veil of fun and fabulousness—but helped put behind bars many of his former colleagues. (Village Voice, 'Wu-Tang Clan are Sumthing ta Fuck Wit,' Frank Owen. May 24-30, 2000)

Well-intentioned Edens fall. This shouldn't be an unfamiliar theme to anyone. One can hardly blame James St. James in his wish to move-on from this whole affair. It's a sad story filled with animosity, subterfuge, and several unexplained deaths and a few explained murders. Utopian experiments rarely end well, and we should be examining why this is so. The seeds-of-destruction are usually already in-place, often coming from that "outside world" the participants are desperately trying to escape.

Watch Heathers again sometime, and consider what you have read here. Add informant programs and other elements of criminality added to-the-mix (not DJ Keoki's!), and it only gets uglier. It didn't have to end the way it did, but it did. What can I say? It looked like so much fun, and it could have been so good. It could have been so very good.

Lightly Revised and Corrected, 09.12.2008