Fascinating, it's so ugly up close

Courtesy of Damon Vrabel:



I highly recommend the rest of this series...

Mr. Phillips, a few words if you don't mind...

That's when [Fry Pan Jack] told me - you know, he'd been tramping since 1927 -
he said, "I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor,
I will henceforth cease to work." Hah! You don't have to go to college to
figure these things out, no sir! He said, "I learned when I was young that the
only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true the only real
life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain
to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption
that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?"
Fat chance!

He was old enough to remember the sleigh rods under the boxcars, riding the
rods. Fry Pan Jack; the two bums.

the bum on the rods is hunted down as an enemy of mankind
the other is driven around to his club, is fatted, wined, and dined

and they who curse the bum on the rods as the essence of all that's bad
will greet the other with a winning smile and extend the hand so glad

the bum on the rods is a social flea who gets an occasional bite
the bum on the plush is a social leech, bloodsucking day and night

the bum on the rods is a load so light that his weight we scarcely feel
but it takes the labor of dozens of folks to furnish the other a meal

as long as we sanction the bum on the plush, the other will always be there
but rid ourselves of the bum on the plush, and the other will disappear

and make an intelligent, organized kick: get rid of the wasted crush
don't worry about the bum on the rods - get rid of the bum on the plush
-Utah Phillips (collected stories, songs, & poems)

You know some of my best friends are...

How odd. Try as I might I couldn't find a single word in the New York Times today about the 100,000 ultra orthodox Jews who marched in Jerusalem in support of segregation. I'm sure it was just an oversight... front page tomorrow you'll see.

(Hat tip: War in Context)

Doh!

Below is the damning footage that got away as far as the Israelis are concerned for they were no doubt secure in the belief that they had confiscated and destroyed all the embarrassing footage of their Pirates of the Mediterranean escapade. This footage is courtesy of Cultures of Resistance.org (hit tip: War in Context)

It couldn't be helped you see, they attacked us with sticks

Yes. The Israeli Apartheid State is that venal, not to mention criminally inept:



What's that? You say you object to a commando raid--in international waters--upon a civilian mission to relieve some of the suffering of Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants currently under a criminal embargo? Well that will get you this:



this,



and ultimately this,



The young woman in the above images is 21 year old American activist and artist Emily Henochowicz who was protesting the commando assault on relief efforts along with many others at the Qalandiya checkpoint which separates the West Bank from the Usurping Entity. Emily will lose her left eye.

OOOh Yeahh!

US income inequality in all its graphic glory

When all of one's fears come to pass

As we watch the Goldman Sachs con men twist and shout before a suddenly agitated Senate banking committee shocked, shocked! to hear that there's rampant fraud on Wall Street I think it's instructive to revisit a bygone era when similar forces were arrayed against the interests of the general population yet the warnings went unheeded. Courtesy of Jessie's Cafe Americain:

It is one of the serious evils of our present system of banking that it enables one class of society, and that by no means a numerous one, by its control over the currency to act injuriously upon the interests of all the others and to exercise more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs. The agricultural, the mechanical, and the laboring classes have little or no share in the direction of the great moneyed corporations; and from their habits and the nature of their pursuits, they are incapable of forming extensive combinations to act together with united force. Such concert of action may sometimes be produced in a single city or in a small district of country by means of personal communications with each other; but they have no regular or active correspondence with those who are engaged in similar pursuits in distant places. They have but little patronage to give the press and exercise but a small share of influence over it; they have no crowd of dependents about them who hope to grow rich without labor by their countenance and favor and who are, therefore, always ready to exercise their wishes.
-Andrew Jackson farewell address
The rest...

Twain Revisited

I was rummaging through the archives of the Socialist Worker website when I ran across this gem from the great satirist:

Oh Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded...help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the waste of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst. -Mark Twain The War Prayer

Isn't it funny how we never had the opportunity to explore this aspect of him in school? The rest...

So... what'd I miss?

As I slowly ease back into this blogging thing I think it's important that I share with you this little nugget from the incomparable Wikileaks organization. Yes children, it's good to see that Uncle Sam is still winning precious hearts and minds over in Iraq one at a time...

A Soldier's Story

When cannon fodder become self aware, the Empire has not long to thrive. Let's encourage this trend.

The Power of Money

The truth is there really is no better argument for publicly funded elections than the Barockstar's triumph. Think about it. Tens of millions raised during the past election cycle by the FIRE sector and viola! The greatest heist of the public purse in recorded human history with the bailouts and the continuation of pay as you go "healthcare" only now with the state acting as a handy coercion mechanism will soon be the new normal. This latter legislation has been accurately described by Arthur Silber as the Fuck You To Death Act by the way for there is no better description.

That always fascinating interplay between the money of the owning classes and the elected officials alleged to be working in our interest is by far the surest method of maintaining--and in the case with the Wall Street giveaway--"improving" the status quo. Since so much has already been written about the successful heist of the US Treasury by the Wall Street hustlers I thought I'd draw some attention to an essay by Louis Proyect where he details how the process works on a smaller, perhaps more digestible scale. In this example we follow the exploits of local southern California titans Stewart and Lynda Resnick, owners of Paramount Farms which is the largest grower of almonds and pistachio nuts in the world and also, among other things, the Franklin Mint which should be familiar to insomniacs across the American landscape.

Bonus:
This story may be the most humorous of 2009 as we witness a hapless entrepreneur suffer the unintended consequences of greed and exploitation when Kung Fu monkeys attack. (hat tip to Elaine Supkis at Culture of Life News)

Negotiation Not Imposition

So say the workers of British Airways. Management at BA hoped to use the recession/depression as an opportunity to rape-stomp the workforce but have now run into a bit of a snag. Richard Seymour of Lenin's Tomb fills in the details of this superb worker action.

Pardon the detour...

... but she's back:

Goodness gracious how that boosts my spirits! Back to regularly scheduled bitching a bit later.

War Is Peace

My apologies for the long absence but I really needed the rest for I found myself in something of a rut creatively. Perhaps it was a case of Obama fatigue what with the Prince of Peace predictably delivering the goods for his primary constituents on Wall Street, the war profiteers feeding at the Pentagon trough, and the "healthcare" industry vampires. In any event, the Barockstar has officially taken ownership of the "good" war in Af/Pak with his major escalation speech at West Point so I may as well deal with it in this little space of mine. That's the plan at least. I've had the outlines of a few essays on this theme rolling around in my head for quite awhile now and I think it's about time they saw the light of day. In the meantime I'd like to leave you with a few words from Chris Floyd for whom it can never be said, "the guy just doesn't get it".

The Killing Business

Why again is it that they hate us so? Oh yes, for our freedoms.

Wall falls but myths endure

Though the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is nearly upon us I've noticed that celebratory gestures commemorating this event from the usual quarters seem a bit strained. Why the long faces? I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the crumbling facade of capitalism, of which Margaret Thatcher famously declared There Is No Alternative, lay somewhere near the reason. Two years into its worst crisis since the Great Depression has exposed "capitalism" as practiced over the past 30 years in the US and among its acolytes as a ponzi scheme and cruel hoax on the overwhelming majority of people. Kind of spoils the party I guess.

Conventional wisdom encourages the belief that the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the "defeat of socialism" as a practical ideology. This popular fiction rests on the central conceit that socialism was the really existing system of the USSR and its Eastern European satellites and not a form of state capitalism. Phil Gasper explores this theme in the following essay published in Socialist Worker.
An excerpt:

The collapse of Communism--or, more accurately, Stalinism--in the Eastern bloc did result in triumphalism among supporters of Western-style capitalism, and it led to widespread demoralization among large sections of the left because they shared the belief that these regimes were in some sense socialist or "workers' states."

But this characterization of the Eastern European countries was based on the assumption that socialism can be defined in terms of state ownership of the economy. Since in all of them, the economy had been largely state-run since the late 1940s, it followed that they were socialist, no matter what their other imperfections.

The rest...

Meanwhile on the Wall Street fraud front...

Commercial real estate is the next shoe to drop in our ongoing financial crisis and in order to protect the reckless the (alleged) regulatory agencies who did such a bang up job as the underlying conditions for the present debacle developed, have relaxed the accounting requirements for banks holding the notes on those underwater shopping malls littering the country. And in whose face are these time-bombs set to blow up in the not too distant future? You guested it, the taxpayer.

Dirty Laundry

Every once in a great while a member of the ruling class or, more often than not, one of its lackeys will find themselves grappling with their conscience and succumb to its influence. John Perkins faithfully served his masters for decades as an economist for a US based consulting and engineering firm that specialized in convincing the ruling elites of developing nations to take on massive debt in the form of World Bank and/or IMF loans for construction projects of negligible indigenous economic benefit but a source of windfall profits for western corporations and their investors. Perkins lays out all of the sordid details in his memoir Confessions of an Economic Hit-man but provides a handy Cliff-Notes version in this interview:

Big Government

I’m always amused when I hear complaints about “big government” (wink to Rue St. Michael) and how if only it would stop hampering “innovation” with its incessant meddling we’d all be on Peach Street for damn sure. When will this myth die the bloody death it so richly deserves? Oh well, maybe this little nugget courtesy of Naked Capitalism will help clear the air for those who still, even after Big Government was last seen shoveling tax dollars like a son-of-a-bitch into the coffers of the insolvent financial institutions primarily responsible for destroying the world economy, think Big Government serves anything but the ruling elite:

Beginning late in the week of Nov. 3, the New York Fed, led by President Timothy Geithner, took over negotiations with the banks from AIG, together with the Treasury Department and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. Geithner’s team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps — insurance-like contracts that backed soured collateralized-debt obligations….

Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public.

The rest...