Bloomberg & Occupy Wall St.

A laughable quandary: Demonstrators Test Mayor, a Backer of Wall St. and Free Speech.

The mayor wonders "...why don't you [Occupy Wall Street] get out there and try to do something about the things that you don't like, create the jobs that we are lacking, rather than just yell and scream?"

He's unaware, because of the billions clogging his empathy gland, that not everyone is a member of the divine Job Creator class he belongs to. 

He figures he's engineered the perfect NYC, where anyone with initiative is worth millions, and where the rest of us should be content to Occupy Ourselves with the corporate morphine dripping out of iPhones and advertising as we underbid each other for the honor of running errands for the rich.

The mayor's done everything he can to make the city dependent on and servile to his Wall Street / 1% cohort, which has drowned the power of all speech but its own and turned democracy into a joke by purchasing the political process (see Oligarchy, American Style).

A few years after our banker-inflicted crisis, the world economy is still hostage to hidden dependencies buried in the shadow system built by Wall Street "innovation," with 29 global banks deemed 'too big to fail' and with a distant collapse bound to have side effects here (see Sad Proof of Europe’s Fallout).

But nothing's been done about personal debt, employment, or the next brewing crisis, and we can't do a thing about it through the political process because nowadays, thanks to people like Bloomberg, meaningful citizenship is restricted to the 1%, and its money chokes out any form of life that does not serve it.

Escape from New York Recipes

Coming soon: Creamed Banker Beef on a Shingle,
pictured here under a heat lamp in Hell
Escape from New York

The Tea Party will soon be in power and close down the federal government.  Society will collapse within days, and all the bankers, corporate moguls and media elites will flee New York City, as crackheads take the streets and bloodthirsty mobs chase down stragglers, feed them to homemade guillotines, and use their severed heads to turn the avenues into gruesome bowling alleys.

Without the FAA's air traffic controllers, elites will have to escape by land.  They'll head for their fortified Rockie Mountain compounds in Humvee convoys, guarded by contractors back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Heartland Meth-Head

But they'll never make it, because the U.S. heartland -- full of crazed, toothless, acne ravaged meth-heads suffering withdrawal from Fox News and armed to the teeth -- will lay waste to enough banker beef to make a buffalo skinner weep with nostalgia.

Before the wild dogs and orphans eat it all, get some for yourself and try a few of the following recipes.

Banker Burritos

Chop up assorted body parts -- toes, ear lobes, and pituitary glands are especially flavorful -- and grill them.  Place the fixin's on a large wheat tortilla, smother them in black beans, salsa, and tofu sour cream, then roll up the burrito.  All that flavor makes it hard to believe you're eating the flesh of one of the most vile predators to ever walk the earth.

Banker Tofu Scramble Orange Julius

Use banker brains, which taste just like tofu, for a new twist on the classic scramble.  Banker brains, fine-tuned for high frequency robbery, are extra large and extra gray.

Chop the brains and saute them in garlic, Thunderbird wine, and Worcestershire sauce.  Then pour the mix into a blender, add six organic eggs, a can of orange juice concentrate (minus the can), and a half pint of vanilla ice cream.  Blend on "liquify" until the concoction starts foaming out the lid of the blender.

Then pour a pint from the blender into a Kool-Aid pitcher, add a quart of 199-proof bathtub vodka, and serve!

Serves six, if you can still see well enough to find another quart of vodka.

Corporate Mogul Tomato-Free Gazpacho

Same recipe as just above, but use the moguls' cheeks -- both facial and buttock -- in place of banker brains.  Mogul cheeks, ripened from a lifetime of gluttony and perversion, impart a smoky tang that will make it hard to believe the gazpacho is tomato-free, and leave you wondering "Where the hell is that bacon smell coming from?!"

Media Elite (Fox News Anchor) Fajitas

(Warning!  Be 200% sure the anchor is 100% dead before you handle them!)

Chop off the anchor's fingers and throw away the rest of the body, as it contains poison concentrated enough to kill a small solar system.

Grill the fingers over a gasoline fire.  Then throw them away too.

Serves all of humanity.

GOP Dictionary

Ronald Reagan Memorial
Abortion
Something women do to insult those who believe that life -- in the womb or in the tomb, where it can't disagree with them -- is sacred.

America
The place where Real Americans are born.  A Real American can sit on their ass in front of the TV their whole life and still be great -- because they were born great!  Not to be confused with the notion of racial superiority, though most Real Americans just happen to be bona fied Aryans.

Bipartisan
Meeting the opposition halfway (down into the bowels of hell, home of the GOP, where no one can hear them scream).

Conservative
1. Someone who favors tradition (the tradition of their being in power).
2. Someone who wants to preserve civilization (circa 1000 AD, when people had the freedom to take what they wanted).

Conservative Think Tank
1. An institution defending the rights of a minority* overlooked for far too long!
2. An institution dedicated to making thought pointless.

* Billionaires.

Democracy
A system where you have to spend a lot of money to convince a majority of voters to embrace the asshole within, then shoot themselves in the foot.

Education
Watching Fox News.

Environmental Protection
Illustrated by the photo above of the Ronald Reagan Memorial in Union Square.

Evolution
If students are taught that facts, reason and science are worthwhile, we might as well kiss our ass goodbye.

Freedom
Freedom from responsibility.

Inalienable Rights
1. The right to take what you want.
2. The right to take away others' rights, see Abortion.
3. The right to carry a gun to defend your right to act like an asshole.
4. The right to call certain groups of people by the names they were called before everyone got all politically correct.

Liberal
Simpering Stalinist child-molesting aristocrats.  They are candy-ass weaklings, with their effete pinkies sticking out from tea cups, but at the same time they are the most vicious, elitist, fascist force ever known!

Night
Day.

Patriotism
The ability to hide behind the flag or stand in front of troops for photo ops.

Problem Solving
Watching Fox News.

War on Terror
A slogan that gives us the right to rule by fiat.

"We're broke"
What you say when someone wants you to help pay for something -- like fixing a rusty bridge -- that anyone else gets to use.

"We're broke" vision for the middle class, in Queens

Obama, Bridge to Nowhere

Ladder to nowhere on Bayard in Williamsburg
"The president is trying to present himself as a bridge between the parties."
- Obama as Mediator [NYT]

He truly has become "the bridge to nowhere."

I've been feeling so hopeless that I started watching WWII documentaries to cheer myself up, and it almost worked; the episode on the fall of France reminded me that Obama and Democrats are not the first to meekly hand a nation over to thugs, and episodes about the Eastern Front reminded me that, no matter how much the GOP wants to emulate the Third Reich, it's just too fat, crazy, and tangled in its own lies to pull it off, thank God.

And I'm glad the NY Times started charging for Web access.  Since I'd have to quit NetFlix to subscribe -- and there's no way in hell I'd give up distracting entertainment like WWII documentaries -- now I just read headlines on the Times' site, which is only 60% as depressing as reading the articles.

Yes, the world needs facts and journalism, but right now they just remind me how screwed we are, how powerless, as we watch Obama, Cuomo and the rest help the GOP -- which has spent a few decades doing its best to make facts useless -- carry water for the arrogant scum who run Wall Street and the world, and blitzkrieg any attempt to slow their never ending greed for more economic lebensraum.

If you're feeling grim too, I highly recommend homeopathic treatment with the Eastern Front documentary War of the Century; it goes especially well with a bucket of Siberian-buttered popcorn and a bottle of Kalashnikov vodka.

Gilded Catwalk NYC

Aristocrats frolic in the window at 51st St. & 7th Ave.
I remember the trolls in the comments at Curbed used to (still do?) claim that you have to either let developers have their way or cede the streets to crackheads.

Unsurprisingly, their hero Mayor Bloomberg comes up with his own false choice of extremes, on whether to allow Wal-Mart to build here: "You should let the marketplace decide," he said.  "Anybody who has tried to manage the marketplace, it has not turned out very well.  I think the Soviet Union is as good an example as you'd ever need of that."

I love it how people who can afford to escape the negative effects of The Market preach its innate wisdom, no matter how money's made or spent, and see moral superiority and a lesson for others in their singular ability to take as much as possible from the world without choking on it.

But Bloomberg's never seen anything special in NYC anyway, and never cared to find the balance point that could preserve what made NYC special: the humility, and the respect for millions of humble lives lived in proximity, that left enough air for people at the bottom to breathe.  Instead he's done everything he can to turn NYC into a gilded catwalk where arrogant aristocrats flaunt their wealth and admire each other.

Searching for the key to maintaining a "healthy" city, I keep coming back to this simple thought: There is nothing noble in poverty, but there is in humility.  And the arrogance of wealth is what's destroying NYC, block by block.

A Curse on Rupert Murdoch

With the world up to its neck in a cesspool of evil, and not a lifeboat in sight, I've been forced to take supernatural measures, to pray like hell for a Vicious Christmas Miracle and conjure Dark Forces with an assortment of hexes, curses and spells, to serve my enemies the slow and painful justice they've earned!

The target of my first curse is Rupert Murdoch.  Seldom has the gift of life been squandered with the gusto spent on this evil pile of flesh.  On to the cursing!

Please groan the following chorus (of two anagrams for "Rupert Murdoch" generated by the Internet Curse Server) over and over while you read the curses below: Cur Turd He Romp, Rec Duh Rump Rot

- May the withered, flaccid remnants of his sex organs get slammed in a car door.

- May the used toilet water that irrigates his diseased flesh back up into his head and gush out his grotesquely hairy ears and nose, leaving tiny dingle-berries of toilet paper hanging in their hair trees.

- May those same nose hairs braid themselves overnight, snake around his neck while he snores, and strangle him.

- May his progeny grow to hate him even more than they already do, and succeed in their plots to shorten the time he stands between them and his money.

Viagra Angel & Murdoch

- May his festering crotch itch so severely that he takes a table fork to it while under the spotlight at the holiday dinner sponsored by his venal lick-spittle minions at Fox News, the NY Post and the Wall Street Journal, all dressed in grimy elf costumes to make him look more human.

- And while I'm at it, may all those evil elves, from Roger Alies on down to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, catch the same case of crotch cooties, and scratch them so furiously that they churn themselves up into an angry white tornado of skin dust, that whirls off across the plains and erases half the Bible Belt before it leaps into space to scratch itself against the sun and, like dried cat crap placed at the business end of a particle accelerator, explodes in a poof! of particles that scatter across a half dozen backwater spacetime dimensions, the sewer pipes of Creation, and be flushed down the drain for good.

Or at least until my dark mistress, the Savage Queen of Curses, decides that Creation is a little low on evil.

Palin for President!

I am so sick of the world we've let happen...

...of NYC turning to plastic, phony as a high-rent hooker's smile, as it services the Wall Street party-til-you-puke aristocracy ...of cellphones, wi-fi, and shiny people infesting every corner of public space, broadcasting their emptiness ...of people "following" people on Twitter, "real" people on reality TV, "friendship" on Facebook, and all the other noise that helps us forget the difference between going somewhere and going nowhere.

It can all go burn in hell.

We have reached the End of Democracy, and found that freedom is more than we can handle. We are idiots in diapers, O Lord, who have fouled everything you gave us.  The universe would be better off if earth was replaced with a dirty black hole, sucking in garbage tossed off other planets.


Sarah Palin morphs to Jim Jones
So I hereby endorse Sarah Palin for president in 2012, and offer the following campaign slogan.

Palin for President:
Let's just get it over with!

The sooner she gets to work, the sooner all this crap will be erased and we can return to the Eden our Founding Fathers knew, savoring the flavor of our fingers as we rubbed our hair with possum fat to make it shine, and enjoying the simplicity of a world where, when you noticed someone "following" you, you detoured into the woods and snuck up behind them, then hit them over the head with a club.


Don't laugh, she could win.  Politically cunning, and burning with hatred for anyone who's dissed her, she makes other GOP hopefuls look like the tired hacks they are.  Our arrogant prince of a mayor will run on his own billions and split the vote with Obama, leaving Palin the winner.  I always figured she'd make a decent banana republic dictator, and it won't be long before we find out.

The Topless Party

Judith with Head, Cranach the Elder

If you want thoughtful analysis of our degraded state following the midterm elections, read these excellent columns by Paul Krugman, Timothy Egan, or Frank Rich.

But if you want a SOLUTION, read on.

Bankers are too arrogant to change their ways; just like the oil barons, they'll ride the world into its grave before they give up a cent of their ill-gotten gains.

GOP politicians will never change; they are a disease festering in the bowels of this nation, a huge malignant mass snaking up from where Boehner, McConnell and Cantor's heads stick out America's ass, squirming like the 3 Stooges stuck in a porthole.

So I hereby declare the start of a new political party, the Topless Party.

I was going to call it the Guillotine Party but, being French, "guillotine" makes it sound too elitist.  And this party is gonna be about as elitist as a county jail headcheese sandwich.

The party platform boils down to adding a constitutional amendment that makes being too rich a capital crime, so that if you reach a certain level of wealth, adjusted for inflation, your head will be chopped off in the village square.  Billionaires -- that most useless and dangerous class of criminal -- will be the first to go topless.

Sure there are hundreds of millions of poor assholes out there who deserve a head chopping, but it's much more efficient to start at the top, with the people who siphon so much wealth for themselves, then use it to spread misery at the bottom.

Just as a hypothetical case, consider the billionaire David H. Koch, master polluter and right wing kingpin -- born with a silver spoon worth a few hundred million, yet bitter as hell that you have anything at all -- who's bought off the cream of NYC aristocracy and has a building named after him at Lincoln Center.

This pestilent fascist prince should not be allowed to spread cold germs, much less pump millions of dollars worth of self-serving poison into society's bloodstream.

Soon it will be "Off with his head!," which we'll stuff and mount on his Lincoln Center building like a moose head, to remind budding aristocrats that there's a new mob in town, and constitutional limits to financial gluttony.

Of course he'll get a public trial -- we are not savages! -- confined to a courtroom cage like they use for mobsters in Italy, chained a few feet away from a starving, abused circus bear with a taste for well-fed flesh, just to keep him alert as the bailiffs count through his piles of bills, securities and gold.  And he will get as many lawyers and appeals as a Mexican groundskeeper at one of his estates would get if he got caught pilfering posies.

Just imagine: no more arrogant billionaires towering over the land like the Colossus of Rhodes, pissing in the sea, laughing at us suckers too weak to take the millions needed to become a billionaire.

After the trial and head chopping, all us non-billionaire Americans will get even shares of the money.  And since a billion dollars divided 300 million ways is more than 3 bucks apiece, we only have to round up a few billionaires to score enough beer money to start planning the head chopping assembly line we'll need to take care of the bankers and GOP politicians -- just because they have not yet reached billionaire status doesn't mean they don't deserve the same level of service.

You know, it feels great to start a political party that actually stands for something, with a straightforward solution to all our problems.  Frankly it makes me a little teary eyed and, to repeat the words of Sarah Palin the other day on Tea Party victories from coast to coast:

"This is our moment!  This is our Morning in America!!  This is our chance to annihilate our enemies, bowl their heads across the lawn and drink their blood!!!  Give Me the Money, America... then give me the blood, the sweet sweet blood... enough to irrigate the desert, paint the clouds red, and drown the sun!!!"

NYC Cast as Villain

Barclays Capital burns money thru its lit facade near Times Square
One nasty recurring thought I've had over the years is "Now that NYC is run by and for Wall Street and the global aristocracy, who's going to give a f*ck if the terrorists blow it up?"

The answer is, of course, no one.  As A Favorite Villain in Election Ads: New York City [NYT] reports, politicians -- mainly Democrats -- are running ads that equate the city with Wall Street.

Nine years ago, after 9/11, NYC was a symbol of fortitude under fire.  Now political ads feature NYC tourist sites as the narrator sneers "That's the way they do it... on Wall Street."

I guess that might insult some sensitive New Yorkers, but I wish every Democrat had the spine to demonize Wall Street.  And if some of the demon blood spatters the city, well tough luck -- that's the price of selling your soul.

In the article Mayor Bloomberg defends NYC's financial services industry as a bastion of middle class jobs, pointing out that half its workers make $71,000 or less (neglecting to mention that the average Wall Street salary is $392,000).

Bloomberg made his fortune building a computer network that democratized Wall Street gambling, and helped -- along with all the other financial "innovations" we've seen -- spread its poison throughout the economic system.

Maybe he really believes the average citizen has the desire and ability to become a full time capitalist, placing bets and dreaming up new ways to turn air into gold along with millions of other financial alchemists out there.  But if he does it's because he hasn't got the empathy to imagine people not like himself.

For years we've heard arguments that NYC has always been all about change, money and power -- mainly from hustlers who profit from acceptance of that attitude -- and it's valid to an extent.  We've heard that NYC is just going through the same inevitable changes -- thanks to globalization, the web & cellphones, and corporate concentration -- that have turned everywhere else into the same place, just with different branches of the same conglomerates, and helped create a world increasingly split in two, with connected islands of wealth floating on a sea of increasing misery.

But what's missing from these arguments is any notion of what made NYC special -- at both the sidewalk and mythical levels -- or any desire to shape its future in a meaningful way that does not serve the needs of people who already have too much money.  They use the term "change" to suggest renewal, as they erase humble neighborhoods and replace them with the standard units favored by global aristocracy; they look at NYC the same way a suburban developer looks at barren land.

Somehow it all seems to go together -- all the bank buildings and corporate ads in Times Square, all the shiny new luxury condos and chain stores, the High Line and other gold plated attractions, the suburban bike trails.  All part of a package meant to attract people who used to live in upscale suburbs, that just happens to force out the honest, humble commerce and culture that make urban living worthwhile.

Times Square is the center of the (media/shared) world.  It becomes more intensely hollow all the time, as ads creep from the billboards onto the buildings, and corporations plant their flagship stores.  The village square -- where civic and national victories were celebrated -- now serves to dazzle and congratulate consumers for their good citizenship, for their consumption.  It is a sterilized boardwalk experience, with all the life squeezed out by corporate calculation.

And Bloomberg and his enablers have done their best to sterilize the rest of NYC in the same way, block by luxury block, so the people on top can profit from the life squeezed out, and Wall Street worker drones can live in the antiseptic environment they prefer, with plenty of places nearby to spend their money.  The process leaves zero room for anything unexpected, and pushes out anyone who has not sold their soul in the same way they have.

Their vision of NYC is "urban" in the same way a paper company tree plantation is a "forest."  It's a stainless plastic resort where wealth can recline in comfort, and be pampered with the service it believes it deserves, while it admires itself.

I would hope this round of demonization would shame them into leaving NYC, but these people are shameless.

Update: Want a 20% Raise? Work on Wall Street

A Tale of Two Economies

Explained below.  Meanwhile, learn to breathe under water...
There's the Wall Street Economy, run by people who still make huge amounts of money skimming the take in the deregulated casino they've built at the core of our economic system.  (Wall Street, where the average salary is $392,000, is hiring!)  Then there's the Jobs Economy, where the rest of us live, where state and local governments are still laying off teachers and closing fire stations.

Welcome to the Recovery, says Timothy F. Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury.  The recession is over because his economy -- the Wall Street Economy -- is doing fine, because "financial engineers" are still building ever faster and more convoluted ways to hide the smoke inside their "financial instruments" and rationalize their huge bonuses.  (Paul Volcker vs. "financial innovation.")

What about the Jobs Economy? "The point is that a large part of Congress — large enough to block any action on jobs — cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can’t find work."  - Defining Prosperity Down, by Paul Krugman. 

Krugman is worried that people like Geithner have accehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uBmCW9lZ_0pted high unemployment as "structural," as a fact that can't be changed.  And from what Geithner and others are saying, Krugman's fears are justified.

The illustration above is my take* on how income distribution has changed in favor of the filthy rich, aided by the GOP and its accomplices.

On top is the Ideal distribution, with wealth spread across the middle class, and relative few poor and rich.

Then in the middle, the middle-class was gouged out by Open Pit Mining, as manufacturing and capital went global while labor stayed local, and Reagan and the GOP convinced everyone that deregulation and lower taxes for rich people would cause their wealth to overflow and "trickle down" on the rest of us.  (Wealthy Reduce Buying in a Blow to the Recovery.)

Of course trickle-down does not lift all boats; it makes people already too rich richer and drowns everyone else, so we've wound up with the world at the bottom of the illustration, where -- thanks to technology that connects the islands, and helps outsource any work not nailed to the ground -- First-World Islands for the rich stick up out of a sea of increasing misery for the multitudes.

* Graph is built to get the point across, not on actual data, though I'm sure plenty of poor people have been kicked off islands, and a few million middle-class mortgages are "under water."

FOX/GOP Blood Party (BP)

An alien ship, Dick Cheney's heart pump, or the BP Gulf platform?
If there was any justice, Dick Cheney would have a BP heart pump, and the GOP would be in exile, wandering the streets with its lies and failures draped across its greasy chest like a vest of dead skunks.  But Obama treated the party with respect, like it cared about anything but its own ass, and we are all going to pay the price.

Republicans remind me of pissed off Russians, who would forgive the worst of Soviet days just to be back on top.  In fact the GOP should bring Putin over here to streamline its operations with his KGB-trained thugs, because it's got the propaganda genius but not the guts to take the movement to the next logical level, where it drops the Tea Party charade and becomes the Blood Party (BP).

Though the fairy tales that fuel the Fascist Princess Palin's "Real American" legions pale compared to the myths that fueled Real Germans in the 1930s, I have no doubt that our pitchfork mobs can come through, given capable leadership!

Obama's job is near impossible, like turning the Titanic at the top of Niagara Falls.  And he's had some real success (the beginnings of health reform and financial reform) to go along with a few huge blunders (letting the GOP off the hook and doing a lot more to save Wall Street than to save jobs).

But his successes are too abstract for our knee-jerk reality, and now the GOP is sitting pretty, its lies and liars living larger than ever, mainly because it's succeeded at destroying the terms of argument with its decades-long assault on science (evolution), logic (leave our economic fate to the filthy rich), and the idea of a factual world that can be shared (right wing fundamentalists of all stripes).  And because Obama and Democrats have given the GOP a thousand lives by not directly confronting it.

And here we are, still surrounded by passionate idiots who've bought Night for Day, who truly believe that Obama is Stalin (who killed, what, 30 million Russians?) because... why was that again?  Because he's sitting on their rightful throne?  Or was it Tea Party "taxation without representation?"  Surely there are enough idiots in DC to represent them!

More on the GOP's Never Ending Lie:

FOX/GOP needs racism, so "...Fox pumps racial rage into the media bloodstream 24/7..." with swiftboat crap like the video remix of Shirley Sherrod.
- There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin', by Frank Rich

"...every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media.  You don’t believe such things can happen?  Think Shirley Sherrod."
- Who Cooked the Planet?, by Paul Krugman

Update: Yes, Obama and Democrats should welcome a GOP filibuster!  This is excellent:
- Curbing your enthusiasm, by Paul Krugman

Striking photo on top courtesy NY Times

GOP BP Arson Party

BP Station Spills Green All Over E. Williamsburg
"The images from the last month -- Washington essentially powerless, BP flailing away -- has been deeply disheartening." [ NYT ]

Yes, but at least the FOX GOP Tea Party has finally found a role for government it can endorse: janitor.  From GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal: "We need our federal government exactly for this kind of crisis."  For the GOP, the role of government (and taxpayer money) is to clean up after the filthy rich and corporations that pollute their way to profit.

Meanwhile, in Currently in Vogue: Ringing the Deficit Alarm, Democratic Rep. Neal says of Republicans complaining about the deficit: "The people who set the fire are now the ones calling the fire department."  It warms my heart to hear a Democrat speak truth like that.  But it saddens me to agree with Frank Rich that Obama is still sadly lacking when it comes to getting his modest program across.

I know it's tough to compete with the lynch mob excitement the GOP sells, but if I was Obama and they tried to turn me into a janitor I'd either curse them out sideways to Sunday or do what former Gov. "Drill Baby Drill" Palin did: Quit!

Sign Over Big Hole Where BP Was at Queens Plaza

FOX GOP Tea Party McVeigh Day

X Chromosome of Palin's Real Americans
On the 15th anniversary of Real American hero Tim McVeigh's assault on the Socialist Security Building in Oklahoma City, the assault on reason, honesty, and decency by the FOX Fascist Borscht Belt entertainers -- the Becks, Cheneys, Gingrichs, Limbaughs, Murdochs, Palins, and Roves -- continues, because they make millions off the suckers who yearn for the return of a world where Real Americans, Good Germans, and the Cream of the Confederacy do not have to stifle their right to call a !@#$%^ a !@#$%^.

The suckers' attraction to this deadly entertainment is easy to understand -- who would not want to be born a prince, be born perfect, and live in a world where your every effortless whim is stamped with the (fascist) Almighty's approval?

You could watch trash TV all day, eat like a pig, and pray for global annihilation -- all without lifting a finger -- and still be perfect!

And all you have to do to appreciate your princely status -- the refinement bought by slavery, by holocaust, by the industrialization of hate and exploitation -- is gut your puny conscience and fill that meaningless cavity with the warmth of your inferiors' suffering, burning like a campfire in the wilderness, worshiped by fiends.

[ Welcome to Confederate History Month, Frank Rich, NYT ]
[ A Confederacy of Dunces, Gail Collins, NYT ]

School Daze

From the excellent season 4 of The Wire
Sure there's the deadly recession and the wars, and the fascist harpies on FOX chanting night and day for our destruction.  But there's a whole 'nother world of problems out there too, like... education.

Obama Calls for a Sweeping Overhaul in Education Law, today's NY Times editorial hails movement toward National School Standards, at Last, and Texas conservatives are rewriting textbooks to make their battle against facts, logic, and decency sound heroic.

The way public schools churn out kids doomed to failure -- and the street corner and prison -- is the cruelest of social problems, and the most difficult to solve because school is where everything -- poverty, race, rights, religion, taxes, etc. -- hits the pavement, and because school systems are such large and complex organisms.

On a hopeful note, Building a Better Teacher unearths a few clues to the mystery of classroom success, in the hope that middling teachers can be turned into really effective ones.  Two of the article's key ideas: there's a method to maintaining order and focus in the classroom, and teachers need to not just understand the subject they're teaching, but how it might be understood (and misunderstood) by 30 young minds.

Meanwhile, Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change.  They are concerned that students will not be ignorant enough to vote for them, so they're forcing textbook publishers to extol their "philosophy," which I believe has been distilled since Reagan to the verse...

What's mine is mine
What's yours is mine
And if you don't like it
F*ck you!

...and stuff about how Republicans were 100% behind the Civil Rights movement until the Black Panthers arrived (carrying shotguns without NRA cards) and proved that Government is the Problem.

I was lucky enough to go to decent public schools.  I had issues, misunderstood all kinds of stuff, and didn't take advantage of school the way I should have, but I remember some great teachers (and even administrators, like the grade school principal who rescued me from multiplication table failure, so I now have the ability to understand... just how financially screwed I am right now).

I've said before that I think a lot of the meaning of life has to do with what you pass along and, as one of the researchers profiled by Building a Better Teacher says, "You could change the world with a [great] first-year teacher."

Bloomberg Times Square Antidote

Now that Bloomberg has declared his patio lounge Times Square a success...


Where TV viewers and tourists can sit and inhale their transfat-free 3000 calorie Happy Meal without inhaling tailpipe exhaust, and revel in the reflected, throbbing emptiness of that shiny corporate ad mall, that Romance Novel Vampire Circle Jerk House of Mirrors, where the flagships of all the corporations that own culture are lined up and waiting to ferry us out to sea, where they'll prime us with free cocktails and slot machines quarters, wait till we're drunk and hypnotized, then roll us for every last cent of our cash, identity and dreams before they dump us -- over the New Jersey Trench, full of soggy styrofoam, dirty needles and axle grease -- then turn around and head back to Bloomberg Times Square for a fresh load of suckers...


...the antidote: some pictures from Queens Plaza at Northern Blvd.

Dems Replace Ted with Torso

I cleaned up the original title; for a moment I forgot this is a family tabloid!

How could anyone be surprised by the GOP victory in Massachusetts, where a doofus Tea Bag Party centerfold model has replaced Ted Kennedy?  That's what you get when you try to split the difference between bought-off Democrats and the FOX/GOP Fascist Entertainment Network.  (Next up, taking Christopher Dodd's seat, the vicious beaver-toothed Warrior Queen of the WWF.)

Maybe this will wake up Obama and Democrats in congress, but don't hold your breath.  As Jon Stewart fumed the other day: George Bush Jr. never had a Senate "super majority" and he did whatever the f*ck he wanted.

For those who worry that changing the Senate's "60 vote rule" would backfire the second the GOP had a simple majority of seats, I have to ask: What makes you think we'll last that long?  Democrats' timidity is the only thing keeping the Wall Street aristocracy and its Fascist Entertainment Network alive, and the longer it lives, the worse things will get.

What is the point of power if, afraid to confront evil, all you do is delay it?

And on that note I will sink back into pleasing fantasy.  I am going to wallpaper my bedroom with the spectacular pizza ad I saw in the window of Broadway Pizza at 27th & Broadway (top).

Then, to work off all the pizza I'll be eating, I'll sneak into the Newtown Creek Wastewater Plant (above), fill dumpsters with pipes, and sell them to a scrap yard across the street.

And when I get tired of pizza & pipes, I'll walk out to Hunters Point Ave., buy something spicy off an Afghan food truck (below), and contemplate the green tower that (for now) belongs to bankrupt bailed-out Citibank and -- trying to remain calm in the face of a world where evil has been allowed to burrow right to its core -- count goats jumping over a land mine as I chew.

Wall Street Flag

NYSE, Last Refuge of Scoundrels
What, you expected Wall Street to hide behind some other flag?

If you haven't been down by the New York Stock Exchange lately [map], it's still an interesting sight, with that giddy tourist-friendly anti-terror edge we just don't get enough of anymore.

There's some serious-looking security infrastructure -- its effect intensified by the narrow streets -- and at least one poor bomb-sniffing dog that looked tired of being on high alert.

There's the sculpted scene from Capitalist Heaven above the flag, left, where an apparently pregnant young woman (center) stands amid the naked rabble of industry while her mom (left) panhandles to keep them fully clothed.

Then there's the funny way that Wall Street's hustlers, free from regulation and responsibility, nearly wrecked the world economy all by themselves, without any help from Al Qaeda.  And the unfunny way they've been treated with kid gloves, while unemployment continues to grow.

Maybe most funny is the fact that -- now that any hustler with an Internet server can run their own stock exchange -- the NYSE is losing volume, and that massive flag may have to stay up permanently to hide the emptiness inside.


[ The Big Squander, Paul Krugman, NYT ]
[ Rivals Pose Threat to New York Stock Exchange, NYT ]

Thank You MIKE Bloomberg

Mailed to my cats Snagglepuss Jr., Ms. Meow, and The RatMaster 5000
Thank you MIKE for all the big sturdy campaign ads I keep gettin' in the mail!

In between me, my 5 cats, 3 dogs, my surrogate taxpayer rabbit Mr. Chuckles, and the "Dirty Dozen" rats I been trainin' to pull the miniature Santa sled I found in a dumpster -- all of us registered to vote -- we been gettin' 20 mailers a day!

Soon I will have enough to paper the walls, ceilin' and floor of my tar paper shack down here by the crick, near where Kings County meets the Queens.  (I don't want to tell nobody which crick, 'cause then they'd all be movin' down here!)

Thank you, thank you, thank you!  Thank your ad people for usin' such good lookin' models, and thank your momma for bequeathin' you such a nice soft pleasin' face yourself -- since I'm gonna be lookin' at all y'all for the next 10 years at least!

In fact, since I hear there is no way you can lose, might I suggest you just get elected every 8 years?  'Cause these things is that sturdy -- sturdy as a country girl who can churn butter before breakfast, plow the field all day, and birth a baby in between supper and singin' the chickens to sleep!

Loquaciously Yours,
Festus T. Tennessee, Esq., PhP, DoD

Yup, the T. is for Tennessee too.  My friends call me Tennessee, MIKE, and you can too!  Done forgot what them letters after my name is for, so I can't rightly throw 'em away now, can I?

Urban Shed Competition

Something Is Going On Up There; 38th St. off Sixth Ave.
I got excited when saw a blurb about the Urban Shed Competition: I thought I'd finally be able to share my plans for a stylish shed with room for the moonshine still, an outhouse, and other stuff you either don't want indoors or don't want the Sheriff's boys to find in your possession.

But when I visited the Urban Shed website, I find out they're serious, and want suggestions on how to paint a Happy Face on the unbridled development required by Bloomberg's core constituency: the Masterds* of the Universe and the greedy developers who build condos for them and their legions of wannabe Masterds (who binge crawl all over the LES, East Village, and soon Williamsburg, doing their best to eject their soul along with their stomach contents and thus attain Masterdhood).

The point of the competition is to design a new system of scaffolding and "sidewalk sheds" (like the one to the left, at 2nd Ave. and 12th St.) -- a ridiculous idea, because the current scaffolds nearly always look better than the naked buildings, and the ad hoc, zigzagging sheds are some of the most interesting pedestrian passages in New York City.  (And most exciting: pedicab drivers could sell thrill rides through these twisting labyrinths, swerving around groaning cranes and whooshing I-beams, welding sparks and hungover construction workers.)

Not only is there no need for new scaffolding & sheds, but we get the insult of the Urban Shed website, a detailed propaganda exercise selling the idea that a jury headed by Dept. of Building officials, in a competition supported by the players who've brought us all these years of Masterdization, will somehow come up with something good for the city.

High Above Lexington at 48th
It's a little irritating for a creative type like me to see the respected architects and designers on the jury.  I know that's the way of the world -- rich people buy the art and develop the buildings that keep artists and architects afloat -- but the idea of tarting up passageways around construction sites -- usually the most interesting sights on our increasingly drab and uniform blocks -- just to make the Masterds, the developers, and their friends in office more comfortable is a bit too much.  I accept my place as an artist in the economy, a lapdog to wealth if lucky enough to sell work; but I draw the line at whimpering and licking its face like a neurotic toy poodle.

If the competition could come up with something guaranteed to withstand a semi-truck sideswiping a scaffold, I might be impressed.  As it is, I can almost guarantee the results of this needless exercise: A design that somehow complements the slick blandness of new construction, and is smooth enough in spots to sell to Cemusa as ad space.

Like the case of the "urban shed" that wraps the still-dead escalators at the Union Square subway entrance, right -- courtesy of a sweetheart development deal that cheats the public -- the perceived ugliness of the sheds is not the problem.  The sheds distract from the problem.  To turn urban sheds into something that fits in with the Cemusa newsstands, bus stops and "bike shelter" ad platforms that, thanks to Bloomberg, now bring that slick plastic corporate flavor to every corner of the city, just adds to the problem.

[ Union Square Subway Shed: A Tale of Two Entrances ]
[ Urban Shed Competition ]

* Excuse me, I just read about Quentin Tarantino's new movie "Inglourious Basterds"

What Obama Should Do

Tiresome, I know.  But since I started this, and read Paul Krugman's excellent piece this morning, I might as well finish it.

My question about Obama before the election was: Is he tough enough?  I think he's proved that he can be, but he's also shown a tendency to get over confident and sloppy, and forget just how dangerous and amoral the enemy is.

The #1 enemy of the United States is still the GOP and its media allies and enablers.

I think it was good of him to let go of the Clintonesque tit for tat war with the GOP.  Doing so could bring around voters who are not confirmed dead-enders ready to help Rush, Palin and the rest shove this teetering bus off the cliff.  And you can't win a war like that, with people living a lie, because you wind up fighting on their terms.  The GOP never argues the merits of an issue, and always seeks to invalidate civil discussion with emotional triggers based on distortions and lies.  It can't stop lying because it has nothing else, and arguing with a liar is a waste of time.

The only way out, for both Obama and America, is for him to go all the way with something he's already shown he can do: Talk to the public in an honest and adult way.  Repudiate the destructive "philosophy" the GOP's been selling since Reagan, top to bottom, and call on media to behave like real reporters and not tabloid gossips, spinning phony controversies that make facts immaterial and make the "news" networks a lot of money.

He should tell Americans it's time to grow up, that there's no such thing as government without taxes and regulations; that there's no civil society without government; and that you cannot have a civil society when a sizable proportion of voters and 99% of GOP politicians, for their own cynical reasons, claim that the instrument of order and civility -- government -- is the "enemy," somehow stealing their birthright.

Americans have been spoiled by lying demagogues who've convinced them they can "have it all" without lifting a finger or making the slightest compromise with the factual world (the world that other people can live in).

From the Wall Streeters who "innovate" new means of systematic theft and believe they have the born right to be billionaires, to Palin's phony "real Americans" who think the simple act of being born white in America, coupled with the ability to lift a gun and jerk their knee, makes them rightful heirs to the Founding Fathers' legacy, even as they make it clear their beliefs are a better fit for a two bit fascist dictatorship.

From one spoiled, self-serving brat to another -- and including all the congressional Democrats resigned to cynicism and consoling themselves on the lobbyists' gravy train -- they all need to be set straight in front of the whole world.

Update: I see Obama is having trouble motivating the "netroots" that helped get him elected (Health Debate Fails to Ignite Obama's Web).  How can he expect to get people pumped up, especially about something as complex as health care, when it seems like he's ready to give up the "public plan" -- the one thing that could simplify the issue and get people excited?

[ Paul Krugman: Republican Death Trip ]
[ The Persistence of Assholes ]