The Gift of Gas

Tearing your hair out this holiday season wondering what to get for that indigent family member who is so hard to buy for? You are in luck! With government home heating assistance programs getting slashed and electric bills rising and a third of all American families now classified as poor or near-poor, your friendly local power company has come up with a brilliant solution: keep those cut-offs at bay, the Christmas lights twinkling and the home fires burning with a utility bill gift card!

No need to buy another cheap Chinese sweater to stave off hypothermia for the shivering Grandma subsisting on a meager Social Security check. This year, instead of her turning down the thermostat to 50 so she can eat, she can stay warm as toast and even see what she's doing as the lights stay on while she mails in her prepaid gift card with her utility bill.  

This is definitely a win-win-win-win proposition. First and foremost, the utility wins. It gets paid early -- before it provides even a single kilowatt of electricity, or one cubic foot of gas! Just think of how happy the investors will be with the added dividends. And if there is any money left over, they'll even be able to toy with the idea of spending some of it on infrastructure improvement, like trimming some trees that have a tendency to knock down power lines during the periodic freak storms that are becoming ever more periodic. Customers left in the dark for weeks may see outages reduced to mere days. Gas lines that are inspected and replaced may reduce neighborhood explosions. Of course, this is optional on the part of the utilities. As with every corporation, the American way is to reward investors first, CEOs second, customers third, and employees maybe. Disasters due in part to poor maintenance invariably come with the price tag of a rate increase.

But back to the gift cards -- according to the marketing, you win too. You have the satisfaction of knowing that your gift will keep your loved one warm and bright. You can even be anonymous. And the recipient wins: he or she will be spared the embarrassment of collection calls threatening cut-off, or the indignity of having to prove imminent starvation and dire penury to Social Service agencies in order to qualify for a one-time government heating bill handout.  And last but not least, the middle-man wins: companies handling the gift card business for utilities will get their generous cut, too. Who said there are no winners in an economic depression?

Utility companies nationwide are facing hard times. Delinquent accounts are reaching epidemic proportions, and most states have laws that forbid them from shutting people off in the dead of winter. Right now, they are forced by the states to simply reduce the wattage to the delinquents until they pay up. In other words, provide just enough heat for survival and enough light so they don't trip and break a bone. But if they reach for that remote and attempt to watch TV?  Zap! You cannot have poor people enjoying themselves in the middle of a depression, even during the holidays.

At least one utility company is even marketing its gift cards for those hard-to-shop-for affluent family members and friends who have everything -- but who still "might appreciate a little help with their energy bill." What a relief. Now I know just what to get for Mayor Bloomberg.  I can imagine the way his eyes will light up when he receives his $10 Con Ed gift certificate from an anonymous fan. It'll bring back fond memories of the day he froze out Zuccotti Park by first confiscating the OWS generators and then completely bulldozing down the tents.

Mr. Warmth

Deplorable

 "I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protestors. The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere." -- Barack Obama, Jan. 28, 2011.

Q: On another domestic matter, does the president have any reaction to the way the Occupy Wall Street protesters were removed, how that was handled? 

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney: He’s aware of it, obviously, from the reports. And our position and the president’s position is that obviously every municipality has to make its own decisions about how to handle these issues, and we would hope and want, as these decisions are made, that it balances between a long tradition of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in this country and obviously of demonstrating and protesting, and also the very important need to maintain law and order and health and safety standards, which was obviously a concern in this case. -- Pool report from Aboard Air Force One, President's Australia trip, Nov. 16, 2011.

From Bloomberg's mouth to Carney's lips... or from Homeland Security/Justice Dept. to America's mayors  to Carney's lips to conventional wisdom as practiced by the stenographers of the corporate media.

Whatever happened to the American practice of sanctimoniously "condemning" or "deploring" violent government crackdowns on peaceful citizens? I Googled "Hillary Clinton deplores" and got a quarter-million hits. A sampling of the headlines:

Clinton Deplores Syrian Crackdown, Urges Govt Reforms.... Sec. Clinton Says U.S. Deplores Violence in Equador.... Clinton Deplores Iran's Actions....  Clinton Deplores Bahrain Violence, Wants Reform.

And when it comes to the United States going whole hog and actually condemning another country's undemocratic actions, I hit the jackpot: more than 9 million Google hits.  We've condemned the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador, Sudan's attacks on refugee camps and the violent crackdowns in Bahrain, to name just a few. We have even condemned UNESCO's pro-Palestine vote.

But so far, not one federal official has deplored, condemned, expressed chagrin, outrage, regret or shock over the epidemic outbreak of police brutality against Occupy protesters this week. If nothing else, the apparently orchestrated attacks have shown how much cop couture has changed in recent years. Blue shirts and badges have been replaced by the Darth Vader collection. The police have morphed from protectors and public servants to a paramilitary force replete with high tech weaponry left over from the forever wars.


 The coldly sadistic pepper-spraying by a campus cop against students in California on Friday is only the latest example. These were the school police, for crying out loud, whose job description used to be making sure the dorms were locked up at night and students didn't jaywalk or park illegally. Regarding this latest incident, the most common phrases popping up via Google are "UC-Davis Calls for Investigation" and "Chancellor Refuses to Resign". The verb of choice is "probe", and the noun du jour is "task force." The best description of the attack the school's chancellor, Linda P.B. Katehi, could come up with was a cold one -- "chilling." No disgust, no outrage --or, heaven forbid, condemnation. The chancellor is giving herself 90 days to come up with a whitewash, and the cop and his complicit pals still have their jobs.

James Fallows of The Atlantic has a good rundown and more photos here.

Photo by Wayne Tilcock, The Davis Enterprise

It has now gotten so bad that a former poet laureate of the United States has been beaten up by police for merely showing up at a Berkeley Occupy rally. Read his account in The New York Times. These uniformed thugs have obviously received more training than your run-of-the-mill police academy could ever have provided.

Twilight in America

Americans are as hypocritical as ever (we consider ourselves more religious than Europeans, yet don't believe as much in safety nets to help our less fortunate neighbors). But here's the good news: we are getting rid of our smug snobbery in droves! More of us than ever have rejected the notion that this is the greatest country that was or ever shall be.The idea of "American exceptionalism" is going down the tubes at long last. Do you think this might have anything to do with another new finding showing that one in three of us is now either dirt poor or "borderline" poor? Contrary to the conservative mindset, meritocracy is a myth. Horatio Alger is dead, not that he ever existed in the first place. But try telling that to Paul Ryan or Newt Gingrich and the ghost of Ayn Rand.


The results of the latest Pew Poll, as well as a new study by the Census Bureau are now in, and they should not be surprising to anyone who's been a) Paying Attention; or b) Struggling to Make Ends Meet. 


Three years into the Great Stagnation/Long Depression/Prosperity is Just Around the Corner propaganda campaign, the "P" word is finally being uttered in the mainstream media. The New York Times, wishing to expand upon the latest poverty numbers coming out of the Census Bureau a few weeks ago, actually commissioned a supplemental study to find out just how many people are really poor when geography and cost of living and social safety net programs are factored in. Researchers claim to be absolutely shocked to discover that a growing number of people (100 million strong) are just barely scraping by, and are just a paycheck or illness away from being out on the streets. From today's Times article:

" 'These numbers are higher than we anticipated,' said Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician. “There are more people struggling than the official numbers show.”

Outside the bureau, skeptics of the new measure warned that the phrase “near poor” — a common term, but not one the government officially uses — may suggest more hardship than most families in this income level experience. A family of four can fall into this range, adjusted for regional living costs, with an income of up to $25,500 in rural North Dakota or $51,000 in Silicon Valley. 

But most economists called the new measure better than the old, and many said the findings, while disturbing, comported with what was previously known about stagnant wages.

'It’s very consistent with everything we’ve been hearing in the last few years about families’ struggle, earnings not keeping up for the bottom half,' said Sheila Zedlewski, a researcher at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social research group."

And this is the week that the Pew Poll released its figures showing only about half of us still feel ourselves superior to everybody else in the world.  "Only" half, huh?  Conservatism dies hard, though it's on the way out. Here's the chart:

In his New York times column this morning, Charles Blow bemoans the Great Decline:

"We are settling into a dangerous national pessimism. We must answer the big questions. Was our nation’s greatness about having God or having grit? Is exceptionalism an anointing or an ethos? If the answers are grit and ethos, then we must work to recapture them. We must work our way out of these doldrums. We must learn our way out. We must innovate our way out.
We have to stop snuggling up to nostalgia, acknowledge that we have allowed a mighty country to be brought low and set a course to restitution. And that course is through hard work and tough choices. You choose greatness; it doesn’t choose you."

Nice and noble sentiments, and reminiscent of many a presidential campaign speech, from Reagan's "Morning in America" to Obama's recent and now-abandoned "Win the Future."


The top-recommended Reader Comment is by Nan Socolow, who eloquently and concisely writes:

"As America is exceptional among nations, so was the Roman Empire exceptional among nations. So was the British Empire exceptional among nations, and the French Empire under Napoleon after the Revolution. It is wonderful to aspire to be Ronald Reagan's "shining city on the hill" again. But the time of that Shining City has come and gone, and so has morning in America. And now, because we have stretched the American Empire further than it can be stretched - with bloody wars in the Middle East, with crumbling infrastructure, with an economy that has spiraled down and down and circles the drain, with the gross inequality between the very rich and the poor among us, this century will not be the American century of Exceptionalism. Modern China is on the cusp of becoming an exceptional empire, as ancient China surely was. That President Obama is in Australia right now, agreeing to contain the growing Empire of China for the Australians, as America contained the Soviet Union decades ago, is telling. America has suffered for the past decades from egregiously sick government under the Republican party, from corruption and decay within, much as Rome suffered within in her waning years of Empire. Today, Americans, wired into the newest communications technology, are mindlessly dancing with the stars instead of working toward a rebirth of our exceptionalism. With ubiquitous noisy wire chatter of social media obscuring the facts of American existence today, how can we be exceptional? With our political and financial and cultural institutions as they have never been before - bereft and barren of compassion and empathy for the least of our citizens - we do not deserve to be called exceptional any longer."

However, Marie Burns of the New York Times eXaminer sees reason to rejoice, noting that a closer reading of the poll results gives lie to the old adage that youth is wasted on the young: 

"Now, I see these results as a good thing. They show that young Americans are becoming less parochial. They reject the narrow ideology that the U.S. – whether because of its pioneer history or its form of government or its ethnic diversity or, worst of all, a divine preference – has a unique “spirit” that other cultures cannot hope to match. Instead, more young Americans now view their nation as one among many. They are citizens of the world; they respect and appreciate diverse cultures and customs. Unlike many of their elders, these young Americans are not provincial, flag-wrapped, imperious jerks. Good for the kids!"

You can read her entire piece here.  For more incisive articles by Marie and other anti-establishment writers, be sure to click the link to the eXaminer on my blogroll. (veer to the right of this page in order to arrive at Left).

So there you have it, folks. We may be poor, but damn! Are we beginning to wise up, or what? Occupy!

Scream Machine

It's been called the audio equivalent of a fire hose. Israeli forces have dubbed their version of  it "The Scream" and used it successfully against Palestinian protesters at checkpoints.  The U.S. Navy has used it to deter pirates and terrorists in small craft from boarding ships.  And now, police departments in American  jurisdictions are using it for crowd control at OWS protests. The official name for the gizmo is Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD).

Invented, as the name implies, as a long distance communication gadget, the uses of LRAD have evolved right along with the insidious government morph from democracy to fascism-light.   The version the NYPD used in the Zuccotti park eviction is theoretically non-lethal.  But if you happen to be standing near one when it's deployed, your hearing can be irreversibly damaged  The effect has been described as a buzz saw going off inside your brain. According to Gizmodo:

"Use of the device has come under fire because of the potential for permanent hearing loss. Human discomfort starts when a sound hits 120dB, well below the LRAD's threshold. Permanent hearing loss begins at 130dB, and if the device is turned up to 140dB, anyone within its path would not only suffer hearing loss, they could potentially lose their balance and be unable to move out of the path of the audio. The device is also entirely operator dependent, which could lead to serious ramifications if the officer in charge doesn't have sufficient training".

Police insist they are not using the device as a weapon. NYPD Spokesman Paul Brown said:

“We don’t use it to disrupt. We don’t use it as some horrible noisemaker. We set it up away from where a crowd is. We create a 50-foot safety zone. It sends out a clear, uniform message that can be heard for several blocks.”

But according to manufacturer's own website, the master blaster is one cool all-purpose tool. At an average cost of $35,000, it's the perfect gift for a goon squad looking to avoid the fuss and muss of tear gas or smoke. It's a virtual smorgasboard of unlimited versatility. Besides its original purpose as a high-tech megaphone, it has been used for search and rescue, perimeter and infrastructure protection, enforcing security zones from remote secure locations (maybe from the same Nevada trailers where they deploy predator Drones?), SWAT operations  and crowd and riot control, and serving warrants (huh?)  But here's the disclaimer:  "LRAD Corporation maintains a strict policy of selling LRAD systems only to qualified government agencies and commercial entities that are fully trained in the device's operation and use".  Which leads one to ask what kind of commercial entity could possibly have a use for a Scream Machine. Goldman Sachs? BP? K Street? Store security at Walmart?

And come to think of it, with the big cities crying poverty and firing teachers and closing schools and hospitals and imposing all kinds of austerity measures on the citizenry, where in the world are they coming up with the cash to buy their LRADs?  NYPD has two, and they're mounted on special command Humvees, themselves going for well over $100,000 apiece.  

Just last month Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired close to 700 city education department employees.  St. Vincent's, the big charity hospital located near the World Trade Center attacks, was closed down last year after having served the city's poor for 160 years, and its buildings were gutted to make way for luxury condos, priced between $1 - $12 million.  Nurses and community members blasted Bloomberg at a rally this spring to mark the one-year anniversary of another of the city's sellouts to the highest bidder. See video here. 

Had enough?  Me too. The outrage is enough to make you Scream.

Day of Action

Reminder: today is the Occupy movement's Mass Day of Action, with events scheduled all over the country and worldwide.

  OccupyWallSt, after a breakfast march to Wall Street itself, will be jamming  the subway system in New York City at 3 p.m. I can hardly wait for Mayor Bloomberg to declare the subway system a pit of filth, disease and rats, and shut down all the trains.  Ditto for the planned march to the bridges beginning from Foley Square, just in time for rush hour at 5 p.m.  Bloomberg didn't care much about bridge traffic the other day when motorists were stuck for hours after he ordered the 59th St. Bridge shut down for the filming of yet another Batman movie.  As is his imperialistic wont, he never bothered to inform the people who live, drive and work in the city that they would be inconvenienced.  Some drivers, seeing a guy in a Batman costume dangling from the span, thought he was a real jumper (Gothamist).

As of this writing, crowds were converging near the New York Stock Exchange -- a phalanx of NYPD troops in riot gear keeping them away from the actual money pit.

Meanwhile that $600 million of MF Global customer money that went down another mysterious pit recently is still missing.  Since former MF (apt initials) CEO, former Goldman Sachs CEO, Former Senator, and Former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine is a VIP and erstwhile Treasury Secretary candidate, nobody is actually calling him a thief -- at least not in the pages of The New York Times.  For now, he is just a doting but ditzy parent of a kidnap victim:

“The lost money is sort of like a lost child,” said Bart Chilton, a Democratic member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “Every day that passes is more and more concerning, and there’s less and less hope.”

Regulators and investigators are literally living at their desks trying to avoid actually having to charge Corzine with anything. Meanwhile, the people who actually had their life savings, pensions and futures stolen by the Global Financial Cabal are being arrested as they protest near the NYSE. Catch the livestream.

Update: Foley Square livestream is here: http://www.ustream.tv/theother99 (thanks to reader Will).

Choking on a Gingrich

Ross Douthat, resident preppie of The New York Times op-ed pages, regales us this morning with a tale of choking on his cocktail(s) and hors d'oeuvre back when Newt Gingrich crashed and burned during his penultimate presidential campaign. (Ross has to make sure we know that he is a member of the Beltway media elite, and that they sometimes chuckle at parties with their mouths full, just like the rest of us). In his best pseudo-intellectual fashion, Ross now proclaims The Second Coming of Newt.

Nan Socolow, in turn, gagged on a Douthat, but managed to turn out this comment anyway:

Gingrich Redux!  The Second Coming of Newt Gingrich!  So there you were, Mr. Douthat, swilling martinis, scarfing pricey canapes high on the hog at a Washington DC GOP cocktail party.  And everyone was giggling at the prospect of Newt's return to the Republican cosmos?  And then there were the polls - media-hyped with the intensity that has typified our bizarro political mondo of today - and Newt got a BUMP in the polls (I see a python swallowing a big pig, that kind of bump)!  So what?  This Poll Bump was preceded by all the other bumps - Trump, Christie, Palin, Pawlenty, Santorum, Bachmann, Perry, Paul, Cain, all gone down in flames, all toast now. 

And you announce that Newtie is framing 2012 in manichean terms.  Why treat us to the polysyllabic word "manichean" instead of saying that Newt's present GOP ethos is just the early Iranian struggle between the Power of Good (the Tea Party?) and the Power of Evil (Guess who?).  Manichean doesn't cut the mustard. 

Alas, despite his demeanor as a handsome Big Cheese, Romney is unelectable. All the other Right Wing contenders are crashing and burning and soon Romney will be the Cheese standing alone.  And you think Newt Gingrich is electable?  If his bump is anything more than the usual pig in a python of GOP politics I'll eat my flipflops.

Newtie is the perfect Cerberus, the dog with big heads guarding the Underworld of the Extreme Right and not allowing anyone to escape.  And as for Gingrich's chances of winning the Presidency (or even the nomination next summer), with his checkered background and gynormous blots on his copybook - several wives, several religions, his essential narcissism and Tiffany line of credit, his chances are slim to none.  As Porky Pig used to laugh and stutter at the end of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons - "e-be-dee, e-be-dee, th- th- that's all folks!"



Newterus at the Right-Wing Gates (graphic by Kat Garcia)



The Outing of the Oligarchs

Shrillionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has finally dropped all pretense of being a public servant, serving at the pleasure of the public. This arrogant King of the Plutocrats, who defied term limits by buying his way into a previously illegal third term, has broken the law once again.


He is deliberately ignoring a court order* which allows the Occupy campers back into Zuccotti Park, along with their tents, their tarps, their books -- and their power. Michael Bloomberg should be impeached, recalled, sued, criminally charged, in no particular order, separately or concurrently. While we're waiting for the justice that most assuredly will come, this craven smarmy little man deserves all the invective we can hurl his way, all the shame we can pile upon this smirking personification of  egotistical self-serving entitlement. At his press conference this morning, in which he took sole responsibility for evicting Occupy, Bloomberg claimed he'd heard rumors of the court order, but had yet to verify its existence.


He lied. He ignored the court order, because he considers himself above the law.  At the time of the 8 a.m. news event, he had already been served with papers.


New York City Public Advocate Bill di Blasio called Bloomberg's actions provocative and legally questionable. 


Zuccotti Park, of course, is only the latest in what seems like a lightning-quick falling of the dominoes of Occupy encampments throughout the country. If you think this is part of a coordinated effort, you are right. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan has admitted as much in a BBC interview, saying she recently participated in a conference call with 18 other mayors to plan anti-Occupy strategy.  Was this week of preplanned violent crackdowns also coordinated with the president's convenient absence from the country? The mayors and their police chiefs even had identical talking points. How often have you heard the words "health and safety concerns" from officials' mouths this week?  Along with the NIMBY defense: of course they have a right to protest!  Just not here, there or anywhere. Public space for the public?  Hah!

November 15, 2011: A day of infamy. The day when the bankers and the corporations and the puppet politicians finally came out of the closet and proclaimed their fascism. The day when Democracy was officially flouted by the New Security State. The day when the Gestapo conducted a raid and even declared the airspace above the scene of their outrageous brutality their own private property, and announced that freedom of the press is subject to their whim.


And the whole world is watching.  

*Update, 5:23 pm:  A judge has now ruled that occupiers may return to the park, minus their tents and tarps and other means of survival. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was on TV just now, barely able to contain the glee under his dour exterior, vowing that the protesters will no longer even be permitted to lie down in the park. How they enforce this unilaterally-enacted law should be interesting. It's also fascinating how many mainstream media outlets are now proclaiming the entire OWS movement DOA. These people haven't a clue. 

Like every other strong arm tactic displayed by the police, this one will only make the movement stronger. It's not about the geographical location, pundits. The overwhelming anger, and the newfound solidarity among different kinds of people who have found a commonality in suffering, are here to stay. Call us protesters without borders.