The Stench of US Economic Decay Grows Stronger

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS in CounterPunch, 11/29/10:



On Thanksgiving eve the English-language China Daily and People’s Daily Online reported that Russia and China have concluded an agreement to abandon the use of the US dollar in their bilateral trade and to use their own currencies in its place. The Russians and Chinese said that they had taken this step in order to insulate their economies from the risks that have undermined their confidence in the US dollar as world reserve currency.

This is big news, especially for the news-dead Thanksgiving holiday period, but I did not see it reported on Bloomberg, CNN, New York Times or anywhere in the US print or TV media. The ostrich’s head remains in the sand.

Previously, China concluded the same agreement with Brazil.

As China has a large and growing supply of dollars from trade surpluses with which to conduct trade, China is signaling that she prefers Russian rubles and Brazilian reais to more US dollars.

The American financial press finds solace in the episodes when sovereign debt scares in the EU send the dollar up against the euro and UK pound. But these currency movements are just measures of financial players shorting troubled EU-denominated debt. They are not a measure of dollar strength.

The dollar’s role as world reserve currency is one of the main instruments of American financial hegemony. We haven’t been told how much damage Wall Street fraud has inflicted on EU financial institutions, but the EU countries no longer need the US dollar for trade between themselves as they share a common currency. Once the OPEC countries cease to hold the dollars that they are paid for oil, dollar hegemony will have faded away.

Another instrument of American financial hegemony is the IMF. Whenever a country cannot make good on its debts and pay back the American banks, in steps the IMF with an austerity package that squeezes the country’s population with higher taxes and cuts in education, medical and income support programs until the bankers get their money back.

[...]



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America—The Grim Truth

A must read, in its entirety, as published at Club Orlov, 11/24/10:




Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world—by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.

Let’s start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it’s not just the food that’s killing you, it’s the drugs. If you show any sign of life when you’re young, they’ll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you’ll get depressed, so they’ll give you Prozac. If you’re a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you’ll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you’ll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you’ll need Lunesta to go to sleep.

[...]





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Bumbling Terrorists

As published on Common Dreams and Dissident Voice, 11/28/10:





Tell me if you’ve heard this one: An FBI agent infiltrates an actual, figurative or virtual mosque, finds the most gullible and angry dork around, encourages him to get even, plots out some dubious plan, gives him bombs that don’t quite work, then arrests this dupe to much fanfare.

In every country, at all times, young men can be led to kill or be killed, commit mass murder or blow themselves up. These callow and reckless males need to prove that they are men at all. Many also don’t think they’ll ever die. Without this endless stream of puppets, fall guys, patsies and war heroes, cynical old farts won’t be able to achieve most of their greedy or evil objectives.

As we encroached into Pakistan and as our drones zapped their citizens, the FBI set up sting operations to entrap Pakistani-Americans. They’re terrorists, you see, we have to kill them. Now, as we’re eyeing Somalia, a Somali-American fool is conveniently arrested. This incident also serves to dampen the outrage over the state-sanctioned sexual molestation at our airports.

Why Somalia? Why now? Follow the money. It’s the oil and natural gas. Before he was ousted in a coup in 1991, Mohammed Siad Barre ruled Somalia for 20 years. As with nearly every other dictator, Barre was very chummy with Uncle Sam. He liked us to much, he leased nearly two-thirds [!] of Somali territory to four American oil companies, Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips. Most of this dough went into Barre’s personal bank account, of course, not the country's treasury. With Barre gone, however, we can’t get to that land to drill, baby, drill. The demonization of Somalia is likely prep work for an invasion, unless we’ll be too far broke to send over 50,000 or so of our youngish crazies.

Uncle Sam always prattles on about democracy, but dictators are his favorite kind of humans. In granting Uncle Sam—let’s just call him Samo, as in Same Old, Same Old—these ridiculous concessions, a dictator cashes in, so both dictator and Samo are happy. Who cares about the looted and raped population? When they rise up, like they eventually did in Somalia, Samo will send in his troops “to restore order” in a “peace and humanitarian” mission. Similarly, World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans are often just bribes to Samo’s favorite dictators. It’s how Uncle does business.

In announcing the arrest of Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19 years old, the FBI said that he “acted alone,” but this is contradicted by the very narrative told by the FBI itself: The agency provided Mohamud with cash, fake bombs and van. It abetted him every step of the way, but the idea for mass murder came from Mohamud alone, the FBI charges. In the affidavit, the FBI recounts a meeting in a Portland hotel room where Mohamud told an undercover FBI agent that he wanted to be “operational,” that “he wanted to put an explosion together,” that “he has heard of brothers putting stuff in a car, parking it by a target, and detonating it.” In short, Mohamud hatched up the bomb plot entirely by himself, except the FBI has no proof of this. The affidavit states that the agent “was equipped with audio equipment to record the meeting. However, due to technical problems the meeting was not recorded.” All the other meetings were recorded and/or filmed, but this one, where intentionality could have been unequivocally established, was not.

Like all patsies, Mohamud doesn’t appear too bright. Before being approached by an undercover agent on June 23rd, he was prevented from boarding an airplane on June 14th. He wanted to fly to Alaska for a summer job. Knowing that he was on a no-fly list, that he was already on the government’s radar, Mohamud didn’t lie low but fell into the FBI’s trap nine days later. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, was allowed onto an airplane to carry out a bomb plot. Mohamud, on the other hand, was prevented from boarding an airplane so he could execute another bomb plot. Grounded, he could be groomed into a wannabe terrorist by two FBI agents.

Dude wasn’t too bright. As quoted in the affidavit, Mohamud could barely stutter his way through a sentence without overdosing on “you know” and other verbal mishaps. In one of the recorded meetings, Mohamud did state that deterrence and revenge were his two motivations. He wanted “in general just a huge mass that will, you know like for them you know to be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holiday. And then for later to be saying, this was them for you to refrain from killing our children, women… so when they hear all these families were killed in such a such a city they’ll say you know what your actions you know they will stop you know. And it’s not fair they should do that to people and not feeling it”

Translation: Mohamud wanted us to stop killing Muslims. It’s not right that we can kill people without feeling it. If our own families were killed, we would know what it’s like and perhaps stop the carnage.

Our president was awarded a Nobel Peace prize, hold the laugh track and applause, please, but two years into his reign, we still have nearly 200,000 soldiers occupying two Muslim countries. How many of those are also after revenge and deterrence? Unlike Mohamud, however, with his pathetic, FBI-assisted duds, how many of our young men and women have exploded real bombs, shot real bullets into real bodies, destroyed countless families without remorse? Mohamud may be a fool, even a murderous one, but he’s at least correct in this observation: America can kill without feeling anything. Our invasion and occupation of Iraq have caused over a million deaths, a fact that hardly registers here. Like Barbara Bush and her beautiful mind, we have so much else to entertain and distract us.






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Enabling Bullies

As published on Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, CounterPunch and Online Journal, 11/25/10:





This July, traveling by Greyhound, I arrived in Detroit from Windsor, Canada. A dog sniffed all passengers for drugs, and a border agent checked our bags. U.S. citizens produced IDs, while foreigners displayed visas and/or passports. Nothing was out of the ordinary except for this exchange I had with an officer:

“Why are you going to Detroit?”

“I’ve never been here. I just want to check it out.”

“How long will you stay?”

“Just a couple of days.”

“Where will you stay?”

“At a motel… on Jefferson Street, I think.” Normally, I can’t instantly recall the street of my hotel, or even its name.

“Where will you go after Detroit?”

“Home, to Philadelphia. I live in Philadelphia.”

“Where did you buy this ticket?”

“Online.”

“It says Dallas on your ticket.”

“Huh, I don’t know, maybe that’s the headquarters for Greyhound. I bought my ticket online.”

Then he let me go. It was truly weird, that brief grilling, and totally unnecessary. An American returning home should not have to answer any of these questions. As long as I carried no contraband, it should not matter why I was going to Detroit, how long I would stay, or where I bought my ticket. The only two tasks of our border agents are 1) To stop anyone from entering this country illegally, and 2) To prevent people from bringing banned substances into the U.S. Maybe this officer simply assumed that there were no legitimate reasons for anyone to visit Detroit? But so what if I was irrational or insane? He still had to let me in. Maybe I had a dollar in my pocket and wanted to buy a spacious home, right outside downtown. Maybe I couldn’t wait to have a Coney Island hot dog, then a raccoon quiche… Again, an American coming home should not have to explain himself, especially if he was arriving from Canada, and not an enemy country like North Korea. Maybe I had no place to stay in Detroit and was ready to join the thousands sleeping on its empty lots or inside its abandoned buildings. He still had to let me in. What would he do if I gave an unsatisfying answer? Kick me back to Canada?

It’s only routine to ask foreign nationals for where they would stay while in the U.S. On October 28th, 2002, National Review examined the visa applications of 15 of the 9/11 alleged hijackers. (Four applications were not available.) Of these, only one listed an address. The rest scribbled nonsensical answers such as “Wasantwn,” “Hotel D.C.,” “Hotel” or “JKK Whyndham Hotel.” One simply wrote “NO,” as to where he would stay. There were additional problems with each of these applications, yet all the men were granted visas, absurdly enough. The attitude of these alleged hijackers was not just casual, it was flippant, as if they knew this annoying procedure was entirely unnecessary, a mere formality.

Similarly, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, could expect to fly from Amsterdam to Detroit without a passport. With the right string pulled, who needs a stupid document? Before boarding, Abdulmutallab was spotted by an American couple, lawyer Kurt Haskell and his wife, Lori. This shabbily dressed, 23-year-old Nigerian was accompanied by a suited, Indian-looking man around 50-years-old. The odd pair caught the Haskells’ attention. Speaking in American accented English, the Indian-looking man intervened with the ticket agent to get Abdulmutallab onboard, "He is from Sudan, we do this all the time.” Who are “we,” Haskell would wonder later, if not the U.S. government?

Abdulmutallab then tried to blow up the plane, but eighty grams of PETN couldn’t explode without a blasting cap. Bumbling Umar didn’t know that, however, so only his crotch was martyred. Online, Abdulmutallab had often complained about controlling his sex drive, how even “The hair of a woman can easily arouse a man,” how, despite much effort, he couldn’t always lower his gaze at the sight of female flesh. Perhaps Abdulmutallab was only trying to purify himself by making mince meat out of his ragingly persistent endowment. Down, boy, down! The lives of hundreds of infidels were just an extra bonus.

Not amused, Kurt Haskell wanted to know who this Indian-looking man was. When the F.B.I. visited him four days after the incident, Haskell asked if they had brought the Amsterdam security video so he could help to identify this enabler of terrorism, “but they acted as though my request was ridiculous.” There was no follow up investigation. Someone did bother to phone Haskell, however, to warn him, rather menacingly, that it was “in [his] best interest to stop talking publicly” about this episode.

So people who should be stopped are not stopped, but Americans returning home are sometimes subjected to ridiculous questions, or worse. In January of this year, journalist and photographer Michael Yon was handcuffed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for refusing to answer a question about his annual salary. “When they handcuffed me,” Yon relates, “I said that no country has ever treated me so badly. Not China. Not Vietnam. Not Afghanistan. Definitely not Singapore or India or Nepal or Germany, not Brunei, not Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Kuwait or Qatar or United Arab Emirates. No country has treated me with the disrespect that can be expected from our border bullies.” Yon concluded that a question about his income had nothing to do with airport security, and he was right, obviously. It only takes common sense to figure that out, except that our national security is no longer based on common sense.

In 2008, at Lubbock Airport, Mandi Hamlin was forced to remove her nipple rings before she could board a flight. As male TSA agents snickered nearby, she had to use pliers to take one off. Why was her humiliating and painful ordeal necessary? How could nipple rings ever be a security threat, unless, of course, it’s not about security at all, but power.

Also in 2008, Robert Perry, a 71-year-old man in a wheelchair, was at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport when he set off the metal detector. Perry explained that it was likely his artificial knee had caused the alarm, but a TSA agent still pulled his pants down in view of other passengers. Humiliated, Perry asked to see a supervisor. She came but, instead of showing common sense or, God forbid, compassion, only pounded on her chest, “I have power! I have power! I have power!” How asinine must you be to assume that there was even a remotest chance that this old man had implanted a bomb inside his own knee? No fresh suture marks, see? Are you happy now?

Of course, it’s not about security or common sense, but power. At its essence, power is always the ability to dictate, control or violate another body. Power means “I can lay my hand on you,” if not “I can fuck you up.” The sexual aspect is not incidental. Before a black man was lynched, he was often stripped naked and displayed. Stripped naked, Iraqi prisoners were forced to perform humiliating acts and/or stacked onto pyramids. Perhaps we should replace the generic pyramid on our dollar bill with disrobed detainees? They don’t have to be foreigners, since we also strip our domestic prisoners. Perhaps we can have pyramids of naked airline passengers on dollar bills? Novus ordo seclorum, New order of the ages!

Power is also the ability to be unjust, irrational or merely stupid. Although it makes no sense, I will do this to you because I can. Take the current prohibition against taking photos in certain places. A real terrorist would not take a photo, then plant a bomb. He would just plant his bomb. Again, it’s not really about security, but power. Even as Big Brother sees through your clothes, he can arrest you for snapping a photo in public.

As we experience further turbulence in the years ahead, economically and socially, expect to see more bullying from our government and its agents, even the pettiest. Especially the pettiest. Unwilling to restore meaning and purpose, they will subject their subjects to more absurd orders. Craving solutions, many of us will mistake their ridiculous commands for answers.






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TSA pulls pants off 71 y/o man with knee implant

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Italian high school and college students

protesting in Rome against drastic budget cuts to their school system:







"HERE RESTS IN 'PEACE' THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 1859-2010"




"IDLE RESEARCHER," "WITHOUT RESEARCH THERE'S NO FUTURE," "IDLE RESEARCHER"




Great book shields, Elsa Moranti's "Arturo's Island," Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," Lenin's "What is to be Done?", Petronius' "Satyricon," Isaac Asimov's "The Naked Sun" and Plato's "The Republic."








The sign to the right is pointing to the cost of 131 jet bombers.




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Proof Clearly Indicates Staged Attack on Detroit Flight

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...................
And from an excellent article by Gonzalo Lira:


[...]

But in perhaps some poetic justice, the people most likely to suffer cancer in the long term (and maybe not so long term) are the TSA workers operating the machines. You see, there is a reason that in every hospital, the x-ray room is sealed off, and x-ray operators always work behind lead shielding. Yet TSA employees stand around these backscatter x-ray scanners for hours on end, day after day, with no shielding or protection. It’s a safe bet to claim that TSA workers operating these machines will suffer disproportionate amounts of cancer and/or leukemia in the medium- to long-term future.

[...]



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Visas that Should Have Been Denied

As referred to in my pieces, "Collapsing America" and "I Feel You", here is National Review's examination of the alleged 9/11 hijackers' visa irregularities:




A look at 9/11 terrorists’ visa applications.

The cover story in National Review's October 28th issue (out Friday) details how at least 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers should have been denied visas — an assessment based on expert analyses of 15 of the terrorists' visa-application forms, obtained exclusively by NR.

In the year after 9/11, the hand-wringing mostly centered on the FBI and CIA's failure to "connect the dots." But that would not have been a fatal blow if the "dots" had not been here in the first place. If the U.S. State Department had followed the law, at least 15 of the 19 "dots" should have been denied visas — and they likely wouldn't have been in the United States on September 11, 2001.

According to expert analyses of the visa-application forms of 15 of the 9/11 terrorists (the other four applications could not be obtained), all the applicants among the 15 reviewed should have been denied visas under then-existing law. Six separate experts who analyzed the simple, two-page forms came to the same conclusion: All of the visa applications they reviewed should have been denied on their face.

Even to the untrained eye, it is easy to see why many of the visas should have been denied. Consider, for example, the U.S. destinations most of them listed. Only one of the 15 provided an actual address — and that was only because his first application was refused — and the rest listed only general locations — including "California," "New York," "Hotel D.C.," and "Hotel." One terrorist amazingly listed his U.S. destination as simply "No." Even more amazingly, he got a visa.

The experts — who scrutinized the applications of 14 Saudis and one from the United Arab Emirates — include four former consular officers, a current consular officer stationed in Latin America, and a senior official at Consular Affairs (CA) — the division within the State Department that oversees consulates and visa issuance — who has extensive consular experience.

All six experts strongly agreed that even allowing for human error, no more than a handful of the visa applications should have managed to slip through the cracks. Making the visa lapses even more inexplicable, the State Department claims that at least 11 of the 15 were interviewed by consular officers. Nikolai Wenzel, one of the former consular officers who analyzed the forms, declares that State's issuance of the visas "amounts to criminal negligence."

[...]





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To hell

with the European Court of Human Rights [sic], for freeing a mass murderer:

Russia 'frees Israeli mercenary'

Russia has released Israeli mercenary Yair Klein, who was sought by Colombia for his involvement in the training of paramilitary squads, reports say.

BBC, 11/19/10--Klein, a former Israeli army soldier, is on his way to Israel, Interfax news agency reports.

In 2001, a Colombian court convicted him in absentia of training right-wing guerrilla groups.

Russia arrested him in 2007 under an Interpol warrant and later agreed to extradite him to Colombia.

But the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) forbid the extradition, on grounds that he might face mistreatment in Colombia.

'Drug lords'

Israel's Channel 10 television showed Klein on Friday leaving a Moscow jail where he was being held.

"Klein has been freed and he is currently en route to Israel," Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed security source as saying.

Klein was sentenced in absentia in 2001 to 10 years and eight months in prison in Colombia for assisting and training drug lords and guerrilla groups in the 1980s and 1990s.

He was found guilty of training a cadre of killers for the infamous Medellin drug cartel, a charge which he denies.

They later became the nucleus of the brutal paramilitary army known as the United Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), which prosecutors said carried out some of the country's most notorious political assassinations.

He has also served prison time in Sierra Leone in 1999, on charges of smuggling arms to the rebel group Revolutionary United Front.

[...]

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I Feel You

As published on Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, Online Journal and Prison Planet, 11/20/10:




It’s no big deal that they strap people onto boards, then pour water onto their covered faces, drowning them, more or less, in our name, but we don’t make a big fuss until they nudge our nuts.

It’s OK that they incinerate countless alien bodies, call it shock and awe (some), but we don’t go berserk until they palm our inner thighs.

Go ahead and commit countless crimes, profit and murder with our tax money, destroy nations, including this one, be imperial, kick ass without mercy, kill into eternity with regular troops, part-timers or mercenaries, but don’t mess with our junks!

Don’t tinker with our jewels. Don’t rearrange them. Unleash your frat boy or sadistic impulses on those you’ve detained through renditions. How polite are these verbs, to detain and to render, how artistic, even, much better than to kidnap, lock up then torture without trial, if not kill in secret. I hate to detain you, but may I render you?

Big Brother must probe our crotches because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had 80 grams of PETN explosive in his underwear. Heading for Detroit, he could board an airliner in Amsterdam even without a passport. Unless there was intervention from higher up, from inside, this would not have been possible. Strange, but many 9/11 “terrorists” also managed to get into the U.S. with improperly handled paperwork. I didn’t make that up, it’s no conspiracy theory, but fact, as reported by National Review, of all places. In any case, there’s simply no way you can get on a U.S. bound plane without a passport, unless strings are pulled. More than month before this attempted attack, Abdulmutallab’s father had also gone to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria to express, according to CBS News, “deep concerns to a CIA officer about his son's ties to extremists in Yemen,” but nothing was ever done about it. Of course not.

Umar lost his bloody trousers. Judging from his Facebook musings, bloke wasn’t terribly bright. With patsy burnt, literally, well toasted, seared, Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff lost no time in pushing the newfangled, see-through-your-and-your-mama’s-clothes X-ray machines. These are made by Rapiscan, a client of—guess who?—the Chertoff Group, a security consulting firm. In sum, Chertoff wanted American tax payers to stuff beaucoup cash into his pockets. Open corruption has become a hallmark of our croaking empire. It doesn’t matter, since hardly anyone is paying attention these days. Hardly anyone is capable of paying attention.

Agence France Press quotes Dr. Michael Love, "They say the risk is minimal, but statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays.” Dr. Love runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. Representing 12,000 pilots, the American Pilots Association is also warning its members against these airport scanners.

On the other hand, the successor to Chertoff, Janet Napolitano, reassures us, "IT machines are safe, efficient, and protect passenger privacy. They have been independently evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who have all affirmed their safety." Wait a second, didn't a Dr. Love, of the same John Hopkins University, tell us that these machines aren't safe? Did Napolitano just lie? Would our government lie? Oh, come on, who would you trust, a French press agency, some know-nothing guy named "Love” and a (probably) Commie union, or the honorable Janet Napolitano, as published in USA Today?

But why this constant emphasis on airports? If I were a terrorist, I would hit ‘em where they ain’t. Willie Keller must be in Al Qaeda. Dig him up and arrest him! Don’t plant bombs where they’re so guarded, wound up and uptight, they’re groping all comers, whether co-eds or nuns. Hit ‘em where they ain’t. That’s the first rule of fighting, whether in boxing or war, hit ‘em where they ain’t… defending. Manny Pacquiao must be a Taliban. Lock him up! This singular emphasis on airports makes little sense, unless nudie scanners are also destined for train and subway stations, shopping mall and church entrances. Don’t think they haven’t thought of it. Hey, I have an idea, why not require that each citizen be strapped to a portable scatter scanner, so Chertoff can really make a bundle, and Janet Napolitano and company can really get their rocks off?





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Draped in an East Indian outfit, a young woman
Belted out a Russian song, at the Russia
Festival in Dundas Square, and no one
Seemed bemused. This is Toronto.

In an Old York park, a dozen books
On the grass--Robin Rice, Anne Tyler,
Stephen King, you know, the usual
Bullshit. How sweet it was that no one
Had bothered to pick these up, but then, I thought,
Maybe they already own these titles. What if

bpNichol had been scattered, like this, as gifts
Or trash. They would probably remain there
For the next millenium or two. Speaking
Of orphaned language, I collided with

"WE SERVE ALL DAY DIM SUM," not
To be confused with "WE SERVE
DIM SUM ALL DAY." Maybe they meant
"WE SERVE DAY-OLD DIM SUM."

Dim sum means "to touch the heart,"
By the way, and all I ever wanted was
To massage your core with syllables.

On King Street, I saw, quite suddenly,
A blown-up comic with "La ferita
Continua a sanguinare." The wound
Continues to bleed, and the only
Response to that is "Basta! Basta!
Do you want to focus or not? Let us
Focus. You and me, let us focus."






[In July, in Toronto, I wrote this poem, longhand, while sitting in some bar on Bloor Street, just outside High Park. I read it that night at the Scream Festival, but never bothered to type it up until today.

Trying to make conversation, I said to some dude at the bar, "There aren't too many bars around here. I walked all over before I found this place."

"The bars are everywhere. You just don't know where they are."

Real friendly, he was. A real prick. Later, however, I had a nice long chat with some hippie lady who spent years in Guatemala.]


.

A nice heads-up

from the Philadelphia City Paper about my reading tomorrow:

Friday: …And we’re back to Vietnam. But this time, the tone is dark and deadpan as poet-proser Linh Dinh’s cast of characters navigate a surreal, war-wrought Saigon. Dinh’s meta-fiction has been known to mess with genres and, fair warning, absurdity and confusion are his keystone motifs. For this reading of his novelistic debut, Love Like Hate, Dinh has teamed up with Ocean Vuong, a senior English major at Brooklyn College who was born in Saigon in 1988. Fri., Nov. 19, 7pm, Moonstone Arts Center, 110A S. 13th St., 215,735-9598.

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Philly reading tomorrow

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with Ocean Vuong
Moonstone Arts Center
110a S. 13th Street

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Betting big on Asian gamblers

Monica Yant Kinney in Philadelphia Inquirer, 11/18/10:



Attention out-of-work Chinese speakers: You could have a swell job at the SugarHouse Casino targeting your friends and family. The Philadelphia casino desperately seeks an "Asian Marketing Executive" to separate immigrants from their hard-earned cash.

The job calls for "attracting Asian player base to the property" and "ensuring gaming service expectations are met." For those who don't speak casino, that means offering comps in Cantonese and plying players with ethnic food to make them forget major losses at mini baccarat.

A successful candidate can tweet in Vietnamese, take drink orders in Korean, and make it seem like good, clean Mandarin fun for a restaurateur to blow a night's dinner receipts playing Pai Gow poker.

Interested? At SugarHouse, you must be able to "walk, stand, see, talk, and hear." And you must endure chain smokers. Inhaling with a smile is a job requirement.

Where segregation pays

Segregation in schools is illegal, but it's business as usual in the casino industry, where Asians often play in rooms built just for them. [This is not 100% correct, since people of any race can play in these Asian-targeted rooms.]

Researchers point to Asians' cultural tolerance of gambling. They bet lucky numbers and they bet big. Win or lose, because gambling is generally accepted in the community, they feel little shame. Historically, up to 20 percent of gaming revenue in Atlantic City came from Asian players, including those who can ill afford the habit.

Lai Har Cheung was in kindergarten when her Chinese parents - a seamstress and cook who spoke no English - began dragging the kids to Caesars and dumping them in the casino arcade.

"They'd give us a roll of quarters to play video games," she recalls, "and leave us to wait and wait."

At just 7, Cheung cared for her 5-year-old sister and toddler brother while her parents blew money better spent on household repairs. In casinos that had no arcades, the kids sat in lobbies for hours with strict orders to stay put.

Cheung cringed as her mother fell prey to a hard sell that played into her heritage and isolation.

"All the marketing materials came to our house in Chinese," she recalls. "One time, my grandmother told us to come down because the casino was serving congee, a rice porridge Asians eat for breakfast. I thought, 'Oh, my God! They're even making familiar food to get us there and make us stay.' "

The family spent so much time in casinos that Cheung, a Bryn Mawr graduate now in her 30s, says, "I can't think about my childhood without thinking about Atlantic City." Fond memories they aren't, but they did inspire her to protest a proposed Chinatown casino and to keep agitating about SugarHouse.

"Once my mom started going to the casinos, I lost her," Cheung laments. "She was around physically, but her mental state and emotional availability were gone."

Target marketing in the cards

SugarHouse's job posting on the casinocareers.com website made news days after three Asian women were robbed of cash and credit cards at 1 a.m. as they approached the casino. One of the women was pistol-whipped, adding to the urgency for some positive PR.

[...]






[See also my "Welcome to the Recovery" and "Casino Recess."]



.

Get your hands off me, TSA!

Jennifer Abel, The Guardian, 11/17/10:



These airport so-called security measures amount to state-sponsored sexual harassment

[...]

I'm sick of the craven cliches TSA apologists have cited these past nine years:

"They protect us from terrorists."

No, they impose pointlessly superstitious security theatre, trample Americans' constitutional rights and make foreigners feel sorry for us. TSA protected nobody with its infamous "bathroom bans" after last year's Christmas terror attempt; rules like "keep your lap empty and your hands visible at all times" only demonstrated the agency's willingness to treat ordinary citizens like serial killers in supermax prison.

"You gave up your rights when you bought an airline ticket."

I never gave up any rights. The government stole them while cowards egged them on.

"TSA agents are just doing their jobs."

A lousy apologia and historically ignorant to boot; the civilised world established at Nuremberg that "just following orders" cuts no ice. And my fellow Americans are realising "it'll stop terrorists" cuts none either, at least not to justify low-grade sexual harassment as standard behaviour for government agents.

It's not hyperbole to call the enhanced patdown a low-grade sexual assault; if you don't believe me, go find some woman's boobs or man's balls, start cupping and squeezing them according to new TSA standards, and count how many offences you're charged with. Last month, an agent openly admitted that the purpose of the aggressive new patdowns was to intimidate people into choosing the nude scanners instead.

And Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano justified this Hobson's choice – and abandoned all pretence of being a "servant" accountable to the public – in an insufferably arrogant column she wrote for USA Today, burying outright lies beneath eye-glazing bureaucratic prose. "The imaging technology that we use cannot store, export, print or transmit images," she claimed – though this was proven untrue almost as soon as the scanners were put in use; last August, US marshals admitted to storing 35,000 images collected from one single courthouse – some of which have now been obtained by the website Gizmodo under a freedom of information request.

[...]

.

'Naked' scanners at US airports may be dangerous: scientists

AFP, 5 days ago:


WASHINGTON — Some US scientists warned Friday that the full-body, graphic-image X-ray scanners now being used to screen passengers and airline crews at airports around the country may be unsafe.

"They say the risk is minimal, but statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays," Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, told AFP.

"No exposure to X-ray is considered beneficial. We know X-rays are hazardous but we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner," he said.

[...]





.

Lawsuit: Airport search indecent

Amarillo Globe-News, October 10, 2010:



An Amarillo woman is suing the federal government for intentional infliction of emotional distress after Transportation Security Administration agents allegedly humiliated the woman when her breasts were publicly exposed during an "extended search" two years ago at a Corpus Christi airport.

The suit, filed earlier this year in Amarillo's U.S. District Court, alleges the woman was singled out for "extended search procedures" while preparing to board an aircraft destined for Amarillo on May 29, 2008.

The Amarillo Globe-News has declined to identify the woman for privacy reasons.

"As the TSA agent was frisking plaintiff, the agent pulled the plaintiff's blouse completely down, exposing plaintiffs' breasts to everyone in the area," the lawsuit said. "As would be expected, plaintiff was extremely embarrassed and humiliated."

The suit said the woman filed an administrative claim against the TSA, but the agency never responded, sparking the lawsuit.

The suit also claims that other TSA employees continued to joke and laugh about the incident for an extended period of time. The woman was distraught over the incident and left the screening area so an acquaintance could console her, the suit said.

When the woman re-entered the boarding area, employees once again began joking about the matter, the suit said.

"One male TSA employee expressed to the plaintiff that he wished he would have been there when she came through the first time and that 'he would just have to watch the video,'" the suit said.

[...]





.

Update: TSA Targets John Tyner In Effort To Chill Nationwide Backlash

.

.

Savage austerity

Cindy Sheehan in Online Journal, Nov 15, 2010:

“Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.” --James Connolly, Irish Freedom Fighter and founder of the Irish Labor Party

“We’re all in this together,” is the chorus the ruling class loves to sing while it simultaneously bestows “quantitative easing” upon banks after imposing “savage austerity” measures on the working class.

I have been worried about Obama’s Bowles-Simpson “Cat Food Commission” (CFC) on reducing the deficit since it was announced, and it turns out my worries were well founded.

Besides suggesting raising the retirement age to an ungodly 69, savage cuts to Social Security and Medicare are proposed. Who needs Social Security and Medicare? Not the elite, but they are not forgotten in the CFC plan, the CFC also proposes to REDUCE taxes on the top earners from an already too low 35 percent, to an absolutely obscene 23 percent! Obama is following the international sport of the ruling class of forcing the least advantaged in society to pay for the crimes and excess of the One-Percent Club -- those who sit at the top of the economic food chain controlling at least 50 percent of the nation’s wealth.

One thing we must understand, especially in the U.S, is that Capitalism creates these crises to be able to “capitalize” on them. The bubbles of the past were generated for gross profit on the expansion, and economic vampirism on the contraction. We who are not in the One-Percent Club may feel some temporary prosperity on the expansion, but each contraction squeezes us tighter and tighter.

In the CFC, there are also modest cuts proposed to defense, but, if any do go through, (very doubtful) it will just be a symbolic gesture meant to prove to us that the parasites really are “in it” with us.

Why do we in the 99 Percent Guild just take it for granted that we will slave our lives away for the elite class? It not only will exploit our labor to make itself grow fatter, but it will also flood the banks with billions of counterfeit dollars to drive up prices of necessities and drive down the purchasing power of our hard-earned federal reserve notes. However, we are supposed to suffer through all this with the Protestant rectitude of our forebears.

[...]





.

.

["Collapsing America"]



.

I WHEEL,

a series of images from my State of the Union, is currently featured on Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick's excellent PEEP/SHOW:

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US-Sino Currency Rap Battle

.

.

Moral Decay?

From John Robb's Global Guerillas, 10/11/10:



Moral decay is often cited as a reason for why empires/civilizations collapse. The slow failure of the US mortgage market, the largest debt market in the world and the shining jewel of the US economic/financial system, is a good example of moral decay at work.

Why is this market failing? It's being gutted -- from wholesale fraud and ruthless profiteering at the bank/servicer level to strategic defaults at the homeowner level -- because a relatively efficient and effective moral system is being replaced by a burdensome and ineffective one. What shift? Our previous moral system featured trust, loyalty, reputation, responsibility, belief, fairness, etc. While these features were sometimes in short supply, on the whole it provided us with an underlying and nearly costless structure to our social and economic interactions.

Our new moral system is that of the dominant global marketplace. This new system emphasizes transactional, short-term interactions rather than long-term relationships. All interactions are intensely legalistic, as in: nothing is assumed except what is spelled out in the contract. Goodness is solely based on transactional success and therefore anything goes, as long as you don't get punished for it.

In this moral system, every social and economic interaction becomes increasingly costly due to a need to contractually defend yourself against cheating, fraud, and theft. Worse, when legalistic punishment is absent/lax, rampant looting and fraud occurs.

Given the costs and dangers of moral decay, it's not hard to see why it can cause a complex empire/civilization to collapse.



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America’s devolution into dictatorship with a license to kill

Paul Craig Roberts in Online Journal, Nov 12, 2010:

The United States Department of Justice [sic] routinely charges and convicts innocents with bogus and concocted crimes that are not even on the statutes book. The distinguished defense attorney and civil libertarian, Harvey A. Silverglate, published a book last year, Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, which conclusively proves that today in “freedom and democracy” America we have punishment without crime.

This same Justice [sic] Department, which routinely frames and railroads the innocent, argued in Federal Court on November 8 that the US government, if approved by the president, could murder anyone it wishes, citizens or noncitizens, at will. All that is required is that the government declare, without evidence, charges, trial, jury conviction or any of the due process required by the US Constitution, that the government suspects the murdered person or persons to be a “threat.”

The US Justice [sic] Department even told US Federal District Court Judge John Bates that the US judiciary, formerly a co-equal branch of government, has absolutely no legal authority whatsoever to stick its nose into President “Change” Obama’s decision to assassinate Americans. The unaccountability of the president’s decision to murder people is, the US Justice [sic] Department declared, one of “the very core powers of the president as commander in chief.”

[...]




.

World's largest pilot union shuns full-body scanners

The Register, 11/9/10:



The world's largest independent airline pilot association is warning its members to avoid security screening by full-body scanners out of concern the machines emit dangerous levels of radiation.

The American Pilots Association, which represents about 12,000 pilots, is recommending members instead submit to new pat-down searches, even though critics have described them as "horribly invasive" and likened them to foreplay. The recommendation is based on concerns that, contrary to claims by the US Transportation Security Administration, the types of X-rays emitted by the machines could pose serious risks that still aren't well understood.

[...]

The pilots are by no means alone in voicing concern over the safety of the backscatter X-ray scanners, which are also known as advanced imaging technology. In April, radiation experts from the University of California, San Francisco, warned President Obama's science assistant that the machines pose potentially serious health risks.

Although the machines operate at relatively low beam energies of about 28keV, the radiation is delivered only to passengers' skin and underlying tissue, the scientists argued in an April 6 memorandum (PDF) to John P. Holdren, assistant to the President for science and technology. While the dose might be safe if absorbed by the entire body, directing all of it to the skin only may be dangerous.

[...]

The scientists also warned that travelers might face health risks from malfunctioning machines or from overzealous screeners who raise the dose in an attempt to improve a scanner's resolution.

[...]






.

Revolution Number Ten

As published on Dissident Voice, Counterpunch and Online Journal, 11/12/10:






Revolt is in the air. Fed up with our corrupt government, Tea Partiers elect new, improved Republicans, those who will restore God, vote against gay marriage, tighten our borders and, above all, keep America strong militarily, even though she already has the most bloated (yet strangely inept) military in history, even though the military industrial complex is the very source of governmental corruption. Tea Partiers want to trim pork even as they feed this monstrous hog. We must support our troops.

Secessionists, on the other hand, have had enough of this madness. Why send tax dollars to Washington to be wasted on foreign wars? To save their own state or region, they want to get off this suicidal roller coaster ride, but what will happen when federal troops are sent in? The Civil War was fought over secessions. If the American empire is loathe to give up even its most distant outpost, why would it let go of, say, Vermont, without a bloody fight?

There are secessionist movements in about thirty states now. Among the more established is the Second Vermont Republic, founded in 2003. Besides political independence from Washington, it is also aiming for a more local and sustainable economy. “Life should be lived on a human scale,” it states on its website. “Small is still beautiful […] We celebrate and support Vermont’s small, clean, green, sustainable, socially responsible towns, farms, businesses, schools, and churches. We encourage family-owned farms and businesses to produce innovative, premium-quality, healthy products.” All of these goals are laudable but the SVR’s commitment to non-violence ensures that it’ll never succeed on any scale, I’m afraid. Big government is big business now, and it will not release its prey, I mean let go of its market share, without spilling blood. Big Brother will bare his fangs as soon as you cut into his profits. It will be the Domino Theory all over again. If you let Vermont fall (aside), then you’ll loose New Hampshire, Maine, then Massachusetts...

Even resorting to violence, the Kurds, Basques, Catalonians or Corsicans, etc., have not managed to secede from their respective states after many decades of struggle, but we also have the Soviet Union, which broke up into fifteen republics. Each of these new countries was an ethnic enclave within the Soviet empire, however. Several had only been absorbed quite recently. These peoples never saw themselves as Russians, and were only too glad to break away. We don’t have the same conditions here. The United States will not splinter along ethnic and racial lines, at least not without a considerable mess.

So if electoral politics, à la Tea Party, and peaceful secessionism, Vermont style, are both futile, should Americans resort to more militant actions? For several years now, James Howard Kunstler has conjured up scenes of fed up proles rising up to torch the manor of a blood sucking CEO. A typical, quite gleeful passage, "people with little interest in principle beyond some dim idea of economic fairness, will be hoisting the flaming brands out of sheer grievance and malice. By the time Lloyd Blankfein sees the torches flickering through his privet, it will be too late to defend the honor of his cappuccino machine." In 2006, William S. Lind wrote even more ominously:

One of the things U.S. troops are learning in Iraq is how people with little training and few resources can fight a state. Most American troops will see this within the framework of counterinsurgency. But a minority will apply their new-found knowledge in a very different way. After they return to the U.S. and leave the military, they will take what they learned in Iraq back to the inner cities, to the ethnic groups, gangs, and other alternate loyalties they left when they joined the service. There, they will put their new knowledge to work, in wars with each other and wars against the American state. It will not be long before we see police squad cars getting hit with IEDs and other techniques employed by Iraqi insurgents, right here in the streets of American cities.

If disaffected Americans started to imitate Iraqi insurgents, the best they could hope for is to achieve the latter’s success, or lack thereof. For every American invader killed by an IED, how many insurgents have lost their lives? How many innocent civilians? For all the casualties they suffered, the Iraqis have won nothing. The United States still occupies their country. It has set up its Green Zone, built Enduring Bases, defended the Petro Dollar, stolen Iraqi oil proceeds and robbed American tax payers, so everything has gone according to plan, more or less. The loss of a soldier here and there has long been factored in. No biggie, this collateral write-off is merely a cost of doing business in any difficult neighborhood.

With its well-armed, confused and increasingly angry populace, the United States can quickly become the mother of all difficult neighborhoods, one would think, but so far, all is placid. We rally, rant and hold up cute signs, yes, but unlike the Thais, we don’t occupy the central commercial district for two months, then torch a mega shopping center and the stock exchange. We don’t riot like the French and the Greeks, or topple the government, like Icelanders.

The Obama card was a brilliant move by our ruling class. After eight years of Bush, they placated our liberals and blacks with an articulate and personable black effigy. After four years of Obama, they will likely appease the gun happy and ultra religious with a deer hunting mom of a combat soldier. Sarah is so “real,” she even has a reality show. Pacified momentarily by a fake head, many Americans won’t realize, yet again, that nothing has changed. Many will celebrate and weep, and equally earnest lines such as these will be written, “Citizenship is a passionate joy at times, and this is one of those times. You can feel it. Tuesday the world changed. It was a great day.” (Rebecca Solnit in The Nation, 11/6/08.) I have a feeling, however, that we may be nearing the end of being jerked back and forth like this, that even the most insensate and silly among us is about to explode.







.

Upcoming Events

.




Philadelphia
Friday, November 19--7PM
Fiction and poetry reading with Ocean Vuong
Moonstone Arts Center
110a S. 13th Street



Philadelphia
Tuesday, November 23--11:45AM
A slide talk about my project, State of the Union
The Auditorium of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
118 N. Broad St.



New York
Wednesday, December 8--8PM
Poetry reading with Steve Healey
The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church
131 E. 10th St.
212-674-0910 | info@poetryproject.org
Admission $8 / Students & Seniors $7





.

Chris Hedges,

from his "A Recipe for Fascism," 11/8/10:



That human society has an ethical foundation that must be maintained by citizens and the state is an anathema to utopian ideologues of all shades. They always demand that we sacrifice human beings for a distant goal. The propagandists of globalization--from Lawrence Summers to Francis Fukuyama to Thomas Friedman--do for globalization and the free market what Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky did for Marxism. They sell us a dream. These elite interpreters of globalism are the vanguard, the elect, the prophets, who alone grasp a great absolute truth and have the right to impose this truth on a captive people no matter what the cost. Human suffering is dismissed as the price to be paid for the coming paradise. The response of these propagandists to the death rattles around them is to continue to speak in globalization's empty rhetoric and use state resources to service a dead system. They lack the vision to offer any alternative. They can function only as systems managers. They will hollow out the state to sustain a casino capitalism that is doomed to fail. And what they offer as a solution is as irrational as the visions of a Christian America harbored by many within the tea party.





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BP blamed for toxification

Dahr Jamail in Aljazeera, 09 Nov 2010:


Fishermen, cleanup workers and residents of Gulf Coast believe they are being sickened by toxic chemicals from BP spill.

James Miller, a commercial shrimper, lifelong fisherman in Mississippi and former BP oil response worker, is horribly sick.

"I've been vomiting, my head feels like it's going to explode, diarrhoea, and I keep passing out," Miller, who worked in BP's so-called Vessels of Opportunity (VOO) oil response programme, said from his bed at Biloxi Regional Hospital on November 5.

Four days earlier, Miller, his wife and dog were boating on the Gulf of Mexico near one of Mississippi's barrier islands when all three of them fell ill.

"My wife and I felt the chemicals immediately and my dog even started hacking like he was trying to cough up a bone," Miller explained.

Later that day he began vomiting and experiencing a severe headache and diarrhoea. Then on November 4 he passed out in the shower. Concerned by his uncontrollable nausea and bleeding in his esophagus, his wife took him to the emergency room.

"The doctor just told me I have acid reflux," Miller, who has been experiencing many of his symptoms since joining the VOO programme, said. "They don't even know what this is. I told him I needed to be tested for toxic chemicals. I'm in a major hospital and they are telling me they don't know what this is."

Miller's friend, Chris Balius, also a former VOO worker, was in a boat near Miller's on that same day out on the Gulf.

"I was hit by it too," Balius explained. "Headache, nausea, diarrhoea, and now my eyesight is failing. When I was in the VOO programme, I had to let someone else run my boat after 30 days because I got so sick. Every time I go on the water I get sick, so I no longer go, and don't allow my family to go anymore."

Joseph Yerkes, who lives on Okaloosa Island, Florida, was in BP's VOO programme for more than two months, during which time he was exposed to oil and dispersants on a regular basis.

"I worsened progressively," Yerkes said. "Mid-September I caught a cold that worsened until I went to a doctor, who gave me two rounds of antibiotics for the pneumonia-like symptoms, and he did blood tests and found high levels of toxic substances in my blood that he told me came from the oil and dispersants."

[...]




.

"Born after the Mother is Buried,"

from my All Around What Empties Out, as read by signalandsignify:

.

A bunch of my

State of the Union photos are featured for the fifth time on the Brazlian webzine, Sibila:

Poet Régis Bonvicino, editor of said webzine, states that I was just in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro for two weeks, to witness Brazil under Inácio Lula da Silva. Bonvicino declares, sarcastically, of course, that I consider da Silva the paradigm of a socially conscious head of state:

Ao navegar pelos websites internacionais só encontrava elogios a Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, que, para ele, tornara-se um paradigma de governante. Dinh percorreu São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro e Belo Horizonte em duas semanas, entre o primeiro e o segundo turno das últimas eleições presidenciais.

.

Hey there,

.



I read your article on counterpunch about the homeless and thanks for writing it. I have lived in my car off and on before, and lately have been living in it or in my tent since May. I guide river trips in Utah and in the summer it's like this "cool" thing to live in your car or tent, and it is much easier, and people think it's socially acceptable. In the winter though it's harder, and especially if you are trapped in a city.

My girlfriend (she is 25 and has lived away from home before) in Cortez asked me to live with her and I said ok but then when I got here her mom that she lives with decided against it. So horay I got to live in my car again. That was on Oct 4th so it's almost been another month. I got laid off at the end of September 2008 from my fine dining waiter job and had to sell a lot of things to buy food that winter. I didn't qualify for unemployment which is based on your income the first 4 of the last 5 financial quarters.... I worked a year and a half consistantly up to Aug 2007 and then took 9 months off to travel and live on savings. Guess I picked the wrong time to take a vacation.

Anyways, I figure there are a lot of people like me, who live in there cars sometimes, maybe more than they would like, and have been doing it off and on over the past few years. Some of us have very nice set ups, westphalia vans or pickup trucks with toppers and flase bottoms. I'm in a subaru forrester and I just fit sleeping if my head is between the drivers' and passangers seats when I am lying down in the back. Soon I hope to get some plywood and build a nicer storage shelf that takes advantage of vertical space on the drivers' side...

Today I finally, for the first time since this whole damn economy collapsed, applied for food stamps here in Cortez. I have a job to plow snow lined up but it hasn't started yet so I can't afford a place to live. So I was at the social services office and she asked for my address. I told her I live in my car and she asked, well, where do you park it? Of course I move around a lot between nights but there are a few spots that are great, near town, and are natural where you can cook food in the morning on campstoves and not attract attention. I told the lady, I can't tell you where I park, cause some people don't like people living in their cars and the police harass us sometimes. So, we just decided to put down "Wal Mart" parking lot as my address. Criteria thus satisfied, it looks like my application has come through. I wonder how many applications for food stamps in different social services offices across the country have "wal mart" parking lots listed as residences. I'm sure some future grad student spending their parents' money on a useless degree sometime in the distant future could make a name for themselves writing a thesis to answer this question.

Wanted to say hi, and thanks for speaking out for homeless people.



Theodore






.

Speaking of sports,

here's the incomparable George Carlin on homelessness and golf, from a 1992 performance in NYC:

.

Guns and Balls

As published on Dissident Voice, Online Journal, Signs of the Time, OpEd News and Counterpunch, 11/2/10:




War and team sport are parallel activities, but in today’s America, the coupling of guns and group balling has become increasingly explicit. Before a game, there’s the national anthem, which is reasonable enough, but after the last note has been butchered, jets often thunder overhead. On the field, uniformed troops march and salute. Gigantic flags undulate. In San Diego, five soldiers planted Old Glory on the pitching mound, evoking Iwojima. The Padres also dress in camouflaged outfits for some of their games.

During telecasts, cameras will zoom in on uniformed soldiers, special guests at the game, with commentators reminding us how lucky we are to be protected by such brave heroes. During the seventh inning stretch, we don’t get to sing goofily along to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” as was customary, but must now stand stiffly for “God Bless America,” a second national anthem, so to speak, with the announcer intoning our collective gratitude to the troops.

Participation in this additional patriotic ritual is not optional, apparently. In 2008, Bradford Campeau-Laurion was physically expelled from Yankees Stadium when he left his seat during “God Bless.” The man wasn’t protesting, he just needed to urinate. For this, Campeau-Laurion had his arms twisted by two security guards, then escorted, if that’s the word, from his cheapest, sky-scraping seat to ground level, then shoved through the turnstile, with this send-off from one of the goons, “Get the hell out of my country if you don’t like it.” Yes, citizens, you should emigrate immediately if you have a full bladder during one of our mass jingoistic hypnotizing sessions. A lust for mass murders is not love of country, and coerced love is no love at all. Love me, or I will shoot you. Has the United States become a universal psycho stalker? You’re either with us, or you’re against us. That’s the logics of a narcissistic bully. Since we have troops in just about every country, or just outside it, indifference is not a choice. You can’t ignore me. Love me, or I’ll shoot you!

In 2009, three teens were also kicked out of a minor league stadium for refusing to stand during “God Bless.” Rather surprisingly, 52% of respondents to an American Online poll applauded this ejection. Have we gone mad? Of course. In contemporary America, going to a baseball game means that you must erect yourself for “God Bless,” to show support for our door-kicking, civilian-harassing, finger-chopping, trigger happy, confused, cynical or sadistic troops. So what if you’re a pacifist or an atheist. So what if you have to piss.

Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, where art thou? For those who don’t remember, this NBA player caused an uproar in 1996 by refusing to stand during the Star-Spangled Banner. A compromise was reached when he finally agreed to stand, but with his eyes closed. In our culture, athletes, particularly those participating in team sports, are not expected to voice political opinions, especially rebellious ones. Still, we want them to talk all the time. These jocks are interviewed constantly, whereas our wordsmiths and thinkers are almost never placed in front of a camera. Jocks babble so much, they’ve become even more facile with language than our politicians. Even our foreign, just imported muscle packages can regurgitate clichés and trite observations without the slightest of efforts.

Before game 4 of this year’s World Series, two war criminals, Bush father and son, threw out the first pitch. They entered the stadium to a tremendous roar, these two who have wasted so many lives, including American ones, with the son presiding over our financial collapse. We don’t just lack a historical memory, many of us can’t even remember what happened a mere two years ago. How else to explain the affection shown to this very corrupt man who’s bankrupted us?

Wreck the economy, send troops on repeated tours so they come back insane, truncated or dead, so their children grow up without a father or mother, so their spouses divorce them, but wave the flag, pin one on your lapel, dish up jive turkey, talk nonsense in a fake drawl, and all will be forgiven. Boy, did you see that ass kicking flag? It was something North Korea would be proud of…

Ceremony done, the Bushes were seated just behind the Rangers’ dugout, at a convenient angle to the on deck circle, so we could admire them over and over again. As expected, Fox Television swooned over their presence. The commentators even noted that Barbara Bush was marking her score card. How delightful. Each strike and ball must be recorded. It’s very important. This, from a lady who couldn’t be bothered with human beings about to be slaughtered by the action of her smirking, shoe dodging son. On the eve of our 2003 invasion of Iraq, this dainty monster fretted, “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Yes, with a nightly circus of camouflaged god bless, of balls and strikes shutting out the endless carnage and shame unleashed in our name, with each botched bunt more parsed and considered than the trillions looted from our treasury, who has time to think about body bags, even if they contain your last ounce of flesh?

So much froth over a baseball game. What's wrong with me? So who’s on First?

Who’s on Third but thinking he’s on First?

Who’s down to his last strike?

Who’s voguing on the on deck circle, although he’s just been laid off?

Who thinks he’s on TV even as he stands in a darkened and unheated apartment?

Who’s lying right there, half dead, on cardboard and not even trashed, just outside the oh-so-new, state of the art stadium?






.

Tristan da Cunha

as a resilient and (mostly) self sufficient community. From the BBC, 6 December 2007:


[...]

Secondary school teacher Richard Grundy arrived on Tristan after responding to a job advertisement.

"I was looking for a job abroad, interviewed for ones in Peru and Singapore but got this one," he told us.

He found himself living on an extremely isolated island with very limited contact with the outside world.

Warmth and kindness

"Then we had no TV and there was weak BBC World Service reception."

Since then the island has become more high tech. There are two television channels, telephone lines and internet access.

Post arrives ten times a year from Cape Town aboard the SA Agulhas or the MV Edinburgh or MV Kelso.

"Incoming mail was very emotional as I sat and read family news. I remember being allowed a 100-word a month telegram allowance," said Mr Grundy.

But islanders make up for the isolation with their hospitality. Both Chris Bates and Richard Grundy spoke of the warmth and kindness of the residents.

Mr Grundy said, "When my housekeeper had an explosion in her kitchen, there was a queue of islanders with cash, materials and offers of labour. Who needs house insurance with friends like that?"

'Multi-skilling'

The whole population could fit into four double-decker buses yet it does not seem as if there is anything they cannot turn their hand to.

Chris Bates believes the concept of "multi-skilling" was invented on Tristan.

He said it was quite feasible to come across the same person working at the post office, the cafe, the pub and the fish factory in the space of a day.

"And if you go to church the next day, you might see the same person playing the organ," he added.

[...]





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Suspicious Package to U.S. not from Yemen; Yemenia Air Cargo Director

Yemen Post, 10/29/10:


Mohammed al-Shaibah, Air Cargo Director for Yemenia Airways said to Yemen Post, "No UPS cargo plane left Yemeni lands over the [last] 48 hours. These accusations are false and baseless."

He added, "No UPS or DHL cargo packages heading to Chicago through Yemen took place in the last 48 hours as well."

"All packages are checked very carefully in Yemen, and there is no evidence to prove that this package came through Yemen."

CNN reported the suspicious package, which contained a "manipulated" toner cartridge, tested negative for explosive material, the source said, but it led to heightened inspection of arriving cargo flights in Newark, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a UPS truck in New York.




[When this story first broke, I immediately thought of the CIA. First of, the election is coming up. Second, only those who had planted it could "discover" it so promptly and safely, with an immediate narrative to explain everything.]


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