New York Chic

THOMAS H. NAYLOR in CounterPunch, 10/28/11:




Arrogant City

One of the things I remember most about becoming a student at Columbia University in 1957 was the arrogance of the Columbia College football fight song. “Oh, who owns New York? Why, we own New York. C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A.” A not so subtle reminder of the fact that Columbia once owned Rockefeller Center.

American exceptionalism pales in comparison to the hubris of New Yorkers. Most Americans believe that the United States is the greatest nation in the world. All New Yorkers know that New York City is the greatest city on the planet. Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, “the nation’s mayor,” raised such pretentiousness to heretofore unseen levels. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is no exception.

New York City is the economic, financial, marketing, cultural, moral, and political epicenter of the world. Although Washington, D.C. is the nominal capital of the United States, New York City is the de facto capital, since the U.S. Government is owned, operated, and controlled by Corporate America and Wall Street.

Brooklyn writer Christopher Ketcham recently published a scathing indictment of New York City in Orion Magazine based on a study by the New York think tank called the Fiscal Policy Institute. According to the study New York has the most inequitable distribution of income of any of the twenty-five largest cities in the United States. In 2007, those households in the top one percent income bracket received nearly forty-four percent of all of the income in New York City. These so-called “One Percenters” had an average annual income of $3.7 million. Ketcham notes that the One Percenters consist of only 34,000 households, about 90,000 people, out of a population of 9 million. And who are these One Percenters? They work for Wall Street based stock brokers, investment banks, hedge funds, credit card companies, and insurance companies. Their employers include the likes of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank.

Ketcham describes New York One Percenters as, “Sociopaths getting really rich while everyone else just sits on their asses and lets it happen.” Maybe the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators read his piece?

New York City is all about money, power, speed, greed, and looking out for number one. It is the global capital of technofascism – affluenza, technomania, cyber-mania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism.

My favorite art exhibit in New York City is the large room in the Guggenheim Museum whose four walls are completely covered with 100,000 one-dollar bills.

Several years ago, when the New York Stock Exchange considered the possibility of leaving Wall Street, a prominent Yale economist seriously proposed that the Exchange convert its former headquarters into the Museum of Money.

New Yorkers are primarily into having – owning, possessing, manipulating, and controlling – money, power, people, things, wealth, culture, media, and ideas. In the words of theologian Paul Tillich, “they are separated from themselves, from others, and the ground of their being.”

Christopher Ketcham has few kind words for the city’s culture which he describes as “cultural nihilism” dominated by “neohipsters.” “The neohipster is a creature of advertisers: affluent and status-anxious, which means that he is consumerist and, in the manner of all conspicuous consumers, conforming to the demands of narcissistic chic.”

No one hypes New York chic more effectively than The New Yorker, the magazine for effete snobs. Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are firmly committed to promoting Wall Street, globalization, American imperialism, and unconditional support for the terrorist state of Israel.

New York City is nothing less than the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel. It is too big, too crowded, too undemocratic, too regimented, too intrusive, too polluted, too noisy, too commercial, too materialistic, and too dehumanized. It has too much traffic, too many policemen, too much crime, too much drug addiction, and too little sense of community.

The Columbia College football fight song gets right to the heart of what New York City is all about – ARROGANCE!!





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2010 Election Jive from Jean Quan:

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Common Dreaming

As published at OpEd News, Dissident Voice, Intrepid Report and CounterPunch, 10/26/11:






A protest sign in NYC, “FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE I FEEL AT HOME.” Home is Liberty Park, a 33,000-square-foot plot where hundreds have camped nightly for over a month. During the day, they march together, their bodies merged into a common thrust, while at night, they lie together. Some are barely covered, while others are entirely wrapped, like collateral damage of yet another stupid war. Be careful or you’ll step on an arm, leg or even head.

In a country of walls and locked doors, where even infants have private domains, there are no barriers here. With everyone exposed, and no TV to distract, conversation comes more readily. Here, no canned music slops over each dialogue or interior monologue. Here, all crazy, percussive rhythms and melodies must be generated by living muscles and breaths. Here, all faces are real all the time, with none beamed from uptown or across the land mass.

Though we’ve been together all these decades, I don’t think I ever saw you good before this goddamn protest. Beatific apes, winged baboons or renaissance orangutans, why are we so gorgeous? Sweetie, it’s been so long since I had a leisurely gaze at your magnificence, fixated as I was by the holograms.

Yes, there are laptops, cell phones and cameras here, but machines don’t dictate. Most folks here have no ready access to electricity. During 21st century America, and in Lower Manhattan no less, this qualifies as primitive, and it’s not just something to endure, a nuisance, but a primary if hidden aim of this pow-wow.

In a society where proximity is the biggest sin, where another skin is best avoided, where virtual coitus has become a national pastime, these weirdos, misfits and outcasts have converged into one writhing body, and I don’t list these categories derisively, as I am one also. I’m all of the above. In any sick culture, it should be a badge of honor to not fit in. In my teens, I was inspired by Franz Kline’s “A bohemian is one who can survive where an animal would die,” and by Alfred Jarry having to write on his belly because his one room apartment has been divided, vertically and horizontally, into four quarters by an enterprising slum lord. To supplement his piss poor diet, Jarry also fished from the Seine, but water was still water then.

As always, it’s OK to drop out, train hop, squat in a warehouse, dumpster dive or stand in a trash can to take a shower, but one does not do these out of masochism, but to survive or save oneself from the deformations imposed by a system that sanctions endless war, torture and the humiliation of countless victims. Just this week, America gloated over the capture, sodomizing then shooting of a trumped up enemy, then stood by as our disneyfied allies barbarically displayed his near-naked corpse in public.

Suffering is endurable if our integrity and essential values have not been compromised, and sacrifice is worth it if it may lead to a better order. In this rat race hot house of calculating schmoozers who cheerfully suck up to keep their health insurance, gain promotion, bonus or tenure, not to mention a chance to screw down, there are still many who will eschew comfort and moolah to serve the common good. An Occupy Wall Street snapshot from 10/14/11: A young woman cleaning an unknown stranger’s vomit because, well, someone had to, not that she liked it, “Ah, this is just perfect! Just what I want to do, to clean someone’s vomit in the middle of the night. It’s just like Christmas, I tell you.”

They come to the center from lesser boroughs, cities and towns. Exiled to post-industrial, post-First World waste lands or strip mall and chain-burger-shack developments, they invade this privileged polis, where they must deal with the crooked policy of the pole lease and dicks. Lying on the ground, they can finally dwell in a proper and propaganda America, since, normally, few can afford to rent or buy within five miles of this tourist magnet, post card-ready hunk of real estate. This occupation, then, has aspects of a refugee camp. Here gather victims of an economic war, the homeless, unemployed, underemployed and those who may be fired tomorrow, but it is also a rebel camp, where these previously faceless, dispersed and downtrodden lumpens discover common cause and recover their strength for a counterattack.

In any community, renewals are essential. For health to be regained, mistakes must be acknowledged, structural defects corrected and character flaws identified, shamed then purged, but, in this society, all normal channels for healing have been corrupted. Once again, we are presented with an animated election pageantry that promises much, but will solve nothing. The American patient will be kept prostrate and exposed, so that it can be picked over by the military/banking complex vultures. (Yes, it’s time to update that term, since we hardly have any industry left in America.) If we want renewal, then, we must do it ourselves, from outside in and from the ground up, but before we can achieve anything, we need to sharpen our vision of what victory may look like.

Besieged by heaven-puncturing towers of double speak and obscuranto, an all inclusive tribe has gathered. Lapped by an invisible ocean, we teem in this common embryo, but mother is exhausted and may not survive this. Will light come?






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Totally Corrupt America

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS in CounterPunch, 10/24/11:




Last March I reviewed Matt Taibbi’s important book Griftopia, an entertaining account of the through-going financial fraud that gave us the financial crisis. Taibbi shows that the US “superpower” can match any third world backwater in the magnitude of greed and fraud that is endemic in business and government. Taibbi’s Griftopia was published last year. This year Henry Holt publishers have provided us with Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment.

Morgenson and Rosner tell the story again, but with less drama and provocation. Possibly, it might be more acceptable to those gullible Americans who wrap themselves in the flag and refuse to believe that their country could ever knowingly do anything that is wrong.

I am not suggesting that Morgenson and Rosner pull their punches. To the contrary, the authors deliver enough knockouts to be contenders with Taibbi as world champions in exposing the reckless fraud that the US financial sector and its regulators now epitomize.

The financial crisis, which is very much still with us, did not result from accident or miscalculation; neither did it result because of a flaw in Alan Greenspan’s theory, as he told Congress when a feeble effort was made to hold him accountable. It was the intentional result of people motivated by short-term profits who wanted to get theirs and get out.

As Reckless Endangerment shows, fraud characterized every stage of the process from the fraudulent borrower incomes and credit scores that mortgage issuers gave to unqualified buyers, through the securitization of the mortgages and their triple-A investment grade ratings by the rating agencies (Standard & Poor’s especially, but also Moody’s and Fitch) to the investment banks that sold what the banks knew was junk to investors around the world as investment grade securities. Indeed, Goldman Sachs was simultaneously betting against the mortgage derivatives that it was selling to clients.

Investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, which once considered it a matter of honor to represent the interests of customers, took advantage of the trust that had been built up in the past to commit fraud against customers in order to advance the banks’ short-term profits and the out-sized multi-million dollar managerial bonuses that these fraudulent profits produced.

Morgenson and Rosner provide a number of unique accounts of how those benefitting from fraud were able to defeat laws that were passed that would have held them to account. For example, the state of Georgia passed perfect legislation that held predatory lending to account. William J. Brennan Jr. and Georgia Governor Roy E. Barnes got the Georgia Fair Lending Act through the state legislature. It was a model for other states. As the federal regulators had thrown in the towel, the state laws would have prevent the worst part of the financial crisis, it not prevented the crisis altogether.

The Georgia law only lasted a few months, because the rating agencies saw that their enormous profits from issuing fraudulent investment grade ratings were threatened by the law. The corrupt rating agencies mischaracterized the consumer protection act as a jihad by regulators. Standard & Poor’s declared that it would no longer allow Georgia mortgages to be placed in mortgage securities that it rated.

In other words, Georgia mortgages could no longer be securitized. This announcement banned Georgia mortgage lenders from securitization. Thus, the law was overturned, and fraud ran wild.

These kind of mafia strong-armed tactics in order to protect at all costs the short-term mega-bonuses that drove the totally fraudulent system have never been held accountable or punished. Totally innocent people are held indefinitely and tortured by the US government for no other reason than to convince the gullible public that they are endangered by terrorists, but those who wiped out the home ownership and retirement pensions of millions of Americans now hold high and honorable positions on corporate boards and US regulatory agencies.

Federal regulatory agencies totally failed. Brooksley Born tried to use her statutory authority to regulate over-the-counter derivatives, but she was blocked by the Federal Reserve chairman, the US Treasure secretary, and the SEC chairman and forced to resign. As University of Chicago Nobel economist George Stigler predicted, regulatory agencies are captured by those who are intended to be regulated. This was the case.

Regulators turned a blind eye to obvious criminal fraud, and were rewarded with lucrative positions in the financial community. The same for the US senators and representatives who repealed Glass-Steagal and other financial regulations.

For example, former US senator Phil Gramm who spearheaded the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking, the repeal of which set up the financial crisis, was rewarded by being made vice chairman of the mega-bank UBS, a Swiss global financial services company.

What Taibbi, Morgenson and Rosner make clear is that while monster criminals continue to collect their multi-million dollar annual incomes, depressed single mothers, deserted by the men who fathered their child, are sent to prison for having small quantities of illegal drugs to boost their depressed spirits, and their children are put out to adoption.

This is “justice” in America where there is “freedom and democracy.”




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Occupy Liberty Street (OLS)! (The Federal Reserve Bank of New York)

Gary North at LewRockwell, 10/22/11:




The phrase "Wall Street" is a representative of the financial community. The only sensible reason for occupying Wall Street is for symbolic purposes. You want to call the public's attention to the problem.

What is the problem? I contend that the people occupying Wall Street do not understand the problem. If they did, they would be forming picket lines in front of the New York Federal Reserve bank at 33 Liberty Street. That is where the problem began in 1914. That is where the problem will be solved.

The less well informed will form picket lines in front of the representative agency of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, namely, the Federal Reserve Bank building in Washington, D.C.

The power has never resided there. That is a symbol to deceive the Congress of the United States, which operates under the illusion that it is in charge of the Federal Reserve System because it is nominally in charge of the Board of Governors of the FED, an agency with national sovereignty.

The symbol of this sovereignty is the suffix to its URL: www.FederalReserve.gov. The "gov" ID is the mark of sovereignty.

The New York FED is where the decisions are made. Its URL suffix is ".org." That is the mark of its legal incorporation as a private entity.

[...]






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"Real World" seeking Occupy Wall Street protestors

(Reuters)--Occupy Wall Street protesters may get a new platform to voice their opinions after MTV's "The Real World" reality TV show posted a casting call reaching out to supporters of the movement.

The casting call, posted on Monday this week by "Real World" production company Bunim/Murray on website Craigslist, stated they were "seeking cast members to tell their unique stories" and specifically asks people if they are part of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in their 20s.

"The producers of Bunim/Murray productions are targeting young passionate people to be a part of the next cycle," of the TV show, an MTV spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday.

[...]




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Resurrection Cities

As published in OpEd News, Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, CounterPunch and Intrepid Report, 10/20/11:








The 99% will convene a National Convention in Philadelphia, so that’s the good news. Where America was born, they will try to bring her back to life, save her from this deepening degradation. Their list of demands, to be released in October of 2012, will most likely be ignored by whoever are in charge by then. The new, reshuffled Washington gang will be made up of Wall Street and Federal Reserve puppets, as usual. These career flunkies entered national politics to suckle and suck from big business, so why would they bite their gold men’s sacks? With their grievances ignored, the 99% will field candidates for the 2014 mid-term election, then, presumably, the 2016 Presidential one, but will they get enough officials elected to make any difference at all, and what kind of shape will America be in by then?

Will unemployment be 40 or 50%? Will we be fighting a dozen wars, or, defeated everywhere, maybe even none? Will the occupy encampments become “enduring” tent cities? Will Chicago protesters plant vegetables and raise chickens in Grant Park? For a preview of what’s to come, look no further than Philadelphia itself.

Unlike elsewhere, Mayor Nutter has been sympathetic towards these protesters. He visited them on the very first night, showing up at 1:15AM to say, “The things you're talking about are the things I talk about every day.” He instructed his police chief to have the First Amendment, about freedom of assembly, to be read at roll call each morning, at each police district. Most importantly, he allowed protesters to pitch tents right next to City Hall.

Two weeks into Occupy Philly, there are about 350 tents right in the heart of Philadelphia, as well as makeshift dwellings of pallets, tarps, cardboard and plywood. One has a two-foot-high platform, so it can endure the cold and rain better than most. These people are planning to stay, in short. This plaza has long been a magnet for Philly’s homeless, with about 50 folks curled up on benches each night. Now they’re joined by hundreds who are only symbolically homeless.

Some of the long-time homeless have picked up donated tents, and three times a day, they also line up at the Occupy Philly chow tent. Though they tend to be more scruffy and older, it’s not always easy to distinguish between a regular homeless person and a protester, but, if you think about it, each homeless individual is already a protester.

All-too-visible and rapidly increasing in each city and town, the homeless are an accusation that our system is truly messed up. In the “greatest country on earth,” the top 10% own 71% of the wealth, while the bottom 40% must scrape by on less than 1% and, this year, at least 3.5 million Americans, or more than 1%, will experience homelessness at some point.

The brainwashed will sneer that the poor deserve to be broke because they’re so damn lazy and, well, not enterprising enough, but, in any society, no one works harder than those at the very bottom, where it takes a superhuman effort just to survive from day to day, and it wasn’t poor Americans who conned the entire world, then looted our treasury to reward themselves eight-figure bonuses. In this upside down nation, it’s the bottom 90% who must sacrifice everything to succor the top 10%. We must eat less and even sleep outside so they can indulge their vicious, insatiable greed and endless war. Our biggest companies rake in trillions from organized carnage and swindling, yet Citigroup, Bank of America, GE, Chevron, Boeing, Conoco, Exxon Mobil and other big boys pay no taxes. Instead, they get rebates from the IRS. Money buys influence, and all the rules are rigged against us, and unless we revolt, we must endure increasingly savage destitution. Not satisfied with our sweating and bleeding bodies, these ogres want to devour generations to come. No wonder the kids are rebelling.

Martin Luther King’s last project was to organize Resurrection City, where poor Americans could be made visible to the Washington elite, the rest of America and even foreign tourists. Living in makeshift dwellings, they were a protest against America’s misplaced priorities, but King was shot before Resurrection City was even erected, and Bobby Kennedy, its conceiver, was murdered just afterwards.

In Philadelphia, a new Resurrection City has arisen, however, and across the street from this rapidly expanding community, there’s Philly’s swankiest address, the 48-story Residences at The Ritz-Carlton, where a one-bedroom bachelor’s pad can be had for half a million bucks, and the penthouse, $12 million. Backlit by warm, yellow lights, Ritz-Carlton residents can be seen each night looking down at the mess of tents below. Some peer through binoculars, others snap photos, but they didn’t pay through their cosmetically enhanced noses to put up with this stinking Third-World vista. It is quaint and lively, yes, but also squalid and somewhat menacing. Tonguing a prosciutto roll, they frown and imagine the day, soon, too soon, when these tents will surround them completely.






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The Beginning Is Near

As published at OpEd News, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and Intrepid Report, 10/17/11:






The anti-Wall Street protest has often resembled a street party. In occupied Liberty Park, people banged on drums, danced, performed mime, even dangled donuts to bait cops. Their mood has been merry, which is remarkable considering that they’ve been sleeping out in the open, on hard ground, in a compact park, without even tents over them. Food and money have been limited, and sanitation a logistical nuisance, yet even a cloudburst in the middle of the night, drenching everyone, was greeted with cheers. A sign, “THE REVOLUTION WILL BE PLAYFUL.”

Critics have slandered these protesters as idle and frivolous, as muddled crybabies who would flee from any job application, not that anyone’s hiring, by the way. This rally, then, is just a noisy blight on America’s crooked economic engine. With a first dusting of snow, these anarchists, hippies, art students, bums and trust fund kids would all go home to mommy. Third-term billionaire mayor Bloomberg—who says money can’t prolong life?—even moaned that this protest was targeting people just "struggling to make ends meet," and he was sorta right, of course, because there’s no way Wall Street’s end can meet any of our ends.

When noticed at all, the protesters’ frequent meetings have often been dismissed as pointless and confused. Surely nothing will come of their callow and cumbersome deliberations. Their decisions can’t and won’t matter. America’s life and death matters are decided by cynical, rich old guys in suits, not bongo stroking freaks, so debate all you want, but there’s no way your jejune ideas can inflect, however slightly, this monster bank-dominated, Federal Reserve-run, two war party system.

With the just released The99%Declaration, our ruling class has been issued an ultimatum, however. The anti-Wall Street protesters will convene a National General Assembly in Philadelphia from July 4th, 2012 until October of 2012, resulting in a “PETITION OF GRIEVANCES to be submitted to all members of Congress, The Supreme Court and President and each of the political candidates running in the nationwide Congressional and Presidential election in November 2012.” If these grievances are not redressed within one year, the 99% “will organize a third independent political party to run candidates in the 2014 mid-term elections.”

This is the best news I’ve heard in a while. Finally, some much needed oxygen in this suffocating political dungeon. These mostly young protesters have stayed clear of any current politician. Showing more maturity than many of their elders, they trust neither Democrats nor Republicans. They are not suckered by Obama nor distracted by Clinton’s Usher and Lady Gaga circus. It’s incredible, isn’t it, that the man who enacted NAFTA and repealed the Glass-Steagall act can now go on television to lament that “the American Dream has been under assault”?

With their rejection of this walled up and dead end system, the protesters can bring to mind Bartleby, with his “I’d prefer not to,” but this movement is not just a refusal to be co-opted into a murderous and life-sapping existence. Last week, America entered yet another war, but who’s keeping track any longer? A Yahoo! headline, “Mysteries of Clinton’s Big Concert Solved,” and the Cardinals are amazing, aren’t they?

A third, viable political party is long overdue. Though the moneyed interest will surely bare its fangs before it gives up even a sturgeon egg from its privileged table, it is high time we break apart this mad vehicle before it hurls us all into the abyss.





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Linh Dinh's state of the union

Andrew Cox interviews me for Jacket2, 9/28/11:

New Orleans. Photograph by Linh Dinh.

Linh Dinh is a Philadelphia-based poet, author, and teacher. He currently runs State of the Union, a photo blog that documents the homeless in the United States and explores the relationship between the economy, advertising, society, and poverty. You can see a gallery of images selected for Jacket2 here.

Andrew Cox: Why did you start State of the Union?

Linh Dinh: In 2005, I taught a writing course called State of the Union at Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado. I wanted the students to address the crises afflicting our nation. It’s certainly not easy to make sense out of what’s going, especially since there’s so much disinformation and propaganda out there. I’ve also taught this course at the University of Montana and University of Pennsylvania. State of the Union, then, is my attempt to track, through images and words, what’s happening to this country. The project has also forced me to spend much more time in the physical world, as oppose to sitting in front of the computer. Like most of us, I was living a mediated life, I was living mostly through the computer, but, with this project, I’ll walk for miles though the streets, looking and hearing, and sometimes asking questions. Before I started, I had become alienated from much of my home city. I had forgotten the names of the neighborhoods, places I had known as a housepainter.

I was also tired of being an inhabitant of the poetry ghetto. Poets are entirely invisible and irrelevant in this society. As America collapses, poets have nothing to contribute to the general conversation. Few have anything to say, and the ones who do are ignored in any case. I was tired of being published in books and literary journals that no one reads. My political essays, then, are my attempt at reaching a bigger audience, a more general audience. I want to use all of my skills as a writer to address people who would not likely read my poems. I’m particularly happy that my latest piece, “Mare Mere,” is being run by both CounterPunch and Dissident Voice, since it has elements of the prose poem. It is two-thirds political essay and one-third poetry. I’ll try to write more in this vein.

Cox: Why do you think poets are ignored? Is it worldwide or just an American phenomenon?

Dinh: Conditioned by the car and television, we value speed above all. We want everything to be fluid and accelerated. We don’t care about quality, just quantity. It doesn’t matter what we eat, we just want to stuff ourselves as fast as possible. Poetry is too slow for this culture. The poets themselves are also to be blamed, however. Dodging life instead of confronting it, most of them are ridiculously feeble. They think the ideal life is to be on campus forever, with a break once a year to go to their much-anticipated convention. There, they can suck up and screw down.

Da Vinci said, “A man who looks forward to spring is looking forward to his own death.” To always look forward, then, is to be forever dissatisfied with the present, but that’s the culture we have, we’re always looking forward to next year, next week, next hour, we can’t stand this present second. Our culture doesn’t just anticipate death, it’s living it!

In short, a people who will not reflect and who can’t stand silence will not read a poem. Though this has become a worldwide phenomenon, it’s much more advanced in certain places, like [the US], for example, where we’ve reached a psychotic state. We hate our own mind, frankly. We don’t want to hear it speak. Notice how people must turn on an electronic device soon as they enter a room, be it TV, stereo, or computer. Sometimes all three are turned on simultaneously. Without these surrogate voices, we’re lost. What I’m talking about goes way beyond poetry, obviously. What I’m trying to get at is the reverence and courage that allow you to hear yourself and other people not just more clearly, but at all.

A quick observation about Vietnam. I went back in 1995, 1998, then stayed for two and a half years starting in 1999. While there, I could observe it shift towards the American model, which is all distraction all the time, where serious thinking is drowned out by nonsense, titillation, and trivia. Wearing T-shirts with weird or actual English, many people started to listen to loud, recorded music, watch mindless TV and lusting after brand names, though few could afford them. None of this is necessarily bad in itself. I mean, a stupid T-shirt is just a piece of underwear with some moronic writing on it, and I enjoy a good soccer match as much as the next guy, but this rising pop culture was helping to mask many, many serious problems. There was prostitution on practically every street. In factories, workers were being abused. Likewise for the servants in middle class households. I’m not even against prostitution in itself, only the poverty that forced many young women to become whores. Top Communist officials became obscenely rich, bought many properties and sent their kids to Western universities, while the poorest sold their bodies and begged. However, with this loud music, exciting soccer matches, constantly flickering TV and many sexy photos, intimate or blown up, it was no longer necessary to arrest serious writers and thinkers. As in America, the Vietnamese intellectual has become irrelevant.

Cox: When you first left the office and computer how did you feel getting out into the physical world?

Dinh: The office sounds so grand! Well, I have a little room with a desk and a tiny bed. I didn’t snore ten years ago, but now I do, so my wife and I sleep in different beds, in different rooms. In my so-called office, there’s some food stored in the corner: a case of tuna, one of instant noodles and several bags of rice. We don’t have much room, so every square foot must be stacked with something. Where I work, then, where I’m typing this, is more survival bunker than regular office. If there’s a nuclear explosion or meltdown, my wife and I could lock ourselves in this rat hole of a room and survive until Jesus, Allah, or Buddha, whoever’s truly biggest, meanest or asskickingest, knocks on the door to say, Hey, everything’s OK, you can come out now!

By definition, a writer or artist must work in isolation. He must be removed from the world as he writes, paints or whatever, but a writer must also be among other people so he can have something to write about. My first book, Fake House, was populated mostly by losers, the types I was surrounded with, and with whom I worked and drank. Of course, some of the characters were more or less me. I was a total loser, financially, socially, and erotically. I was an embarrassment. Still am. I couldn’t get any of anything. You asked about the media. Well, the media is all about getting stuff. It’s about having all of your natural and unnatural appetites fulfilled. It’s about whooping it up, partying, fucking, and spending, but real life is not anything like that. Well, you might have a few highlights here and there, fondly remembered, but most of the time, it’s incredibly hard just to get by. Just to maintain your basic dignity, you have to exert yourself like crazy; you have to be a physical and mental athlete just to get by.

My first book, Fake House, was dedicated to “The Unchosen.” I’ve always been interested in so-called losers, because that’s the general human condition, if not now, then soon enough. We will all lose, but there’s also dignity and strength in losing. I came from a losing society, South Vietnam, and I’m experiencing a collapsing culture right now.

Anyway, I’ve always been a wanderer, a walker. As a kid in Saigon, I walked all over. When I lived in Italy and England, I’d go to many strange cities, towns, and villages and just walk. This project, then, is an intensification of an impulse I’ve always had. The only time in my life when I didn’t walk was in high school. I lived in San Jose and Northern Virginia then. These two places are heavily car-dependent. I hate them, frankly.

The computer is very addictive. I have never been addicted to the TV, for many years I didn’t even have a TV, but with the computer, I became sort of a screen addict for the first time. My site, State of the Union gives me a clear reason to leave the house, so that’s a good thing. I can walk out without going to the bar. I don’t drink a fraction of what I used to.

When you’re among people, you’re always surprised. You think you already know how they look and talk, but you’d often be wrong. People are always inventive because they’re restless, bored, and exhibitionistic. They also like to have fun. Packaging themselves, they’re always refining their acts. They’ll come up with the weirdest way of putting on a hat, for example, or of conveying the simplest message.

New York. Photograph by Linh Dinh.

Cox: What surprised you the most when you first started documenting the homeless? What surprises you now?

Dinh: I’ve lived in cities most of my life, so the homeless is nothing new. There is a lot destitution and squalor in Saigon, where I was born and spent my early childhood, and where I returned to live for two and a half years as an adult. When I moved to Philly in 1982, I saw many homeless living in the subway concourse, and I remember seeing hundreds of homeless in Tompkins Square in New York in the mid 1980s. Before I started my State of the Union project, I never talked to the homeless, however. It is enlightening to hear people’s stories. I don’t want to generalize too much about the homeless, but it is amazing to observe how tough and resilient these people are. On their faces and bodies are evidences of the very difficult lives they’ve endured, even before they became homeless. Many of these people look beaten up, because they have been. In Vietnam, too, you see these types of faces and bodies.

“Home” is such a physical and emotional necessity. While most of us still have roofs over our heads, I’d say that many of us are emotionally homeless. At best, we are dwelling in emotional halfway houses, or emotional bunkers, with many cans of expired tuna in a corner.

Now, I’d like to shoehorn an umbilical cord mooning monologue about home: I was born in Saigon and have lived there as an adult, but to call that home would be a stretch. I’m most familiar with Philadelphia and do identify with it, but I can’t deny feeling elated whenever I could leave it, if only temporarily. I was calmest and happiest when I lived in Certaldo, Italy, population 16,000, but I could barely speak the language and didn’t have to make a living there. With the exception of San Jose and Northern Virginia, I’m fond of all the places I’ve lived in, including Norwich, England, and Missoula, Montana, but, as Camus said, and I’m quoting from memory and probably butchering it, “He loves all women, which means he loves none of them.” My mother is from Hanoi, so I can still fake a fairly convincing Hanoi accent, and several times I’ve caught myself thinking, while in Hanoi, “It’d be beautiful to die here,” but of course I’m not dying to live there, so that’s not really home either. I’m OK with being home/less. I’m happiest when I’m on a train, though of course, I’m also anxious to get off.

Philadelphia. Photograph by Linh Dinh.

Cox: You said many homeless people have been beat up. Who is attacking these people?

Dinh: Tyrone, a forty-five-ish black man who was on the streets for nearly a year, told me he was beaten up by three teens. He showed me stitches on his forehead. A thirty-ish white guy was almost stabbed with a box-cutter by a white, drunken girl, walking with a group of friends. She slashed his bag. The story sounded a bit outlandish, but everything else he said was plausible. He said black women treated him the best, and, sure enough, a young black woman gave him a bag of McDonald’s food while we were talking. In Richmond, a white former nurse, Tony, also said that black women were the kindest to him. As if on cue, again, a black woman gave him an apple not even a minute later. Tony related how a Mexican homeless man was hit with a stick as he washed his clothes in the river. His attacker was some black guy, maybe another homeless dude. This Mexican guy had a big gash on his head but didn’t dare go to the emergency room because he was illegal. Knowing Tony had been a nurse, he asked Tony for help. Tony looked at it and said it would heal eventually, so that was that.

If you’re lying on the sidewalk, you’re going to be vulnerable, obviously. That’s why so many of them sleep during the daytime, because it’s safer that way, with many people walking around. Even when you’re not attacked, it’s impossible to get a good night’s sleep, obviously, because of the weather, the noise and because you’re lying on cardboard.

Cox: Some of your pictures feature images of advertising. What do you think about the relationship between marketing and the homeless?

Dinh: Much of photography is used to seduce. It sells you on a fantasy so you will buy the product. The glamorous advertising images and catchy slogans serve as an obscene contrast to what’s actually on the streets. The last time I was Vietnam, in 2001, I often saw the slogan, RICH PEOPLE, STRONG COUNTRY, on government billboards, but this was still old style Communist propaganda. With their heroic, broad shoulders and determined figures, always depicted from below, the Communists sought to inspire, but Capitalism is all about seduction. On American TV, there’s an ad that shows a famous football player, first in uniform, then stripped down to near total nudity. These female hands then dressed him in slacks, shirt and tie. Only at the end would you discover that this is actually a car commercial!

In any case, photography plays a central role in this come-on economy. There’s photographic seduction everywhere you turn. The system will strip you and leave you with a very cool photo, and it won’t even be yours to own, son, you can only look at it! I’m trying to capture this swindle in my photos.

Cox: In your writing you are critical of the spread of casinos. Why?

Dinh: Casinos are perfect emblems of our nonproductive economy. A lot of money changes hand in a casino, but it produces absolutely nothing. Factories are being abandoned in cities and towns across America, but casinos are spreading all over. Fools and crooks who support casinos say they bring jobs, but casinos are net losses in every community.

Camden. Photograph by Linh Dinh.

Cox: Do you ask for permission before you photograph anyone? Do you explain what you are using the images for and if so, what is a typical reaction?

Dinh: If I can get away with sneaking a photo, I’ll do that. Generally speaking, I don’t want my subjects to pose or even be aware of my presence, but since I carry a large camera, this is not always possible. From each photo, you can generally tell whether I’ve engaged my subject. Sometimes I offer people a bit of money, usually just a buck or two, to take their photos. I gave ten dollars to a Camden woman, however, so she could buy cans of Sterno for her tent. In Detroit, I also gave an old man ten bucks because he was in such bad shape. He said he needed this money for a prescription. Whenever I visited the tent city in Camden, New Jersey, I’d bring twenty-four large cans of beer, though I’d end up drinking three or four myself. I’ve also bought food for the homeless.

When I talk to people on the streets, I do tell them I’m writing about the economy. Most know full well the economy is in horrible shape and will get even worse, and most of them don’t mind talking to me about their dire situations.

Once, I saw a young woman who was raving and extremely dirty, she even smelled of urine, but as soon as I talked to her, she became sane and radiant. Not to exaggerate but she became shockingly beautiful. I bought her something to drink and lent her my cellphone so she could call a friend in Baltimore to pick her up in Philadelphia.

As an artist, you’re always a kind of vulture when you’re around people, you’re always trying to make use of what they say, how they look or who they are, and since art is always subjective, a kind of distortion, you’re always deforming people to suit your purposes. Although art is always, in this sense, an exploitation, it is also a kind of tribute, and hence, of love. Sometimes I can barely stand how magnificent and beautiful people are.

Cox: You mentioned bringing beer or food with you sometimes. A common stereotype is the homeless asking for money or holding a sign by the freeway just want it to buy drugs and alcohol. How accurate is this stereotype?

Dinh: Well, there are soup kitchens. In Camden, I went with a group of homeless to a very clean and dignified soup kitchen. People sat down at these long tables and were served by volunteers. When this homeless couple left a bit early, I asked them, “What happened? Didn’t you like the food?” The woman was a deaf mute, so only the man answered. He said, “Yeah, we liked it fine, but now we’re going to a second soup kitchen!” Another guy told me, “You have to be a moron to starve in Camden.” The problem is, many of the homeless are at least slightly crazy. Though some started out mentally ill or deficient, I’m sure many more became that way from having to live on the streets.

There’s a guy who wandered around the shopping mall in downtown Philadelphia. His pants were falling apart and sagging. You could literally see his crotch. My wife actually tried to give him a belt, but he wouldn’t take it. He wouldn’t even take cash. He never said a word, not one word, so maybe he couldn’t talk at all. Every now and then, you’ll run into a homeless person who won’t even take money.

In any case, I bring beer to the tent city in Camden because I figure, why shouldn’t these people have a beer? Also, I’d not be so welcome if I didn’t bring beer!

Cox: The tent city in Camden, New Jersey has made headlines in the past but I think many people would be shocked to hear tent cities exist in America. Some news reports said the type of people there would surprise you. What was it like when you went there?

Dinh: It was orderly and safe. In the summer, you could smell the shit in the honey bucket, but it wasn’t terribly dismal. Sure it was bad, but people were making the best of it. They’d hang out in the center, talk and laugh. Sometimes people would fight, they’d scream at each other, but I was there maybe ten times and never saw any violence. I’d hear about violent episodes, however, but these were very rare. In any case, the rest of Camden was much more dangerous. Jamaica, the head guy of the tent city, kept everything under control. Later, I’d hear from someone, living in another Camden tent city, that Jamaica would charge people a nominal fee to live in “his” tent city. I don’t know if this was true, but I did notice that Jamaica sometimes hoarded some of the beer I brought. Whatever. He was the “mayor” of that place, and a lot of the people I talked to seemed genuinely grateful to him. Rex, seventy-six years old, told me Jamaica carried him on his back to the hospital. Hardly anyone had a cell phone there, so it wasn’t like you could easily call 911 if there was an emergency. One time I went there and it was, like, five degrees out, and there was a huge snowstorm, and this kid, maybe twenty-two years old, was freaking out. We were standing around the fire, trying to warm ourselves, and this kid was raving because he couldn’t take it anymore. I lent him my cell phone so he could call his mom. He started to beg her to let him come home. “I’ll do anything you want me to do, Mom! I can’t take this anymore.” Jamaica said he’d put the kid on the Greyhound, and he apparently did, because I never saw that kid again.

That tent city got too much publicity, so the city government finally shut it down. It didn’t do anything but chase the people out and put a chain link fence around that plot. As for all the newly displaced, a private organization did take them to a motel, where they could be cleaned up, groomed then assisted in finding a job or housing. The official unemployment rate of Camden is twenty-five percent, however, so I’m sure many of these folks have ended up on the streets again. As for other tent cities, I’ve seen people living in tents or makeshift dwellings in a few other places besides Camden. There must be dozens across the country.

American cities are outlawing sleeping or camping in public. In many places, dumpster diving is also illegal. One should remember that during the 1929 Depression, much food was destroyed even as the nation starved! In Hawaii, Santa Cruz, and elsewhere, you can’t sleep in your own car, and in San Francisco, you can’t even sit on the sidewalk. These cosmetic measures are designed to mask our accelerating economic collapse. And yet, despite all the evidence, the mainstream media trumpet daily that the recovery is here.

To close, I want to quote Texas Congressman C. Wright Patman, as recorded by the great Studs Terkel in his 1970 oral history of the Great Depression, Hard Times, “A dictatorship could spring up here over night, if this country got so bad. If another Depression came, we’d have a revolution. People wouldn’t take it any more. They have more knowledge. The big ones, they’d be looking for somebody that’d have the power to just kill people, if they didn’t agree. When John Doe begins to get up, they’d just go down and shoot him.”

Well, that depression is here!

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Dear Poets (a circular letter):

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A couple days ago, at the arraignment hearing in Chicago for Stephanie Dunn, the poet and artist arrested at behest of Poetry Foundation a few weeks back for a performance-based protest at the PF Wine and Cheese Gala, an official representative of the Poetry Foundation called on the judge to send Dunn to jail until her trial nine days from now. The judge was about to do this (he said as much to the defendant), but a public defender who is otherwise unrelated to the case intervened and convinced the judge to let Dunn go until her trial date-- on condition that a guilty plea be entered. The terrified Stephanie agreed.

Three days after Raul Zurita's reading at the Poetry Foundation, where six or seven activists of the Croatoan Poetic Cell peacefully hung banners (one of them praising Zurita and his old activist group CADA) and passed out leaflets calling for the charges against Dunn to be dropped (the cops were also called by the PF on these poets--they scampered away), the Chicago Police Department carried out a raid during a musical event on the warehouse where most of the members of the Croatoan Poetic Cell live. Property was confiscated and three people detained. Minutes after the police left, a car parked outside, belonging to a friend of those involved, burst into flames. I state the bizarre sequence of these events without making any claim of connections between them, for I have no solid proof. But that is the anecdotal record.

A statement by members of the Croatoan Poetic Cell will be released in the next days, I understand. It is time for poets to stand publicly against this outrageous overreaction by the Poetry Foundation against young writers and artists guilty of nothing except peaceful, conceptual acts of poetic insurgency-- of which there is, to be sure, a long and venerable tradition in our field.


Kent Johnson





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Surrounding the Bull

As published at OpEd News, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and Intrepid Report, 10/7/11:






Hundreds of cops, some on horsebacks, are now protecting Wall Street 24 hours a day. At Bowling Green Park, they have also blocked access to the Merryll Lynch bull. To be warmed by the methane gas of a healthy market, no doubt, a group of New York’s Finest gathered near their sacred bovine’s digestive exit, just below its up-lashing tail.

“They’re all guarding the bull’s asshole,” I said to this middle aged black woman standing across the street.

“Yeah, they’re all guarding the bullshit!” She laughed.

It was nearly 10PM. At Wall Street and Broadway, I met a young protester from Austin. Twenty five years old, he’d been sleeping at Liberty Park since September 24th.

“What do you guys do when it rains?”

“We just have to deal with it. We sleep under tarps.”

“Man, that must really suck. You probably can’t sleep too well.”

“Yeah, sometimes I get up and my body aches all over, but we just have to deal with it. We’re not leaving.”

“And it’s fucked up they won’t let you guys use tents.”

“Yeah, it’s fucked up, so we’ll have to set up tents at some point. It’s getting colder, and we can’t just sleep like that if it snows.”

“You think the cops will come in and get rid of the tents?”

“I don’t know. Who knows.”

“You know in California and other places, cops have slashed tents of the homeless.”

“Yeah, I know, but the whole world is watching us now, so if they do that, the whole world will see it.”

I asked him about demands, about how everyone is demanding that these protesters make demands, but so far, nothing.

“We did put out a Declaration.”

“Yeah, but that’s a long list of grievances, without concrete demands.”

“Well, we don’t want to narrow it down to a few demands, because each community has issues that it wants to address. This protest is spreading, and a list of demands from here can’t address all the problems.”

“But what about educating the public? If you can highlight a few key issues, then the public will have a clearer idea of what is wrong?”

“I hear you, but there are already people doing that. Writers. They may not be in our group but they are sympathetic to us. The explanations are out there. There are already people explaining what is wrong.”

Naomi Klein was scheduled to speak at Liberty Park the next day, as a matter of fact, so he was right. All the explanations are out there, if only people would pay attention. I then asked about them having no leaders or spokesmen.

“We don’t want to designate a spokesman or a leader, because we don’t want all the pressure to be on him. We don’t want him to be harassed by the FBI, for the FBI to tap his phone. Look at all the protest leaders from the past. Look at how they killed Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. If they want to tap the phone, they’ll have to tap all of our phones.”

“Yeah, but some people are better at speaking than others, so these will emerge naturally, right?”

“You’re right, and they already have, but we can all talk. We all know what to say. We’ve taught each other what to say.”

He believed the country was solidly behind this protest, and support will only grow, “People love us, man. They send us all kinds of stuff. They send us money. People love us.”

Speaking of solidarity, I wouldn’t have been able to observe the protest if a dozen readers of my photo blog hadn’t sent me hundreds of dollars this past month alone. Part of this cash was used to fix my broken camera. With a poisoned media, untrained citizens must anoint themselves journalists.

Though protesters have released no official demands, many of the signs at Liberty Park are clear enough, “END THE WARS,” “END THE FED” and “TAX THE RICH.” These demands are also shouted out by protesters on their marches.

And the marches are getting larger and more representative. Everyone is here, basically, from tiny children to senior citizens, egg heads to hard hats, pacifists to war veterans. Black, white, yellow or brown, they are all here shouting in unison, “Wall street got bailed out. We got sold out,” “Tax the rich! End the wars!” and, “This is what real democracy looks like!”

About the only types who aren’t marching are Wall Street suits and, well, cops. It is sad to see so many policemen protecting the very people who have also ripped them off. At a Starbucks near the New York Stock Exchange, some cops have even become bouncers.

Running around trying to find a place to charge my camera batteries, I saw a Starbucks, but its entrance was blocked by a police-manned barricade spanning the street. I approached, “Can I go in?”

“I need to see an ID,” a cop said.

In the new America, one needs to show an ID just to enter a Starbucks? I pulled out my long expired Virginia driver’s license.

“So you’re not from New York?” The cop interrogated.

“No, I live in Philadelphia.”

“What are you doing in New York?”

“Just visiting.”

“Why did you come up?”

“Just to hang out in the city. No reason.”

This cop gave me a long hard look. I had neither tattoos nor piercings, and my hair and clothes were more or less neutral. I mean, I don’t dress to make a statement, and I don’t like to wear slogans on my person. He gave me a long, hard look, and I could tell that he didn’t quite believe I wasn’t a trouble maker of some kind, or maybe even a terrorist ready to plant a robust pipe bomb inside Ben Bernanke’s lying quiche hole, but goddamn it, this was only a stupid Starbucks, though it happened to be within sight of the New York Stock Exchange.

Had the cops moved their barrier five feet back, the public could enter this business unmolested, but they couldn’t do that, you see, because that would inconvenience the Wall Street denizens arriving from the other direction.

So there you have it. While 99% of us are losing our present and future, as we’re harassed and groped and sleep in the rain, in protest or for good, as some of us are sent overseas to get our nuts blown off, a banker must never be made uncomfortable, even when his errand, or, rather, even when his secretary’s errand is nothing more than to grab her (and the cops’) boss a frappucino.






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Marines Heading to Wall Street to Protect Protesters

Tim King at Veterans Today, 10/4/11:





This is a war against people who are utilizing their constitutional rights.

(SALEM, Ore.) – The protesters on Wall Street will soon have the protection of United States Marines who will form a human wall between the crowds of tireless protesters and the increasingly unpopular New York cops who continue to appear on YouTube in scenes that twist the insides of patriotic Americans.

Michael Hayne, a Comedian and Columnist who has contributed to NY Times Laugh Lines, guest-blogged for Joe Biden, and writes a column for MSNBC.com affiliated Cagle, wasn’t joking when he related the information this weekend on the Website Addicting Info.

[Editor's Note: If ever the Veterans Orgs were going to stand with the American people and demonstrate that they are a contemporary force to be dealt with, it is now. Why? Because they take an oath 'to defend the country from all enemies, foreign and domestic'. They have failed miserably on the domestic end because they have not had the stomach to stand up to the politicians, usually due to the threat of having their current VA benefits legislation put in jeopardy if they don't stay in their assigned lane. Vets can be for their country, but only up to a point.

So all of you Vets in the New York Metropolitan area, you need to jump in here with your orgs. To sustain this protest, the key to winning, Vet groups will need to be 'rotated' where they can take turns. And the Vets don't have to buy onto all the demands of the current protestors, like free college for everyone and their other Santa Claus wish list. The Vets can put up their own demands. ...Jim W. Dean]

The news is welcome, particularly as people continue to learn more about Wall Street and New York City and the nature of the people in the upper echelons. Not only have Americans watched the players on Wall Street shove the nation’s future into their wallets, but there are more specific reasons that the police are behaving in a corrupt manner, they’re being paid off by groups like JP Morgan Chase, which recently donated:

“… an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple.” -JPMorgan Chase

Strengthen security? This is a war against people who are utilizing their constitutional rights.

There are many sayings associated with the United States Marine Corps, and most have something to do with honor and decency and respect for the right things. Sure, many people disapprove of this band of warriors due to the nature of their business, but I personally see it differently, and it would be impossible to do otherwise, as I was once a member of this military group.

At any rate, I like the way Haynes looks at it:

“That’s the type of support that may make an NYPD cop think twice before he decides to go all Tiananmen Square on a group of teenage girls, armed with chalk and cardboard signs (maybe it’s because they are spelled properly?).

“The Occupy Wall Street movement may have thought it broke new ground when the NYC Transit Union joined their movement, but that ground just tipped the Richter Scale with news that United States Army and Marine troops are reportedly on their way to various protest locations to support the movement and to protect the protesters.”

Here’s the message Ward Reilly relayed from another Marine, on his facebook page:

“I’m heading up there tonight in my dress blues. So far, 15 of my fellow marine buddies are meeting me there, also in Uniform. I want to send the following message to Wall St and Congress:

I didn’t fight for Wall St. I fought for America. Now it’s Congress’ turn.

My true hope, though, is that we Veterans can act as first line of defense between the police and the protester. If they want to get to some protesters so they can mace them, they will have to get through the Fucking Marine Corps first. Let’s see a cop mace a bunch of decorated war vets. I apologize now for typos and errors.

Typing this on iPhone whilst heading to NYC. We can organize once we’re there. That’s what we do best.If you see someone in uniform, gather together.

A formation will be held tonight at 10PM.

We all took an oath to uphold, protect and defend the constitution of this country. That’s what we will be doing.

Hope to see you there!!”

Remember, the Occupy Wall Street protests in other cities are getting underway, Seattle is already active and the Portland, Oregon event starts later this week.

[...]




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Letter from a Banker

As published at OpEd News, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and Intrepid Report, 10/4/11:






Bankers are misunderstood and often slandered. Yes, we are greedy, but so are you. Cupidity is a natural urge, wouldn’t you say? It’s a kind of (con) genital juice that courses through everyone’s lower and higher plumbing. Whether it’s money, fame or nookies, most of us don’t just want our share, but always a bit more, often a lot more, than the next guy. Not to oversimplify, but here’s a bumper sticker for you, GREED IS LUST, but before you slap that onto your car, PayPal me five bucks, OK? It’s copyrighted. I just copyrighted it. Use it without my permission and I’ll sue your motherfucking ass.

So that’s established. So there’s nothing wrong with the fact that greed hardens me, but what makes me different from you is my method. I’m more clever than you, a whole lot more clever. (I didn’t want to say “smart” outright, since that would offend your sissy sensibility.) Part of it is education, yes. I did learn a few tricks in college, but it has to be the right one. While you sculpted sandwiches for Subway and/or went into suicidal debt, thanks to me, to attend Butt Fuck U, I chain smoked Havanas at the Skull & Bones before segueing into Haaaaaavard. Bet you don’t even know where that is, you dumbfuck. In any case, you went to school to get indoctrinated. I went to network.

At Harvard I joined a gang, so to speak, an Anglo-American gang, and our method is so clever yet so simple, and since you’re so stupid, I’ll only use the teeny tiniest words and speak as slowly as possible. If I had a set of crayons handy, I’d draw stick figures to help you to understand this. OK, so our entire method, trumpet blast then drum roll please, comes down to this: We make money out of nothing, then we lend it to you, you and you, for profit.

Is that it, you ask, and I’m sorry to be so anticlimactic, but if it works, why complicate it? This laughably simple method has enriched us and impoverished you, you and you for nearly a century, since 1913, to be exact.

I can see that you’re not quite satisfied. You want more. OK, OK, I’ll give you a cartoon slide show: Let’s say you are a developer, and you want to build a bunch of houses. Since you can’t just pull cash out of your ass, like me, you must come to my business for financing. The customers, likewise, can’t just fart Federal Reserve notes either, so they too must trudge to mi casa to secure loans. Thanks to the wizardry of fractional reserve banking and other neat tricks, I’m lending to y'all money I don’t even have, but though these interests are making me so damn fat—figuratively speaking, of course, not like you—I will go a step further. I will bundle a gazillion of these crappy mortgages together, chop them up real fine, then sell stinking shares to investors all over the world. Like Taco Bell, I’ll stuff my products with all sorts of impurities, but unlike them, I won’t even list the disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate or potassium chloride, etc., in my investment scrapple. Selling dog shit, I’ll even charge a commission.

But how can I get away with this? Where are the regulators? What are you, a Huffington Post intern? A college professor with an Obama button surgically attached to your forehead? Here, look into my laundry basket. The regulators are dozing among the lint and skid marks. Don’t disturb them.

So everything is going great, with houses being sold left and right, on mountain tops and in the middle of the desert even, until it seems that every Wal-Mart greeter and busboy is a proud owner of a McMansion, but of course they won’t be able to keep up payments, especially when interest rates jack up.

Though their mortgages have been turned into confetti and scattered all over the universe, I’ll still repossess their houses. Some I’ll sell, but since there are so few buyers these days, especially as I’ve tightened lending standards—who say I’m not upright?—many of these homes are left to rot. Some I’ll even tear down.

Looking out the window, I now see a mob down below. Night after night they sleep in the cold or rain without even a tent over them. They have a long list of grievances but no demands, not that they’ll get any concessions anyway. Though they’ve pointed accusatory fingers in my direction, I have nothing to worry about since they’ve refused to call me by name. Perhaps they don’t even know. Do you?

Should this carnival get rowdy, these hippies, punks, eco loonies, union goons and other assorted misfits will only get themselves hurt and, at most, a few of my foot soldiers annoyed. I’ve been talking to you real friendly, fuckheads, but in spite of my bonhomie and $10,000 Fioravanti suit, I can be nastier than Quentin Tarrantino’s worst nightmare. I’ve brought entire countries to their knees, so I won’t hesitate to squash a few more tattooed and nose ringed cockroaches. Cornell West or Michael Moore groupies ain’t ish. (I picked up that lingo from my “rebellious” son.) Now, would you like a drink? I’ll buy the first round.







[Occupy Philadelphia will not start tonight, so I will head to NYC in a few hours. For those in Philly, there's an Occupy Philadelphia planning meeting at Arch Street United Methodist Church, 55 N. Broad Street, just North of City Hall, from 6:30 to 9:30 PM tonight.]





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Radix Malorum Est The Man

10/3/11 Update: I've just asked Common Dreams, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and Intrepid Report to not publish the piece below, since I wrote it before seeing the "Declaration of the Occupation of New York City." Following the Wall Street Protest through OccupyWallStreet, I didn't catch the Declaration when it was posted at NYC General Assembly on 9/30/11. Though the article below no longer reflects the current, very in flux situation, I still stand by my emphasis on clarifying one's demands in a protest.





The aims of any protest are to air grievances and, if everything goes right, to gain redress for the wrongs done. With language or action, the protester seeks to broadcast to an indifferent or even hostile public that he has been wronged by a specific agent, be it person or institution, and that this agent must be held accountable. The message, then, is crucial to any protest. One can even say that without a clear message, there is no protest.

Going into its third week, the anti-Wall Street protest has often been accused of being vague with its demands, and this obvious weakness has been exploited and ridiculed by the mainstream media. This is ironic since Anonymous A99, an original organizer if not brainchild of this protest, is perfectly clear about what it wants. From a YouTube video of March 12, 2011:

We seek an end to the corrupted two-party system by ending the campaign finance and lobbying racket.

Above all, we aim to break up the global banking cartel centered at the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Bank of International Settlement and World Bank.

We demand that the primary dealers within the Federal Reserve banking system be broken up and held accountable for rigging markets and destroying the global economy, effective immediately.

As a first sign of good faith, we demand Ben Bernanke step down as Federal Reserve chairman.

It’s baffling that these succinct demands, exactly what this protest needs, are not being shouted out now, but with a much larger cast of protesters, a consensus is no longer possible. With their strong egalitarian or anarchic instincts, the protesters eschew not just leaders, but even majority decisions. Some even believe that demands are not necessary, but if that’s true, why subject yourselves to the ordeals of a sustained protest? If you don’t know what you want, how do you know when to pack up and go home? In any case, our criminal overlords would like nothing more than a thousand protests without demands. Yes, work off all of your anger but don’t demand anything from us!

Though most protests will fail in their primary objective of gaining redress, they can at least claim to have delivered a message, with many protesters choosing even death to make sure that their narrative is as stark as possible. Consider the hunger striker in prison. Voiceless and impotent, he has no other means to indict his oppressors, so his slow suicide is an allegory of his suffering and their crime. Look at what they are doing to me. They are killing me everyday! In turn, his jailors will try to disrupt this morality play by force-feeding him. Though torturers, they will pose as rescuing angels, and though they may kill him on another occasion, perhaps right after this failed hunger strike, they cannot allow this man to terminate his life now, on his own terms. Such is the importance of the message that they must hijack his story.

By sleeping in Liberty Park, even in rain and cold, the anti-Wall Street protesters are vividly illustrating to the world the dispossession afflicting nearly all Americans. We have lost jobs, homes, savings, Constitutional rights and, yes, even our country as a representative Democracy, but this powerful indictment would be wasted if it’s not clear who are being charged or what should be done about them.

It is pointless to rail against “greedy bankers,” for example, for greed is a sentiment that can flare up in anyone, even bums and hippies, and banker is just someone in the money lending business. You can’t prosecute greed any more than you can punish lust, but one should certainly demand that criminals at Goldman Sachs, Citibank and JP Morgan Chase, among others, be held accountable for rigging markets and stealing money from American tax payers. The nexus of these criminal activities is the Federal Reserve itself, a private banking cartel with a monopoly, incredibly and outrageously enough, on the issuance of our money.

What you have, then, is an entrenched and well defended group of criminals who know exactly what they want, while their vulnerable and transient victims are still undecided about what they’re demanding, if anything, or even who they’re fighting. If these protesters are not willing to define themselves any better, others will continue to distort and caricature them. Many will show up to further dilute or pervert their cause with alien agendas. Watch for Obamabots and Democratic Party operatives to slither in, not to mention undercover pigs.

Despite your momentum, protesters, you don’t have all the time in the world to help the public to understand what’s what, and what needs to be done. Of course that’s a heavy responsibility, but you have the stage now. I know the brilliant David DeGraw is among you, so why haven’t we heard more from him so far? Since you have no spokesman, the topless Zuni Tikka has become your mascot, and though I have nothing against eye candies, it’s doubtful that Tikka is even a minor annoyance to a guy like Lloyd Blankfein. In fact, I bet you he’s smiling.

Martin Luther King was only 26 when he became a leader of the Civil Rights Movement. I don’t know about you, but I find that very inspiring.






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Mayor Bloomberg Claims ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Protesters Are Targeting Bankers Who ‘Are Struggling To Make Ends Meet’

Think Progress, Sep 30, 2011:



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This morning, while on local radio host John Gambling’s show, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was asked about the demonstrations on Wall Street. Bloomberg condemned the protests, claiming that the protesters are targeting people who making “$40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet.” He then went on to say people are focusing too much on the causes of the financial crisis and that we need to be nicer to the banking industry so that it starts lending again. He concluded by saying that we are “blaming the wrong people” by “blaming the banks” for the recession:

GAMBLING: Mr. Mayor, let’s talk about Zuccoti Park and the protesters. How do you end that thing?

BLOOMBERG: The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That’s the bottom line. Those are the people that work on Wall Street or on the finance sector. [...] People in this day and age need support for their employers. We need the banks, if the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economy problems, we will not have jobs. And so anything we can do to responsibly help the banks do that, encourage them to do that is waht we need. I think we spend much too much time worrying about how we got into problems as to how we go forward. [...] Also we always tend to blame the wrong people. We blame the banks. They were part of it, but so were Frddie Mac and Frannie Mae and Congress.

Listen to it:

Actually, the median salary for stockbrokers is approximately $88,000 a year. But that is besides the point. The demonstrators are not targeting the individuals who work on Wall Street, they are targeting the financial institutions and practices they represent.

Recall, the banks were the primary actors who set off the global recession, and that recession plunged 60 million people into extreme poverty worldwide. By protesting in favor things like a financial transactions tax, Americans can hope to get some of that wealth back from financial institutions that are anything but “struggling to make ends meet.”

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Elderly Couple Kidnapped by Texas Adult Protective Services and Ripped Off by Lawyer

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Prophets Of Doom: 12 Shocking Quotes From Insiders About The Horrific Economic Crisis That Is Almost Here

Economic Collapse Blog, 9/30/11:




We are getting so close to a financial collapse in Europe that you can almost hear the debt bubbles popping. All across the western world, governments and major banks are rapidly becoming insolvent. So far, the powers that be are keeping all of the balls in the air by throwing around lots of bailout money. But now the political will for more bailouts is drying up and the number of troubled entities seems to grow by the day. Right now the western world is facing a debt crisis that is absolutely unprecedented in world history. Europe has had a tremendously difficult time just trying to keep Greece afloat, and several much larger European countries are now on the verge of a major financial crisis. In addition, there is a growing number of very large financial institutions all over the western world that are also rapidly approaching a day of reckoning. The global financial system is a sea or red ink, and when we get to the point where there are hundreds of ships going under how is it going to be possible to bail all of them out? The quotes that you are about to read show that quite a few top financial and political insiders know that things cannot hold together much longer and that a horrific economic crisis is coming. We built the global financial system on a foundation of debt, leverage and risk and now this house of cards that we have created is about to come tumbling down.

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