CURRENT COMEDY

When Local Means Yuma to Utah

2012-02-05T04:39:00.001-08:00

"When Local Means Utah to Yuma"

When i told my editor i was going to disorganize a run for US Congress chasing after the newly formed open seat for AZ CD4, the left coast of AZ, a land area about 1/3 of the state; he wrote back saying to write about the way my campaign affects local politics. I, at first, admit i was at a loss. At the time i was planning my first real deal campaign trip (9 events, two days, 500 miles), from my hillside themepark in So-Hi, AZ overlooking the lights of Golden Valley all the way to the Roosevelt Art District of small-D downtown PHX, where the cops and municipal codes have managed to yet again gut another arts movement in the name of building codes. I was on the phone trying to unlock the secret codes of the gatekeepeers at the DCCC, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in DC and the PCCC Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Code Pink, ADP, PDA in PHX, folks in Flagstaff, Colorado, New Mexico & L.A. US House of Representatives is a world stage, setting up fundraisers in Flagstaff, Vegas, L.A. Bullhead City and Yuma, lined up graphic artists in PHX, Tucson and Sante Fe to help me, had lined up $2500 in media work from folks in L.A. and was courting my friend the media guy in Montreal. when they FEC says you must raise $5000 to get on the ballot and your media guys and lawyers have begun donating that to you, suddenly, local takes a whole new meaning.

Is it like the horns that honk or the birds that fly when we Occupy Kingman at the historic Locomotive Park. Kingman is my little town from where i'm launching this trial balloon, so local means whether or not we block parts of the street in May when we host the annual KABAM ("Kingman Area Books Are Magic!") book festival May 14-19. But how about the folks like the Wickerds up in Dolan Springs? What is local in their vocabulary? Perry and Donna had been aming 80 mile round trips to be part of the local Occupies KIngman, my home base. Traveling with their kids and guitars, like devotees to the bigger little city to call for justice, for months, when i announced this testing of waters. It is the term of art for this stage of the candidacy process. So you know me, with my with four houses in Aquarius and Aries rising, you know that i had to be in. But what about Perry and Donna? What makes them want to follow this campaign to the point at Perry met me this morning in Dolan as we attended the candaitdates forum for the Dolan Springs Community Center, then when i had to leave for Kingman fo the next event 52 year-old Perry stuck his thumb out and hitched to Kingman just to ride this wave and see if we can get big enough to change the world from our little neighborhood in the desert. Why not? If the only thing that every changed this world was a small group of dedicated activists imagine what we can accomplish now that our neighborhood stretches from sea to shining sea?

Today Perry is up with me at 4:00am as we strategized for our big deal disorganization meetings in Cave Creek, Carefree and North Phoenix, in addition to our Sunday morning "Come to Jesus meeting" with the PHX team at Klang Gallery, owned and operated by poets in my district, Neil & Heather Gearns from Apache Junction. The PHX end of this district have the excess of what we country folks have mostly dreamt of: arts excitement, music. Connecting to that neighborhood, in itself, is already improving the lives of the people in my district as i organize actual poetry events in Prescott, Kingman, Bullhead City and even Seligman (which is not in my district, but deserves poetry too). Now will my quest for this world stage to change the lives of all these neighbors how will it affect the poetry events i bring. That is local.

Up in Dolan Springs, "local" is having no bank and/or having to pay $3 per transaction at the Double D Market's ATM and/or their $3 a lb. for green tomatoes and greasy frozen beef. Eat what's local or drive 40 miles to and then 40 miles back from Kingman, or 70 miles up to Vegas. Their bank deserted them in the desert twice and now, even banking is too rural to live like you are part of what is supposed to be America. Dolan Springs boasts a road grid that is immense, nearly large as large as Rhode Island, but isn't more than 7000 with half of them as destitue as that bank. No sidewalks, they're told it wrecks the tourism and they need to become quaint little backwards too silly to put in sidewalks, so the tourists will dribble some money their way as they fly through on their way to the next cute thing.

Or maybe, since this district does run from Yuma to Utah and from Bullhead City to Apache Junction, maybe local means the cool modern office i am clacking away on at 4 in the morning in Moon Valley. The Sub Zero fridge is stocked with assorted beers cheeses and fresh juices, and the patio has hand thrown oval concrete tiles. These are also some of the neighbors in my district as well, among the rows of villas disguised to resemble rows of walls and windows. My PHX area coordinator Nina Smith is working out the details to help me disorganize in the big city mis-week while i motivate school kids in Kingman 200 miles away at my day job as a social studies teacher. You know, one day i asked my kids,"Come on, you guys, don't you even know what apathy is?" And they called back, "They don't care!" In many ways, i began running that next day. Is local politics stopping at the tourist attraction at mile 123 in Wickiup where the locals hope to have some of that cash dribble off each turnip truck that passes and being in the desert they are a bit rare?

Is local the fact that once the election season FINALLY kicked off following Jan Brewers' recent "scandal of the week" when she tried to fire Independent Redistricting Commission and failed, Well, when the numbers came back, it was revealed that the AZ Dem Party had neglected the entire left half of the state to the point that it would only take 700 signatures to run for Congress. 700 people who can spell their own name and you get a spot in the ring at one of the biggest arena's on the planet. Is local politics the fact that two years ago , my neighbor and opponent in this race, Ron Gould, in public, dissed me at one of Beth's campaigns at a country club in Fort Mohave and said that he did not have to talk to me because i was just a candidate's spouse. If i wanted to ask questions of him or challenge on the BS that was spewing out of his mouth that night like a fresh stream of Santorum,theni could just put my name on the line and run against him myself. Howdy Ron! I'm your new neighbor. Is that local enough for ya? I chased State Representative Doris Goodale and her husband Kingman mayoral candidate Bill, around Dolan Springs to make sure they'd share this juicy bit of neighborly gossip with our mutual friend, Ron.

A shot at the world stage if i can find among the 700,000 souls in the district, just the names of 700 people willing to say "sure." That is all it will take petition-wise and i got to pick them from among the entire populations of the river cities (Lake Havasu, Bullhead City, Parker, Fort Mohave) and Kingman in Mohave County, Yavapai, La Paz, Maricopa, Gila, & Pinal Counties. Surely there are 700 people in that area that could believe i should have the chance to chase through life following 20 hour days not to win an election, but merely to change the world. Jesus, there are probably that many people in that area who believe in flying saucers or Santa, so why not?

Once i am listed on the nationalballot for this race, just how big does that neighborhood suddenly get? Well i am already cahsing noted Ron Goul-hater Stephen colbert for his super pac muscle since they did a Gould skewering back in Feb. People say i am crazy to try to win, but i l already knew that. They say i don't even know how to dress like a real politician, but since when did we start being required to think real democracy could demand a dress code? Insure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare, these are my issues and far as i can tell after 16 days campaigning, that is a message that sells just about everywhere. The right are already leaving folks out all over America as fast as they can. Maybe i can do this differently. They say the traditional are the ones i should follow but look at the messthose guys made. If they left a gap in the matrix for a guy like me to slip in, what is that saying about their skills anyway? And how about all the folks who get left out, like the majority of my district, the folks not cut into the gerrymandering of Phoenix proper, the rest of us? Why not? Lots of places in western AZ have water. Why not test it?

Why not test the waters and see who wants some of this Koolaide? So, sitting on a bench in front of Jo-Bot Coffee tonight in the art district conspiring with one of the "Marks" from Haymarket Squares about how to turn their upcoming show at Lost Leaf on the 17th into my anniversary party. Small wonder i find myself discussing my energy and charts with Wiccans in Dolan and the artists in Cave Creek's garden party for the Phoenix Art Expo in another, (both of which were held on dirt roads).

Local i guess is a way of saying intimate. If i have learned anything in this crazy campaign to defeat the three headed dog the GOP fields as Babou, Gozar and Gould, then this is an incredible intimate experience of watching people cry as they remember how to believe, one neighbor, one Occupy protester, one heart breaking story, one honked horn at a time.

Of course local also means that since my papers are already filed with the FEC, when i cross that $5000 finish line and the 700 folks on the street who can sign their name correctly, suddenly my neighborhood includes both Hollywood and Washington and all us fly-overs in between. I mean what is more local than my circle of friends on Facebook? Like Big Tuttie, the tug boat guy in Texas, who hasn't seen me since my first wife died, but has been my devoted friend since we were too young to go to public school and were taught fire and brimstone at our local Lady of Guadalupe in Raymondville, Texas back when there were still Kennedys and Kings leading the way. Yes, those folks seem a lot more local than the shuttered windows and the closed businesses on the main streets of Kingman, Dolan, and any town, AZ, since the shooting phase of the class warfare began and i decided to Occupy whatever strength i had left to work for my country and,if nothing else, at least burn out trying one more time to keep it from going down in flames.

Tomorrow it's the Yavapai leg and meeting patients in Cottonwood and Christians in Prescott, as well as a former congressional campaigner whose offered to earn his own salary. Why not? This is America and there are few things more capitalist than running for office. Of course the bigger this gets the money beans pass through the factory the more bean counters we'll attract, which means we'll have ever more beans for them to count and at some point this disorganization just won't be so local anymore.

Yum.

mikel weisser-writes from left coast of AZ

Sign of the Times: Foregoing Forwarding Nugent Forwards

2011-11-08T09:19:00.000-08:00

I recently received a forward from an old friend and, opened it, so the rest of this story is my own fault.

I typically operate by the policy that the email abbreviation “fwd:” stands for “delete on arrival.”This approach has saved me hours, if not weeks, of time being spared from pondering imponderables, staring at kittens, slurping through syrupy iambs, and puzzling out cheesy GIF animation all of which is supposed to stand-in for a legitimate communication from some specific person to me. But this came from an old friend, who, though he is quite the right-winger, is a wise and kind person. He further has sent me dozens if not hundreds of forwards since he moved away and our real world relationship moved online.

This one had the cutesy title of “What Deer Think.” Knowing my friend to be former military and a gun enthusiast, I expected something along the lines of the occasional scientific thing or some joke deriving from the fun of hunting. Instead I got a purported Ted Nugent quote about how deer weren’t smart enough to think and that, like Democrats they were only interested in what they could eat, who they could screw and if they could get away if caught. As a joke it was but on the same kind of right-wing precepts and memes that fill inboxes across America. Generated who knows where in some Heritage Foundation styled “Humor” factory these forwards fuel much of the daily distain many liberals feel in places where they walk through a sea of conservative aggression.

BTW, people on the right, the left have no equivalent for this on our side, no forward factory of left wing zingers that I know of. It is unsettling to see how entrenched this anti-liberal attitude is as a part of your daily life that you even send each other forwards to laugh at us. I believe the usual response to something like this is something, “har-har.” Mine was:

“Well ________,

This isn't the least offensive quote i've heard from Ted. In fact, it's a relatively harmless in comparison i guess to some of the clips from him i've seen; but let me be clear: I am NOT a supporter of Ted Nugent, never really loved his music (didn't buy any albums then when he was popular and I was young with discretionary money) and now I merely find him hugely offensive, largely in reaction to his hateful and violent rhetoric in particular against liberals like myself. Nugent's rock n roll past may make him seem harmless to many a right-winger, but as far as i am concerned i thought he was a dangerous man even before he started sending out hate-speech. I don't know if you are familiar with the speech he gave onstage about Obama and Clinton, but here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy8RIiTyhMI

There is much more if you enjoy that sort of thing.

I, for one, do not. ______, in general i hold you in high esteem and think you a well-considered person. I ask you to consider this then: Our country is falling towards a crisis that could lead to out-in-out violence and open rebellion. Many on both sides, right and left, forget political parties here, i mean the real right and left, are increasing their rhetoric and activity.

I myself have become a very active Occupy protester, 1st attending events in various places and now becoming an organizer locally. I do this in fear for and in love of my country. Love, tolerance, and understanding, but most of all peaceful behavior are things that i am promoting. Being on the front lines, both in the press and in person on this issue, i can tell you that those on the right are not championing peace, but violence and hatred.

I fear a violent right-wing takeover of our country since that is the rhetoric they use. I fear i, and people i love personally and some i respect politically, would be their targets; and i have been a good man and done for my country and do so now. I feel it is wrong to want me dead for that, but i also suspect there are many on the right who relish the idea of the deaths of me abd liberals across America. I know because they talk about it often enough. Ted Nugent speaks for a lot of people who bought into that whole "hate the liberal to the point you joke about killing them" comedy merchandise i see all too much of in my redneck of the woods.

Though you are clearly avidly military, i have not thought of you as a person to promote, however tangentially, hatred and violence. Ted Nugent's hostility isn't representative of my image of you, though i feel politically you are probably more aligned to him than me. I ask you think about the importance of peace at this time of crisis.

I have received forwards from you for a long time and enjoyed many. I ask you to respect me enough to skip sending me Ted Nugent material for sure, but all that "hate the stupid liberal" supposed-comedy stuff in general, if you find you must send it at all. I believe i have been polite and respectful to you in this request.

thank you,

mikel

In less than an hour my friend had written back, apologized and foreswore to forego Nugent Forwards, at least to me. Peace can still be made for now, but can we still make change?

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Current Comedy, 11/6/11: Occupational Hazards:(Top Ten Misconceptions You Will Hear When You Say You Support the Occupy Movement)

2011-11-06T21:44:00.000-08:00

Current Comedy, 11/6/11: Occupational Hazards:

(Top Ten Misconceptions You Will Hear When You Say You Support the Occupy Movement)

Dear New Activist,

Welcome to the Occupation! You can change the world! … unless your spirit gets trampled, either figuratively or literally, first. And I am here to warn you, if you are not careful, that is likely to happen. My name is mikel weisser, a long-time activist & disorganizer. I am the head of nothing. I am also not here to be about taking, nor giving, orders to or from anyone. I have joined the Occupy Movement of my own volition, just like you did, because you were compelled as a citizen to do your best for your country. In return you can rest assured your country will soon do its best to demonize you to the fullest of its spiteful little heart’s content.

Yes, rest assured friends--friends, family, and absolute strangers will soon start going out of their way to take it upon themselves to call you all kinds of fool. (Generally while resting on non-existent laurels of their own non-contributions to our country). You know it’s going to happen and we all know it sucks.

At some point, you turned, sickened by the injustice and finally said, “Well, I think the Occupy Movement might be bringing up some good points.” Or something innocuous like that.

And they heard, “Bugger mother’s apple pie & rape the Statue of Liberty! Kill the rich, free money for everybody! Especially me!” Next thing you know they start reaching for the pitchforks and torches and it goes downhill from there. Happens all the time, been through it a thousand times myself.

Haven’t liked it once.

So, rather than leave you ill-equipped for your impending series of battles of wits and duels with fools, here is a handy guide to refute some of the condescending vitriol you will soon be drenched in. While each of you will have to work your own way through the whole personal attack wave you wiIl soon be surfing (and how it meshes with your own life style choices and/or guilt over them); here are some of the replies I generally wish I could say—

(PS: Thank you for joining the cause of saving the world. It is worth it far as I can tell.)

They will say: “You are ____________________________!”

1. Anti-Capitalist:

And I want to say--Get serious, this is America, everyone is a capitalist. We need money like we need oxygen. I like to spend and I am ready to work to get it. I have had a job since I was 15, and have one now; but even more so, i am also an artist. So, of course I believe in individual reward for individual achievement. Of course, I want people to be rewarded for their hard work and effort, just as I want to be rewarded lavishly if I should achieve lavishly. I further think everyone should have these opportunities I hope to have for myself. Duh. But I think that there’s a point beyond which accumulation for is generally a sin against others and I know, much of the wealth made in the world in this or any point in history has been based on exploitation, misery and/or poverty of others. Through 99% of human history 99% of humans have suffered through a subsistence existence of some while a select few manipulated and exploit the many.

I am a capitalist, I want to be rich. I want to be rich for being good at doing good things, but not for doing cruel and rapacious things well. I am a capitalist. I want to get rich because I figured out a way to make lives better, not because I figured out a way to squeeze already stressed lives just little harder to wring another dime from another’s misery. That’s not being a capitalist, that’s being a monster. If you can’t tell there is a difference, I don’t want you in charge of my country; because this country is supposed to be about improving the lives of the multitude, not the enriching the wallets of the few at the public’s direct suffering.

Yes, I object to such things, but that in no way means I am not a capitalist. Besides working for others, I have bought and sold several houses in my lifetime, and as a writer/entertainer, I have charged people for my services for over 20 years. These are two of the most defining-ly capitalist actions an individual can take. In those instances, my personal standards of capitalism demand that I expect to conduct myself as a fair-hearted honest business partner and insist the same in return. Not wanting to tolerate you manipulating the rules of the game so you can economically rape me is not being anti-capitalist; it’s being anti-being flipping raped.

2. Anti-American—I don’t know about you, but I am so American by the dawn’s early light I purple mountains’ majesties and live on a fruited lane where I proudly hail the twilight’s last gleaming. I hold it a truth that should be self evident that a government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from this earth. As a school teacher, I actually do say the Pledge of Allegiance five days a week and mean it eight. And as political writer, I actually do quote Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson and Franklin every so often, and study the Constitution on a regular basis and honestly do carry a copy in my coat pocket, beside my favorite poems. I have US history books in every major room of my house. I work an American job and produce an American product: your children.

And when it comes to loving the land or leaving it, being a cog in good faith in the machinery of American economics, I know our country was founded on a capitalist venture, the moneyed elite of the colonies organized a revolt against British business interests to create their own economic power structure. Washington, Hancock, Jefferson, & Franklin were all plutocrats and among the couple of dozen movers and shakers who made an America shaped to their own interests with quirky little personal touches, such as 3/5ths persons and properties that claim full personhood.

Still I buy and sell American. Me and the mortgage company are currently buying my current home. I’m about four years into the mortgage. I did take my money out of a mega-bank and move it to a smaller one, but I still bank with a bank that I don’t want to fail. I have purchased or am paying on all the home accessories good Americans are supposed to buy. We eat turkey on Thanksgiving and mangle red white and blue assemblages on the 4^th, often complete with Patriotic music. In fact it is the very fact that I do so love America, I am compelled to protest against her destruction. To not stand up would be to me Un-American. To paraphrase Thoreau, the questions isn’t why am I protesting, it is why are you?

3. Commie/Socialist---First let me say this about that: I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the communist party, I have never desired to be one. I never read Marx, or Lenin, or Mao. I don’t use the word “Comrade.” I’ve never sung “The Internationale” nor could I quote any of the words. This term has become so abstracted from over-abuse that these days the cliché contemporary GOP use equates to simply, “Any boogeyman I am too lame to actually describe with nuance and specificity.” I am in fact insulted that that is the best insult you can come up with.

In the so-called “Communist” governments of the 20 century, Russia and China for example, actual operations had so little to do with the supposed actual “communist” ideology that to continue to use the label at all anymore as if it ever was appropriate or remain current is to be either ignorant or disingenuous. Oligarchy, kleptocracy, dictatorship, command economy—those words apply to those systems but none of that isn’t interesting to me, not a proposal I or most people would want to embrace.

Now “Socialist,” is the essence of the Preamble to the Constitution—you know, the whole business about justice, tranquility, defense, general welfare, liberty, all that stuff, all of it is socialist. A socialist government is one that cares about the needs of its people; and since that is the basis of any and every government, by that definition, I, and most people interested in theorizing on government, are to a degree socialist. I do expect my government to work on the problems of my public, I do expect to be expected to contribute to a system that benefits the whole of the public. I bet you do too, to some degree. So, once you get that far along the slippery slope, we all adjust to our own level of comfort, but to me the impulse to work for my own benefit through working for the good of the public is the essence of being American. If that impulse isn’t American then the folks who volunteer to go to war for the country are really only doing it to shoot people and having joined the military once myself, I am pretty sure for most there’s more to it than that.

4. Unemployed Moochers, Selfish, Lazy (meaning it’s their own fault)—Having now been to weekly AZ protests for almost a month, I can definitively explain why so many of the thousands of protests around the nation happen primarily on Saturdays: because we the protestors have got jobs and only can protest on the weekends. See? That’s why this is the saddest item on the list. I am not unemployed, nor am I alone in being not unemployed among the protesters at the Occupy protests I’ve attended. And I’ve checked out a few. Thus far I have attended protests or meetings in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Flagstaff, and helped put two together in Kingman. In large cities where the economic policies of business and government have led to an immense swelling of the homeless population, the Occupy events have become 24/7 ad hoc 21^st Century Hoovervilles; but in smaller communities, it is the people with the resources to get away on a Saturday that can and do lead the protests. One of the routine cat-calls aimed at Occupiers is that others will sneer they can’t join the protest because they’re busy working as if it is a badge of honor to have a job that sucks so much you can’t have your weekends free.

I can tell you most of the people I have met have or at one point had a decent job. Then the entire economy shed millions of jobs. Businesses evaporated, only the strong survived, only those who could defend their market over the past few years as the money dried up and blew away. For workers like that, for the now millions of Americans who haven’t been able to continue to work because the jobs they did just aren’t there anymore, this isn’t about lazy or gaming the system. This is about staying alive.

And, somehow, that is a minor detail to most of the most austerity-minded. The “ let them eat cake while they pull themselves up by their bootstraps” mentalities never put together that to actually give up on America’s ever increasing number of poor people is to choose a genocide that would make Hitler blush. We are now talking 46,000,000 Americans living below the poverty line. Casual talk aside, are you really ready to sacrifice those lives to teach them a lesson and to consolidate your own holdings? Gosh-ee, I hope not. If so, then tell me, who is the real moocher?

And this does not even go into the myriad of ways getting up off one’s butt and going out into the public square to stand up for one’s country is the exact opposite of being lazy or selfish; or to address the commitment of energy one must expend to deal with the overt hatred one will surely subject themselves to by announcing you want people to rebel against the corrupt, but widely-accepted, system. Thus, until you’ve tried it, you may not realize, that agitating for one’s country is and should be a whole lot of work.

5. Ignorant of the Fairness of the American Economic System—Please. Do we have to go through this again? Pick any decade of American history and tell me a time when numerous businesses and government officials, operating at all levels, were not actively involved in trying to rip the rest of us off. One hundred years ago the elites held the rest of us in serfdom and slave labor. Whether the peasants of the Steppes or the sharecroppers of the South, shop-girls in the East and miners of the West, the whole world was held on its knees. One hundred year ago, your twelve year old would be complaining about her fourteen hour workday and not her algebra. Go ahead, pick a decade. The twenties when market manipulations collapsed the economy? The 30s, when business leaders like IBM and Ford were doing business with the Nazis? Is there a decade that can be picked to show that businesses can be trusted to operated unfettered by the protections of government restraint? White collar crime was estimated to be 200 billion a year back in the 80s and now are measured in the trillions. Eighty percent of the new wealth in the nation over the last 30 years went directly to the rich, not because they earned it, but because they took it. The litany is so long it should pass as a given; but when millions of Americans are thrown unjustly out of their homes to serve the greed of the rich, we can’t legitimately claim it is a just system. If they can’t see this one, they’re not looking.

6. Democratic Stooges—The scenario here is that supposedly, like Dick Armey and the Tea Party, there is a direct link from Democrat Party hierarchy to the protesters freezing their butts off in Zuccoti Park and elsewhere as the fall of our economy turns into a winter of growing discontent. Sure, there is an admitted connection with the voting records of many of the activists “Occupying” around the country. A lot of us either are currently registered or tend to vote Democratic. I, for example, am. But the Democratic Party doesn’t support me anymore that it supports Occupy. The upper levels of the Democratic Party are as bought and sold as the GOP and have just as much stake in perpetuating the system and its inequities as Republicans do, Dems are just more deceitful about it.

And as a result, like Occupy in general, I am ready to condemn and call out Democrats who slit the throats of the public to help their cronies swindle another bundle from the public, either though unfair business practices or unfair tax cuts. At a time when the average wealth in Congress is upwards of $600,000 and their annual salary is $100,000 above the median income in a nation where half of the workers in America earn under $10 an hour, it is farcical to suggest they even have an inkling of the realities of the average American, much are prepared to represent them, the D or R behind their name notwithstanding.

While the small time activists may associate with the Dems because the party bears the comparative label of being progressive, the hierarchy of the party is every bit as beholden to the plutocrats as the GOP is. That’s why they were ineffective as a challenge to Bush and ineffective at subduing the Republican challenge to Obama. Corporate money buys suits on both sides of the aisle and the folks at the Occupies know it. That why they aren’t backing the traditional political parties’ solutions to the problems. Tea Partiers turned out to merely GOP with funny hats. Occupiers distrust the Democrats only slightly less than Republicans.

7. You guys should point their protests at politicians not innocent hard working businessmen just trying to earn an honest living in the free market. Next you’ll be telling me Santa and the Tooth Fairy have weapons of mass destruction. Among things we know categorically to not be true is that the US economy is anything but a free market and I am not talking about the supposedly egregious business regulations that keep your boss from demanding 12 hour work days in unsafe conditions from both you and your 8 year old. I am talking about the way, around the world, our government enforces its so-called trade agreements at the point of a gun. I’m talking about the way, here at home, government subsidies and tax breaks Congressmen create give their friends tens, if not hundreds, of billions in unfair advantages. The latest outrage comes as Bank of America shifts 75 trillion of toxic debt into federally insured banks, virtually saddling our country with another mountain of debt without a public referendum or even a Congressional vote. How can this be shown to be good for the public?

Eighty-five percent the toxic mortgages rightwing pundits want to grouse about have turned out to be banker frauds and hundreds of trillions of our alleged debt was created by bankers first creating loans then betting against them then contracting the money supply to cause them to fail knowing the US government would bail them out; which our Congress did in ’08 in direct contradiction to the will of the public. And every since they got away with that theft of trillions, the plutocracy and their banks have been emboldened. They provided themselves millions in bonuses for successfully impoverishing the rest of us, while the beholden Congress have cleared the way for them enacting thirty years of bribery purchased de-regulation. While it is true the plutocrats have only succeeded in this nefarious plan with the aid of their servants, our Congress, Congressional abuses are only a symptom, not the whole problem. We can get rid of the current crop of sell-outs who ruin our lives at their owners bidding for their own self-aggrandization, but as long as we leave the corporatists in actual power they’ll just buy the next wave as well.

8. They are all outside agitators, Looney Tunes bomb-throwers out to violently overthrow our country, folks who don’t have any idea what they’re talking about. If there was any one thing I would say that unites the protesters it is this--they may be there to protest about a wide variety of things, but they all have very specific, sometimes painfully personal, explicit reasons to be protesting. Former military guy who saw the systemic corruption of the military industrial complex first hand and now organizes for Veterans Against the War. The other retired military guy who can detail how our country has been sold to corporations. The small-town business woman who has watched her customer base dry up and blow away. The woman who lost her home because of medical bills, the couple who lost their jobs, but got replacements, but the banks wouldn’t renegotiate and evicted them anyway. The woman who took out 80 grand in student loans to learn a profession that now has no jobs left in it. The kid who does not even know why his family lost their home, but now has his whole family living on his student loans and the debts just keeps piling up. The retired couple from Chicago who are warning that the Post Office is the next target of the rightwing goal of privatization. These aren’t wild-eyed professional dissidents, these aren’t tin-foil hat wearing, paranoia saturated, conspiracy theorists. These are regular Americans standing up and calling on you to join them, not to overthrow the country, but to save it.

9. You’re Wasting Your Time—Already this ruse is being proven wrong. Already the general public is getting used to the idea that some folks are protesting about American injustice, and maybe they're not all nuts. Already in a poll of the 1%, about 35% are willing to acknowledge the protestors have a point. Already you can see a diference in the way the public hears your objections and the way you feel about yourself for finally standing up and trying to make the difference you’ve wished to see n this world. Already you probably feel better about yourself merely for trying to try.

What better use of one’s time is there than to devote one’s self to pursuing the good of one’s country? Compared to the folks who languish their lives away wishing there was something to be done, then feeling guilty about not getting anything done, protesting, even for a losing, but right, cause is its own reward.

10. They will be appeased with minor corrections—Understand, minor corrections aren’t going to fix this thing. We will change the system or it will destroy itself in short order; but neither of our options are going to be a minor blip on the radar. This is the time of radical crisis you’ve been bogey-manned about your whole life. If you don’t see it yet, you will.

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ

Current Comedy, 10/29/11: Report from Occupy Kingman, Some of My Immodest Proposals

2011-10-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

Current Comedy, 10/29/11:
Occupy Kingman, Some of My Immodest Proposals

I had the great fortune to be one of the activists who helped semi-organize the Saturday Oct. 29 Occupy Kingman event. It was an incredibly powerful experience for me since i have generally taken an interested spectator position in the organization of most of the events i attend. I don't organize because i am not very organized myself, so i do a lot of personal independent and thus singular protests in addition to the ones i attend. But this issue seemed too important to not act on it so i press my skills and connections to promote the event as best as i could. I put more effort in promoting this than i generally do to anything political in my hometown and for here in Kingman, it was a genuine success.

About 30-35 people showed up. There was much public support and quite a bit of exchange. I debated a right wing contrarian who showed up just to challenge us until i wore him into the ground to the point he walked away. The press that was there was favorable. I think it was a great start but needs months to coalesce. The problems we’re facing won’t go away until we act as a people to drive them away, so this was just the beginning. If the public of America does not come to back the Occupy Movement then it won’t really be “the 99% “and thus will fail.

So, i put more effort in promoting this than i general do to anything and for Kingman, it was a real success. About 30-35 showed. There was much public support and quite a bit of exchange. I gave my first political speech based on my writing in 20 years of writing about politics. I debated a contrarian into the ground to where he walked away. The press that was there was favorable. I think it was a great start but needs months to coalesce. The problems we're facing won't go away until we act to drive them away, so this was just the beginning--I spoke a bit in the general assembly but eventually pull this list of proposals out of my sleeve and read from it.

I said this is NOT my list of demands. I am not making demands. I am not some madman trying to kidnap America, I am not some petulant child; I am a concerned citizen, doing what i am supposed to do when i see trouble for my country. This is just my list of changes i wish America would make. Once again, these are not demands & i am not a spokesperson for the 99%, even though i did say many of these things in Kingman’s first general assembly. I was but one voice among many there to protest the crises at hand. I/we hope you will join our efforts in Locomotive Park again next weekend. Until we raise enough voices, we will not be heard.

These may not be the solutions to our problems; but these are my ideas.

1. Wipe out ALL derivative markets and close out the fictitious trillions the bankers have artificially created for themselves at the rest of our expenses. They get nothing. They can keep the loot they've already stashed away if they promise not to whine about losing the billions they never had as they imperiled the planet. If they insist on whining, then we get to sue and/or imprison them and confiscate those funds too.

2. Close the stock market to all mutual funds and small investors, eliminate brokerage firms, ratings agencies, speculation in government bonds, and establish rules will prevent speculation with actual people's actual capital, such as pension funds and mortgages.

3. Close the Federal Reserve. Close all hedge funds. Investigate and prosecute as widely as possible.

4. Halt all foreclosures. Return all unsold properties to their evictees. Re-finance all home loans at current market rates in contracts that continue to adjust the cost of the loan to fluctuations in market values (a reverse ARM). Jail time for any banking executive that can be proven to have fraudulently approved a loan, a refinance or an eviction. All evictees from 2005 till present get a reimbursement check for the value remaining on their homes at their time of eviction and a punitive damage for each month they have been evicted.

5. Arrest of the heads of all multinational banks. Their bail can be set based on 10% of the money they've defrauded the public for.

6. Universal health care, pre-cradle through grave. Health insurance industry dissolved. Executives indicted for the unnecessary deaths they caused through denial of services.

7. Wipe out all existing student loan debt and provide free college education and living allowances to qualified successful students through their doctorates if possible. The expenses of which will be offset through a required commensurate period of public service. In fact, mandatory public service for all citizens upon completed high school and prior to commencing college. Public service performance will affect college choice opportunities.

8. End all wars and close the majority of our nearly 1000 overseas military bases. (Lease the properties to the citizens of the foreign countries we have terrorized around the world through our military might.) Offer alternative government service employment to RTF-ed veterans in programs such as the old CCC or neighborhood renewal services. Hey, if these guys can destroy and rebuild neighborhoods across the Middle East in the name of US democracy, then they can rebuild our neighborhoods here at home too.

9. Eliminate ALL no-bid government contracts, charge, convict, and imprison all corporate officers of companies that have defrauded or grossly overcharged the government. Add an imprisonment component to the fines corporations pay for environmental or employee abuses.

10. Reform the tax code, with a reasonable progressive tax code and no capital gains and income cap for contributing to Social Security. The rich would end up topping out at 50%. They would stop whining about paying these taxes and acknowledge that the playing field in America is designed to tilt their way, like the luck on a blackjack table.

11. Indict Bush officials on treason regarding lying us into Iraq, Halliburton collusion, Enron involvement and signing statement abuse. As is appropriate, also charge officers, Pentagon officials, and DOD admin with war crimes and torture.

12. Reopen the 9/11 investigation.

13. Repeal No Child Left Behind and reinstate or create funding which will afford each school in America to have staff and materials to create class sizes of no greater than 15 to 1 with an aide. A full assortment of electives and shop class will be provided at all schools. School counseling services would also be expanded to include mental health services. Alternative ed programs should be fully funded and students who refuse to function in a normal school setting will be removed for the good of other students. Chronic bullying would be grounds for expulsion.

14. In addition to expanding public access to health care, establish mental health public access as well including the restoration of in-patient facilities for the profoundly mentally ill or debilitated.

15. Reinstate ownership limits in public media and investigate-indict-imprison media executives and personalities who knowingly colluded with the government defraud or deceive the public on policy issues, such as the run up to Iraq.

16. Overturn Citizens United. All elections should be publicly funded and candidate airtime and print space should be limited, equitable, and provided free of charge. Further all elected officials should be paid a living wage and prohibited from working other full-time jobs while in office. They, along high ranking non-elected government officials should be prohibited from working or investing in the industries they have worked to regulate.

17. Reform drug laws to tax cannabis products and services commensurate with tobacco and alcohol products and services. Release all possession-only offenders in prisons. Provide them with rehabilitation services.

18. All companies making money in our country must incorporate and headquarter in our country and pay full US taxes. Let's see what these guys really think of free markets when it comes to being free from the insider breaks they've been getting.

19. All government subsidies and/or tax breaks eliminated.

20. Immigration reform to require citizenship of the twelve million undocumented immigrants currently in the US and a greatly revised process for immigrating that will provide the vast numbers of refugees seeking to immigrate easy clear channels. Reduce illegal immigration by making it easier to do legally.

21. Increase minimum wage and create a maximum wage for any industry doing business with the US public or government. Salary caps not just for CEOs (now making 470 times the salary of their own entry level employees).

22. A violence tax for consumers who wish to purchase and thus support violence. Various sports, books, movies, art and music would be subject to this tax, which would serve as a deterrent to reduce the amount of violence in society, in the same way that we tax other destructive vices such as gambling or alcohol.

I know these aren’t the only solutions to the crises we find ourselves in. I encourage you to disagree and to form and then agitate for your own list. I encourage you to do it soon. I will be at my local Occupy next Saturday.

Will you?

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Report from the Occupy Flagstaff Protest Oct. 15, 2011 (video)

2011-10-16T22:44:00.000-07:00

In the course of a week i managed to attend the Las Vegas, San Francisco and Flagstaff Occupy protests. By the time i made it to the Flagstaff event Saturday Oct. 15, 2011, i had a pretty good idea of what i would say if asked why i was protesting ... and, amazingly, what should happen, but NAU's William Brown came and did an interview. Between his audio and Beth Weisser's photos of the protest i've put together a video now available on You Tube.

Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rfDrVAqwzU

Current Comedy, 10/12/11: Pre-Occupied

2011-10-12T00:33:00.000-07:00

By last April, after 20 years of writing about politics hoping to make a difference, i had become so weary with America i could not even make fun of it anymore. I was defeated. The plutocrats had won. Again. The GOP had the upper hand and were wringing our throats with it. Again. And the media were making them out as heroes for it. Yet again. Yet another case of the sheep pleading the case for their own slaughter.

And through the summer the news just got worse. Our obscene wars continued to be mismanaged and the American public continued to be force-fed the idea that blindly supporting the mass scale destruction of foreign cultures for little, other than corporate profit, was in some way equal to loving one's country. Occasionally the Arab Spring sprang a whiff of democracy across our nation's television sets, but anytime an American protest tried to capture the media attention we got to watch celebrity show trials instead.

And every couple of weeks some new expose came out showing vast web of criminality the financial and political sectors have created in their ongoing effort to dupe the American public out of trillions. For me it wasn't so much a matter of eating the rich, but i sure would like them to get their teeth out of my neck. And when faced with the challenges of serving their constituents who are now more poor and more uninsured as wages continue to drop and their very lives are imperiled, our rich politicians complained that instead of the public's call to increase the taxes on the rich, (i.e. themselves) the real solution was to increase taxes on the poor. Oh yes, and cut government services so the rich could have more tax cuts. I kept wondering when the public was going to get so sick of this crap!

Then ... they did. Some are calling this the first progressive populist movement since the 1930s. I call it wonderful. After 30 years of the fires being slowly turned up under us, the American people finally got preoccupied with the fact we, the people, actually occupy the vast majority of this country and the 99% should not be forced to bow to the whims of the richest one percent.

It is now a month since the Occupy Movement started. Like movements around the world, people started gathering at their country's seat of power. In our case, that means Wall Street. On an island that was once "purchased" from the Indians for $24 bucks in costume jewelry, where that richest 1% now collect 45% of all wages paid on the island, the people have assembled to gripe about the plutocrats. At first, as Gandhi once wrote: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Let's hope part four of that equation comes as true as parts 1-3 have. It took a couple of weeks before the press became too embarrassed to not acknowledge their presence. They then went from condescending derision to scornful condemnation at a pace that rivals most land speed records. Reviled by the same national corporate media who lie to us to secure the positions of their masters? The media who created the box we are now expected to think within? It certainly seemed like a group for me.

Me? I am an American, more than that i am a teacher. It is precisely the precious duty of each one of us "we the people" to stand up and speak up in favor of our country, to work to advance the good and challenge the bad and to teach others to do so also. For that is the only way the "of the people, by the people" stuff actually works. Without the people, "our" government is a simply sham sold to the highest bidder. I cannot entrust my precious country's future to a future generation that i will expect to work to change stuff, if i don't work to change stuff too and show them that it can be done and is worth the effort to try, though the status quo-zers will always have a desperate stake in making sure folks don't knock over too many apple carts or rock too many boats. Our culture may claim to champion rugged individualism and outspokenness over issues; but the bureaucracy, the plutocracy, the religious and the social power structures, our marketing and entertainment industries all depend on people tacitly accepting and helplessly depending on our leaders' decisions even when we can plainly see they are yielding nothing but a long train of usurpations. It is not my leaders i pledge my allegiance too, or even, honestly, to a flag. It is to the United States of America--to perfecting our unions, establishing some justice, ensuring some domestic tranquility for a change, defending the commons, promoting our welfare and securing our liberty.

If a person has even an inkling of our history and not merely sucking on the glass teat of the corporate spin that serves the 1% at our expense, you will understand why I have been protesting since Richard Nixon ran for office. And why, over these last 40 years, in no certain order, i have marched in the street, carried signs, written articles and/or just plain agitated opposing the Vietnam-, the Gulf-, the Serbian, the Somali, both the Afghan misadventures, the latest Iraq and the Libyan Wars. I was pissed about Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, and Reagan's little Libya thing too, but i was a bit slow to get up off my ass, so they were over before i got started. And as for the whole deplorable shenanagans in various South & Central American countries where our politicians and munitions manufacturers sold our military as mercenaries for multinationals "developing" the 3rd world? Oh the shame. I've had to speak up. That' what Americans do--we change for the better, we build for the future.

I have protested for farm workers' rights, equal rights, religious rights, poor & homeless people's rights, teachers' rights, immigrant rights, northern Arizona water rights & LGBT rights and of course, for the Right to Choose. Against Richard Nixon, against Gerald Ford, against Jimmie Carter, against Reagan, twice, against Bush the First, against Bill Clinton and against the GOP against him, against Bush the Second and a second time, and inevitably, against Barack Obama and against the GOP against him. I have protested against worshipping Christopher Columbus and for celebrating civil rights, race relations, universal health care, whole foods, for the great "Ohm" at the annual July 4th Rainbow circle and even plastics recycling.

A movement that insists it wants no leader and issues no official set of demands, yet wants the public to stand up over the issues that are rapidly starting to strangle the whole world, seemed just right to me. I have got a lot i could complain about. 99% of us do. Without any central leadership there is no one person to discredit. Without a codified official list of demands there is no agenda to marginalize--just folks like me and you and 99% of us agitating to draw attention to the things we believe in. A public assembly for "shouting out the troubles we're all mumbling about, like that a half a million greed, while a hundred million need, and another billion bleed full-speed from the deed" as i wrote 10 years ago, when the future was not yet a derivative marketed on Wall Street? Count me in!

So, over the course of last weekend, my wife and i made a new generation of protest signs and took our granddaughter to the Las Vegas organizing follow-up meeting following Occupy Vegas' successful Las Vegas Boulevard action centered at the Statue of Liberty sign at New York, New York last Thursday. Over 1000 people showed up and there were no shows of violence, merely a crowd full of "we the people" pledging their allegiance. On our way to the meeting 7 seven old Atlantis and i stopped and stood on a corner of Las Vegas Boulevard beneath the shadow of the great pyramid of Luxor and held our protest signs high. Mine read "99% ." Hers said "Ensure Domestic Tranquility/ Promote the General Welfare/ THESE are the REAL American Values." We laughed and waved for over an hour. When people really liked our signs we hugged and danced.

And wow, just like that, i think i feel the wind change. And whether it chooses to lay or gale, i for one have been blown from my doldrums and am again chasing some course. It was great to feel alive again, to believe in America and a future. I just hope it is not too late to have one.

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Current Comedy, April 13, 2011: Godzilla Returns

2011-04-13T00:35:00.000-07:00

Last year at Xmas, i thought i had written what would be my last column. It was good enough, a great place to stop. As i whip around the sins and the syntax searching for some laughs on a semi-recurring basis, after twenty years it seemed i had about written about all i could stand about the relentless Republican onslaught on America. I was plumb "Repuglied -out." You talk about disaster fatigue, what with all these earthquakes, typhoons, and floods, wars and rumors of wars and other natural and manmade disasters which fill the new news hole each day? From my hillside, so high above the left coast of Arizona, it looks like the worst messes we've got going these days are the ones made by elephants and like a herd of stampeding elephants, they never seem to stop. I'm now over 50, they've been doing the dirty as far back as i can remember. I personally have been raging against the GOP BS machine since i was 9 years old ... for all the good it's done me.

I remember how this whole thing started. It was election eve, 1968. Each new day of the Vietnam atrocity widened the credibility gap. The Olympics were in Mexico and Black men raised black fists and were called traitors even as they won honors for our country. In theaters, the movie that haunted me was "Destroy All Monsters," wherein Japanese radiation sponge rubber mutants were conquering the cardboard city world, well, more rightly, accidentally trashing it--in schlocky smoke swirled slow-motion--while the monsters jockeyed for position among themselves. And on TV my heroes were dying.

As far as my young mind could tell the world was at a tremendously important crossroads and i needed to make my mark and have my voice be heard. So i went down to that tremendously important crossroads to shout out at the public. Of course, in my case, the crossroads in question turned out to be the street corner in front of my childhood home, 1st and Fox, Raymondville, TX. And on that election eve, i brought home chalk and, eyeing the traffic warily, over the course of a dozen stops and starts, scrawled: "Humphrey-Muskie is our man" on the pavement. And at the time, i recall feverishly debating taking the poetic license to abuse the grammar in this way for the sound of the rhyme for the purpose of base electioneering, but did it anyway.The second line read, "Nixon Belongs in the Garbage Can!" As i recall, after due consideration of my masterpiece, i believe i did go back out with the tiny nub that remained and added the exclamation point.

As you may recall, America didn't listen. Voted for the Republican = Cambodia bombing, Co-Intel-Pro, the health insurance industry, Watergate, Bebe Rebozo, and growing up with a president unaffectionately, but accurately, known as "Tricky Dick." Come on, i was nine flippin' years old and even i knew better than to vote for a guy that everybody knew was a dick. But the American people bought it and it's gone that way every since.

Having just watched the latest ludicrous bipartisan farce, they like to call the government shutdown showdown, i'm ready to raise my fist at both parties. The Ds again made asses of themselves, by failing to take the floor and letting Tea Party disinformation shape the agenda. Obama again, as if on cue, jumped to work responding to the GOP threats by gutted social programs, further turning his back on the his base to pander to the Simon Legrees of the world. With their bevy of policy riders, the Tea Party has made clear they not only intend to impoverish the American public for their masters, but reserve the right to lash us as well. Funny that a party that claims to be all about freedom, works so hard to restrict and punish it.

Those GOP-Tea Party policy riders on the stop-gap budget should make clear for anyone who still claimed to doubt it, that the Tea Party was never anything more than another way to market the same old same old GOP social repression, masking it as fiscal conservatism. It's not really because they don't want to spend the money. It really is because they don't want you to have the services in the first place. So far we the people are being told the budget compromise is a victory for us an Obama because we only have to suffer through 38.5 billion more in cuts to social services, instead of the 60 billion they were aiming for. They may've failed in their efforts to gut NPR, Planned Parenthood this round (even though Jon Kyl got caught trying to lie to make it happen); but rest assured this is just round one. This monster will return.

They are already talking about the upcoming debt ceiling drama and the epic kabuki theater expected over that. As always expect evermore cuts in education, cuts in health care and then a whole host of punitive policy mandates, sold as "accountability."

And sometimes, it just gets so wearing.

The litany of outrages America endures in any given week at the hands of Republicans is enough to wear out the jaw of Amy Goodman. You could fill up page after page of outrage, year after year and still face a fear of fresh BS to battle through each time you touch a TV. Back in December, when i started the project of creating a reasonably euphonious list of "American Scandals in Semi-Chronological Order," i had no idea how heartbreaking a task i was taking on. It really is an litany of outrages. Time and again our government or business interests, generally while draped in bunting have raped and plundered the rights and needs of the people. We gotten so habituated to our abuse because it is our status quo. Like the bumper sticker used to say, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." And when you are talking about outrages on that scale, it is hard to believe i can chase it away with my little nub of chalk.

But let's give it a shot anyway. 'Tis the season to do articles about tax cheats, falla-lalla-la-la-la, etc. Here, have a little outrage on me and supposedly we'll both feel better.

I don't know about you, but i pay taxes all the time and rarely give it much notice, in much the same way as i also intake air and water and expel such as well throughout the course of every day. Yet there are those who can elucidate for you all statute and verse of each of the umpteen different taxes one incurs in the course of an American lifetime as if it were an outrage. To me, that scofflaw shirker's attitude they foist as patriotism is the real outrage.

The mess is about more than money. It's about a toxic attitude that infiltrates and poisons the very air we breathe: it is about the desire to make your life worse just for the power trip of it all. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the steady spewing of poisons into the air are causing our country to mutate, the way the fish around the coast of Japan are sure to soon mutate. We've become blind eyed, half hearted, ill-willed, and lame-brained.

I want a bumper sticker that says, "REAL PATRIOTS PAY THEIR TAXES." Just like real parents raise their kids. You can't claim to love your country then refuse to maintain it. The reality of this seems so simple, but unfortunately the brand-recognition of patriotism has been appropriated by the herd of tax cheats, being led, or should i say misled, by those still trying to drown the federal government in a bathtub.

I once contended they were driven by quest for personal wealth, but now i am beginning to believe it is everyone else's impoverishment that is the true GOP goal. They like to claim that they will grow the economy by firing government workers by the hundreds of thousands and by diminishing the public's individual buying power by cutting wages and pensions. They like to tell you that America will be a happier better place, when we have more sick old people, more unwanted children born and a larger, less educated lower class.

Meanwhile like termites gnawing at the foundations of our society, the GOP continue to nibble away at the structures that uphold our very lives. Both Arizona and New York can be seen working up plans for restructuring taxes to raise the amount that the poor pay, while cutting the top earners' rates. Speaking of top rates not paying taxes, thanks to a spate of articles on AlterNet, we recently learned that G.E., the world's largest corporation paid no taxes last year, and neither did a full 2/3s of US corporations. Even Time and Newsweek gave notice. As Allison Kilkenny's article for The Nation noted, " Bank of America hasn’t paid a nickel in federal income taxes for the past two years, and in fact raked in an additional $1 billion in tax “benefits.” The bank is enjoying these profits after accepting $45 billion from taxpayers, which the company then got to count as a deduction when they paid back the money."

And that's just the outrage in two articles. A steady diet of AlterNet could alter your consciousness. With even CNN pimping for the anti-tax as well as the anti-Islam crowds with their recent specials; it is important to remember the beauty part of the relentless GOP calls for ever more dire tax cuts, is that they get sold as appeals to the public's basest of instincts: greed--the greedier among us want to keep their taxes as low as unreasonably possible and are just looking for reasons to justify their impulse. They are more than willing to train the rest of us to believe that selfish attitude is the American Way.

The chairman of Caterpillar, for example, is griping that IL raised corporate taxes two percent to 7%, even though the state was in the hole by billions. Murdoch's News Corp once again skips out on taxes and gets away with it. Meanwhile the US House GOP are floating a bill that includes cutting the public assistance of any family if a family member goes on strike. In Georgia they're cutting corporate taxes, even for foreign corporations and raising taxes on food, even Girl Scout Cookies. Speaking of sweets, in Colorado, outraged that the liberals in the US Dept. of Ag have been linking soda to obesity, the state GOP is making a special exemption for soda just to be spiteful. That's right they are providing economic incentive to the wave of high fructose corn syrup related obesity statistics in the state of Colorado just to spite liberals because they've had the audacity to notice our national waistline.

And last but not least, last month the GOP outrage of the month had to be Missouri's move to rewrite child labor laws; but this month the state of Maine, the same state that recently stripped the labor mural from their own state department of labor hallways because it was too, ah, pro-labor, or something, has come up with a move to lower the minimum wage for youth and extend their work hours. That's right, they want your kids to become their slaves too and they don't even want to pay them for the privilege.

How much further will the plutocrats expect us to sacrifice for the good of the economy? Are we to give up our federal system for a feudal one? Is that their point? If so i think they are mistaken about the will of the people. If we must impoverish ourselves for the good of our financial sector driven economy, just so the wealthy can give themselves better bonuses, why should we care if their economy is working or not? How much longer should we work for them to aid their quest for our destruction?

It's a question a lot of folks are beginning to wonder about. Michael Ruppert, of Collapse Net fame, who has been charting our national suicide for more than 30 years due to systemic corruption and depleting resources has recently gave the international economy less than 6 months till collapse. Evangelicals are currently touring America promoting the idea that the rapture is set to take place May 11th, 2011, less than one month from the night i typed this article. And then there's 12/21/2012, which is already the most overwrought set of digits since Y2K. I say i don't know. If we make through to December of '12 without this whole mess blowing up further, i will be surprised.

As of 4/12/11, the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first shot of the US Civil War, the country of Japan has acknowledged after a month of disinformation, that the radiation contamination from the Daiichi nuclear power plant is much worse than they had previously been willing to mention. Worse, in fact than Chernobyl. Once again corporate cost cutting and negligence and a government paid to ignore corporate mischief have created an, as of yet, incalculable threat to mankind's very existence.

Last time Japan was so devastated with radiation, a metaphorical set of phony monsters were unleashed as a parable on the destructiveness of men's folly. Now as the radiation pours, by the gallon, into the Pacific and is thus woven into the very fabric of our steadily more precarious existence, as the acknowledged contamination ring expands and the harm level rises, as a third of the world's economic engine crumbles in the after-shocks, one wonders which monsters will be the metaphors that savage our cardboard world--fire-breathing dragons, men in sponge-rubber suits or raging elephants?

What good is my little nub of chalk? I can only write this:

We are at the cross roads. The monsters are real and they are here.

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

NOTE: Unlike the self-acknowledged unreliable remarks of Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, all assertions in this article are to be taken as factual.

Current Comedy, 3/23/11: Are We Libya Yet?

2011-03-24T00:34:00.000-07:00

Is this America?

Years gone on, and years gone by, and still the question comes: "Is This America?"

When Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats asked that question in 1964, she was a Black woman courageously trying to create justice in the "Whites Only" political world of the Democratic South. The rest of the world took one look at the racists running our country back then and knew the answer was no. "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave"? Cheese whiz. That was just some huckster's slogan used to sell canned apple pie. Always was, always will be. Or so some say (as if it justifies their apathy.)

But still the question comes: Is This America?

As they've killed America, they've hoped we wouldn't notice. They juggled bread and circuses to dazzle us. They told us every year we were getting better and shinier; and, vain fools that we are, we believed them. We fell for it time after time.

They've been killing it before our eyes all along. They sold us an ever diminishing fractionalized slice of the pre-reamed American Pie and an adjustable rate monthly lease on a gas hog Chevrolet with three recall notices, claiming our military, thick as locust on a carcass, was merely scattered about the world as a global force for Freedom and Justice, as we either razed whole societies or rebuilt them in the image of our whores. Then trained their dictators at our School of the Americas.

The media told us it was the Blacks and the Browns that were responsible for their crack epidemic and so we were right to hate and marginalize them. But they failed to mention it was the CIA who brought the stuff in, in the first place, to fund their covert war in Nicaragua, so they could also secretly sell weapons to our enemy Iran. They told us to fear the "gansta" more than the bankster. Then sold us billions of dollars worth of bling and blather and wrapped it up in saggy pants. Then told us we were right to hate the Blacks because they didn't even know how to dress. They still wag the finger at the Blacks and Browns at all the drugs they supposedly use. Meanwhile the government openly does business with the world's number one opium producing family, Hamid and Ahmed Karzai, meanwhile both parties refuse to address the real source of Mexican drug violence--American demand for Mexican drugs and secret American sales of Mexican drug violence weaponry, also smuggled, but in the other direction.

To keep us from noticing how they bought and sold us, they told us we didn't have enough stuff so they would loan us bonus money to buy more of their bogus stuff. Then they sold off our jobs and told us we were the bad guys for wanting to have more stuff than we could afford. They told us watching Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton, Tara Reid, O. J. Simpson, Liz Taylor, Errol Flynn, etc. self-immolate was more important than joining a cause to stop the rich from raping the workers in Wisconsin, in Idaho, in Indiana, in India, in Indonesia, in search of profit. They told us only they knew how to make us happy and we would only be happy if we let them do as they please with our meaning their economy, without our interfering "legal protections"-- that then they could get so much more accomplished for us, and then we could focus on our true happiness: ourselves. Of course, that kind of happiness could only be purchased if we could just consume more, indulge ourselves more, insist on our inadequacies, obsess on them without actually fixing them. And those kind of comforts could only be purchased at cut-rate prices with someone's sweatshop labor; but we told ourselves we didn't know, as if that justified the fact we didn't care and thus inflicted our own self conflicted wound, again and again and again.

AND, in the due course of human events, they have killed America and we've all helped. Like the dreaded "silent but deadly" cloud of noxious fumes that wordlessly wafts its way through the pews at the Easter Sunday service, we all knew the stink of the rotting of America was rising, but tried not to speak of it. Ignore it and it may go away. But the only way this particular stench is going, is towards getting worse.

You know that famous chart of the hallmarks of fascism by Lawrence Britt? It's this 14 point list of societal traits to determine if your country is headed the way of an Orwellian dystopia except with better TVs and more flavors of Victory Gin. Britt's chart has been around since 2003, been widely republished. It scared Naomi Wolf so much she went and wrote a full length book and even did a cross country series of speeches about it with End of America Tour in 2007?

The list is Britt's compendium of uniformly defining traits of dictatorships and fascism regimes around the world. If you've ever seen it, you should give it another look. If you've never seen it, you should read it now. Here you go:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism, 2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights, 3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause, 4. Supremacy of the Military, 5. Rampant Sexism, 6. Controlled Mass Media, 7. Obsession with National Security, 8. Religion and Government are Intertwined, 9. Corporate Power is Protected, 10. Labor Power is Suppressed, 11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts, 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment, 13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption, 14. Fraudulent Elections.

I hope he's wrong. I sure would like that, but that list looks a lot like the America i see. Even if your vista's not that dark, we all know America is not what it used to be, or what it's supposed to be. I, for one, am afraid of what we are about to become. One thing i know is, this is not America anymore. They've sold it off piece by piece and lie by lie.

AND, in the last ten years, as we've become more brainless thanks to their "Improved De-Education Program"; and weaker, thanks to their "Medical Freedom" efforts; and poorer, thanks to their "Bail-Out for America!" program, as they've persuaded Americans to give up their homes, their children's education and their own opportunities to earn a reasonable wage so the rich could keep more of their capital gains. In the midst of all these crises around the world, CNN recently took the time to do a life style piece about the bumper crop of millionaires America has been growing, now nearly three percent of the population, over eight million people, among the three hundred and eleven million of us are millionaires. And as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the pace of the lies picks up speed. Our will to fight back is eroding. Once upon a time they sold us a losing president and dared us not to call them on it. And no, history students, i am not referring to Jefferson, JQ Adams, Hayes, Truman or Kennedy. You know this story: "sold us the losing president and dared us not to call them on it"? Come on, it's Bush.

In 2000, millions of Americans actually did exactly that: called Bush on his election fraud and got told to stuff it by the Supreme Court's five/four split, meanwhile Republicans saw it as a mandate to foul the country up the way they've always wanted; and, as usual, the Dems rolled over and pretended not to notice. At times a majority of Americans believed that George W. Bush was not the legitimate. On Network TV Jeff Toobin himself declared recounts showed he wasn't. The government didn't act on their citizens complaints. They had some money to make and went about their business.

For awhile those millions protested. And Bush slid in the polls. Then, presto-change-o, 9/11 blew up and we turned the other way. Perhaps that was the moment. Instead of asking about Enron, pressing for recounts or wondering where the two point three trillion dollars disappeared to at the DOD on the eve of 9/11, we worried that the Patriot Act was not strong enough to take away enough of the terrorists' rights for the rest of us to sleep safe at night. Ten years gone on by; America's no safer, and whom, pray tell, qualifies as terrorist in America these days? The same old same old, Brown people and Black people, the same old poor, the same old immigrants still yearning to breathe free of the stench of the crap that gets spewed about them, while the boardrooms of America screw millions.

The next big theft came in '03 when a decorated US Marine and the entire United Nations stood on international TV to tell a bellicose Bushco there were no weapons of mass destruction. Over twenty-five million people protested in cities around world on the same day at the same time, to send a message that everyone on the planet heard, but we Americans. Bush said there were WMDs ... 945 times, in fact, in media statements in that 2 year period that included the run-up and first year of the Iraq War, according to FAIR. They lied, the press gobbled it up, we followed like good little soldiers and, even though we had clearly been told it was unnecessary, even though we insisted we just were there to be a friend to Iraq and just after the one man, Hussein in that case, we murdered millions anyway, squirreled billions away, decimated nations in a matter of days, and desecrated whole cultures several ways, without so much as an "Oops sorry," we ran roughshod over others' economies and civil rights world round, then wondered why they hate us for our freedom.

And so, we let another lie go by, and it brought us further down. And the momentum started to grow.

In 2006 the Dems took a break from their otherwise consistent ineptitude and somehow successfully campaigned that they would save the world from the evil Bush, and, upon election, immediately took impeachment off the table. Then they continued to cooperate with his agenda, and wonder why Americans don't trust them. Then once again when he was out of office and totally prosecutable there was no accounting for the mayhem Bush's mischief created, neither by his fellow GOP, if there had happened to be any of them left with any sort of principle, nor by the Dems, who never claimed to burden themselves with such things anyway. So, we let them get away with it again. But in 2008 when Obama claimed to be "Change in a Bucket," we leaped after that pie in the sky and he spit in our eye and he turned out to continue to be more of the same status quo.

Stop me if you've heard this one: Republican president with questionable re-election prospects. No, i don't mean McKinley, though good guess. Not Bush I or Bush II. Come on, Republican president. You know it's Obama. Think Obama's not a Republican? Tax cuts for the rich, cuts social services, leaves public to be evicted, won't prosecute Bush. Sounds Republican to me. Oh wait, that isn't that funny is it?

And the lies just kept coming. when Bush first said, we have to give banks trillions, America screamed no. It was amazing, it seems like we still cared enough to care. But the next day the banksters and their Congressmen friends went on with their business anyway, and passed their own law for their own selves, took our trillions, and again we let them get away with it. And then in 2009 they ramped up the fraudulent eviction machine, using our tax payer money to do and to award themselves more bonuses because of all the business they were doing. We could have still complained about it then. But by that point we didn't know how. By this point Americans were a little sickened and a little weakened from fighting the machine. They say, and on pretty good authority, that crime continues to go down. Not wanting to be one who champions criminality, but i'd say that trend correlates with our crumbling will to live.

What sparks of life that may be left in us, they are already working on crushing or controlling. In Missouri they're eliminating child labor laws. In Minnesota, they're making it illegal for poor people to have cash. In Nebraska, they're making it legal to kill a doctor if you suspect he might do an abortion on a member of your family. And in New York, known IRA collaborator, Peter King is trying to declare a certain religion an Un-American Activity. Some schools are proposing cutting history, the GOP is cutting PBS & NPR because they call them on their BS BS. The public does not need their health or education, the public doesn't need art or intelligence nearly as much as the rich need their tax cuts. Meanwhile Democrats are now such surrender-monkeys the French make jokes about them.

Like Andrei Cherny, here in AZ, at a time when Dems need to be as cunning and united as ever, turns out he's conspiring to destroy his own party from within by cutting the funding and central office support for county offices, the offices that most need party support because they're fighting the longest odds. Cherny may be running on a Democrat name, but his GOP style top down organization and slashing of budgets makes one wonder. Sucking dry funding for the 15 county plan he campaigned on to fill the coffers of the "Kingdom of Maricopa," Cherny's plan to hold back this year's funds for next year's election cycle will probably atrophy the party to the point there won't be a county level apparatus left to spend the money later.

Is this America? Is this what we're left with?

Do understand, i'm not saying that long ago and far away, there actually was once some bright shining believe-in-able America. Actually i expect that all along the term has simply served as a red meat label slapped on a can of churning worms. I don't know what actually was, or if that kind of America ever was, but if it once was, it's not now. We do not live in that America anymore.

So, if we are no longer "America," which emblem are we now?

Not Japan. Yes, the world is shifting under our feet with a force we've never known, and the blowback of our domestic and foreign disasters are washing us away. America's facing grave disasters (even Time Magazine has a cover story on our coming collapse), but we are no Japan, even though their radiation is now lighting up our west coast in this latest incident of private industrial pollution imperiling the lives of billions and endangering whole oceans of ecosystems. Massey Coalmine disaster, BP, now this; we're like a junkie getting messy with his drugs. As we brace ourselves for our own impending of disasters, we only wish we were as well off a society as Japan was. They had a government that has built its infrastructure, and a belief that society exists to be respectful to each other--to act civilly, respectfully in times of crisis. But they were also somewhat like America, their society and its marketing machine gleamed with the latest consumer trifle, repeatedly their top political officials went down in scandal and, as an economy, they're engaged in capitalist questing has led to some imperiling behaviors. Also, you can't trust the corporate directed media or the corporate owned politicians refuse to deliver facts, without airbrushing or mislaying them first.

Perhaps we are about to become Yugoslavia--hyper-inflated, balkanized, with the prospect of ethnic cleansing as the Tea Party platform of the GOP returns our republic to a Confederacy of Dunces. Remember that right up there with the whole "no taxes" thing, another top Tea Party slogan goes, "Buy your bullets now, Are we to be Burma, Nigeria, Congo, Russia? Oh wait, we are already run by gangsters. In that same Time article we learned once more as a nation we have dropped from 1st in 2006 to 10th in 2010 and that's just on the prosperity chart. On life expectancy, education and medical care we are farther down the scale devolving into a futile set of states as feudal as they get, where 400 families control more than one hundred and fifty eight million of the rest of us combined. We've had a trade deficit for over a decade and our number one export is weapons and number three is our garbage. No matter what our leaders say about exporting democracy, if the rights to it can't be purchased away by multinationals, America's not buying it. Perhaps Yugoslavia, perhaps Weimar Republic.

Are we more like Egypt where the kleptocrats abscond with billions as the state run media mischaracterize the situation to the point of laugh-ability? Where they blame Muslim extremists and outside agitators for the fact that the government's own corruption is bringing it down. Where rightwing thugs beat protestors. But where in the end, the dictator falls. Bush and Obama aren't the same dictator, but they work for the same people, the billionaires who make it by taking pennies a piece for the miseries they make. Are we to resist? Is there still room for that? If hundreds of thousands of us gathered in protest, if we swelled like a sea around our leaders, would we have our "Arab Spring," or body bags.

Are we Libya yet? Does the dictator kill us all to further itself, to destroy our village to save its territory? Does the media lie to us endlessly. Does our Nobel Prize winning president have the audacity to explain the justness of his actions as he sends new soldiers to destroy the children of new nations.

Is this America?

Are we Libya, yet?

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Current Comedy, 12.23.10: The Millionaires 'Club

2010-12-23T16:20:00.001-08:00

Happy Holidays Everyone! Look, i've brought you a present:

For your consideration, it's ... "YOUR Major American Scandals in Chronological AND Alphabetical Order [the Wikileaks-style edit]!"

OK, it's not really in perfect alphabetical, or chronological, order for that matter, but it does go from A--

--American Revolutionary Soldiers' Pay, Shay's Rebellion, the 3/5th Compromise, Sally Hemming, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Election of 1824, the Spoils System, the Trail of Tears, the Panic of 1837, Manifest Destiny, "54 Forty or Fight," that "Little Texas Border Dispute" 1846-1848, the Glanton Gang, the Know Nothings, Slave Codes, Dred Scott, James Buchanan's complete political career, Bleeding Kansas, CSA, Martial Law at the Maryland Statehouse, Andersonville Prison, the Conspiracy Behind John Wilkes Booth, the Johnson Impeachment, Credit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring, the KKK, Black Codes, the Election of 1876, Boss Tweed, Union-Pacific, Standard Oil Trust, Haymarket Square, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, the entire military career of Phillip Sheridan, or William Tecumseh Sherman, Indian Schools, the Oregon Land Fraud Scheme, Open Range, the Oklahoma Land Theft more genteelly laughed off as "those Silly Sooners-guffaw," the Chinese Exclusion Act, Plessey V Ferguson, the "Annexation" of Hawaii, the USS Maine, our Philippines "Stewardship," Food Poisoning of Army Rations in Spanish-American War, the Leadville Strike, the Tacoma Massacre, Joe Hill, Eugene V. Debs, the Sedition Act of 1918, Prohibition, the Red Scare, Warren G Harding, Teapot Dome, Sacco & Vanzetti, Prescott Bush, "The Crash," the Bonus Army Riots, the Tuskegee Experiment and its Guatemalan cousin, our overall Guatemalan/Central American "policies" in general, Executive Order 9066, the Dresden Bombing, the Nazi NASA, Arbenz, Mosaddegh, the Bracero Program, Strange Fruit, Downwinders, George Wallace, Joe McCarthy, Lunch Counter Strike (or just name your major southern city in any time in any century), the Election of 1960, JFK-RFK-MLK, Gulf of Tokin, every breathing moment of Richard Nixon, Agent Orange, Ear-Necklaces, Cambodia, Laos, Air America, Co-Intel-Pro, Operation Northwoods, Watergate, Salvador Allende, Chappaquiddick, SOA, Karen Silkwood, S&Ls, Iran-Contra, David Dukes, Ab-Scam, Diablo Canyon, the Lockheed Bribery "Deal of the Century," White Water, Mina, Arkansas Airport, the Run-Up to Iraq I, DU, Gulf War Syndrome Cover-up, the Keating Five, Hinckley, CA, George Ryan's Trucker's License Bribery Deal, Election of 2000, Enron, WTC7, the Run-Up to Iraq II, Scott Ritter and Hans Blix, WMDs, the various times missing billions of dollars have been "lost" in Iraq, Katrina & the Army Corps of Engineers cover-ups, Karzai the Opium merchant, Pat Tillman, Terri Schiavo, Patriot Act, Bridge to Nowhere, all the way from A (Abu Ghraib) --

-- to Xe.

There you go. You like your present? I really could just go on and on, couldn't i? All this annoying, not-nice history. And that's just the list i could think of. Bring out your own dead. The closer you look, the more there is to see. Our government has often betrayed us and ignored the people's attempts to make it behave. In fact, it's happened so often it IS the routine. How icky, how unpleasant. It is easier to simply dream of an "America that is always right and just and good," without all that ugly history stuff getting in the way. What's a slacker to do?

Luckily, the Millionaire's Club is here to help. You poor peons shouldn't have to think about this kind of thing. Just go sit in your boxes made of ticky-tacky, turn on the Idiocracy Channel, "stare at 'Funbags' there and enjoy your Brawndo. It's got the electrolytes that your body craves!"

Don't worry, be happy. Ignorance is Bliss. And Strength too, for that matter.

And, of course, once they have killed Julian Assange, that wicked Wikileaker, you will never have to hear of these unpleasant, icky, downright Un-American American historical embarrassments again. That whole Orwell thing about "who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present now, controls the past"? It wasn't just a cool line co-opted for a Rage Against the Machine song; it was very much a notice of the kind of universal memory a public can be willing to sacrifice in favor of the comfort of illusions and how rapidly that public can sell that memory for a pitiful portion of porridge when they think they need to, to keep the Millionaires' Club happy.

As we, the people, consider joining in the public burning of the heretic Assange, and contributing our anger to the international war on the very inconvenient truths Wikileaks exposes, let's take a second to consider who and what it is we are actually destroying.

WWJC, indeed? ("Who Would Jesus Crucify?")

That's right, that's what it's come down to dear readers, members among the powers-that-be are calling for you to call for the death and destruction of the kind of people who remind us of our leaders' failures to live up to the same ideals they force us to espouse ad nauseam. The 21st Century Pharisees and Sadducees are calling for us all to stone the prophet, sacrifice him to protect our ignorance, and on cue we blindly fling our fistful of gravel at the straw-man Assange, and join in the call to silence the truth.

The truth is, folks, America-as-we-know-it depends on and defends some ugly, ugly secrets. And until we change that, we can't possibly achieve America-as-we-dream-it. Don't get me wrong. I love America, but, like any other lover of any self-destructive sometimes suicidal sweetheart, I accept that sometimes, even the love of your life, sometimes, does the wrong thing, sometimes mistakenly and sometimes on purpose and, when you realize it, that love, be it spouse, or child, or country, that love has to be snapped back to its senses. You have to work to change it, and that work is your show of your love.

I admire the American Spirit. We are a people and a mythos of amazing accomplishment and it has led to the fantasy of universal great wealth. Oh there is great wealth all right. There's supposedly something like fourteen trillion dollars in GDP. But it's not for us consumers; we actually owe something on the scale of sixteen trillion in personal debt. Who do we owe it to? Well, the richest 5% own like 90% of everything, so we probably owe it right back to them.

How did that happen? We let them set it up this way. See our government, our rich, and our racists, usually in the same room, have done crooked things to us and been inhumane to the rest of the world for forever, and they've never really wanted us to pay too much attention to their follies. In the meantime, our citizens have done shameful things to each other since Day One as well. This is our history, a room littered with corpses, one wonders why we allow the facade that each new outrage is to be treated as an anomaly.

Yep, that's our history from A-Z, a history of disgrace, starting with our own most important heroes, the American Revolutionary War Soldiers. That's right, never forget, we're a country that started out not paying the soldiers who fought in our own national battle for independence. Volunteers who risked everything, many who lost everything, average citizens of uncommon valor and endurance, fighting our battles to gain our own nationhood as a republic of free slave-owning men, and as soon as that war was over, and we'd won our war to be free to own slaves, we betrayed those very soldiers who fought it for us.

Tough break, couldn't pay 'em, well, wouldn't anyway, at any rate, we didn't pay them in the end. Sent 'em packing, better luck next time. Know why? Folks didn't want to pay the taxes. That's right, the Articles of Confederation Government said they felt they already had too much debt and didn't want to raise taxes. So our first founding fathers screwed over our very own revolutionary army and then told everyone it was all going to be all right and everyone would behave from now on. And you can see how it's gone since then. You may have noticed the fairly long paragraph above.

Here's the truth: If you REALLY want to go back in the day, to a time when man was truly "free,'" you'd have to go back before agriculture, and even before organized hunting and gathering clans, back to a time when man was truly wild and purely free for sure, but often hungry, cold and miserable most of the time. Yes, even "freedom" has its limits, and as Hobbes once pointed out, life before organized social/governmental structures was "solitary, brutish and short." So mankind had to allow himself to be tamed in exchange for daily bread. And since that day, the ones who own the bread, own the rules.

If you were to accurately consider the timeline of the human historical period (about 5000BCE to present, say 7000 years of "civilized" history), about 90% of all the people who ever lived, lived in a society where the few powerful (the kings, the priests, the rich), have ridden the rest of us like serfs. Whatever the excuse used--glory, gold, or god--a ruling elite have been a given throughout history, despite the idea of rugged American Individualism.

Which is not to say that America is not a place where many can float through life and a few can make it beyond their wildest dreams, frequently by screwing someone else over. Remember that the richest one percent equals over three million people and that that richest 5% make a multitude the size of New York. And for much of the 20th Century, the rich and powerful in America kept their unspoken social contract with the public of America. There was plenty of bread; there were plenty of circuses.

Then the concept of constraint on business began to erode around Reagan's time and the plutocracy, no longer satisfied with mere hyperbolic wealth, began lusting for the astronomical. Forget the billions we hear about that Wall Street gives themselves as seasonal treats. That's a pittance next to the long green they're really riding. At a time when the total personal assets are a mere fifty-four trillion and the total US debt is over fifty-five trillion, the plutocracy has us leveraged in currency and credit derivatives to the tune of over five hundred and seventy six trillion. Yes, i am using the "t" word.

You only use numbers like that to measure galaxies, not GPDs, especially not when one out of every four kids is surviving on free school food. But this is the pass we have come to. The rich are no longer thinking of money in terms as an actual thing, but more as ideas of numbers that require scientific notations. The only way actual humans experience such a monetary scale is during periods of Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation where it's cheaper to burn money than to buy firewood, or in early1990s Yugoslavia, when the entire country blew apart.

Neither of those are a place or a time i hope to have my country taken back to; but as the plutocracy that runs this world is getting hungrier and feeling that old time religion, we are reverting to an aristocracy and a serfdom right before our very eyes. Through my life i have watched this menace grow, but the news lately cries out the truth as never before. This last couple of weeks have been overwhelming. Just like the corporatist nightmare future of every sci-fi dystopia, the rich are currently seizing their power with the Congress they just purchased for the task.

It's up to us to let them get away with it or not.

The recent Republican landslide will be a test to see how many 21st Century Americans are actually ready to party that hearty when we're talking Tea Party style, as in like it's 1773. First, as i noted in an earlier column, through recent speeches and campaign party platforms, it seems the true goals of the Tea Party movement aren't just some open ended "Take America Back" to some unspecified place and time, but to specifically take American governmental operations and social norms back to the ideas of the failed Articles of Confederation. You know, no national taxes, no governmental restraint of business practices, and state sovereignty over federal preeminence.

We all know how well that worked: it didn't. We scrapped it within six years.

The new idea was supposed to reach beyond the dog-eat-dog hierarchy and form a society based on establishing the kind of justice that both insures domestic tranquility and secures liberty, all the while providing for the common defense. It was an amazing goal, a wonderful myth. The idea of committing a government, on paper anyway, to "[promoting] the general welfare" was somewhat novel in 1787 among world governments.

If only we had had any actual intentions of keeping our word. It's always been a battle to deal with the reality of the rich and powerful running everyone's lives. And their partners in crime, our government has lied to us continuously and brazenly and then indignantly when we realized to dispute. From the beginning the government was not designed for the empowerment of the people. No matter what sham "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" -type America cartoons like Rush and Beck bleat and bray about, the initial American concept of "universal suffrage" actually only extended to about 8% of the population. As the history books so delicately phrase it, "Native Americans, African Americans and women were not considered part of the political process, so they were not included."

Neither, btw, were poor people include in the decisions in their government. Property rights were necessary for enfranchisement up till the 1820s, and the 1st presidential election the poor could and did vote en masse was in 1824. When the poor then voted in Andrew Jackson, a former poor orphan, though Jackson got more votes, a Washington backroom deal gave the presidency to the son of a former president, in that case John Quincy Adams.

Now, as the newly elected crop of GOP cranks prepare to take office, Judson Phillips, the president of Tea Party Nation, is calling for a return to property rights as a valid criteria for being qualified to vote. If you ever wanted for proof the Tea Party's idea of "way back when" involved servants and masters, look no further. Remember the "we the people" who were supposed all created equal actually referred only to White male taxpaying property owners, who had also signed their respective state's religious oaths of church loyalty. Keep in mind that despite the supposed freedom of and/or from religion written right into Article Six (1787) and the First Amendment (1791), religious oaths were common till about 1810.

Another old school idea currently being floated by the right is that those who don't pay federal income taxes should not be allowed to vote either. Not just those who refuse to file a return altogether, but even any law abiding citizens whose wages fall so low they owe nothing on the federal form would be summarily disenfranchised. I guess, according to Millionaires' Club rules, in the ultimate free market even your vote could bought and sold just like that. If the whole country is a seller's market, will anything ever be free?

And there is definite cause to worry as our reins of power shift hands from the do-little Democrats to these marketers of the Millionaires' Club. To be fair, there never has honestly been any pretext that the Congress of our country were truly the people's people. Sure, throughout the past they were always just the ones we were told we were picking, but now, more than ever before, those who buy their way into the statehouse then use that power to ensure the rich stay rich. As Bernie Sanders laid out in recent speeches before Congress, 80% of all the new money that has come into the system in the last 40 years has gone to the wealthiest 1% of the people. Right now about 12 cents out of every dollar goes to the richest one tenth of one percent. We are a nation that has 400 billionaires, at the same time one in seven Americans survives because of food stamps.

We will see how much they think they can get away with. Here in AZ, my not-so-lovey-dovey govey, Jan the Bruja, is already sharpening up her scalpel to lash away enough social services in the midst of her stalled economy to allow her to afford the lifestyle to which she's personally become accustomed, and, to continue to cut rich people's taxes in the upcoming budget. Jan is committed to making tax cuts a part of a working budget, even if she has amputate the state medical program that assists with organ transplants to do it. Which she has in fact now done, saying it's just too expensive to keep people alive when millionaires are needing their tax cut. Note the logic: taxes for the wealthy = necessary, life saving medical procedure for the average folk = unnecessary. You run along and die now poor person; soon you may not even be able to vote about it.

Then there came the belittlement of the meeting between Obama and Congressional GOP leaders. Not the part where the media dismissively tagged the critical event as the "Slurpee Summit;" but the following day when the 42 GOP good old boys from the US Senate sent their letter to the president promising to stall any and all legislation until they'd gotten their tax cut for the wealthy, even emergency health care for 9/11 1st Responders, i felt the gauntlet had been tossed. The rich will take care of the rich 1st or we won't take care of you at all.

Unemployment for millions did not matter at all unless the richest were guaranteed their right to send the government further in debt. And who were "our" politicians, sent to represent US, but instead were voting to do this for us/to us? They're the rich of course. And whom did Obama obediently bowed down to, to be allowed to afford to send out 13 more months of bread for the poor people to go with their circuses, and possibly even enough to afford a couple of extra lumps of coal for the old Christmas stocking.

"T'is the season to sing hymns of praise. Praise the rich, their kindness and mercy! We now resume with our regularly scheduled programming." Is that really what America looks like these days?

How many Assanges will we have to kill to hide those untidy facts? Are you still so sure to take up stones against the man, when he's merely revealing the fact that it is the machine that is trying to destroy you? And so dear readers, ponder this as you fondle your chunk of coal and wonder where the money went: History is like "Net Neutrality," or justice for that matter. If it doesn't matter enough to you to take care of it, then those nice folks who work for that nice old Millionaires' Club can always take it away from you ... if you'd like to let them.

They've done such wonderful work for us in the past. Of course we can trust them again, can't we? Aren't you glad to let your future rest in their hands? We are about to have a new year, that's for sure. Hope it's a present we want to be opening.

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Ode to Assange (a poem)

2010-12-11T09:27:00.000-08:00

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury,

in this court of public opinion,

before the execution is completed

and we close our eyes forever to secrets

for your consideration,

"IT'S YOUR American Scandals in Chronological and Alphabetical Order!"

Well at least from A--

--American Revolutionary Soldiers' Pay, Shay's Rebellion, 3/5th Compromise, Sally Hemming, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Election of 1824, Spoils System, Trail of Tears, Panic of 1837, "54 Forty or Fight," "Little Texas Border Dispute" 1846-1848, Glanton Gang, Know Nothings, Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, CSA, Martial Law at the Maryland Statehouse, the Conspiracy behind John Wilkes Booth, the Johnson Impeachment, Credit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring, KKK, the Election of 1876, Boss Tweed, Union-Pacific Railroad, Standard Oil Trust, Haymarket Square, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, the entire military career of Phillip Sheridan, Indian Schools, the Oregon Land Fraud Scheme, Oklahoma Land Theft, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Plessey V Ferguson, "Annexation" of Hawaii, the USS Maine, Philippines "Stewardship," Food Poisoning in Army Rations during the Spanish-American War, the Tacoma Massacre, Joe Hill, Sedition Act of 1918, Prohibition, Red Scare, Teapot Dome, Sacco & Vanzetti, Prescott Bush, Bonus Army Riots, Tuskegee Experiment and its Guatemalan cousin, Executive Order 9066, Dresden Bombing, the Nazi NASA, Arbenz, Mosaddegh, the Bracero Program, Strange Fruit, Downwinders, Joe McCarthy, Election of 1960, JFK-RFK-MLK, Gulf of Tokin, every breathing moment of Richard Nixon, Agent Orange, Ear-necklaces, Cambodia, Air America, Co-Intel-Pro, Operation Northwoods, Watergate, Salvador Allende, Chappaquiddick, SOA, Karen Silkwood, S&Ls, Iran-Contra, Abscam, Diablo Canyon, Lockheed Bribery's "Deal of the Century," Mina, Arkansas Airport, DU, Gulf War Syndrome Cover-up, the Keating Five, Hinckley, CA, Election of 2000, Enron, WTC7, Patriot Act, Scott Ritter and Hans Blix, WMDs, the various times billions of dollars have been "lost" in Iraq, Katrina Levee Cover-up, Karzai the Opium Merchant, Pat Tillman, I say from A, Abu Ghraib, to Xe.

Now bring out your own dead and then tell me again

Why we should trust them.

I rest my case.

12/11/10

Current Comedy, 11/27/10:"The Things We Do as Democrats"

2010-11-27T17:06:00.000-08:00

It was such a jaw-droppingly ironic sign of things to come, the sign i saw that morning, that i had to reach for my camera. I mean, literally, it was a sign at the top of the escalator, directing traffic to the various meeting rooms on the second floor of the Wyndham Hotel Saturday Nov. 20th. It was the kind of thing that made people visibly and even audibly respond when it caught and held their eye. You want a symbol? Well, here's your sign. Almost everybody spotted it, almost everyone winced. Some laughed. Some cursed. Buddies pointed and interrupted each other to draw attention to it. Some shook their heads as if exhaling a fly. I took this picture.

Like many others, I had come, as a Democrat to downtown Phoenix seeking to assemble with other Democrats, wandering if we were still welcome in the capitol city. I felt lost. We had lost, in a great-big, major way. It sucked, i wanted a new plan. I'd come to the Wyndham to find it. This hotel was supposed to play host to what was supposed to be the first post-election state-wide meeting of the party and there wasn't a donkey in sight.

I was there as myself of course, but also, as my wife's, Beth Weisser's, representative at the consolation-fest she would surely be in for as a recently defeated state senate candidate. The AEA had scheduled a training day the same day. We are both members of both and had to split forces to cover the bases, and sift through the clichés. Beth drew the short straw and i was off on an adventure.

As myself, i was there as an "elected precinct committeeman," which is, i guess, one tad better than being an "elected nothing," but i was still a novice, a babe in the woods, despite something like being a 6 year semi-active member of the actual party, as opposed to someone who simply votes Democrat based on the TV ads or some much. While working as a Democrat wasn't often a central part of my life, come election time, and especially since my wife candidacy, i gleefully put up some signs, pass out some flyers. I drink a lot of coffee while a wide variety of people explain to me exactly what the problem is. You know, good times; it's a party.

But then i am also this annoying self-supposed would-be journalist-type, a supposed jokester who skews Dems as freely as the GOP when desperate for easy targets. It is an odd role to play, being the kind of guy who would probably write a column like this, about a meeting like that with a sense of minor, but gleeful, mischief. Anyway, in any of those various roles that play the player, i was mostly there to ask, 'what the ____ just happened? '

"Shellacking." It is such an active verb, Mr. President.

As you may recall that was Obama's morning-after descriptor of choice for the defeat dealt the Democrats in this just past election. To be properly "shellacked," one is not "merely" or even "summarily" defeated. No. One must be brought down, killed, and subsequently disemboweled, immersed in acids, stuffed like a beaver, and THEN painted, varnished in fact with the shell secretions from lac beetles. That's right doused in beetle juice. It's the same yummy flavor all candy lovers crave on the shells of their shiny M&Ms, though there known as "confectioner's glaze." It's the kind of term use to describe what you would do with a roughly worn relic that was looking a little worse for wear. As in:

("Should we throw this here ol' stuffed iguana? It's lookin' a might bit scruffy about the elbows."

"Naw, just give it another shellacking.")

See? That what it means to get a good "shellacking," Mr. Obama. And i admit, that that was a fairly apt description of the appearances of many of my Dem colleagues that morning at the Wyndham. Like so many Dems there that day, i was still a little sore from my election-day shellacking and i was looking the restart button, hoping for some recantation-style postgame color done by penitent Dem leadership sans the spin cycle; and, more importantly, some quick pointers on how the rest of us were going to save our state from the hillbilly Gestapo Fox News had just put in charge of us.

I further went with the attitude that the Blue Dog Dems brought this turn upon us all and had a lot of explaining to do. The success of the Tea Party emblem for the GOP showed that Dems needed to differentiate from not assimilate with the GOP leaning segment of the voters. Yes, i am prepared to say it is the move to the right that has destroyed the Democrats, a move away from the public's and the party's best interests.

Twice in recent elections the Dems had first sold, then sold out the message they'd campaigned on, squandering American goodwill and momentum in support of them. The public has every right to be wary. As Jon Stewart quipped to Barack Obama, "It's like they're campaigning on 'Come on, Baby, give me one more chance." In 2006, Dems claimed they were rising up against the Bush regime and rallied the country and then, upon being swept into office on national good will for their message, they just basically became members of the Bush power-structure for the last two years of his presidency. Though Dems "controlled" Congress, between bluster and signing statements, Bush still wrote or rewrote government to his liking, consistently got military funding, torturer approval, and legislative endorsements for his Wall Street bail-out schemes.

Then in the face of the Bush economic crisis, America hired the opposition, the Dems to the rescue, to sort it all out and make the mess right, right? And instead, banks continued to get billions in bail-outs while millions are thrown out of their houses by these every same banks with no way to fight back, even after it is plainly shown that multitudes of these evictions are frauds. The fabled Stimulus package gets hollowed out to where it won't achieve much more than the ability to be stuck with a GOP label as an excess spending talking point.

Then there's a whole other massive expense of energy and goodwill on a health care reform that in the end ... ran the same course, dribbling down from mighty message to mealy mouth gesture, selling out the same people it claimed it was helping, following a tri-cornered hat waved around by a PR firm, all to keep powerful health and insurance interests entrenched and train a public to work against their own best interests, by fighting in the streets against universal healthcare.

And now those Tea Party people were going to be running my state? I needed some inspiration. So i wandered through the well-appointed lobby, looking for likeminded Donkey-lovers, searching for some sign it was all going to be all right. With no sign of a sign in sight. That's right, and when i asked for directions, it sounded something like 'over the river and through the woods.' All the length of the lobby and up the escalator there was no further sign of Democrat direction. As if we were hidden from the general public.

Finally up an escalator and just as you got sight of the second floor, the one and only sign of Democrats in the house came into view. It read:

Schizophrenia

Building Awareness

Advancing Understanding

[and the room name in smaller print]

AZ Democratic Party

State Committee Meeting

[and the room name in smaller print]

AZ Democratic Party

Breakout Sessions

[and so on]

Seriously, i wasn't there to play hall monitor, but i got in a little early, like several other out-of-towners, so i had some time to observe. Few of the people i saw come off that escalator got past that sign without some sort of reaction. And i had about an hour's time that morning lounging on the second floor luxury lobby furniture, to gauge the degree of irony appreciation in each escalator riders' registry as they saw the sign.

I spent some of that time with Rudy Clark, long-time Native American activist and lobbyist, and a retired teacher. He came down from Peach Springs this morning, but had done some time in the trenches in DC. He warned right now the Democrats look weak and frightened, "pushed into a corner, heading for failure." And Clark wondered why all state and national Democratic leadership allowed that characterization of Democrats to happen and become lodged in the public mind. He also wondered why the Republican party and in particular the Supreme court "had lost their minds, offering the extremely wealthy people even more advantage."

Statewide Clark, himself, felt a bit shellacked over victories by pro-SB1070 candidates. "I keep hoping Joe Arpaio will have something to do to take him to our reservation and then I'll ask him where are his papers and what's he doing in MY country?" Clark quipped.

Just before joining the crowd flooding into the main meeting hall, we caught up with the Safford contingent of Democratic activists. Jay Rasco took a second to explain what he saw as the upcoming GOP agenda: "If you keep the working man down, nose to the grindstone, everyday, nose to the grindstone just to keep up, and make sure they have lots of kids and have lots of bills, then they'll be too busy to rock the boat. That's what the GOP has in mind for us."

At a time when the "Party of Change" could be saddled so easily as the party of status quo the Dems had obviously lost track of their message. I was hoping to bring them back to their sense. But you know what they say, the first step to fixing a problem is being willing to admit that you have a problem in the first place; and the Dem hierarchy there that day were all as happy as campers, despite the fact we were all still drippy with beetle juice. Vince Rabago's campaign chairman, Gilberto Zaragoza, for example was a happy camper with party's campaign effort this year. "Everything went well," he concluded. "We did everything we could." Except win, of course.

Despite the fact that the long-standing and wide spread nickname for her organization within the Democratic Party is mockingly referred to as the "uncoordinated campaign," Michelle Davidson, the coordinator of the party's "Coordinated Campaign," was shockingly proud of her efforts as well; and could and did substantiate her claims of actively running an extensive campaign, through numerous charts of various grafts ... though polling had shown that by May of '10 the public's goodwill for Dems had decidedly dwindled. Considering all the robo-calls that were made, the pieces of campaign literature created and distributed, and the personal connections pretended, and, all of it duly documented on the big screen PowerPoint presentation, Davidson's campaign had indeed stayed busy, fiddling away as the whole titanic enterprise sank beneath waves of GOP voter resentments.

Recent shellacked Mesa state representative candidate, Mike Conway, thought of the backlash he was already seeing, and said bitterly, "I am already sick of hearing about 'Obama-care.' I mean come on, at least the Democrats do care!"

Conway elaborated, "Look, i did better than some of the targeted candidates. If the targeted candidates did this badly, the ones who got additional funding and support, if they did this badly, then what does that say about the effectiveness of state party efforts, no matter what their expense of energy?"

If the Arizona Democratic Party leadership was aware of this widespread dissension, they were in emphatic denial. For the first 1/2 hour of their presentation it seemed possible no one had told these assembled experts the results of the election. They were very busy talking about their success in fundraising and the challenge of logistics and how good they had done as if losing by 20% or so was a fine race run.

Unfortunately if the rank-in-file were there to get a display of what party higher-ups cared about, it was obviously still money, to the point of being oblivious about almost all else. As state party chair Don Bivens gushed ecstatically, "We raised the money we wanted and spent it the way we wanted to."

The roster of morning speakers were likewise money minded. Bivens set the tone for treasurer and others who focused on the success the party had had in fund-raising. True early on in the election cycle the fundraising for Democrats versus Republicans, both nationally and to a degree in AZ showed that Dems while anemic were more robust than the Republican party. In fact in 2009, prior to the Citizens United case, the Republican party was supposedly on the fundraising ropes.

The first person to move past applauding effort expended and openly acknowledge the actual vote count was state treasurer candidate, Andrei Cherny, "We had an unmitigated disaster and there are people all over the state who don't even realize the consequences that will devastate their lives for years to come." It roused the most vocal applause all morning.

On the floor the party leadership spent as much of that morning's energy as they could get away with by blaming Obama. Over-all the talking points that morning were AZ racists love SB 1070 and Obama let us all down. And then there was that most predictable of mechanisms, the backlash of midterms. Yet we had our best year ever ... except for that losing part. One of the more comic unintentional ironies was when a presenter noted, "We had more data than ever and better data than ever. So we made a huge investment in data collection and it came out to tell us exactly what we expected all along: 65% of the GOP showed up to vote, only 55% of Democrats," and thus we lost. A spokeswoman for the Goddard campaign added, "As Democrats, we see ourselves as a party of intellect. The GOP present themselves as a party of emotion and the emotion they build on most is fear."

When the floor opened up to Q&A, i was offered a chance to frame a question for the panel and scrambled through a series of near misses, such as: "Nationally the pundit class is claiming the message of this election is that Republican ideas should rule. How are Democrats to take this?" Or, "Nationally this race showed that the plutocrats can in most cases buy the candidate of their choosing. The big corporate money went to the GOP slate of ideas. Are we, as a country, fated to that kind of existence, to be bought and sold by such hateful ideas."

OR, "The division is clearly between money and people, in this next election, does the Democratic party intend to work for the money or work for the people?" or rephrased, "Let's be honest about the moral of the Citizens United Supreme Court case decision. This election showed the plutocrats can buy the elections that they want. Their message was clearly hate, fear, and division. This meeting has talked about money quite a bit already. Does the Democratic Party in AZ intend to work for the money or work for the people?"

In the end i chose to rephrase my Goddard question from earlier articles: "The GOP works closely with the Tea Party. The move showed to be a success. How does the Democratic Party intend to try to rebuild their connections with the liberals and progressives who typically energize a party and whom the Dem party turned their backs on this election?"

But dear reader you're going to have to satisfy yourself with your own answers to those queries because in the end my question wasn't taken and we were all sent scurrying for a quick lunch.

Returning, i noticed the sounds of a street musician across the hotel's main entrance. I dug out some change and said, "So, there's a political convention going on over there," and i pointed to the hotel. "Yeah?" he seems unimpressed. "Getting much?" my pocket change clanked in his hands. "Not much." "No surprise," i said. "No surprise," he echoed behind me.

When i got inside the first person i spoke to was this wise Indian woman, a Hindi Indian, woman, at the LGBT Rainbow Caucus, in a discussion of recruiting candidates. She was inspired and explained, "If you don't have to worry about winning then you can be more fearless with your message." I hoped to let that be a guide for me for the afternoon sessions.

Torn between my wife's favorite, the Federated Democratic Women, and the LGBT Rainbow Caucus, i decided to split my time with both, but first chatted up Phil Hettmansperger and District 4's Ken LaKind about the need of Democrats challengers in all races in all districts. Hettmansperger had been a recurring state candidate.

In the course of conversation, LaKind hoped i would delineate for him and his neighbor an explanation of the banking scandal and why both GOP and not just Dems, like Dodd, were culpable. The neighbor, on a rightwing news diet, believed that the Democratic Party was consistently at fault for Wall Street deregulation because of Clinton era deregulations, in particular the partial repeal of Glass-Steagall. But as the powerful, but under-heard video "I'm not Voting Republican Because I Have a Memory," dutifully documents, it's actually the GOP who have been in power through every major banking scandal in the last century.

The 1999 reversal of Glass Steagall was orchestrated by three Republicans, Gramm, Leach and Bliley, not Clinton, in a time when the Republican Whitewater lynch mob ran the Congressional show. Next, just as his brother, Neil, had dabbled in the Silverado Saving & Loan Scandal decades earlier on daddy's watch, George W Bush backed banks bilking the public again and again, until they had leveraged the whole apparatus to fall over on itself; and then, instead of taking the lumps, they pushed to have the public bail them out, to keep them in business so those very same banks could then throw us all out in the street. And then post it as their record profits and use them to pay GOP record corporate donations.

The impact of those donation dollars was plain to see on the faces in any of the caucus breakout sessions i attended that day. Finally i ducked into the Women's caucus. The sweet gray haired ladies who had spotted the promise of my dear sweet wife, Beth Weisser, and who had then paid the expenses to send her to the women's candidate training program, Emerge Arizona, were still there and still as earnest as ever. It made one feel proud to see such a collection of the heritage of Democratic women had in Arizona, including friends and acquaintances of former Dem governors Rose Mofford, '88- 91, and Janet Napolitano, '03-09. I mean the original little old ladies were still there, still running the meetings, now a little older than ever.

The ladies talked about a cookbook they had going as a fundraiser. They talked about some resort time they could sort-of raffle off. And then there was a fine-looking paperback edition of the collection of quotations by extraordinary women edited longtime AZ Dem powerhouse Ms. Carolyn Warner. She spoke of coming back from DC after the election and riding with both McCain and Harry Mitchell.

About that point i asked AZ Dem Party State Secretary, Brittni Storrs, her take on the average age of the people in the fairly filled room. She speculated, "mid-50s, somewhere in the 50s." I asked for her age: 23.

When the talk again returned to dealing with fundraising i raised my hand. Unlike my chances on the main floor that morning, in the women's caucus i got my question asked. I said, "I don't mean to be impertinent, but i have to wonder. Thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court case, the GOP has received hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions. How are you going to battle that kind of fundraising with cook books?"

Not missing a beat, Warner challenged that rather than figure a way to work with Citizens United, which was clearly a path to ruin, the Dems had to lead the way in creating the legislation prohibiting corporate funding of elections. furthermore, Warner warned, it needs to be pressed for now, during the lame duck Congress before Republicans take power in January. Warner called for all Arizonans, and all Americans in general, to call dramatically on Congress to pass such an amendment while we the people still have a chance to own what remains of our country. I was so struck by her speech i promised her to write of it and have. See?

And just then, fear not campaign lovers, as it happened in every session i attended, it somehow seemed Rodney Glassman, fresh from baby and ripe with one liners, was already in campaign mode with a nuanced road-ready "thank you everybody" speech about how he goes from room to room with no planned speech, but he hears the same issues being discussed in each of the breakout rooms. [Insert preferred caucus-centric issue here.] Playing the outsider, in 3 different breakout sessions i attended, Glassman roused himself and others to the call they needed to tear down the walls between the caucuses, if only the leadership would let everybody speak.

Meanwhile over at the Rainbow Caucus, at least in the few moments i saw, i was just wishing everybody would shut up--recurring infighting diluted the fun of being gay about politics. Instead of addressing issues like strategies for refuting impending GOP anti-homosexual agenda, they were battling over web pages and availability of minutes. The thing about caucuses, when they start being more about their own personal politics, than about how they intersect in the larger political landscape, their energy is absorbed on their own Peyton Places and they lose effectiveness. For those jostling for position, the battle must be breathtaking. For the rest of us, there because GSA issues are the essence of human rights issues, the tug-of-war turned tedious quickly. Just sayin'.

Luckily, i just barely slipped into that meeting in time to help it degenerate into the after-talk indicative of such gatherings as political caucuses; and then slipped out and onto the only caucus to prove worth really catching that day for me, the only place with the rush and tingle of the excitement of possibility ... was the progressives. The Progressive Democratic Caucus of Arizona, our state's branch of the PDA (Progressive Democrats of America), that is, a congregation of every liberal cause imaginable.

Combined, they proved a thrilling ménage to behold. The Progressive Caucus in fact, proved the only caucus on campus where the hotel staff had to bring in additional seating and the bustle of people gathered and chairs being passed down, added a thrill to the build up for the meeting. Chairs lined back walls and people stood along the sides. The room buzzed with the power of ideas. Dynamic PDA speaker and leader Jeff Latas revved up the crowd to the point cheering and speechifying erupted spontaneously.

And have no doubt, the populism was indeed popular. Despite the fact they appeared to be thought of as an unwanted evil stepchild by the party leaders, the progressive caucus was far and away the largest caucus there that day, the loudest as well. On a day when only 240 or so even attended the statewide committee meeting, over one hundred people signed in at the Progressive Caucus, a group that has longtime bad blood with the establishment money boys like Bivens in ADP (Arizona Democratic Party--yes, those are the same letters as PDA, except in a different order).

In fact, ADP leadership refused to grant the PDA a seat at the executive committee with the other caucus leaders and had even tangled for the helm of the state party back in Jan of '09, when progressive leader, former Pima County party chair Paul Eckerstrom handily defeated Bivens in a short-lived upset. As detailed in Stephen Lemon's New Times article, "Eckerstrom Upsets Bivens for Dem Party Chair; Pullen Beats Back James Challenge for GOP Spot," unhappy with the continuing erosion of the Dem brand in AZ, Eckerstrom and the Progressives tried to upset the "Kingdom of Maricopa" strategy of the central Democratic leadership. (Dem higher-ups and the ranks and file are quick to note that 60% of all the votes cast in this election were cast in Maricopa County. That includes Tucson, that includes Flagstaff and all the hinterlands rolled together.)

Progressives, however, counter that the only way to retrain this reddest of red states is to get the progressive message out in every election and force a frame on the debate that is away from issues like abortions and gay marriage. In a mirror of the national collapse of progressive momentum following the Obama election, Fresh out of the gate with Obama's taking office Arizona Progressives unified and surged in the vote, derailing Bivens and briefly seating Eckerstrom who vowed to take a "15 County" approach for the state party that was similar to Howard Dean's widely-lauded "50 State" approach of working in all races, even long shots to spread the progressive message.

But less than a month after the upset, Lemons was again reporting on the Brew-ha-ha. This time that Eckerstrom had resigned acknowledging he wasn't ready to meet the time and travel demands of actually being state party chair. Not only had progressive upbraided themselves, apparently, there had also been considerable dissent among the old school rank and file Dems at the thought of having progressives shaping the party agenda, and even talk of fundraising drying up if Bivens was not back on top as the led money man for the Dems.

Guess what? Presto-change-o, Eckerstrom's back out, Bivens is back in and the Dems have been battling an image of being sell-outs every since, with the upstart progressives still scrambling to reform their coup.

The saga of the progressives' lunge to regain their credibility was written between the lines of oratory and there was plenty of that to be had around that floor. It was the one place where those rallying cries were seen as entirely unironic and/or non-delusional. And there were plenty of rallying cries to be had. Helmed with grace and quick wittedness orchestration by Dan O'Neal, the meeting, as documented on the PDA website in "Democrats Need To Act Like the Opposition Party and Put Up a Fight," by Dianne Post and Barbara McCullough-Jones, was a round robin of at-large calls to action (yours truly's included).

A veritable who's who of liberal activist causes in AZ, including "Arizona Institute for Peace, Education and Research (AIPER) and Radio Phoenix, the ACLU, NAACP, the Democratic Party, the Green Party, DFA, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Code Pink, Arizona Progress ACTION and the End War Coalition. It was the only place where people openly looked like hippies, traded wit in addition to whining and where i felt like my "ImpeachBush.Org" ball-cap and peace signs weren't a deficit to my message.

I even spoke twice, muddled in garbled wishful thinking, first about acknowledging the importance of accepting the reality of the plutocracy and of figuring a way to market liberal ideas to plutocrats as a viable option to their current apparent preferred brand of rightwing oppression.

My other speech went something like:

"The Dem party needs to not lose sight of the fact that the youth of America does not support GOP ideas. They voted against the McCain-Palin brand of Bushco Redux in '08 by more than 24 million votes. This go-round, despite two disappointing years of failed Dem rhetoric and a forced fed diet of "Democratic party portrayed as posed ineffectualism" by the mainstream media, young voters still voted against GOP candidates and propositions by nearly 20%.

Unfortunately more than fourteen million of those young 2008 voters stayed home this go-round, dooming Dem chances because the Democrats dropped the ball for marketing their ideas. The Democrats need to become as exciting a logo for progressivism as the GOP have been by co-opting the image of the Tea Party to symbolize their conservatism. We had the youth and lost them and we need to inspire them back again. The Dems need to look cool to young people or we won't get this thing fixed. And Dems are not going to energize a youth vote, or anyone else's vote, by insisting the brand be about old school moneyed politics as usual. That is exactly the stigma kids detest about the GOP. Kids want to believe in something, but we need to act like we believe in something more than fundraising."

I am sure i didn't say all of that correctly, but i said my piece. Kind people that they were, they let me finish the whole speech. But the meeting only had so much time and soon we were back to the main hall for the afternoon general assembly and a final round of "we'll get 'em next time"-type speeches from the various, and numerous, defeated statewide candidates, minus Penny Kotterman, among others.

Though some genuine winners were in the mix, the roster of speakers shared a tone of trying to not speak of the grapes as too, too, sour. Re-elected Southern AZ Congresswoman Gabbie Giffords stood proud when her turn at bat came round. "We didn't do anything wrong," she bragged of her role in the Democrat-led Congress' widely lauded immensely productive legislative record. Yet every achievement she listed was in fact, in the end, a sold-out, compromised-to-the-point-of-meaningless, backroom deal designed to satisfy a sneering GOP who hate giving even an inch to win a mile; and to serve Dems who would rather manufacture PR points, rather than actually accomplish anything.

For those keeping track, again Rodney Glassman made it clear he was still hoping to run for something, and Andrei Cherny made it clear the rest of us should hope he would run again as well. The tearjerker sweetheart prize of the afternoon had to go to Felecia Rotellini, whose speech left not one dry eye in the house, including her own. She had been the closest statewide candidate in the election, getting 48% of the vote. Like Cherny, Felecia felt like a future of AZ Democrats. Afterwards, she also called my lovely wife Beth, "An Unsung Hero." So, of course, even if she hadn't already seemed like the most competent Dem candidate among what i took to be a highly qualified slate, Rotellini won my heart with that remark.

Still, my favorite speaker that day, on a day of great hope but many mixed messages, was the big man himself, Terry Goddard, who rose to thunderous applause and mixed standing ovations. Though the outgoing Attorney General, Goddard's not going anywhere as a force in AZ Dem politics anytime soon. Like the other Dem elite, Goddard was happy with the level of productivity the mechanism of the state party machine created, proud of the work Dems had done together.

"We need to keep doing the things we do as Democrats and we need to keep doing them right," Goddard cheered. It was a stirring line in a speech that included the line that got me stirred up: the part when Goddard concluded that though Arizona had "never been a land of hatred and racism," in this election, really, the only way Dems could have won this election would have been to "join the immigrant bashers."

I about choked on my cookie. That is to say, i had a hard time with Goddard's claim about AZ racism. Considering that our state is widely acknowledged to now be and to have long been so racist a society that it used to be known as the "Mississippi of the West," so much so it led to historic civil rights action in the 1960-70s, and was later the target of a Public Enemy protest song in the 1990s. And that as a territory Arizona once allowed Tempe to make it a crime to be "Sonoran" back in 1872; and that the city Goddard once was mayor of was founded by a disgruntled Confederate soldier, Jack Swilling. Considering all that, i wanted to speak up to him. Unlike watching his speech on TV, when it was over i could, and actually did, walk over and asked him about it.

While Goddard acknowledged the history, he clarified he believed the current crisis is the result of people like Russell Pearce and Fox News. As he said in his speech, "Russell Pearce was not elected to be the Voice of Arizona, but you just watch, because he thinks he was."

Before i left i had to ask, "So, back before the election, i asked you a question about Prop 203 and i felt you made it seem like supporting 203 would put you out of the mainstream--"

"I know," Terry smiled, "I read the articles"

I looked up and Terry Goddard was smiling at me. So i forged on, "--and yet that's exactly where you wound up being. Marijuana got like 200,000 more votes than you did. What do you make of it?"

Goddard scratched his cheek, "I don't know what to make of it. I don't think it was the right decision, but Arizonans voted in a lot of decisions that day. Almost as many people voted for marijuana," Goddard explained, "as voted for Jan Brewer."

Quickly i quipped, "Are you saying a person would have to be stoned to vote for Jan Brewer."

"No, but I'm laughing when you say it" Goddard lol-ed. So did i.

And we left it at that.

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

"The People's Work" (Welcome to the Occupation, Part 2), now revised

2010-11-21T21:22:00.000-08:00

Hey Folks,
The editor's at OpEd News kicked back my original submission of "The People's Work," calling for revisions. I looked, saw they were right, and have made dozens of changes. I would like my writing more if i did not make mistakes, but since i do, please take this apology and try this edit instead--mikel

"The People's Work" (Welcome to the Occupation, Part 2), now revised

"Listen to the Congress where we propagate confusion primitive and wild"

--Berry, Buck, Mills, Stipe

UPDATE: In our last post, i quoted our soon-to-be former attorney general, outgoing AZ Democrat darling, and then-gubernatorial hopeful Terry Goddard, as laughing at the suggestion that, unlike the GOP's blatant support of its Tea Partiers, the Democratic Party appeared to distance itself from the agendas of its liberal base. When asked for an example, i pointed out the wide-ranging support for Prop 203, which he flippantly dismissed as a "pet issue." Prop 203, you may recall, aimed to regiment the legalization of highly regulated medical marijuana to cancer and glaucoma patients and the like. Goddard was afraid the image of supporting medical care for sick people would cost him votes and earn a label as "being out of touch with the mainstream."

Turns out that's exactly what he was. Eleven days after Goddard's concession speech, after nearly two weeks of vote counting, Prop 203 passed and became Arizona law by just over 4,000 votes. Goddard had lost by well over 200,000.

While it must be admitted that the national races offered an even wider range of embarrassments of Dems selling-out their most motivated supporters, liberal/progressives, and then getting their just due "shellacking," as the President so glumly put it, it is fun to note that in this reddest of states, health care for sick people, a liberal idea that most life-long politicians, such as Goddard himself, had scoffed at and condescended over, over the years, as "hippie crap," just got more votes than Goddard did. In fact, even in an election year with a supposed tidal wave of Right-Wing tsunamis in their respective tea pots, "weirdo weed" had the audacity to get itself elected, timid Terry did not.

The math is simple: Democrats didn't get the vote because they didn't earn it. I mean, if Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell are any measure of how messed up an opposition candidate has to be to not be able to defeat a Democrat, the brand has appallingly tainted itself. Thankfully the demographic that gets its news from Jon Stewart, knows a joke when they hear one brag about being a Constitutional scholar and then not recognize the first clause of the First Amendment.

Despite the roar of elephant trunks trumpeting their triumphs, this year's vote was not a powerful testimonial to Republican ideas. It was merely proof, again, that corporate sponsored advertising works with some consumers some of the time, but it can't make a wing-nut smell like a silk purse and won't mold an elder statesman out of a political jackass. Republicans did not win the hearts and minds of the American public. They may have rented a few votes; but i doubt they'll be able to keep them.

Don't be deluded by the Fox-megaphone right-sliding sound effect of hyperbole. All the GOP won was some ill-timed name recognition and brand identification with the upcoming CF certified FUBAR SNAFU our government shall become for the next two years. The stalemate on the left is still the stalemate on the right. And yep, the new boss is exactly the same as the old boss because it's going to be the exact same bunch of bossy bastards from just two years back, except now in Tea Party-monster mode.

This may be a bit unpleasant for the rest of us, but it's the prices we have to pay for the stalemate that profits our paymasters so. The only way our corporate criminals can possibly control their economy, maximize their profits, and minimize our interference is to make sure neither side gets ahead by too much in the tug-of-war tape-loop we call our political process. You know the old drill: you can move to the left, or you can move to the right, either one, as long as you don't move forward. If we did, it would ruin their whole delicate balance of expensive ineffectiveness.

For example, if the crazed religious right were to actually gain their fantasy level of control of our government to reek their vengeance, since vengeance is the main product they sell, it would make Rwanda look like a Disney-ride.

You could start with all the mass deportations they've been begging for, praying for, for decades. Ejecting whole families, anchor and all, on such a scale can only lead to inevitable mass miseries, martial law and more crime and, of course, higher prices. You are going to break a few eggs with that omelet. We're talking forcibly removing twelve million people from their homes all across the country, containing them for transport, then shipping them to parts unknown. When the Nazis tried this sort of thing we branded it a "Holocaust." The Right may want to label their final solution, "Keeping America Free." But the rich will simply call it "screwing with my #1 source of cheap docile labor" and just say no.

Then there's the "Reconstructionist"/"Wall Builder" crowds' wet dream of a theocratic fundamentalist "Christian" nation, and its unavoidable holy war against all infidels-- both foreign and domestic--who won't bow before their blood-god Yaweh.

Yeh-NO. Corporations have no souls and thus they need no saving. Besides, everybody knows the Religious Right don't want peace on earth and good will to all men. They want just what they've always wanted: a heavenly rapture for a select few of them, fire, brimstone and the gnashing of teeth for the rest of us.

As former evangelist, now skeptic, Frank Schaeffer details in his latest expose of the religious right, "How Republicans and Their Big Business Allies Duped Tens of Millions of Evangelicals into Voting for a Corporate Agenda," the hard line Christian right GOP base is as zealous about eliminating heretics and infidels as any "Talibani" burqua merchant they might want to waterboard. Here's a telling quote Schaeffer cops from leading conservative theologian David Chilton's manifesto, PARADISE RESTORED--A Biblical Theology of Dominion, “Our goal is a Christian world, made up of explicitly Christian nations. How could a Christian desire anything else?"

Well, excuse us, the other four billion people on the planet, but that sounds like a cue for an exit. Talk about mobilizing the world of enemies who already thought we hated Islam. And every other religion in every other country on earth. And, what of the terror such an edict would elicit right here at home? Though Christianity is still the number one self-identified religion by Americans, including untold millions who are actually too lazy to admit they don't believe in anything, including the need to believe. Which may be all well and good if that's the crowd one wants to get loud with. But about a quarter of Americans now claim to not be Christian. Including folks who are not Jewish or Muslim, fish, nor foul, and all of the folks who simply are, or simply are not. What are they going to do with all of us in our US?

Surely if i should fear suicide bombers who kneel on one kind of prayer rug, then i'm just as right to worry about the abortion-doctor murderers and their fan club, who simply kneel on differently patterned rags, or intone their respective adorations with slightly varied inflections, yet still head onto their own mayhem, singing glory to their god to be. As if we should see their work as holy. As if the choice of words said made a difference.

Of course, for some evangelicals, the potential for igniting an international America-centric hate-fest against our own brand of "Christianity [copyright 380 AD, patent pending]" IS the whole point. For those folks, this mess means messiah and this is all just a page in the Master's master-plan. Taking up the zealots' unfinished crusade against the Arab world seems like the quickest way to create their own sequel to a certain Jenkins-LaHaye series. For you, that may have been a fad best left behind, but for the religious right, it's their daily bread. Oh well, for the unraptured rest of us, it's the fabled lake of fire, while Christians get to enjoy box seats in a handy cloud-side perch to revel in our roasting and chirp, "I told you so!" for eternity, and ever and ever, amen.

Of course, that's just one voices amongst the many co-conspirators the Republicans have promised our next two years to. Don't forget the "never-met-a-tax-they-would-not-try-to-skip-out-on-&-then-insult-my-intelligence-by-calling-that-act-'patriotism,'" Libertarian voices in Tea Party chorus of the GOP's hallelujah symphony? These are the folks who call for no laws what so ever, except the ones they intend to place on a woman's body once they gain the power, to keep the "Christians [void where prohibited, some restrictions may apply]" quiet.

And the most important freedom for a liberty-loving Libertarian is freedom from taxes. This cabal intends to get you to want to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and end all federal income tax, thus wiping out about 45% of the national revenue. So with no one paying taxes, not only could Grover Norquist finally drown the by-then-vestigial federal government in the bathtub of his choice, social services could also be slaughtered, leaving millions to starve, die of illness or homelessness.

If these "Tenther" types get their way, Social Security, like all other social services, will be sold to the highest bidder, and would then deliver the lowest-possible-cost services to only the oldest of survivors. See? Through the miracle of privatization, public sector responsibility gets deferred; and yet we still have to pay for half the service purchased at twice the price. That's the power of the market for you. Capitalists call this "competition" and "Ayn Rand-style idealism." The humans in the audience probably just cringe and hiss "heartless."

Abortions would be banned, faster than one could say "saline solution," swelling the population third world country style, further straining our resources and expanding the rolls of the poor. Businesses could rape the public with impunity, as they have tried to do every since the invention of money whenever a government will not stop them. And they would once again offer only the lowest wages and the highest of prices for the shoddiest of goods. Though at least there'd still be plenty of jails.

And don't even ask me to tell you what they'd do to gay people.

Oh yes, and everybody would have plenty of guns! If you cannot see the potential hazards to corporate profitability from such a doomsday scenario, you must have been cribbing your investment strategies from Meg Whitman.

On the other hand, if any handful of liberal "pet issues" should really, unimaginably, somehow actually rise to preeminence, then that would also be fiscally fatal to corporate interests, guaranteeing a monetary shift that would have to be measured in the trillions. Universal health care, ethical immigration and wage laws, corporate crime prosecution for Wall Street manipulations and robo-foreclosures, 9/11 truth, FEMA camps, dismantling the military- and/or the prison-industrial complexes, eliminating derivatives trading, mandating clean energy development and, most importantly, every poor man's fantasy--getting the rich guys to once again pay their due in taxes.

I'd even settle for a flat tax if they just paid theirs like the rest of us and didn't "capital gains" their way out of it. If they paid into social security, like the rest of us based on our whole income, instead of topping out around $107,000, even if you make millions. Tricky, huh? Of course, they know all the tricks. Their servants built in those loopholes, just for them to swim through. Now that they got away with building this government to be custom-designed to their liking, at our expense, the least they could do is pay for it, i say. Wait, did i say rich guys paying their share? Silly me.

So none of that stuff will ever happen.

That's why the rich generally prefer to buy their own Congress instead of using the ones the unwashed masses might accidentally pick for them. With the Citizens United case we got a speculum-eyed view of the birth of the upcoming kleptocracy. Now that the rich openly buy their servants, we'll see what happens when the Masters charge what Americans express. Not surprisingly, more and more these days, when the rich shop for their congressmen, they tend to stare in the mirror.

In a job market where the starting pay is $174,000, and then there's all those expense accounts to abuse, 44% of Congress are already millionaires and the average combined wealth is more than $660,000, with an average of well over a million apiece in the Senate. The Millionaire's Club has finally lived up to its name. In Boehner's speech declaring victory for their glorious revolution newly anointed Chairman John announced his plan for the new People's Republic of America. "People's agenda will be our agenda!" Boehner proclaimed. I guess we know which people he is referring to. His own.

As Michelle Bachmann brayed when asked on MSNBC about the message of election night, and it wasn't her long promised investigation of Congressional Democrats as "UnAmerican." No. She said the president has to learn to work "for all the American people, not just those who make under $250,000!" In other words, not just the 98% of the population she is not a part of. No wonder Congress has turned on Obama, or anyone else, that talk about taxing the rich. THEY ARE the rich. It all makes sense now.

Like the rich, their pet poker table, Wall Street, did just great this election year, paying out new "record bonuses," "earning" new record dollars freshly manufactured by the Federal Reserve and then loaned back to us from Chinese banks at still more interest. But don't worry folks, these derivative Wall Street dollars are not merely minted out of thin air. If the bank, or the government, ever needs to come calling for them, they'll just dig them out of your pockets. Hey, it's nothing personal, just those rich guys gotta eat.

The only consolation for liberals is that, despite their own recent abysmal performances, the Dems' badge of dishonor is still nowhere near as sleazy as the one the GOP leadership have earned through their own efforts over the past couple of decades, so i hope there's still hope for the next couple of decades. There is some suggestion the future of American values may continue to evolve for the better.

Even though the vast majority of younger voters of America (age 19-29) didn't even go to the polls this go-round, and the ones that did may not have treated the Dems like their BFFs at the polls, they did see right through Tea party trickery. Despite GOP braggartry about capturing younger minds, national exit polls show Dems outpolled Republicans by from as much as16%. Nineteen percent if you include third party voting as voting against GOP candidates.

Tea Party Republicans also did not engage well with women or minorities either. Palin propaganda to the contrary, this year will be the first year since 1978 fewer women will be in the newer session of Congress than in the one just past. I guess, being a bit bearish herself, Sarah Palin and her clones do not realize the majority of Americans don't actually want a "mama grizzly" waiting around to maul them when their back is turned. We've already got to bear enough Wall Street bull for that as it is.

There are also going to be fewer Blacks in Congress and none in the Senate. And, even though this round, the American people succumbed to the best costumed mock-patriotism money can buy and their own twin foibles of greed and racism, like some Lee Atwater style "Southern Strategy" on steroids, the GOP now has the Tea Party label to keep up with. And that flavor won't take long to leave a sour taste in most people's mouths.

Funny thing, those Tea Party "patriots" who claim to be such American History buffs think that it entitles them to wear knee pants in public and toot their own flute as a fashion statement, then censure Jefferson from Texas textbooks as insignificant. Those guys and their legion of propagandists always leave out the fact that Sam Adams and the original "patriot movement" were less a civilized tea party and more of a badass beer bash, a political philosophy based on justifying drunken rowdies rioting at the customs houses while rich smugglers like John Hancock parlayed their personal wealth into the politics of a nation. Sound familiar?

These same Tea Party historians also fail to mention the morning-after disaster the original Tea Party ideals turned out to be, after America emerged from the fog of war, stopped fighting against Britain, and began fighting amongst ourselves. No matter how much fun these rabble rousers had trashing their British tax masters, once the shooting stopped, the Articles of Confederation government these rebels forged for themselves failed so fantastically it had to be scrapped in less than seven years.

Sure, that's why we remember so little about the Articles of Confederation government and barely keep record of the twelve different guys that briefly were its president--because it sucked so bad it vacuumed itself off the pages of our American Heritage, the history we try to be proud of. In less time than it takes to say "Shay's Rebellion," America went from international inspiration to international embarrassment, a country that preferred to shoot its own soldiers than to pay its own bills.

Under the Articles of Confederation, by design, to ensure that each man might have his liberty, including the right to do wrong, the central government was supposed to be so weak it could never control the states the way England had controlled the colonies. Congress could not regulate trade, no matter what way people wanted to run their business. It could barely create laws, but had no power to enforce them. And best of all, as far as the states' rights crowd was concerned, the new federal government had no power to tax.

A Libertarian's dream, state sovereignty ruled the day. The states all vowed they would treat each other like friends; and friends don't need rules to control the behavior of "friends" right? And friends will always act like friends all the time, right? Wrong.

The businesses of the several states screwed each other over royally, and everyone else for that matter. Citizens labored under petty tyrants in their workplaces and petty tyrannies in their statehouses all across the land. Claiming outrageous taxes, state governments stripped the land and the very homes from returning Revolutionary War heroes to sell it to their real friends, the banks. These were the same Revolutionary War soldiers they had poorly supplied in the war that made our nation and then when that war was over (due to the "no federal taxes" loophole they wrote into the Articles for themselves) they refused to pay the soldiers who had fought for their freedom to own slaves. And these state governments even threw some of our returning soldiers in jail for failing to pay their outlandish state taxes which didn't even meet the interest on the loans we'd taken out to afford to fight our most recent war. And all the while they were claiming to be "Christians" as they did it.

Now if that doesn't have a familiar ring to it, then i'm just beating around the Bush.

But seriously, the chaos goes on. The states didn't treat each other any better either than the soldier who had fought to create them. Intensely independent entities, the states soon fell to throwing tariffs and insults at each other. The roots of later Civil War factionalism were well underway. Most states had had decades to develop sectional hatreds between each other. New England and the Old South depended and despised each other in equal measure. Think of a land where the states weren't at all united, but simply untied, and there is no spell-check that can fix that typo. You have to secure that kind of liberty yourself.

Each state served its own "needs" first, confederates be damned. Speaking of which, the Christian fanatical religious leaders of the time, Tea Partiers one and all, all bullied their own brethren beneath tales of sinners in the hands of an angry god, meanwhile condoning the accelerating annihilation of Indian societies; all the while condemning whole other states' populations as heretics worthy of excommunication because their brand of "Christianity" landed on the wrong side of the Reformation. See, the several states contended not only with their competing business interests, but also with a welter of contentious state religions. Remember, states like Rhode Island and Connecticut were made from good Christians trying to get away from the fanatical Puritans. And Maryland was the only place a Catholic was safe. So much for all that "god of love" business, huh?

And those righteous "Christian" citizens themselves were no bed of roses. Racist, sexist, classist, and violent, their god smiled on as they enslaved Blacks, beat their women like chattel, spent most of their time drunk, and despite declaring that all men are equal, did not even allow their own poor people to vote until 1824. Meanwhile they genocided their way across of a continent.

I don't know about you, but knowing these are the people who brought you the original "Tea Party" makes for a bitter brew. If these are the people Boehner has in mind when he pledges to do "we, the people's" business, it's small wonder their forbearers equally small-minded idea of small government fell apart. Untied things don't hold together very well.

I prefer a different sort of American "we." A "we, the people" who are looking to establish justice, secure some domestic tranquility, and even promote the general welfare. But if our country truly has goals like that, we have to be willing to call ideas like the Articles of Confederation "history." I am banking that the more "old-school" today's Tea Party tries to get, the more blatantly they attempt to institute their own brand of liberty and freedom, the quicker we, the people, will finally choose a form of more perfect union.

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Current Comedy 11/15/10: "The People's Work" (Welcome to the Occupation, Part 2)

2010-11-18T21:31:00.000-08:00

"Listen to the Congress where we propagate confusion primitive and wild"

--Berry, Buck, Mills, Stipe

UPDATE: In our last post, i quoted our soon-to-be former attorney general, outgoing AZ Democrat darling, and then-gubernatorial hopeful Terry Goddard, as laughing at the suggestion that, unlike the GOP's blatant support of its Tea Partiers, the Democratic Party appeared to distance itself from the agendas of its liberal base. When asked for an example, i pointed out the wide-ranging support for Prop 203, which he flippantly dismissed as a "pet issue." Prop 203, you may recall, aimed to regiment the legalization of highly regulated medical marijuana to cancer and glaucoma patients and the like. Goddard was afraid the image of supporting medical care for sick people would cost him votes and earn a label as "being out of touch with the mainstream."

Turns out that's exactly what he was. Eleven days after Goddard's concession speech, after nearly two weeks of vote counting, Prop 203 passed and became Arizona law by just over 4,000 votes. Goddard had lost by well over 200,000.

While it must be admitted that the national races offered an even wider range of embarrassments of Dems selling-out their most motivated supporters, liberal/progressives, and then getting their just due "shellacking," as the President so glumly put it, it is fun to note that in this reddest of states, health care for sick people, a liberal idea that most life-long politicians, such as Goddard himself, had scoffed at and condescended over, over the years, as "hippie crap," just got more votes than Goddard did. In fact, even in an election year with a supposed tidal wave of Right-wing tsunamis in their respective tea pots, "weirdo weed" had the audacity to get itself elected, timid Terry did not.

Democrats didn't get the vote because they didn't earn it. I mean, if Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell are any measure of how messed up an opposition candidate has to be to not be able to defeat a Democrat, the brand has appallingly tainted itself. Thankfully the demographic that gets its news from Jon Stewart, knows a joke when they hear one brag about being a Constitutional scholar and then not recognize the first clause of the First Amendment.

Despite the roar of elephant trunks trumpeting their triumphs, this year's vote was not a powerful testimonial to Republican ideas. It was merely proof, again, that corporate sponsored advertising works with some consumers some of the time, but it can't make a wing-nut smell like a silk purse and won't mold an elder statesman out of a political jackass. Republicans did not win the hearts and minds of the American public. They merely pissed Americans off. They may have rented a few votes; but i doubt they'll be able to keep them.

Don't be deluded by the Fox-megaphone right-sliding sound effect of hyperbole-ing every news item till it is distorted beyond any actual humans' actual recognition. All the GOP won is name recognition and some ill-timed brand identification with the upcoming CF certified FUBAR SNAFU our government is going to become over the next two years. The stalemate on the left is still the stalemate on the right. And yep, the new boss is exactly the same as the old boss because it's going to be the exact same bunch of bossy bastards from just two years back, except now in Tea Party-monster mode.

This may be a bit unpleasant for the rest of us, but it's the prices we have to pay for the stalemate that profits our paymasters so. The only way our corporate criminals can possibly control their economy, maximize their profits, and minimize our interference, is to make sure neither side gets ahead by too much in the tug-of-war tape-loop we call our political process. You know the old drill: you can move to the left, or you can move to the right, either one, as long as you don't move forward. If we did, it would ruin their whole delicate balance of expensive ineffectiveness.

For example, if the crazed religious right were to actually win their fantasy level of control of our government to reek their vengeance, since vengeance is the main product they sell, it would make Rwanda look like a Disney-ride.

You could start with all the mass deportations they've been begging for, praying for, for decades. Ejecting whole families, anchor and all, on such a scale can only lead to inevitable mass miseries, martial law and more crime and, of course, higher prices. You are going to break a few eggs with that omelet. We're talking forcibly removing twelve million people from their homes all across the country, containing them for transport, then shipping them to parts unknown. When the Nazis tried this sort of thing we branded it a "Holocaust." The right may want to label their final solution, "Keeping America Free;"but the rich will simply call it "screwing with my #1 source of cheap docile labor" and just say no.

Then there's the "Reconstructionist" and the "Wall Builder" crowds' wet dream of a theocratic fundamentalist "Christian" nation, and its unavoidable holy war against all infidels-- both foreign and domestic--who won't bow before their blood-god Yaweh.

Yeh-NO. Corporations have no souls and thus they need no saving. Besides, everybody knows the Religious Right don't want peace on earth and good will to all men. They want just what they've always wanted: a heavenly rapture for a select few of them, fire, brimstone and the gnashing of teeth for the rest of us.

As former evangelist, now skeptic, Frank Schaeffer details in his latest expose of the religious right, "How Republicans and Their Big Business Allies Duped Tens of Millions of Evangelicals into Voting for a Corporate Agenda," the hard line Christian right GOP base is as zealous about eliminating heretics and infidels as any "Talibani" burqua merchant they might want to waterboard. Here's a telling quote Schaeffer cops from leading conservative theologian David Chilton's manifesto, PARADISE RESTORED--A Biblical Theology of Dominion, “Our goal is a Christian world, made up of explicitly Christian nations. How could a Christian desire anything else?"

Well, excuse us the other four billion people on the planet, but that sounds like a cue for an exit. Talk about mobilizing the world of enemies who already thought we hated Islam. And every other religion in every other country on earth. And what of the terror such an edict would elicit right here at home? Though Christianity is still the number one self-identified religion by Americans, including untold millions who are actually too lazy to admit they don't believe in anything including the need to believe. Which may be all well and good if that's the crowd one wants to get loud with. But about a quarter of Americans who now claim to not be Christian. Including folks who are not Jewish or Muslim, fish, nor foul and all of the folks who simply are or simply are not. What are they going to do with all of us in our US?

Surely if i should fear suicide bombers who kneel on one kind of prayer rug, then i'm just as right to worry about the abortion doctor murderers and their fan club who simply kneel on differently patterned rags, or intone their respective adorations with slightly varied inflections, yet still head onto their own mayhem, singing glory to their god to be, as if we should see their work as holy. As if the choice of words said made a difference.

Of course, for some evangelicals, the potential for igniting an international America-centric hate-fest against our own brand of "Christianity [copyright 380 AD, patent pending]." For those folks this mess means messiah and this is all just a page in the Master's master-plan. Taking up the zealots' unfinished crusade against the Arab world seems like the quickest way to create their own sequel to a certain Jenkins-LaHaye series. For you, that may have been a fad best left behind, but the religious right, it's their daily bread. And for the unraptured rest of us, the fabled lake of fire, while they get to enjoy box seats in a handy cloud-side perch to revel in our roasting and chirp, "I told you so!" for eternity and ever and ever, amen.

Of course, that's just one voices amongst the many co-conspirators the Republicans have promised our next two years to. Don't forget the "never-met-a-tax-they-would-not-try-to-skip-out-on-&-then-insult-my-intelligence-by-calling-that-act-'patriotism,'" the Libertarian voices of Tea Party chorus of the GOP's hallelujah symphony? These are the folks who call for no laws what so ever, except the ones they intend to place on a woman's body once they gain the power to keep the "Christians [void where prohibited, some restrictions may apply]" quiet.

And the most important freedom for a liberty-loving Libertarian is freedom from taxes. This cabal intends to get you to want to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and end all federal income tax, thus wiping out about 45% of the national revenue. So with no one paying taxes, not only could Grover Norquist finally drown the by then-vestigial federal government in the bathtub of his choice, social services could also be slaughtered, leaving millions to starve, die of illness or homelessness.

If the "Tenthers" get their way, like all other social services, Social Security will be sold to the highest bidder, and would then deliver the lowest possible cost services to only the oldest of survivors. Yet, through the miracle of privatization, public sector responsibility gets deferred and yet we still have to pay for half the service purchased at twice the price. Capitalists call this "competition" and "Ayn Rand-style idealism." The humans in the audience probably just cringe and hiss "heartless." Though at least there'd still be plenty of jails.

Abortions would be banned, faster than one could say "saline solution," further straining our resources and expanding the rolls of the poor. Businesses could rape the public with impunity, as they have every since the invention of money when a government will not stop them. And they would once again offer only the lowest wages and the highest of prices for the shoddiest of goods.

And don't even ask me to tell you what they'd do to gay people.

Oh yes, and everybody would have plenty of guns! If you cannot see the potential hazards to corporate profitability from such a doomsday scenario, you must have been cribbing your investment strategies from Meg Whitman.

On the other hand, if any handful of liberal "pet issues" should really, unimaginably, somehow actually rise to preeminence, then it would also be fiscally fatal to corporate interests, guaranteeing an impact of a monetary shift that would have to be measured in the trillions. Universal health care, ethical immigration and wage laws, corporate crime prosecution for Wall Street manipulations and robo-foreclosures, 9/11 truth, dismantling the military- and/or the prison-industrial complexes, eliminating derivatives trading, mandating clean energy development and, most importantly, every poor man's fantasy--the rightness of getting the rich guys to once again pay their due in taxes.

I'd even settle for a flat tax if they just paid theirs like the rest of us and didn't "capital gains" their way out of it. If they paid into social security, like the rest of us based on our whole income, instead of topping out around $107,000, even if you make millions. Tricky, huh? Of course, they know all the tricks. Their servants built those loopholes, just for them to swim through. Now that they got away with building this government to be custom-designed to their liking, at our expense, the least they could do is pay for it, i say. Wait, did i say rich guys paying their share? Silly me.

So none of that stuff will ever happen.

That's why the rich generally prefer to buy their own Congress instead of using the ones the unwashed masses might accidentally pick for them. With the Citizens United case we got a speculum-eyed view of the birth of the upcoming kleptocracy. Now that the rich openly buy their servants, we'll see what happens when the Masters charge what Americans express. Not surprisingly, more and more these days, when the rich shop for their congressmen, they tend to stare in the mirror. In a job market where the starting pay is $174,000, and then there's all those expense accounts to abuse, 44% of Congress are already millionaires and the average combined wealth is over $660,000 and well over a million apiece in the Senate. The Millionaire's Club has finally lived up to its name. In his speech declaring victory for their glorious revolution newly anointed Chairman John announced his plan for the new People's Republic of America. "People's agenda will be our agenda!" Boehner proclaimed. I guess we know which people he is referring to. His own.

No wonder Congress has turned on Obama, or anyone else, that talk about taxing the rich. THEY'RE the rich. As Michelle Bachmann brayed when asked on MSNBC about the message of election night, and it wasn't her long promised investigation of Congressional Democrats as "UnAmerican." No. She said the president has to learn to work "for all the American people, not just those who make under $250,000!" In other words, not just the 98% of the population she is not a part of. It all makes sense now.

Like the rich, their pet poker table, Wall Street, did just great this election year, paying out new record bonuses, "earning" new record dollars freshly manufactured by the Federal Reserve and then loaned back to us from Chinese banks. But don't worry folks, these derivative Wall Street dollars are not merely minted out of thin air. If the bank, or the government, ever needs to come calling for them, they'll just dig them out of your pockets. Hey, it's nothing personal, just those rich guys gotta eat.

The only consolation for liberals is that, despite their own recent abysmal performances, the Dems' badge of dishonor is still nowhere near as sleazy as the one the GOP leadership have earned through their own efforts over the past couple of decades, so i hope there's still hope for the next couple of decades. Even though the vast majority of younger voters of America (age 19-29) didn't even go to the polls, and the ones that did may not have treated the Dems like their BFFs at the polls, they did see right through Tea party trickery. Despite GOP braggartry about capturing younger minds, national exit polls show Dems outpolled Republicans by from as much as16%. Nineteen percent if you include third party voting as voting against GOP candidates.

Tea Party Republicans also did not engage well with women or minorities either. Palin propaganda to the contrary, this year will be the first year since 1978 fewer women will be in the newer session of Congress than in the one just past. I guess, being a bit bearish herself, Sarah Palin and her clones does not realize the majority of Americans don't actually want a "mama grizzly" waiting around to maul them when their back is turned. We've already got Wall Street for that.

There are also going to be fewer Blacks in Congress and none in the Senate. And, even though this round the American people succumbed to the best costumed mock-patriotism money can buy and their own twin foibles of greed and racism, like some Lee Atwater style "Southern Strategy" on steroids, the GOP now has the Tea Party label to keep up with. And that flavor won't take long to leave a sour taste in most people's mouths.

Funny thing, those Tea Party "patriots" who claim to be such American History buffs and think that it entitles them to wear knee pants in public and toot their own flute as a fashion statement, then censure Jefferson from Texas textbooks as insignificant. Those guys and their legion of propagandists always leave out the fact that Sam Adams and the original "patriot movement" was less a civilized tea party and more of a badass beer bash, a political philosophy based on justifying drunken rowdies rioting at the customs houses while rich smugglers like John Hancock parlayed their personal wealth into the politics of a nation. Sound familiar?

These same Tea Party historians also fail to mention the morning-after disaster the original Tea Party ideals turned out to be, after America emerged from the fog of war, stopped fighting against Britain, and began fighting amongst ourselves. No matter how much fun these rabble rousers had trashing their British tax masters, once the shooting stopped, the Articles of Confederation government these rebels forged for themselves failed so fantastically it had to be scrapped in less than seven years. Sure, that's why we remember so little about the Articles of Confederation government and barely keep record of the twelve different guys who briefly were its president--because it sucked so bad it's vacuumed itself off the pages of our American heritage, the history we try to be proud of. In less time than it takes to say "Shay's Rebellion," America went from international inspiration to international embarrassment, a country that preferred to shoot its own soldiers then to pay its own bills.

Under the Articles of Confederation, by design, to ensure that each man might have his liberty, including the right to do wrong, the central government would be so weak it could never control the states the way England had controlled the colonies. Congress could not regulate trade, no matter what way people wanted to run their business. It could barely create laws, but had no power to enforce them, and best of all, as far as the states' rights crowd was concerned, the new federal government had no power to tax.

A Libertarian's dream, state sovereignty ruled the day. The states all vowed they would treat each other like friends; and friends don't need rules to control the behavior of "friends" right? And friends will always act like friends all the time, right? Wrong.

The businesses of the several states screwed each other over royally, and everyone else for that matter. Citizens labored under petty tyrants in their workplaces and petty tyrannies in the statehouses across the land. Governments which stripped the land and the very homes from returning Revolutionary War heroes to sell it to their real friends, the banks. These were the same Revolutionary War soldiers they had poorly supplied in the war that made our nation and then when that war was over (due to the "no federal taxes" loophole they wrote into the Articles for themselves) they refused to pay the soldiers who had fought for their freedom to own slaves. And these state governments even threw some of our returning soldiers in jail for failing to pay their outlandish state taxes which didn't even meet the interest on the loans we'd taken out to afford to fight our most recent war. And all the while they were claiming to be "Christians" as they did it.

Now if that doesn't have a familiar ring to it, then i'm just beating around the Bush.

But seriously, the chaos goes on. The states didn't treat each other any better either than the soldier who had fought to create them. Intensely independent entities, the states soon fell to throwing tariffs and insults at each other. Most states had had decades to develop sectional hatreds between each other. The roots of later Civil War factionalism were well underway. New England and the Old South depended and despised each other in equal measure. Think of a land where the states weren't at all united, but simply untied, and there is no spell-check that can fix that typo. You have to secure that kind of liberty yourself.

Each state served its own "needs" first, confederates be damned. Speaking of which, the Christian fanatical religious leaders of the time, Tea Partiers one and all, all bullied their own brethren with tales of sinners in the hands of an angry god, meanwhile condoning the accelerating annihilation of Indian societies and all the while condemning whole other states' populations as heretics worthy of excommunication because their brand of "Christianity" landed on the wrong side of the Reformation. See, the several states contended not only with their competing business interests, but also with a welter of contentious state religions. Remember, states like Rhode Island and Connecticut were made from good Christians trying to get away from the fanatical Puritans. And Maryland was the only place a Catholic was safe. So much for all that "god of love" business, huh?

And the righteous "Christian" citizens themselves were no bed of roses--racist, sexist, classist, and violent, their god smiled on as they enslaved Blacks, beat their women like chattel, spent most of their time drunk, and despite declaring that all men are equal, did not even allow their own poor people to vote until 1824. Meanwhile they genocided their way across of a continent.

I don't know about you, but knowing these are the people who brought you the original "Tea Party" makes for a bitter brew. If these are the people Boehner has in mind when he pledges to do "we, the people's" business, it's small wonder their small-minded idea of small government fell apart. Untied things don't hold together very well.

I'm actually part of a different sort of American "we." A "we, the people" who are looking to establish justice, secure some domestic tranquility, and even promote the general welfare. But if our country truly has goals like that, we have to be willing to call these Articles of Confederation ideas "history." I am banking that the more "old-school" today's Tea Party tries to get, the more blatantly they attempt to institute their own brand of liberty and freedom, the quicker we, the people, will finally choose to form of more perfect union.

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Current Comedy, 11/4/10, Germany 1928: Welcome to the Occupation

2010-11-05T02:12:00.001-07:00

On the Sunday just before the election, in front of a room full of people and reporters in Kingman, Arizona, i asked AZ Democrat darling, gubernatorial hopeful Terry Goddard, point blank: "Sir, we see that the right-wing, the GOP, not only embraces their extreme members, the Tea Party, but in fact have taken to championing their causes. Why is it the Democrats are continuingly attempting to distance themselves from their liberal base?"

After a quick gasp, the room gulped silent, and leaned in at the two of us, glancing back and forth between like a sports bar crowd trying to watch a ping-pong match in 3X fast-forward. Utterly unruffled, Goddard simply flashed his patented politician smile for the cameras then turned to me and, in the epitome of feigned innocence, asked, "What makes you say that? I'm not sure what you are talking about." He grinned, inviting the audience to join him in disbelief. "Can you give an example?" he asked and the room turned my way.

After a brief paralyzing instance where i ran through the all-time favs from that very long list of national issues the Dems had deserted liberals and progressives over (such as Bush war crimes, defunding the national war machine, mortgage relief, Wall Street indictments, and universal health care just to name a quick 5). But i knew he could quickly deflect those as not of his purview.

Desperately seeking an equally compelling AZ state issue, i finally settled the old, and guaranteed ineffective, standby. "Well, how about Prop 203?" [the medical marijuana proposal]?

Anyone want guess his reaction to me, a volunteer who, for months, had donated hours, and cash, and gallons of gas trucking his signs around my end of the state for this long-time professional politician who promised HE was the best choice to represent my interests?

That's right, he laughed at me.

And then proceeded to further casually condescend about why the party couldn't get involved in individuals' "pet issues." Two days later Terry Goddard lost by nearly 13% of the votes cast in an election where 60% of those who could vote didn't, showing that they cared no more for Terry Goddard's "pet issues" than he did for theirs.

Earlier that week, in a different room full of different people, this time in Bullhead City, i had asked another would-be Dem emperor about his choice of clothing--US Senate candidate, Tucson rich guy Rodney Glassman. I had arrived a bit late, as usual, in this case having been lost, but eventually found the place by spying Glassman's distinctive full-sized lavishly decorated tour bus in front of a local union hall.

As a devoted Dem volunteer, i had performed similar services and made similar donations of time, cash, and gas for Glassman as well, including one 720 mile round trip, on my own time and my own dime, driving his signs to the farthest northern regions of the state. If the guy was over in our end of the state i was going to try and catch a glimpse of him just to remind myself of who i was working for.

[Full disclosure--though it took some time and effort in all honesty, in comparison, my efforts for all of AZ statewide Dem candidates combined were minimal next to this one state senate with this one candidate i absolutely loved. You see, in addition to occasionally carrying and posting signs for those guys, i mostly did volunteer work for my wife Beth's equally Dem doomed campaign, but still.]

Finding myself without paper during the Q&A portion of Glassman's final whistle-stop visit, i painstakingly undid one of the numerous donation envelopes he'd showered the room with and carefully wrote out my question. I wanted to get it right.

When i finally got a turn he was halfway towards the front door. "Mr. Glassman," i asked, referring to my notes. "First let me remind you, assure you, i am a supporter and have done volunteer work for you for months. I'm not making this question up to embarrass you, but i would really like to know. Right now, the elephant in the room that nobody's talking about is that the rich are running our country like it's their own plutocracy, again and again shaping our government to suit themselves at the expense and misery of the public and paying politicians to do their bidding for them. And until we fix that we're all going to suffer. This problem has a long history in the US Senate, which used to be called 'The Millionaire's Club.' Mr. Glassman, a lot of us are working pretty hard to get you elected, and if you do get elected, how can we be sure you're not going to turn around and feed at the trough like all the other politicians we send to Washington to protect us?"

Now, audience, you know that look folks get when they discover they just took an unsuspecting sip of sour milk? It only lasted a second, but Glassman got it; the look i mean, though i will never be sure if he actually got my point. For within seconds, he had focused in on the now-folded up donation envelope that still rattled in my hands. His eyes narrowed and he asked, "Wait a minute. Have you donated to my campaign?"

[Full disclosure, once more: My wife, Beth, had funded her campaign for the State Senate seat in LD3 through the state's "Clean Elections" program. Paid for from donations and various state fees, other than taxes, the Clean Election program, one of several across the country, funds qualified candidates who collect enough public support as shown through signed candidate petitions and $5 donations. While the program supplies candidates with a considerable amount of funding (up to $15,000 for their primary campaign and another $25,000 if they should qualify for the general election) the program also limits candidate spending and public donations are kept to $5 max.

Meanwhile, Glassman had run a traditional campaign with no set spending limits and a Citizens' United style interest in corporate donations (not that any Dem saw much of that action this go-round). As a US Senate candidate, according to Phoenix New Times' James King, Glassman burned through well over a million and a half bucks including $500,000 of his money. As a minor league candidate's eye candy, i had trailed my wife everywhere and had run into Rodney and his donation envelopes at a number of Dem events and had never gotten used to this rich guy trying to get me to give him money.]

However, at that moment that Monday in Bullhead City, unmanned by the intensity of his gaze, i stumbled, forgetting about the very 1st fundraiser, over a year earlier, when i had just met him and against my gut instincts, had handed over a $20 we couldn't afford. "I don't remember," i said. "I don't think so. If i did, it wouldn't have been much; i don't generally have much, and further i believe in working for the candidates i believe in, not just throwing money at them."

This time Glassman wasn't thrown by the audacity of my hoping to get him to change. He quickly parried with, "Do you know how Obama got elected?" and then raised his eyebrows in expectation.

And though i instantly knew where he was headed, the best retort i could come up with was, "By getting a whole lot more votes than John McCain did, which," i quickly added, "is what i am hoping you will do. Which is why i just took your signs to Colorado City and Fredonia and Page."

But it did no good. Glassman simply, lightly, chuckled and shook his head at me as one would a child emoting about his letter to Santa. "No. He got more money than anyone else."

Then, as fellow working-class Dem volunteers, who had also sacrificed for months for the man, stood close by, Rodney Glassman, the rich guy i was worried about trusting with my efforts and my government, proceeded to lecture me on the meaninglessness of the people who had voted for Obama without the cash that sold the message. At some point along the exchange, i kid you not, Glassman collected a clutch of donation envelopes and started gesturing with them to emphasize his points, the way Robert Dole once did with his pen. He then elaborated on his money woes, as we nodded, felt bad for the guy and promised to keep working hard to help him win.

Eventually, the crowd wandered out front to the tour bus which idled as Glassman explained the rest of his itinerary for this last western swing to get out the vote in good old Mohave County. He offered anyone interested a free ride on his tour bus to, Kingman or Lake Havasu, whichever it was. There was some confusion. While we admired the bus and attempted to make favorable comments about the unique music video Glassman put out, which the bus had just appeared in, Rodney reminded us how important it was to beat McCain, how much he needed our help, how hard he was working for us, the middle-class folks that made America great.

Seeing no one had taken him up on it the first tim,e Rodney repeated his offer of a ride on the tour bus to the next stop for anyone who wanted to go with him. And then he quickly quipped, "Of course, you'll have to get your own ride home."

"Of course," we nodded and he rode away. I believe a couple of little old ladies might have taken him up on the offer. For the most part the crowd dematerialized and i went back in the union hall to help pick up the Glassman signs he'd left behind and collect the unused donation envelopes.

Eight days later, Rodney Glassman would collect less than 35% of the popular vote.

And if i stopped this article here, it would seem like a great laugh and leave every Democrat painted in these broad colors and that would be great for a Republican rag or a simple "I-told-you-so" sour grapes type rant. I could even squeeze in a joke about "how it seemed like across the country the sheep-ple were literally willing to vote for any crap on the ballot as long as there was an (R) beside its name and if you don't believe me check out the winner of the Senate race in Idaho, i dare you." And wittily conclude that the worst part isn't how awful people like Huppenthahl, Horne, Brewer, and Russell Pearce are--and don't get me wrong they are heartbreakingly horrendous. No, the worst part is that they were what so many people wanted. As a wise man once said, "you could make a pretty good argument against democracy simply by interviewing the voters."

Or there's always that other bitter joke it seems we also often have to suffer through; the one that goes, "If they really wanted us to vote, they would have given us candidates."

But in Arizona in these statewide elections, that wasn't really true. One didn't have to see red or blue to see who was right or wrong in this election. Terry Goddard may be professionally trained to have left-side blindness, but he was clearly better than Brewer. Most animate objects and even some fence posts would probably be better than Brewer. And McCain? Come on, all i have to do is say the guy's name and i can rest my case.

But when people like Penny Kotterman and Felicia Rotellini, who were honest and earnest and incredibly well-qualified for jobs they had worked for their entire lives to earn, jobs that shape our very lives as Arizonans, when they lose what should have been slam-dunk elections to party hacks and rightwing cranks like John Huppenthahl and Tom Horne by ridiculous margins; there is a tragedy here.

Today when i traveled once more, now taking down signs, on my way home i stopped when i got to my own neighborhood out in So-Hi and gathered a sign for Goddard and one for Glassman, and all the others i had placed at a prominent corner. Across the street, a new billboard lit up the night. It had sprung up in the last two days since the election. It is big enough and bright enough i can even see it from my front porch more than a half a mile away. A stark white and green it simply said, "Where's the Birth Certificate?" and then gives a name and a number in smaller letters. Welcome to the Occupation.

Both in Arizona and America, it's a tragedy that has come upon us and we're all going to suffer. We have not yet begun to realize how much we have lost in this election.

But we will.

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Current Comedy, 10/05/10: Just Bully

2010-10-29T00:56:00.001-07:00

Gordon Gecko is dying of cancer.

Have you seen the pics in the National Enquirer? The man is nothing but scared skin and bones. Greed is good he said, then bullied his way to the top only to bring the whole thing crashing down with him. Says money never sleeps? Well, it doesn't weep for the wicked either, even for those who think themselves winners, till we all fall down.

Greed is good? Why would anyone ever want to teach the idea that greed was good to a population which is supposed to live together? Why did we, the population in question, not question whether we wanted to believe it? How could we be taught to believe greed was good when it is the same thing as when that bully back in the first grade took your money and got away with it because he was so strong and he was so mean. Why have we been taught, as grown-ups to think of that guy as the good guy?

No matter how much i love my country, no matter how many colored lenses i look through to try and reread the past in a better light, no matter how hard i try to not cringe at the present, i still am left still having to say this: America is not a land of the free, it is a land of the slave, where the richest 74 make more than the poorest 19 million. A land not "of," "for," nor "by" the people, except as allowed by the plutocrats' corporate interests. As for the rest of us, bullied and worked and worried to death in chains we don't even see. America has always been a country where the bullies ran things for their own interests while the rest of us suffered for their whims. This is just another of those times where the rich have got the upper hand and are reaching for our throat.

And then we were told we were supposed to love it and honor its tradition of might making wrong sound righter in the after-fact, no matter how bloody the moment might be. We've been sold that it was OK to terrorize each other to get what we wanted; it was the right way to treat each other and the others of the world as long as you waved a flag to sanctify the whole process when you were done. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the impact of Bullying in America. Taken as a whole, the role of the bully as a metaphor for America is a terrible topic to behold.

Over the last few weeks I have looked into the face of the topic of "Bullying in America" and it has beaten me down. Like the time last year when i watched Michael Moore's Capitalism twice in rapid succession and then was too depressed to write, much less laugh, for six weeks. As i contemplated how much power bullies actually have in our society, i became over-whelmed by the immensity of the problem and my probable lack of impact by wielding merely a couple of punch-lines and a few thousand words. Like climate change, and the plutocratic tyranny that runs our world like its marionette, this "battling the bullies" column is probably another case of too little, too late.

But here we go anyway--

Thanks to the recent Anti-bullying week media blitz, half the liberal media, and CNN in particular, throughout the whole month stayed semi-focused on another, slightly different, bullying story--a fresh twist on the continuing tale of the ever-running spate of homosexual teen suicides. Five in One Week and all with plenty of photos. The sad stories and glam photos were rolled out like a poor little black-clad emo parade to celebrate our indifference. Each story told a tale of bullying, of a struggling gay kid hounded to the point of choosing death to end the life of torture.

The favorite one for the media to glamorize was Tyler Clemente, a first semester freshman at Rutgers who literally died from the humiliation of getting outed live via the Internet while doing it with a man in his dorm room. Back in my day somebody might've passed a note, nowadays there's live streaming. Clemente later jumped off a bridge. Buddies promptly claim it was just a prank and they were just playing. That's what the bullies always say. Oh those crazy college kids. It was all just supposed to be in good fun, right?

Now it just so happens that the conjunction of all this gay-bashing is particularly unnerving at this particular time when the Right is ratcheting up its marketing of their own homophobia as a selling point. CNN's coverage of the apparent wave of teen suicides was a good chance for America to realize what teachers have been telling folks for years. It's true: our schools are so over-run by social issues we are at a point where it seems it is hard for almost anyone to learn almost anything except for a faulty bare basics of survival: shut up and keep out of the bullies ' way. The cult of bullying has not only weakened our schools, but is dominating our politics and destroying our economy, eating us from the inside with our very own greed.

Teachers may try to work against this social structure that dominates our kids' worlds; but we can only go so far because the same attitude we try to extinguish in them is the one that dominates their parents' world. But it is clear the teachers are not winning, and the longer the GOP control the discussion the less likely they are to be able to do so. why do they keep telling me greed is good? Why would anyone want to build a society that would operate this way?

Of course if one wants to be a bully, the current crisis must seem like a field day. Bullies like to keep their victims hungry and sick and ignorant and scared. And aren't those the four major points of the GOP agenda? End social services, abolish Obamacare, defund education, mass detentions for suspected aliens or terrorists and a theocracy for all. Wrap it up in ribbon and we'll call it the free market, though everyone i know is a slave to it.

Some say this election could make or break the future of our country right before our very eyes. Some say the Tea Party takeover could be a cover for a fascist coup. I am one of those people. Naomi Wolf was laughed at two years ago when she warned us about the upcoming End of America. But i wasn't among the laughing.

And as i see the news this month, it feels as if the pinscher is closing. So much of the current increasing bigotry and oppression is based on the rhetoric of racial politics, or sexual politics, or religious politics, or litigious politics; but it's all just excuses for those who wish to use force to feel free to do so. I mean, come on--everyone knows it's gay to call someone a faggot, duh. But folks do it anyway 'cuz it's so funny right? And if you don't think so, you must be queer.

Take the case of the "pretending to be the governor" of Arizona, Jan Brewer, who is hoping to get "re-elected" to that office. Have you've seen this train wreck some call a woman? They could use any five minutes of her debate footage as an IQ test. Forget about the whole "laughing at her over her 16 seconds of dead 'drunk, er, i mean, deer in the headlights' silence" thing. The times when she's speaking are way more incriminating. Just listen to any five minutes of Jan Brewer speaking. ANY five minutes. If some silly voter still find anything attractive about that woman--her words, her attitude, her ideas, or her looks, that person is probably not even intelligent enough to even be capable of the complicated series of tasks involved in completing the process of voting.

Jan Brewer who bumbled into office, mumbled and bungled her way through job of appearing to only suck a little; who the GOP hated till she got behind SB-1070 and now she's the little "Jan that can!" THAT Jan Brewer, the bully. Though she's not the worse of them, it says a lot about Arizona that Brewer is the odds on favorite. But what does she do when her opponent (Terry Goddard) begins to gain a little traction in the polls due to her own ineptitude at fear mongering and personal inability to speak English as if it were her own native language? Then she simply calls him gay. It's so typical and so tiring and so predictably GOP. It's all typical bully behavior. No wonder folks die and the society suffers.

But back to the news because the annual anti-bullying week this year was a news anomaly. Somehow five teen suicides of actual bullied-to-death homosexuals made it into the news in the same week. Understand there are thousands of teen suicides each year, so five in any given week is, in fact, a given. Five in one week? Five that they counted. The synergic media magic beauty part was that this particular week also happened to be the kick-off of National Bullying Prevention Month and, as if by magic, America suddenly, briefly, almost actually cared that kids are getting tormented to death. A growing epidemic finally got its fifteen minutes in a news cycle.

But only after it promised to be forgotten in time for the next news cycle. Though in the meantime, the stats are indeed staggering. Every day one hundred and eighty-six thousand bullied victims don't even go to school because of the harassment. Each year about 40% give up on school and thousands give up on everything entirely.

Yes, yes, i know, that is just a few more tears in the ever flowing stream. This is just that old "same as it ever was" epidemic tale of bullied victims who always were and still are pummeled relentlessly from sea to shining sea, despite the martyrdom of St. Matthew Shepard. Though nobody is willing to lay out a current and complete statistic, but the most common figures you can find say the teen suicide rate tripled from the 70s to the 90s, and has, since then, only continued to grow. Suicide has become the 4th most common cause of death in kids 10-14, the 3rd for 15-20 and 2nd most common for 20-25. About 12 out of every 100,000 teens will kill themselves and as many as twenty-five times that number will try.

Our children torment and tease each other every day in every way one can say "you're gay!" and still they get away with it. Nobody wants to be the baby who wimps out and couldn't handle a little "playfully" doled out misery. It is the one gift most kids prefer giving. And nobody is supposed to complain because hurting each other is so much fun. Meanwhile most adults look away because they are closet-bullies themselves. It's the one way the right's not afraid to come out of the closet. That is the society our children live in. And then we wonder why they do not learn?

Well, as their teacher, i can tell you your kids are learning plenty. They know how to "kill," "maim," and belittle their enemies and/or opponents in most major gaming media. They know how to turn a phrase till it cripples and when to relish the sight of pain in others. They know exactly which muscles to twitch when they fake lunge at each other to get that maximum scare effect, which buttons to push to best piss off the world.

And, where do the bully-kids learn it? From their Tea Party Lovin' parents, of course, who bully them around the house all night, so they can bully their fellow kids around the playground all day. Meanwhile they don't know where Poland is, why the water cycle matters, what a noun is or what a verb does. And neither do their parents. But both generations know how to push their way to get what they want, don't they? By bullying of course, it's the American Way. Babies raising babies and with nobody playing parent, no one learns why it's bad to be bad. Whether or not you agree that that's where we came from, it appears to be where we are headed.

Take my current favorite bullying exploit, told in many places, but most engagingly in Josh Holland's AlterNet article, "Ayn Rand Conservatism at Work -- Firefighters Let Family's House Burn Down Because Owner Didn't Pay $75 Fee." Wanna see what that whole "smaller government" thing Sarah Palin loves looks like? Here you go:

It's the case of a Mr. Gene Cranick of Obion County, Tennessee. The Republican run local government voted to keep taxes low by not operating the county-wide fire department. Firefighting is, you know, one of those basic kinds of government services most Americans say they see as the bare minimum of what they'd expect to get when they pay their taxes. Instead, in addition to country taxes residents in rural Obion County were required to pay a separate $75 fee for fire service.

Long and short of it, Cranick hadn't paid. The fire broke out in some barrels near his home, then crawled across the field as a brush fire, until it engulfed his home. Cranick watched his life be destroyed in slow motion. He tried to be a responsible citizen and went after the fire with his own resources, but his garden hose just couldn't handle it. It was a time when he needed his government. And they refused him.

The firefighters came and did nothing as they watched the fire leap from the barrels to his house, utterly destroying it and killing the household pets. Throughout that whole infernal process, and even before hand, while he was on the phone with 911, Cranick repeatedly tried to pay the fee. But the firefighters just stood by, though eventually they did bust out their hoses when the next neighbor over's property was threatened. He had paid the fee. They were good loyal Republican firemen, one and all, Tea Party pure.

The firemen knew that the pure beauty of the American "Free Market" system is that capitalism means the only reason to save another person from misery and devastation is if you are going to make some money. Cranick just had to learn the lesson is all, it was nothing personal, just following orders.

To stand idly by and watch a person's whole life be destroyed when it is in your power to stop it, to listen and not lift a finger while three dogs and a cats are burned to death right in front of you, this is the height of bullying. These are the people we've let put themselves in power.

And it is just one of a series of incidents, an epidemic of incidents of bullying across the board. Wall St.'s destruction of America is bullying. The battles over gay rights and abortion: basic bullying. Our foreign policy reduces down to US being the biggest meanest kid in the 5th grade over and over again.

Over and over again, the right-wing call for businesses to breathe free, free from the oppression of government's supposedly bullying regulations. Over and over the people looking out for our safety, our government, gets cast as a bully and we rally to condemn the bad old "gub'mint," remove the cage we us to contain the wild beat we call the free market and every time we try this, it bites us in the ass. With the Treasury being Goldman- Sachs territory, and Wall Street and the insurance industry purchasing congressmen wholesale; everywhere you look bullies are shaping our commerce and every time you look, someone else is getting screwed.

And it's a vertical monopoly: Bullies Uber-Alles every time and everywhere. Our culture? Movies of violence or cruel comedy, television of barking political attack dogs and "reality TV" that banks on humiliation. Hate screamed rock and thugged up rap. The problem is, our society has evolved into a bully society, the intentional product of a bully brained government. This is in no way me trying to pretend this is some strictly recent aberration, or that America hasn't always been a bully.

Ask the Powhatan, the Algonquian, the Seminole, the Cherokee, the Navajo, the Chinese, the Irish, the Hindi, the Black. Ask Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Korea. Sure, in foreign policy we have often been bullies and splendidly bastardly about it besides. Ask Mexico or ask the people of Guatemala what they think of the US right now that it's been revealed we once used their country as our own little secret real world STD experiment. And when we were too busy being bullies by ourselves, we trained others to do our bullying for us at the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. School of the Americas. What a wonderful sounding name for a place that offers classes in anesthesia-free knee cap removal and comparative genital electro-conductivity.

But until now America at least wanted to pretend we were above barbarity, that we were the good guys. Nowadays, it's just might makes right. At least in the recallable past, the government and pols, our business leaders and role models tried, at least to appear, to be in favor of protecting the weak from the brutish. Now they are all so bald-faced about it.

Take any day from last month's Democracy Now headlines and one can weave the tale of how the bullies shape our lives. 10/11 sounds good. You can trace the tales of the bullies from story to story: Now that it is coming out that, not only did our beloved financial institutions fraudulently raise housing prices so high everyone went broke, then bust, then they bilked us out of billions in bailouts; and then took homes away from four million families. Not only that. Now it turns out that too, that the mass foreclosures they have used to throw our citizens into the streets in pursuit of their corporate profits are also based on fraud. Foreclosures were robo-processed with rewards for the agents who could forge due process the fastest.

As of yet we don't know how many families were falsely thrown into the street, but instances have shown up in several states and all fifty are currently investigating. Meanwhile the head of Countrywide agrees to paying millions in fines for his misbehavior and joins the long list of banks and big businesses quietly agreeing to fines. Like we needed their permission to hold them accountable for screwing us after having been caught again, caught red-handed bullying the American public. And we have to let them do it because that's what keeps free enterprise free: the right of the rich to rape the poor.

These are the banks we were told were too precious to our country to risk collapse. These are the banks we loaned money to like a friend. Screwing us over all over again. Defrauding America at every single juncture in this sorry sequence of events. Several state governments have intervened and around the country, folks are calling for a national moratorium on foreclosures. But the federal government says, 'no, can't risk hurting our precious banks' precious bank profits.' Translation: because the banks are bullies and we don't want the bully to get mad. Wall Street's a bear when you piss off the bull.

Meanwhile another 95,000 lost their jobs. As the rich consolidate their capital, there is not enough left for paychecks it seems. And the list of bullies bloodying the public just goes on. Remember, these are just the stories from a single day.

Next up, NY gubernatorial candidate and bestiality fan, Carl Paladino, joined the right wing wannabe-governors' gay-basher band wagon with the aid of some Jewish religious leaders, who who wrote Paladino an anti-gay script, which not only read but has defended in separate interviews. Paladino might simply be throwing red meat to his red state fans; but the rabbis were declaring precious principles of their faith. Once again, the supposed god of love apparently hates fags. Odd that those Jewish religious leaders must've never heard that it was wrong to persecute people for being different.

Speaking of oppressions Paladino's rabbis might've heard of, how about that Ohio GOP congressional candidate Rich Iott, who out and out unmasks all pretenses of right wing pretensions about their intentions and simply dresses the part of a Nazi Waffen SS officer, the guys who operated the camps. His website recounts their exploits so lovingly it is hard to tell whether he's recruiting re-enactors or promoting their resurgence.

This is of course followed by a bit on the fact Israel is now demanding loyalty oaths as their next step towards a final solution for their Palestinian problem. Then two stories of US foreign follies of bully-dom with a Syrian man mistakenly imprisoned for seven years in Guantanamo Bay and the latest faux pas of one of our Latin American graduates of the School of the Americas, the aborted coup attempt in Ecuador.

Then was the story of Glenn Beck disciple, Byron Williams, who went out to shoot up the Tides Foundation to teach us all a lesson and ignite his revolution. Instead he just shot up the California State Police cars in his effort to rid the world of the bad guys. Way to train 'em, Glenn!

Stuck somewhere in the middle was this shocker of an item: "In what’s been described as the world’s biggest day of climate action, over 7,000 rallies and events were held Sunday in 188 Countries. The "10/10/10 Global Work Party" was organized by 350.org to urge people across the globe to do something in their city or community that will help deal with global warming." Which is the only time i ever heard about any of that. Why is this the only new source talking about an international event so massive it makes the idea of a Tea Party party, even one as lavish as Beck's big bash at the Lincoln Memorial, seem paltry?

Well, the truth is we won't hear about it in the mainstream because you aren't supposed to be interested. As an American news story that topic's officially DOA. Climate Change deniers have won the day on that one. American rich won't give up the profits and the rest of us intend to stay too damn comfortable to ever willingly give that up for the rest of the peasants around the world. They have to do what we say anyway. After all, we are the bully.

The last story of that night was about a dead John Lennon and some awards in his name on what would have been his 70th birthday, if he hadn't been shot down by a bully.

Of course, you can go through most any day and find stories of the bullies getting ever more brazen: Alaska reporter handcuffed by GOP candidates private guards who had to be rescued by the police. Rand Paul's boys stomp on MoveOn.org. And Stephen Broden, a GOP Congressional candidate in Texas, who says the GOP should just hold a violent revolution if they don't get what they want through election. On tape, in a sermon. That's right, this guy's a minister. If that guy is the example of the folks spreading the word, it's small wonder they know neither right from wrong, nor the true spirit of the god of love that they say that they love. Perhaps their god isn't meant to be man's friend but his shield.

Welcome to the Jungle. "Kill Teams" collecting fingers for trophies in Afghanistan, Wikileaks revealing our own recounting of torture and mass massacre in Iraq. America is no longer among the 20 least corrupt countries of the world in Transparency International's annual index. Now we're 22nd and the countries we've been destroying and/or mismanaging for the last couple of decades, Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, are among the absolute worst.

Or for me the story with the with the scariest bully face, the GOP candidate who most exemplifies what appears to be the new face of the GOP, former marine and admitted murderer, Ilario Pantano. While some will say Amy Goodman's good liberal authorship can spin some stories, you couldn't possibly distort the facts in this case to make them more hideous. They are bad enough as they are; and no one is disputing them.

"A Tea Party-backed congressional candidate in North Carolina is facing scrutiny for having killed two unarmed Iraqis while serving in Iraq. The candidate, Ilario Pantano, has said he has no regrets about fatally shooting the two at point blank range after detaining them near Fallujah in April 2004. Prosecutors later alleged that Pantano intended to make an example of the men by shooting them sixty times and hanging a sign over their corpses that read "No better friend, no worse enemy." Pantano did not deny hanging the sign or shooting the men repeatedly after stopping their vehicle at a checkpoint. He admitted to emptying one magazine of bullets into the Iraqis, then reloading and firing thirty more rounds. Despite his admission, the military cleared Pantano of wrongdoing in 2005. He’s now in a tight race with Democrat Mike McIntyre in North Carolina’s 7th Congressional District."

Did you catch that last line? Tight race? The people of North Carolina like this sort of thing? How is there hope for America when the people want to elect cold blooded killers to their Congress? And who are the people behind him?

Raw Story elaborates about the support Pantano has been able to get. "Pantano has been able to raise almost $1 million for his campaign. He has received endorsements from the Veterans In Defense Of Liberty, the North Carolina Chapter of Eagle Forum, far-right blogger Pamela Geller, and a number of other conservatives."

Is this where we're headed? Recently long time Fascism watcher Sara Robinson published her latest report on the ever-threatening "totalitarianism-creep" factor in the upcoming elections, "Fascist America: Is This Election the Next Turn?" and asked, are we there yet? Her result? Maybe.

Robinson recognizes the work of Robert Paxton as the authority in the field of studying the process a democracy goes through as one collapses and crumbles into fascism. As she often does, Robinson quotes him extensively. Paxton identifies, three final warning signs to awaken citizens to soberingly real possibility our country is sliding past the point of no return. which an emerging fascist regime has too much power to be stopped:

"1. Are [neo- or proto-fascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?

2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?

3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?"

Yes, yes, yes in all three cases. We've let this virus grow inside us and now it's eating us whole. No matter which way the elections fall, we are all going to lose. If they land even the slighest advantage, then like they did with Clinton, like they did with Carter, the GOP will bully Obama to exhaustion and everyone will suffer while nothing gets fixed.

That's the best case scenario. If, somehow, the Dems retained some power, you can predict all kinds if retaliation. Bullies aren't good with being told no. As Sharron Angle notes they're ready to resort to "Second Amendment remedies." Are we about to devour ourselves?

Bye, bye, Gordon Gecko. Greed is good, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Thanks for the cancer, now we've all got it. We're all bullies. It's the American Way. And just like you, this might be our curtain call.

George Orwell once predicted the future would be a boot, smashing a human face. Forever. I fear the future is here--

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Current Comedy, 9/2/10: Terrorists Win?

2010-09-01T01:45:00.001-07:00

I am not now, nor have i ever been a terrorist. I am also not a Muslim.

As i type these words terrorists are winning, destroying the land that i love. As i type these words, i am losing my country, my America. And, by the way, the terrorists i am talking about, the ones out to destroy this land i love, are not Muslims either.

Yeah, i am talking about the NYC mosque and i'm talking about the Glenn Beck DC rally and the host of other related religious outrages which have shamed our country these last few weeks. I had hoped the need to write this article would have gone away by now. I had hoped, i had prayed in fact, by the time i sat down to complete this column, America would have restored its own dignity by laughing Beck's whole "phony restoring our fake honor by declaring me your messiah after we listen to this word from our sponsors" snake oil televangelist's side show right off the airwaves.

I mean, clearly when you spend years spewing racist mockery and hate-filled attacks on your perceived enemies, then try to repackage yourself as an icon of racial harmony and the messenger of the god of love, surely even the blindest of Americans would see the unvarnished fraud of it all. By me, any huckster who aims to hide his sinister intentions in a cloak of religion is one of the lowest of sinners, a knowingly false prophet. In some religions you get stoned for it, or in Rush Limbaugh's case, really, really vicodin-ed out.

By now i'd've thought New York City, that city which is itself the symbol of the melting pot that is America, would have listened to their own mayor and accepted the fact that NYC, according to their own website, already has 6500 churches and one more church won't make that much difference, unless, of course, you make a big stink about it. Surely by now the big apple's big cheese could've convinced his city to lay off the religious intolerance and stop annoying their fellow Americans when they try to exercise their first Amendment freedoms.

But neither has happened.

In the long run, you know, i know, and Christian Americans know they are going to have to learn to tolerate other visions of god in much the same way White Americans have to adjust our shrinking prominence in America's multi-colored future. Some say there always was, and always will be, racial and religious intolerance. It's only natural. Like a virus in a dormant stage, America's racial problem has generally been present throughout American history, occasionally flaming up to plague us. Many a time America has championed the cause of bringing in more immigrants while turning a blind eye and deaf ear to their struggles and their oppressions. Take for example the plight of the Braceros in the 20th Century, or the Chinese railroaders in the 19th. But that barely, or is it rarely, repressed instinctual White anger has been recurrently reignited most anytime a political party hopes to make hay out of some citizens' "Nativist" tendencies. And there has always been some phrase to sell the hate: "Know-Nothings," "Yellow Menace," "Red Scare" to name just a few historical buzzwords in chronological order ... or as is happening now, on another front, with the whole issue of "Anchor Babies'" turn at having their Swift Boat flags a-flyin'.

In essence, this resurgence in racism and xenophobia is simply the scared old guard clawing to keep a hold on what they already know they are losing. And no matter how much they rant to the contrary, they are bound to die off and stop being so much of a problem for the rest of us. Unless they kill us first, which is the approach they've usually taken--Indians, Blacks, Chinese, Japanese.

So of course i'm terrified.

Everywhere i look there's more terror. The Fox Network's vertical Terror monopoly works very hard to keep us afraid. And not even of the real stuff: floods washing away Pakistan due to global warming. Gang rapes by the hundreds in the Congo. BP's slippery slide into Exxon-Valdez level environmental clean-up negligence, the billions in corruption and the cover-up its created in both our foreign wars, the mortgage crisis, slipping economy, Mexican drug insanity, Dr. Laura claiming she's the victim, or McCain's potential 5th term. There's plenty that could legitimately scare the holy and unholy bat crap out of us.

But no, what Fox really wants us to be afraid is liberty and progress, liberals and progressives anyway. Why? Because that's not what they're there to sell. They're there to teach us to be afraid of Obama. They're there to teach us the rest of the world is an ugly scary place, which is why we should pay any price to have a lot of big guns. Even more so, over the last 10 years, FOX has been working day and night to sell us a different daily hate--making sure we are afraid of and despising Muslims.

Though the Feb, 2001 Taliban destruction of the giant Buddha statues was a foretaste of the demonizations to come, even pinpoint the roll-out date of the new "Islam is Evil" brand that Fox has sold us for much of the last decade. There were lots of ways to frame the character of the alleged hijackers on 9/11: Al Qaeda, Saudi/Yemeni, bin Laden disciples. But instead we were simply taught they were "Muslim." And so for ten years, all terrorists and insurgents in the countries we've attacked, every foreign enemy we've fought against, and demonized in the process, has been identified as Muslim. After so many years of being told that "All Terrorists are Muslims," it is an easy eyes-closed leap to believing "All Muslims are Terrorists."

Though it is odd Fox should work this hard to sell us this, since Fox itself is in part owned by a Muslim, who happens to have both business and familial ties to Osama bin Laden. And that may be why Fox News ownership is actually, quietly, funding the very same Manhattan mosque they work so hard to demonize. Because they're the terrorists.

That's right, as Jon Stewart and numerous others have laid out for us, after Murdoch himself, the 2nd largest shareholder in News Corp is Bush's old pal, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Murdoch also owns billions in shares of Talal's Rotana Group, "the Arab World's largest entertainment company." Prince bin Talal is a member of the royal family of the country that produced most of the 19 9/11 hijackers and which has repeatedly been caught funding terrorists around the world. As dirty an image as that may seem, through his work with Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Foundation, Talal has also helped fund numerous high profile high quality projects, such as the mosque in lower Manhattan. It is just amazing that Fox took such glee in the public burning of the image of all Muslims under the guise of an earnest crusade to follow the money funding the project. When in fact they knew all along.

So to try and keep this straight, Fox is significantly owned by the same Muslims they work so hard to get us to hate. And the principle reason lately is that Fox is giving immense coverage to this particular mosque that their owner is actually funding. As a result, ever more people claim Obama is a secret Muslim, etc.; an Arab looking cab driver has had his throat cut, mosques are harassed in Texas and California, desecrated and urinated on in New York, and a mosque in Tennessee has been not only vandalized, but now firebombed. Just like Black churches once were across the South, when Blacks became too visible and too vocal and demanded to have a reality of equality and not just a dream.

And talk about having one's religion and rights urinated on, at the same time supposedly 71% of Americans are opposed to the proposed "terror mosque at ground zero," noted Florida hatemonger minister Bill Keller has started his own ground zero ministry to preach the word of Islamophobia, homophobia, and Mormonism as Satan worship. As Salon's Justin Elliot noted:

"A bigoted pastor who has assailed gays and Muslims is launching the "9-11 Christian Center at Ground Zero" a mere two blocks from the World Trade Center site this Sunday, but so far the project hasn't drawn a peep of protest from those who are outraged by the "ground zero mosque."Pastor Bill Keller of Florida said today he will begin preaching Sunday at the Marriott at 85 West Street A weekly service is planned at the hotel until the $8 million 9/11 Christian Center finds a permanent space. (Fundraising is going well, Keller told Salon today.) ... Keller is the same pastor who hosted a birther infomercial that encouraged viewers to send him and a partner donations to advance the birther cause. His Internet ministry explicitly calls President Obama the new Hitler. He calls homosexuality a perversion. And in 2008, he targeted presidential contender Mitt Romney for being Mormon with a campaign called "voting for Satan."

Gee thanks Fox. What a horror show! Why Fox what do you want from this? Do you hate us for our freedom? What could these terrorists want bad enough to so destroy America? Gold? God? Glory?

Sad to say there is no possible real solution to this improbable problem since the vast "American Uninterested" ignore the blatant crisis in favor of quibbling over which toilet paper is softest, which fast food tastes the right kind of too salty, which beer gives the best drunk, and which mindless entertainment leaves one the most numbed. They prefer to simply look out for number one and treat everyone else like number two.

Just like Fox News told 'em to.

And when they do rise up to civic wrath, they don three cornered hats to defend a Constitution they aim to rewrite, then, while the kleptocrats rape and pillage their way through our national treasures, they loudly bleat like sheep about such non-issues as an Americans right to marriage, a woman's right to control her body and a people's right to believe, or not believe, in their own vision of god to drown out any serious discussion of America's real issues--racism, economic inequality, and our violent lurking invisible theocracy.

They claim they long for the America of their ancestors, an America bought with the blood and suffering of everyone else's ancestors. They are only interested in aiding human suffering if an insurance company can make a profit in doing so. They debate how hard one has to squint to make it look like "non-citizen" means "non-human;" and the best way to give a zygote reproductive rights over its host. All positions sold to them by Fox.

So, since the American public appear to intend to continue blindly following the misdirection of their so-called leaders, meanwhile leaving the Fox to raid our henhouses blind; let me make a modest proposal, a compromise: First we, the American public, give Fox the equivalent revenue for all television advertising in all markets in all America in all perpetuity. Sure, just give it to them. Yeah, it's another government subsidy for the rich; but it would be a small price to pay if in trade the rest of us never ever have to watch that crap they call news again.

Two, in trade for shipping Glenn Beck, and all those who really want to follow him, off to Guyana along with a lifetime supply of Kool-Aid, the rest of us accept we have to give in the cry baby tea party god-haters and let them have their way in this one case.

I know, that's the hard part. The part where we have to let the terrorists win. That's right, it looks like the only way out of this mess is to go ahead and destroy our own precious First Amendment right of the people having the liberty to go to whatever church they want to. It seems the only way to get the terrorists to stop their attack on our country is to pass a law to forbid any sign of any Muslims anywhere close to hallowed ground called zero. Like everyone says, those Muslims can build their mosque elsewhere, any elsewhere they want, as long as it's not in anyone's backyard.

I know this seems harsh, but this should protect us. We only have to turn against a small portion of our country, at the most it's only seven million people, it's like 2%, it's a weak glass of milk. And it's just the Muslims; and all the terrorists back on 9/11 were Muslims right? So all Muslims are bad right? Isn't that the rationale?

Of course ... the 9/11 terrorists were also all men. So to be safe, we better get rid of them too and why should we say that there is some kind of imaginary shield of "hallow-fication" that begins exactly three blocks for the WTC "footprint"? Isn't that the theory since we're told it's not safe enough to have the proposed Terror Mosque be built two blocks away (though it won't be nearly as close as a couple of hallowed-ground "ground zero" strip-clubs, which also coincidentally attract men--see, i told you there was a plot.) No way are we going to let men so close to our precious "ground zero." They might be terrorists. So shouldn't that shield extend a bit to a less risky distance of, say, New Jersey? That's it--from now on, no Muslims and no men on Manhattan.

Oh wait, They were all also dark skinned, so we have to get rid of dark-skinned women too. So where were we? Oh yeah, no Muslims, no men, and no dark skinned non-Muslim women allowed on Manhattan to properly hallow the hallowed ground at ground zero. Of course, since dark skinned peoples are the vast majority of humans on the planet, and since 37% of US Muslims are White, well, we just can't be too sure, now can we? We would be safer if we got rid of people off of Manhattan entirely, then no human could sully the sacred hallowedness of Ground Zero.

What a monument that would be. To our stupidity perhaps, but it would be a hell of a job of hallowing that hallowed ground. Of course ... the hijackers were also all mammals, backbones, and cells. Why be species-ist about this? If Glenn Beck can claim to be a man of god, who's to say a slug can't be a terrorist? We'll have to all be sure and we can only be sure when that the entire isle of Manhattan is lifeless and white.

Just like that awful morning nine years ago at Ground Zero when it seemed like, the terrorists won. Oh my god, it seems like that again. God, i pray it's not true. God? You don't care which way i pray do you? No?

Oh, that's right. You aren't the terrorist. We are.

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.