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

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

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--organized myself, so i do a lot of personal independent and thus singular protests; but this issue seems too important to not act on it and support and work for it as best as i can. 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)

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

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

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.