Nazi Chicago

Photos & films of cocky Nazi SS troopers rounding up & brutalizing the innocent in Europe have helped our world grow away from those terrors.

But now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel seeks to stifle American debate by magnifying protestor penalties and prosecuting those filming police brutality. The upcoming May G8 & NATO summits in Chicago are expected to rekindle scenes of 1968, when Chicago policemen merrily busted heads & bloodied the dreams of Americans seeking a kinder national discourse.

It is now illegal under the Illinois Eavesdropping Act to record police without permission. The Class 1 felony is punishable by 15 years in prison.

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy (link) reportedly favors video & audio recordings as protection for both police & the public.

State brutality is dangerous. Our foreign interventions deserve scrutiny, and domestic political suppression must be reviewed (and should not happen at all). Four words against tyranny for Mayor Rahm Emanuel: "Let My People Know!"

Screwed by Banks & Uncle Sam

There should be no banker immunity. Their crimes cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Their donations have corrupted government. Tens of millions American people live poorer lives due to these criminals.

Politicians suck the poison teat of corporate corruption, then ask swindled Americans to eat shit.

Read Richard Eskow on foreclosure fraud (link)

You LOSER

Mitt Romney is a self-absorbed rich weasel. In Mitt Romney's America, normal people with normal jobs are losers.

Mitt Romney claims he's a self-made man. What an ingrate!

In fact, his Dad headed one of America's largest corporations. George Romney was Governor of Michigan, a US Presidential candidate, and a Cabinet official under Nixon. In other words, Mitt is a silver-spoon brat, born on third base, who thinks he hit a triple. All his life Romney wealth & family connections greased Mitt's way. His privileged upbringing included private Cranbrook School for Boys, Stanford & Harvard. In 1966 at age 19 he went to France as a Mormon missionary, avoiding U.S. military service and the Vietnam war. Mitt subsequently worked hard - but his career as a businessman-speculator was built on a wealthy home life, family connections, luck & privilege.

But that's not why Mitt Romney's an asshole. He's quickly irritated by us proles. He's wholly supportive of speculators, bankers and corporate gamblers, while scorning normal people. We need a nation where jobs pay a living wage. Willard Mitt Romney cuts your full-time salary to the bone and then chuckles at your pain. We'd be fertilizer if he could manage it. He's a jackal.

Regime Change

Israel, the USA, and their satellite governments failed imposing new UN sanctions on Syria. Now chest-pounding & bleating about violence & death, they ignore similar outrages by allies. Don't be fooled. The Great Satan threatens the world constantly, and Occupied Territory is everywhere. Retake the Good Life!

Peace & Calm

Peace in the midst of strife. Calm in the throes of struggle. Ability to refocus & "will to chill" are prerequisites to sustained effort & ultimate success.

Enjoy the path.

Transaction Tax

A financial transaction tax would calm rampant machine trading and defuse otherwise unlimited speculation. Our homes and jobs and communities should not be used as chess pieces for gambling games. Tax them suckers!

Accountability for Murder

Illegality tolerated... criminality unpunished... Political leaders waging dirty wars must be prosecuted & legally sentenced. Without accountability, the wrongs continue.

Don't tolerate crushing local peoples. Lame potential external threats are corporate gambits to justify murder. Genocide was attempted on American Native communities. The crimes by the USA in Vietnam and surrounding nations have never been paid for, and many of the weasel political leaders such as Alexander Haig, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld came back to plague the world again. If we're not haunted by the bloodshed in Iraq and elsewhere, we should weep for huge loss of wealth to military adventurism & waste.

These fuckers raped the world. It's not enough to believe they'll burn in hell. They should be convicted in court, their crimes detailed, and justice administered. Exemption from scrutiny prolongs suffering.

Happy New Year

A new beginning is possible this 2012. Good health & happiness are goals worth working for.

Economic insecurity triggers stress, illness & despair in many people. We will suffer till the population understands they've bought-in to a flim-flam society full of minefields & continued stress. "Let the buyer beware" when purchasing: accountability is poor to non-existent. Work hard at a tough job without a living wage. Turn on TV for force-fed bullshit. Bad scenario.

The pathway to a better world won't be on corporate TV till it's well-trodden old news. You're not alone in pain & insecurity. Born with nothing, we slave to rest. The entitlement systems are warped. The super wealthy, the banks, the military, have taken almost everything. New ideas are twisted as the masses are pushed to fight, slave & die. Good luck finding a better way to live in 2012.

Election Scam USA

Are you a true American, who can vote without trouble? The electoral process in the USA has become horribly corrupted. Democracy as taught in schools is a mirage. Too many people will be turned away from voting. Too many others will never bother to stand in line, to choose the lesser bit of shit as leader. The system could be repaired easily, the outrages of past national elections are widely known. But the distortions don't trouble our tinpot political bosses. The 99% must stand up for democracy, or continue to be shat upon.

Rant Against Arrogance

Too many arrogant bossy Republicans seek to rebrand themselves. They're too often robber barons who've built positions through insider deals & corrupt buyoffs.

They now self-style themselves "job creators" but again the arrogance: take all limelight & grab all profits. Cool communities create & sustain jobs. Entrepreneurs and business owners are vital key contributors, but when they selfishly claim full credit for all & everything it's time to drop any contact with them. These pricks will claim they make the sun shine. Scum.

H-2B Hurts Americans

American businesses devised the H-2B visa to enslave labor. Difficult or dirty less desirable jobs would reasonably pay more, but...

Employers can hire temporary H-2B foreign workers when they "can't find" sufficient local employees. But local people or other Americans will work if paid more. The employer strategy is to pay below what Americans require, and hire in more-vulnerable foreigners.

Much of the payroll then leaks away overseas.

Support Local. American workers should resist such scabby techniques, and H-2B foreign workers must understand their presence depresses wages.

Give - or Pay More

As we use & rely upon electronic media, it becomes important to reflect upon benefits & threats. Scummy businesses & slimy politicians take advantage of the gullible & careless.

They'd sell us as fertilizer.

Readers of this blog are urged to support the EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation     http://www.eff.org

Tools we use for networking, information & everyday life are under constant attack. Together we can create a better future.

Dismantling Democracy by Disinformation

Democracy is under grave threat in the USA. Where the Occupy movement is successful and people develop more sense of community & empowerment, the 1% who've occupied our government, banks & power centers feel their primacy threatened.

Expect more trouble from the security services and horror stories from corporate media as they try pushing us back to dumb servitude.

Pain Pusher Businessmen

Business suffers when corruption is tolerated among businessmen. Our communities are robbed by big industry pushing their costs onto the public, and sucking away undue profits.

Collusion and corruption have allowed this to happen. Not every businessperson is a pain pusher -- shaving "externalities" from their balance sheets through dark agreements with political lackeys & media bigshots.

Recent huge cases include the windfall success & fall of Enron, the "inside job" of banker-led real estate investment trust speculation & the bank bailout (while borrowers lost their homes), and the radiation pollution TEPCO has scattered in the fields, seas & people around their Fukushima nuclear plant. In the latter case, huge pain was unleashed, but there's been no clawback of past dividends. The owners dodged accountability. Horrible. This Pain Pushing must be stopped.

Defense & security spending must seem wasted funds to America's 700,000+ homeless in horribly insecure conditions. Expensive protection for the rich is pain pushed on the rest of us.

Edward Haskell, Banker

Edward Haskell presides over a big desk at the regional bank. Eddie's a fixture at the country club bar.

Community funds built the bank employing Eddie, but he gets far more salary & bonus money than other workers round town.

Bankers (and lawyers) assist cost-pusher efforts by industry (such as nuclear and big oil), where costs are pushed onto the public, but dividends sucked away by a chosen few. Eddie and other hirelings make it happen. Some might call it corruption. To Eddie it's a good business, though he sometimes worries his children are threatened by a deteriorating community.

Eddie was considered a weasel, "an operator" -- or more bluntly, an asshole. But now it's "Good evening Mr. Haskell!" as Eddie drives his corporate town car to the welcoming gates of Hell.

Incentive taxes

When a businessman receives $150 million in annual salary, another million or two provides little marginal incentive.

The same million can mobilize the poor to do so many things...

Youth born to great wealth need do nothing -- a dirty secret if Junior talks to worker proles. Where's the incentive to excel?

Taxes can help provide incentives.

Rich Man Hate Teacher

Teachers under fire for "failing" to stuff student brains with basic skills? The true roots of this debate: teachers threaten wage-slave society. Teachers help develop people who think. Wealthy bosses want cheap interchangeable labor units that never complain -- slightly intelligent donkeys, scared & defenseless.

Teachers are thus subversive.

Teachers also have long vacations, giving them more leisure to look around & to understand their community's financing is threatened by arrogant parasites.

Boiled Frogs

We're in the midst of the boiled frog phenomenon, and we're the insensate frogs.

Systems collapse all around us, and pompous pricks tell us all's well (or would be better if they were in power). Bullshit.

Don't settle for a short grim life. Wake up!

(more to come)

Pay Attention -- Or Pay

They've taken our money. Key battles are already lost. As we slide to disaster, national bankruptcy & homelessness, you're trying to switch the channel.

Apathy Ain't Cool

Sadly, apathy is costly. Politicians & their billionaire friends promote wasteful wars throughout the world and butt-fuck our communities. Pee-ons pretend it ain't happening. Your children will live grimly as wage slaves, or maybe as homeless scum. Apathy ain't cool.

Too many Americans are fat & apathetic.
I'm fat too, but not apathetic.

Count the Empties

How many homes are empty on your street, in your community, or across the country?

The USA has nearly 15 million empty homes (link) --
these blank gaps are 11.4% of all housing. Headlines in the UK declare (link) a million empty homes. Vacant homes are often "owned by the bank" though the bank's money was taken from the public. Citizens also pay police to evict the homeless.

We should pay more attention to the wider tragic picture of financial crisis and hollowed-out communities. Many homes are emptied by foreclosures or a midnight escape by the grossly indebted. How many? Count the empty homes near you, and better understand housing ripoffs.

Vacant or abandoned properties harm neighborhoods. They're a safety & fire hazard. Someone needs to pay for:

• Trash removal & cleaning
• Yard maintenance
• Utilities
• Boarding/securing the building
• Repair, hazard, emergency repairs, demolition
• Inspection, vacant property registration
• Taxes, etc.

We're living a major political disaster. Maybe spray-painting a big number on the street or building corner (as with other disasters) might mitigate our distress.

Corrupted politicians helped the banks & the rich, who control jobs & housing, and who now squeeze the rest of us, as we shiver in merciless cold.

Joe Metric

U.S. manufacturing is often world-leading, but the primacy of the USA as a market and as a source of products is declining. The rise of China, with four times the people, and other vast swathes of a developing world seem undeniable and almost inevitable. And this is not necessarily a problem.

But the American media is cultivating anti-scientific prejudices. Engineering and the worldwide metric system are denounced as elitist, or foreign, and a threat to Mom & apple pie. Units used in America can confuse - twelve inches to a foot, three feet to a yard. A pound weighs sixteen ounces; eight liquid ounces to the cup. If we switch, the world won't fit... but it don't fit so good now. Pity the nuclear-armed Yankee imperialist & his overweight cannon fodder shock troops... ?

Occupy Our Parks

Hey Bully:       Shut Down     Occupy Afghanistan !

Filet of Filly: Eatin' Hoss

Horsemeat is not part of the American diet. It would be difficult for people to eat horse, even if they wished to, as horse are not legally slaughtered in the USA for human consumption. I'm quite surprised.

Just around the corner from my home in Stockholm is a restaurant specializing in horsemeat; we go there often (great french fries). Perhaps my first taste of horse was 30 years ago in Japan, eating 'sakura niku' or raw horsemeat - basashi 馬刺し. Tasty! The odd thing of that neighborhood was its big horse racing track, and we regularly joked we ate the slow ones. Disappointed gamblers perhaps enjoyed revenge when ordering that dish.

I've surely eaten many odd foods over the years. Jellyfish in Chinese food is one. All creatures great & small, but I'd forgotten horse was odd.

Visit Japan for Fraudulent Food

Many Chinese tourists in Japan seeking a taste of world-famous Matsusaka beef have been served lesser stuff. Over the past five years, several dozen tourists each month were sold 180-gram ¥3700 servings (US$48 or $120 per pound) of mislabeled inferior meat. One restaurant under investigation, Barato Garden North Hill of Ishikari City, Hokkaido, admitted deception (link). But the firm's president Shigeru Oka insists Japanese customers for the well-marbled wagyū were never swindled.

Cheat only the tourists... Terrible. A great way to torpedo trade.

No information about how the scam was uncovered. What penalties should be imposed? The heifer themselves would be happy if their hand-massaged, beer-fed, tasty flesh were in less demand. But does such news damage producers of the beef? Or will the attention and publicity raise demand? Advertisers elsewhere in Japan recognize mislabeling fraud, sometimes insisting "Proof of Origin Supplied!"

Tears from the Pepper Spray?

Shameful violence in California:
(video here)

UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza defended the indefensible, claiming officers used force in concern for their own safety.

Claudia Morain, spokesperson for UC Davis, explained the pepper spray was used because campus police "needed to get out of there" (link). "The police tried to use the least force that they could" but in any case, "We are just not going to allow a tent city. Just period."

But as other evidence mounts, these explanations evaporate from corporate news archives. For analyses of the incident, see:
(link) UC Davis Prof. Bob Ostertag
(link) Jon Weiner at The Nation
(link) Student Activism report

PS - UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza recently won National Campus Safety Director of the Year Award, citing the fact that (link) "Although her department’s budget was cut by 8 percent, the cut was accomplished with little impact to workload at the front line and without impact to the community"... mmmm.

Arrogant Authority

Brutality & use of chemical agents on non-violent, unarmed civilians mocks democracy. To smother reporting is more offensive.

Arrogant restrictions on the press have already undermined the USA's self-definition as a beacon of freedom for the world. How should journalists, Occupy participants & supporters respond as political bullies attempt to club, muzzle & gas them into submission?

And the world is watching. (link)



(quote below)
New York, November 15, 2011--The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by today's reports of New York City police mistreating and detaining journalists and obstructing them from covering events at the Occupy Wall Street protests.

"We are alarmed by New York law enforcement's treatment of journalists covering the eviction of Occupy Wall Street today," said Carlos Lauria, CPJ senior coordinator for the Americas. "Journalists must be allowed to cover news events without fear of arrest and harassment. It is particularly disturbing that government officials sought to block any coverage of the event at all." ...

Worship the Bunghole of the Rich

The oligarchs control most media. They show us reality, and
often we believe.

Have you visited an Occupy assembly? What do you know of what's going on? You may be scared to question authority -- will our rulers take away the little you've earned?

Why did our neighborhood cops become paramilitary?
...looking & mobilizing like a Darth Vader unit?

We're told those clubbed on the streets by our stormtroopers are dirty rabble. They are gassed and electrocuted for "talking back" or taking photos.

But arresting the public won't solve the vampire banking crisis.

Did the marchers cheat my community of trillions of dollars?
If I work hard, won't the system treat me fairly?
Are our leaders corrupted by the megarich?
Can't wealth buy-out equal opportunity?
Have our recent wars done any good?
Time to wake up, asskisser.

apathy ain't cool

Busted By Billy: Billionaire Bloomberg

"The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out - but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park..."
    -- "Billy"   New York City billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg

Billionaire Bloomberg now barricades himself against the city.
Mayor Billy lies in luxury, but it's beginning to end...

He's harbored Wall Street, a nest of vipers -- corrupt financiers who robbed us of trillions of dollars. Billy's a gimpy poster boy for corporate media, which seeks to scare, mislead and constantly tease the public. They consider us dumb beasts. Sheeple. But the abuse stops now - we're not gonna take it anymore.

Meanwhile Pres. Obama senses trouble & scurries away.
Obama turns tail to Australia & goes Down Under...

"Mic Check" & Other Merry Pranks

The Occupy movement needs good ideas & energies. Activists hoping to shake up the status quo and promote reform by culture jamming might try some of the below strategies:

1) Of course, illegal actions & pranks that threaten life, liberty or pursuit of happiness are best avoided.

2) Intimidation by authorities is very spooky. State Stormtroopers easily generate fear (each darkly wants to be Vader; serenade them with the Star Wars Imperial March). Try to insert levity. Smile, laugh & foster a sense of humanity as darkness surrounds you.

You'll be scared. Laugh at the cold! Prepare to get dragged & be violently clubbed. You may lose property, and may suffer stress & pain. It's fun!

3) It's a great idea to publicly confront deceitful businesspeople & corrupt government officials who've raped our national treasuries. But how to do it? Activists politely deferring to wealth & power are ignored. The "Mic Check" and human megaphone strategies of cascading disruptors have energized participants.

4) During "serious" meetings, hidden phones can laugh, or cry... From assorted concealed places, phones can amplify a message. Cellphones can be programmed to ring together.

5) It's important to encourage drop-in visitors to our Occupy venues at any hour. Motley tent cities & roped-off private territories frighten newcomers; it's easier to join assemblies gathering in places not allowing camping. Any Occupy assembly is a shifting assortment of people. Most can sleep elsewhere. Potential mobility is tactically superior to a rooted encampment Thanks Billy! (see below)

6) Build memes, motto, slogans, catchphrases, and battle cries. Hopefully we'll not see another "Boston Massacre" or "Remember Pearl Harbor" but imagery work is essential. For a start, recognize the unusual elegance of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg by dubbing him " Billy "
-- short for Billionaire --

7) The key contest is a battle for minds. Corporate media (so-called "News") regularly portrays unsavory actions & doubtful people, and seeks to thus emasculate the Occupy movement. But it's a small 1%, the rabid megarich, who are extreme. Stay on message:

-- Megawealthy banksters & corrupt politicians suckered us for $7 trillion dollars of public money (US$7,000,000,000,000).
Stop.   Indict.   They stole our future.   Claw back.

-- Public spaces are for public use, and are not the private domain of government or the police. Where possible, public spaces should always be open & accessible. Our societies run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; the public should be able to meet & play freely, and not be shutout of our own spaces by Puritanical operating hours or nanny-state cost-cutting.

-- Overseas US military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan (Vietnam, and elsewhere) are brutalizing & too expensive.
Unaffordable.   Stop.

8) Handout key web addresses to passers-by, who'll go home and lookup information. Many who might be sympathetic are as yet unprepared for confrontation. Start by recommending:

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com   [ speak up now ]
http://www.occupywallst.org
http://www.adbusters.org
http://www.commondreams.org
http://www.mindwatch.com
http://www.cooltownstudios.com
http://www.pps.org

9) Record what happens. Archived records protect both demonstrators and law enforcement officials from unjust abuse. The bottom line remains: too little justice, too many cops.

... more later