November 28, 2011
November 26, 2011
November 25, 2011
November 24, 2011
November 23, 2011
The new revolutionaries: Thank goodness for FaceBook!
A new revolution is taking place in America — and it’s all happening on FaceBook. Does anyone but me find that a little bit weird?
After I “friended” Leah on FB, she sent me a video of U.C. Davis police torturing non-violent college students with pepper spray just because the poor students didn’t want their tuition to go up — again http://boingboing.net/2011/11/18/police-pepper-spraying-arrest.html. And now the video’s gone viral and everyone in the world can see how America treats its youth.
But who benefits most from state-supported higher education? Surprisingly, it isn’t the students. It’s the One Percent. Every year, corporatists get a whole new crop of shiny young geniuses to chew up and spit out — hopeful young graduates just begging big corporations to allow them to work in brain-numbing gray-flannel-suit corporate sweatshops.
Instead of having to educate and train their own peons themselves, corporatists now let the state do it. And they let the state pay for that training too.
So I immediately “liked” and shared Leah’s post.
“The One Percent just don’t get it,” I wrote back. “We have FaceBook (for now), so that all the evil secret stuff that corporatists could get away with 20 years ago is now being broadcast all over the world instantly — showing these bad guys up for what they actually are: People with NO FaceBook friends.”
Go FaceBook!
Then I got a link from my FB friend Romi — about Rep. Ted Deutch’s proposed new Constitutional amendment that would eliminate corporatist personhood. http://deutch.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=269672 And here’s my FaceBook reply to Romi’s post:
“This could be the most important Constitutional amendment ever proposed since we eliminated slavery and gave women the vote! At the NY stock exchange, they have the GALL to fly an American flag. But then why not? They own America lock, stock and barrel. Your kids won’t get a college education. Their kids will.”
Then my FaceBook friend Saeed sent me an eye-witness video of the insane brutality that Israeli corporatists’ occupation forces perpetuate in Palestine — reminding me that our American college students could be treated that way too if we don’t watch out.
Oops, too late. They already are.
Saeed wrote on his News Feed, “Four demonstrators got shot in Ni’lin Village. The Israeli army used live bullets against non-violent demonstrators, and even before the demonstrators reached the apartheid wall, the army started shooting and suppressing the demo. Many demonstrators suffered a lot as a result of inhaling the tear gas too.” Here’s Saeed’s video, also now viral: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcTmmqQN7Vs.
Does that remind you of UC Davis? Or UC Berkeley? Or Kent State? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI7-m919ynU (From Larry — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young singing about the four dead in Ohio, “soldiers are hunting us down…we’re finally on our own,” will bring tears to your eyes!)
Don’t you just love FaceBook?
On FB, you get real eye-witness news the moment that it happens — not that boiled down, censored crap that you get on TV.
I wonder how long FB will last before most of us real Americans, most of us 99%, will become “un-friended” by the corporatists. Mark Zuckerberg, this could be your moment to either be a patriot or a poodle. Be careful how you chose.
And next comes my post about the current labor movement in America: “Have you noticed that mostly the old and the young are coming out for Occupy America demonstrations? Could that be because America’s biggest employers, the coproratists, are holding the rest of us — afraid of losing our jobs and overwhelmed by credit-card debt — by the, er, short hairs?
“I went to a labor union rally the other day and was almost the youngest person in the room. Shocking! I also heard four heroic ILWU longshoremen from Longview, Washington speak. Those guys were fearless — they went after their corporatist masters with baseball bats! Wow. Here’s some history and context of EGB’s attempt to take over our grain export trade: http://www.longshoreshippingnews.com/2011/09/robert-mcellrath-ilwu-international-president-we-will-not-permit-egt-to-undermine-the-grain-export-industry/
“And there are also plans afoot to shut down all west-coast ports on December 6. Good. Let’s see how long America can last without its heroin-like addiction to foreign goods.
“PS: I’m old now — but not dead. Those longshoremen were cute!”
Then my friend Kristin wrote on FaceBook: “There are people, with tents, camping in front of Best Buy in Encino Hills right now for Black Friday. Camping. On. Cement. For. Days. Wow.”
“Isn’t anybody gonna pepper spray those people?” Ross C. replied.
And then I wrote this comment on my wall on November 22, a day that will live in infamy forever in my mind: “WHO KILLED JFK? Who had the means, the motive and the opportunity? Seriously? Kennedy’s death marked the major beginning point for the brutal corporatist take-over of our government, our country and the planet.”
November 22, 2011
November 21, 2011
November 20, 2011
Will Jean Valjean run for Congress?
Protester in Oakland on Saturday.
Protester in a one-sided debate Sunday.
There were more Police than protesters and journalists on Sunday morning.
On Saturday afternoon of November 19, 2011, protesters gathered in Oakland. By Saturday night a new Occupy Oakland encampment had been set up at a different location. By 9 a.m. Sunday morning, it was gone.
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November 19, 2011
November 18, 2011
Deja vu all over again: 1968 and 2011 on Sproul Plaza
Here I am, sitting on the steps in front of Sproul Hall at the University of California in Berkeley, looking out over Sproul Plaza before me, reliving my youth.
“Come to Cal and study city planning,” my best friend Anne wrote me back in 1966. “President Johnson has just ear-marked hundreds of millions of dollars for urban renewal and for his Great Society, and there will be lots of city planning jobs available to us after we graduate. This is a good way to both help America and also have meaningful jobs.”
Sounded good to me. I’d just finished helping Bill Tatum and Walter Thabit save New York City’s Lower East Side from the bulldozer and I had nothing else to do. Cal, here I come!
Then what happened? I graduated from Cal in 1968 with an MCP — only to be told by perspective employers, “Too bad for you. All the money that had been going to the Great Society is now going to the Vietnam war and most city planning jobs have been eliminated. And besides, we can’t hire you because you’re a woman — we’re only hiring men with families to support.”
It was 1968. I had no money. No job. Nothing to do. So I just lived in a friend’s attic, lived by my wits and sat on the steps in front of Sproul Hall every day for a year after my graduation. For a whole year.
It was a very bad year.
And now it’s deja vu all over again. No job. No money. No hope. All the big hopes that we held for the new millennium in the year 2000 have all been wasted on stupid endless pointless wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Palestine.
So I decided to do the same thing today that I had done back then: Go sit on the steps in front of Sproul Hall. Only this time I’m hoping that it won’t take a whole other year for me to figure out what to do next.
PS: In many ways, the corporatist One Percent just loves our Occupy America movement — because It gives the oligarchs who control us a chance to flex their weaponized muscles, to divide us American peons against each other still further and to characterize people who object to their wealth as dirty, homeless and crazy instead of moral and financial victims of their blatant systematic chicanery.
PPS: Nationally, the first thing that we 99% need to do is to eliminate the wide-spread massive corruption that currently characterizes American politics: http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/112-s-1769/1020354/contributions-by-vote. Every politician who spends over $100,000 on any one campaign should be thrown in jail — hopefully one of those private gruesome for-profit forced-labor-camp nightmare-inducing prisons that our current legislators have been shameless about voting into place.
Second, Anyone who has ever had anything major to do with the Federal Reserve should be jailed as well — or tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. According to the GAO, the Fed just embezzled 16 trillion dollars from us and gave it to Wall Street and big American banks — and to foreign banks too. http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/10.11/gaoaudit.html) If that doesn’t totally piss you off, then you need to start checking your pulse.
Third, unjust Supreme Court justices such as Thomas and Scalia should also be jailed immediately. And White House pretty-boy poodles for the One Percent such as Bush, Cheney and Obama should be jailed as well. And Congressional errand-boys for the big corporations? Also clamped in leg-irons! Duh.
Fourth, every single man, woman and child in America should also take turns sitting on Sproul Plaza for a day. And then we should all be awarded free education and/or meaningful jobs. Plus we should also be awarded $30,000 each — as part of America’s new victim compensation plan after having been viciously robbed by corporatist thieves in Washington and Wall Street.
PPPS: Speaking of bulldozers, U.C. police raided Sproul Plaza again at 3 am last night — driving bulldozers across the plaza, flattening everything in sight, destroying tents and artwork in their wake and pushing people out of their way. No big surprise there.
PPPPS: And speaking of endless war, the Glasgow Sunday Herald’s war correspondent David Pratt just sent me an article entitled “Danger: the Middle East may go Ballistic”.
“In more than two decades of Middle East watching,” stated Pratt, “I’ve got used to unexpected events and endless predictions of doomsday scenarios. But, even by its own politically volatile and labyrinthine standards, there have been some very ominous and shadowy things taking place there of late…. So many factors could now ignite the [Middle East right now], and standing well back would be a near impossible option for the international community. The Middle East might just be about to go ballistic, and I’m not simply talking about a few missiles in Iran.” http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/david-pratt/danger-middle-east-may-yet-go-ballistic-1.1135570
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November 17, 2011
Take Action on the 2nd-Month Anniversary of the OWS Movement
Just two months ago, Americans began assembling in Zuccotti Park in New York City to protest our lives being taken over by corrupt politicians who work for the Big Banks and Multinational Corporations instead of ‘We the People.’ Since then, the OWS Movement has spread like wildfire and has had enough influence to, among other things, change the media debate from cutting programs beneficial to the 99 Percent to discussing the obscene rewards the 1 Percent enjoys from gaming our system and bribery at the expense of the rest of us. If you can, try to show up for the protests that will be happening all over the nation, but especially in Zuccotti Park. For more info, go to Occupy Wall St.org.
Poster copyright 2011 R Black.
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November 15, 2011
Seems like old times in Berkeley
Striking students pass through Sather Gate
Striking students gather on Sproul Plaza Tuesday.
Music was part of the program at Sproul Plaza Tuesday
The fact that broadcast news media want to cover an issue in about 90 seconds works to the advantage of the Conservatives because most voters don’t want to get a complete picture of a complex issue and the student strike at University California Berkeley will provide an example of how the rush to oversimplify destroys journalism’s reason for being.
In the Sixties the University system in California was an outstanding opportunity for young people in that state to acquire an affordable education.
In the Seventies, Prop 13 was sold to home owning voters as a way to save money. The property tax had provided the funds for affordable educations. When Prop 13 passed, businesses saved large amounts of money when that tax was eliminated from their overhead expenses. Did they pass the savings along to consumers?
Wealthy families are used to expecting that their kids will be college educated and become industry management. The potential for middle and low class families sending their children to college may have seemed like the underclasses were stealing opportunities for large salaries from them so it behooved the wealthy to put the cost of education beyond the capability of the middle and lower class.
The fact that Prop 13 benefited business immensely made its passage a double payoff for the wealthy.
Can an explanation of how the passage of Prop 13, more than 30 years ago, caused the current student unrest, be reduced to a few words that fit on a bumper sticker?
Can the opposing force’s message of “Reduce taxes, increase jobs” be refuted on a bumper sticker?
So today students strike to make the point that they want the opportunity for an affordable education just like there was in the Sixties and the people who don’t want to restart a tax burden they managed to eliminate just say “trickle down” and dupe the voters who don’t examine the history of an issue.
To the best of this photographer/columnist’s ability to cover the start of the UCB student strike on Tuesday, November 15, 2011, we can report that we did not see a single instance of any student burning his draft card.
Doesn’t that prove conclusively that change has been delivered, just as promised?
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Rove’s January surprise?
Some well known American political pundits have recently started to dabble in speculation about the possibility that a deadlocked Republican National Convention in Miami next summer will ask JEB Bush to please come to the Party’s aid and accept the nomination. That kind of hypothetical scenario indicates two possible explanations about the sources of such “trial balloons:” either the “expert” has grossly underestimated Karl Rove or they are writing those forecasts to pay off some kind of journalistic/political IOU’s.
Karl Rove is a leading practitioner of the existentialist philosophy and he makes things happen the way he wants them to unfold or he sits it out. Karl Rove isn’t going to put all his bets on something that might happen. What would happen to this elaborate scenario if, hypothetically speaking, two candidates see a deadlock developing and form a mutual aid alliance and join together to make a complete ticket package with an unbeatable number of committed delegates? If Rove decides to play an active role in the selection of the Republican Party’s Presidential Candidate, he ain’t gonna rely on luck to get his guy the prize. If Karl “the architect” Rove is half as good as nationally known pundits hint that he is, he’ll go into Miami with the nomination a done deal.
What makes the World’s Laziest Journalist think that he can make an accurate assessment of the situation while all the best paid political reporters play dumb? (Glad you asked.)
Here are three clues: When JEB spoke recently at a convention of Educational specialists in San Francisco, his opening act was Rupert Murdoch. Two: Karl Rove has been working for the Bush family since 1973. Some Liberal pundits think that Rove had a covert role in engineering Republican Presidential wins in 2000 and 2004. (If he has done it before; can’t he do it again?) Three: the electronic voting machines with unverifiable results could seal the deal in both some critical primary elections and the Presidential election in November of 2012.
With those factors working for JEB, shouldn’t the national political analysts making a lucrative living at reporting election results that are surprise upsets that contradict the best pre-election polling surveys, be able to see how Karl “the architect” Rove could deliver a premeditated political blitzkrieg? Since all news reports about the Iowa caucuses include a notation that no one seems to understand the process, maybe someone as astute as Karl Rove could game the system and score a win for JEB at the beginning of January?
He would then ask his well trained friends in the journalism industry to deliver (cue the dog and pony metaphor) an avalanche of news reports that declare (ex cathedra style?) that America has forgiven the Bush family any lapses in judgment by Dubya and that skeptics (moi?) are being presented with irrefutable evidence of a groundswell of support for JEB.
As currently scheduled, January will end with the Florida Primary. Gee, do ya think that Karl Rove would have to resort to an extensive level of chicanery to deliver a JEB win in that state?
In November of 2011, saying that JEB might be used to break a deadlocked Republican convention is a stealth way of bypassing a debate about the bad “brand name” factor attached to a guy named Bush. When (not if) he has a “groundswell” movement being reported extensively in the mainstream media in February of next year, then any objections about the liability of the family name will be moot.
The media loved the tea bagger’s antics but were quick to report the dangers to health and safety presented by the Occupy Protests. Why the difference?
The world will little note nor long remember any accurate JEB predictions we make here, but on a cold November morning in a sleepy quiet University town what else can a columnist do but make an effort to become the Hans Brinker of internet American political punditry?
We could, instead, write a column about the two-mile island of trash that departed from the scene of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan some months ago and is being carried by the Pacific Ocean current towards the West Coast of America but wouldn’t that be a bit like writing a movie review with a spoiler for the lede?
How about a column that points out the possibility that the raids on the various Occupy encampments always come at night might have been inspired by the similar tactic used by German Police before WWII?
An Oakland resident has suggested that we should do a column about the need to rewrite the Constitution. He points out that some European countries have managed that feat.
We could write a column about the recent trial balloons suggesting that it may be time to privatize Veterans Health Care.
Is it true that Fox played video of the policeman at UC Davis defending himself from the out-of-control protesters sitting on the ground in front of him with the only audio being ♫ Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries? Didn’t the newsbabe follow it up with the comment “I love the smell of pepper spray in the morning!”?
Didn’t a Fox newsbabe make an observation that pepper spray is made from food? Wasn’t that also true of mustard gas?
Perhaps, it would be more apropos to write a column about Life magazine’s 75th birthday? We would use that column to ask: Why hasn’t Life magazine (and Youtube?) and other well known photo brand names such as Kodak and Nikon, joined together to build an indispensable aggregate Internet web site for news still photos and videos? (Just like they did for print media and news photos all those years ago.) They could become the image Internets version of what Huff-Po does with words (i.e. news briefs and opinion pieces).
Should the World’s Laziest Journalist write a column asking if the Columbia Review of Journalism noticed that (according to a recent radio news report) ten news groups in their hometown filed a complaint that the NYPD, during the raid on Zoo-cati park, temporarily suspended the Constitutional guarantee of a free and unfettered Press in America? Hell if the CJR doesn’t care, why should this columnist? Didn’t Germany get along very well before WWII without a Free Press?
If, as some lunatic conspiracy theory nuts would have you believe, the United States is heading toward becoming a fascist state, will it be a “flip a light switch” style binary change or will arrive slowly and gradually (cue the Ansel Adams concept of a gray scale?)? Will some hysterical blogger use the Cheshire cat’s disappearing act as a metaphor?
Speaking of lunatic conspiracy theory nuts, a reliable source has tipped us to the fact that the R&D department over at the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory is working on the idea that if the Republicans want to revert back to a Fascist Republic (for which it stands) rather than a Democracy; it might be very convenient for them if Marshal Law is invoked by a Liberal Democratic President of Pan-African heritage rather than some Sturm und Drang Republican. He could use the rocks and bottle throwing (dirty) hippies in the Occupy movement as a convenient excuse.
The President promised change and America has gone from “Don’t taze me, bro” to mace in the face. Who used to say: “Progress is our most important product.”?
St Ronald Reagan used student unrest (as exemplified by the image of a student speaking on top of a police car at UC Berkeley) to establish his credentials as a conservative Republican worthy of being that Party’s Presidential nominee. Is it too much of stretch to imagine that if he were still alive today, he would go over to the UC Davis campus and urge: “Madam Chancellor, tear down this tent city!”?
Doesn’t a school administrator who apologizes for using pepper spray look pathetic when compared to a California governor who declared: “If it takes a bloodbath to end this dissention, let’s get it over with.”? How is Occupy Kent State going?
Now the disk jockey will play Hank Williams Jr.’s “Carrin’ on a family tradition,” Jerry Reed’s “When you’re hot; you hot,” and The Stones’ “Street Fightin’ Man.” We have to go see what odds the bookies in Vegas are giving for bets on JEB as the next President. Have an “expect the unexpected” type week.