In nuclear physics a half-life is the period it takes for radioactivity to decay by half.  Depending on the particular item, this might be in the nano-second realm or on the flip side it might be in the geological-eons realm.

The other day a close friend sent me a little something he’d bumped into on the net – on Blockbusters.  I virtually never watch films except in the line of duty, and I have never used Blockbusters (nor Netflix nor Mubi nor….) so it’s rather unlikely I would have come across this:

My friend noted this was a nice summary; I noted that it presumes I dropped dead somewhere around 1993, or at least in vanishing to Europe I’d stopped making films.   And it’s not only Blockbuster’s cut’n paste editing (as most the above can be lifted from various sites and regurgitated with a word or two shifted) which has done this, but in general it seems I’ve been relegated to “non-person” status, as in the old USSR.   Despite showing up somewhat regularly at festivals (Rotterdam, Venice, Jeonju, Yamagata, in the last decade and more, if not at many American ones – not that I didn’t send them to appropriate places, just they said nyet), it seems I’ve been “disappeared” by the American cultural apparatus, never mind the numerical reality that in the years since 1993, when I dropped off the radar, I’ve made more films than in the 20 years noted above.   And films which are, shall we say, even more innovative blah blah blah than those mentioned, and certainly in my view just as good or even better than those of the previous two decades.   Whether it was my early shift to digital video (well before the tsunami that followed and mostly uses it as a cheap substitute for film rather than for its own qualities), or my on-going political stance, or that I failed to morph into a kind of American Euro-art house director, which it seems to me those in the business sort of wished for, or because I have spoken publicly about certain dubious things of the middling artsy part of the film industry (and scathingly of the commercial sector), I don’t really know.   My guess is it’s been a mix of these, with perhaps some personal axes being distantly ground.   And then as well there was a major cultural shift of another kind, in which we are now fully enmeshed.

But, fact is, I didn’t disappear just yet, and haven’t been exactly unproductive -  here’s what I did in the years since 1993 – these are all from 65 to 112 minutes long each:

LONDON BRIEF

NAS CORRENTES DE LUZ DA RIA FORMOSA

6 EASY PIECES

CHHATTISGAHR SKETCHES

MURI ROMANI

ROMA RITRATTO

OUI/NON

VERGESSENSFUGE

HOMECOMING

PASSAGES

LA LUNGA OMBRA

OVER HERE

PARABLE

RANT

SWIMMING IN NEBRASKA

IMAGENS DE UMA CIDADE PERDIDA

DISSONANCE

TRINITY

And then some hours of short films.

I’d be the first to admit that most of these films don’t meet the current dominant sense of value – i.e., that they either cost a lot to make or they made a lot of money, or preferably both.   For some decades our national (and global) sense of values has been increasingly bent by the Free Market mantra, and step-by-step the talk of money has overtaken all other possible values.  We have seen it in the Supreme Court decision in Citizens vs United (and we see the consequences of that in the current primary election, in its deluge of lying vulgarity funded by superPACS).  We have seen it in the delimiting of “reviews” from newspapers or others being restricted to only those things given a “commercial” release, as occurred just the other day with the shift in Oscar rules for documentaries.    A few decades ago, had I gone to New York to show a film in one of the few venues possible (MoMA, perhaps the Whitney, Millennium or Anthology) I might have counted on a review in the NY Times, the Village Voice, and a few other papers.  Today, if  I can get a screening at all, it is almost assured there will be no review.   And why?  Because the work lacks artistic or creative merit?  No, because it lacks financial value and validation.  And therefore, socially and culturally, it more or less does not, and is not allowed to, exist.   To exist would in effect be an affront to the wonderful values of the supposed Free Market Economy.   If it doesn’t make money – more the merrier – it is not supposed to exist.  Just like poor people.  Or old people.  Or…

While I don’t feel quite as banged up as this geezer doubtless did -  as I begin to pop at the seams with a hernia bulge on the left which while not (yet) hurting still says “get it done soon,” and some kind of torn muscle tissue over on the right hand side where I had a hernia patch done 10 years ago and that I’d hoped would kindly heal itself but instead seems to be getting if anything a touch worse – I do feel the wave of time washing over, and the imminent descent into decrepitude.   Frankly I am not much thrilled by the idea, though as my father lived to 98 – he died three weeks or so ago, on Dec. 28 – the reality threatens.   Meantime I am mired for the moment in deadlines for more films for no one, packing to take a long American journey to make still more films for no one, and perhaps I question my sanity.

Helen Frankenthaler painting (she died in December, too)

For more information on the films above, and the 14 celluloid ones, see

www.jon-jost.com.

There’s a few new ones almost ready (except for a major computer crash the last 3 days, which normally I can solve but not this time it seems.)  Which, along with other pressures perhaps accounts for the glum air of the moment.

Yesterday I finished up the 6 day workshop at the Film School of Tokyo.  Given that it was really just 4 days as a hole was knocked into the schedule by the Christmas 24/25th days making no room available those days, I’d say it came out very well. 13 participants, all of whom tried, and last night, showing the rushed little films they’d made during the last day, I was very pleased at how good they were, and how much they’d learned in so short a time.  I come back at the start of March to give a talk at the Athenee Francais, which is doing a partial retrospective, and the last thing we’ll show is new films these people make in the 2 months at hand.  I am optimistic most of them will make something worthy of showing in public.  Anyway a nice time, even if I am a bit tired in consequence.

While here, at the behest of Toshi Fujiwara, who translated for me, and has his new film No Man’s Zone showing in the upcoming Berlin Forum, I screened for just a few of us, my last finished film, Dissonance.   I had, in fact, never actually sat down and seen it – instead I’d set it up on the computer, rendered a file of it, and since the conceptual nature of it didn’t really require I look at it there, and once finished I didn’t take time to sit and look at it, I never did look at it.  On finally seeing it I guess I’d say it confirmed my thoughts about what it would do – ruffle your psychic feathers in some undefinable manner.

The first sequence lasts 50 minutes: 3 panels, per above, each a single take.  As I thought, it doesn’t get boring at all – instead it slips under your radar and plays with your subconscious.  The remaining sequences do the same:

So I guess it will join the growing list of my unseen cinema.  I sent this one, and previous ones, out to enough festivals, but for some reason they don’t accept them.  I confess they’re not what one would call “audience pleasers” and it seems increasingly that is what festivals, bowing to the dictates of commercial pressures, require.  Don’t want to challenge or upset our audience.  Recently, while looking for screenings in US for the coming spring, I suggested to programmer in the mid-west that I’d like to screen my Iraq war trilogy - Homecoming, Over Here, and Parable.   She nixed the idea, saying that whenever she’d screened films having anything to do with Iraq or Afghanistan, the warm butts had not shown up.   I guess even the so-called liberal kind of people who go to art-house type cinemas would rather keep their heads in the sand about what America does, and what that does to us.   Nice for the government that does these things in our name that the citizenry, acting like good Soviet ones, makes censoring unnecessary: they do it themselves.

From Parable

At Toshi’s request also showed Parable, which I had not seen in quite a while – a few years perhaps – and it is one weird film too.  I guess in my dotage I am going off the deep end.

Homeless in Tokyo

Tomorrow back to Seoul, for a few more months.  Later perhaps some further ruminations on the rich texture of Tokyo, where a disembodied present collides with fragments of the past and sends signals of the future spiraling out.

Happy Gregorian Spin Around the Sun 2012 !

]]> http://cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/tokyo-notes/feed/ 0 jonjost DSC_0193 DISS3C DISS4C DISS6C DISS12C Sequence 02_1crpd Sequence 02_7crpd Stephen Taylor and Rachel LeValley in PARABLE DSC_0009 DSC_0028 DSC_0042 DSC_0045 DSC_0060 DSC_0069 DSC_0058 blognuclear http://cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/xmas-in-tokyo/ http://cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/xmas-in-tokyo/#comments Mon, 26 Dec 2011 03:09:45 +0000 jonjost http://cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com/?p=5231 ]]> Asakusa Temple

Christmas, a day I normally evade as best I can, found me in Tokyo where I’m doing a workshop at the Tokyo Film School.  As it happened the space we were using there was not available on December 25, so it was a free day for me.  In the days before in the hyper-busy Shibuya district I’d noted the frenetic Christmas theme in the many young people dressed in red Santa outfits, hawking restaurant offerings and such.  Noxious seasonal songs pervaded the speaker systems, though it was clear that this country – unlike South Korea – is very minimally Christian, but they seem to have gone whole-hog on Christmas as yet another excuse for rampant consumerism – as if they needed one.   While Japan supposedly wallows in a now several decades long malaise of the economy, and was hit with the double whammy of the March 11 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster it caused – recently said by the government to be a 40 year long problem to clean up – one would be hard-pressed to note this on the streets.   Or when exchanging money, where the Yen seems to stand supreme, despite the alleged difficulties in Japan’s economic machinery.   Rather there seems a constant rush of well-dressed people, young and old, wrapped up in fashion (a wide range of often curious ones), and with the means to have it, as well as engorge themselves in the endless restaurants and bars, not to mention classier places which I can’t afford to enter.   As well “love hotels” hawk their space and time with notices of 1,000 to 4,000 Yen for “rest” (120 mins) or 6K for “stay.”   Yesterday during my random walk around Asakusa and Ueno I bumped into a street of these, nearby the Ueno station and across a railway track from the Tokyo National Museum, with appropriate ladies standing about on the street offering their wares.  No Christmas outfits though.     As it happened the museum was mostly closed, as was the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum and I found myself instead going to the National Museum of Western Art for a somewhat dismal collection of 2nd and 3rd rate works from major artists, and a larger assortment of lesser artists.  There were though a few good paintings – a Hammershøi being perhaps the best.   They did, however, have a very interesting exhibition of William Blake engravings.  At least they let in the elders for free.

Buddhist prayers

Tokyo seems a vast melange, a cyclotron in which the sublime and the crass are racing by one another at the speed of light, and occasionally they smash into one another and produce a hybrid of the two, spinning out in delirious design.  From their arts it seems they’ve been at this a long time.  I am sure Mr Blake would have found it all fascinating.

William Blake draws himself

Wandering the chaos of the internet today, I came across this other declaration, with which I totally concur.   While it didn’t really begin with 9/11, but had been in the works for some time before, with that event (yet to be meaningfully investigated by genuinely impartial parties), our government commenced a series of serious attacks on the Constitution, with perhaps “The Patriot Act” signalling the first step.  Since then in one “legal” ruling after another the Bill of Rights has been stripped of meaning.  As famously said by Mr Obama’s predecessor, “it’s just a goddamn piece of paper.”

While the circus of the Republican nominee selection process travels the country putting on its dog and pony show, back in DC, in the furious rush to wrap up “business”  before the Christmas break, our wonderful Congressmen and women have hobbled together a fantastic new bill, the annual National Defense Authorization Act – to say “law” – which Barack Obama, our erstwhile scholar of the Constitution, and our erstwhile “liberal” President, had promised to veto if it retained a certain element that had been tacked on in the devious manner of our politicians, a “rider” having to do with giving the Executive the (unconstitutional) right to declare someone “a terrorist” or even someone as being vaguely in some way connected to a claimed “terrorist” and to arrest them, lock them up, hide them, and throw away the key.  American or not, where ever they are.   However, as is his way, Mr Obama did his feint to the left, and now is ready to sign this new bill/law.  And bye-bye to what is left of the Constitution’s “Bill of Rights.”

Mr Obama does what his Harvard Massah’s taught him

Thus goes America’s political world, which, like our financial world, basically engages in a constant shell game, shuffling the cards like the hustler down on the corner.   Just keep ‘em movin’ and no one will notice.  So in short order, with a signature on this piece of typical Nazi-style “law” we will have all the trappings of a real genuine dictatorship.  We have already had the practice, now we just need to formalize it in our “laws.”

Bradley Manning

In the same week as this dubious item, Bradley Manning surfaced from the Federal military detention system where he has been held the last year and a half, often naked, in what might reasonably be called less than “humane” conditions.   He was taken, dressed, before a military tribunal to face whatever music they might wish to inflict for having released reams of governmental “secret” documents, many of which essentially described crimes committed by America’s military, along with many revealing views of those in government.  While complying with the Nuremberg laws which require a citizen to report war crimes and crimes against humanity, which the American government purports to support and follow, Manning ran afoul of higher ups within our governmental system who regarded this a dire threat (which in fact it – the truth – is).   Mr Manning will undergo this kangaroo court “trial” and be put away for decades, no doubt.  In the same week, in Iraq, America did a military about face, at least in theatrical terms, and allegedly ended the war in said country, folding flags and driving military vehicles to next door Kuwait.  The corporate news doesn’t see fit to inform our public how many “private contractors” receiving Federal funds remain in Iraq.   The recipient of Mr Manning’s alleged leak, Julian Assange, of WikiLeaks, is in detention in the UK awaiting a British court’s decision whether he should be extradited to Sweden where two women, who admit to consensual sex with him, filed charges of subsequent rape for having had morning- after sex with them, allegedly without consent or condom.   In the interim, while this wound its way through the UK’s legal system, American corporations – PayPal and others – commenced to refuse to service WikiLeaks’ fund-raising system, drying up its financial capacity to function.

And  in yet this same week, a reporter, American, found a trove of US military documents in Iraq, which had been tossed in the garbage as the troops left.  An Iraqi man was using them as a heating source, burning them.  Some of the documents – 40,000 pages – the reporter obtained detailed “secret” testimony within the US military regarding the Haditha massacre of November 19, 2005.  These documents reveal clear knowledge within the US military of what are certain “war crimes” but which were covered up as well as possible by American authorities.

Haditha, Iraq, Nov 19, 2005

While Pvt Manning is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison for releasing documents which reveal American war crimes, as well as other useful information regarding American practices, the soldiers who committed the Haditha murders have had charges dropped, been acquitted or been left alone.  Sargeant Wuterich, the platoon commander, had his trial postponed until 2012.   Apparently the papers discovered in Iraq last week will be pertinent – they clearly show a perfectly normal attempt by the military to cover up this war crime – one among thousands committed in the name of the United States, commencing with the lies which were used to initiate this war of choice upon a country which had nothing to do with 9/11.  Naturally the perpetrators of those lies will never be prosecuted by America’s courts.

While beautiful, the above image, of a lake in Alaska, is less than lovely in other respects.  By coincidence it was published in the NY Times within the same day as another report, from Russia.   In both cases the substance of the articles was on the scientifically predicted surge of methane gasses which are coming from the warming of the arctic tundra and from undersea sources.   The essential story is that biomass which has been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years is now warming, in effect fermenting, and releasing methane gasses into the atmosphere.  Methane is a potent “greenhouse” gas, functioning to trap solar heat 20 times more effectively than does CO2.   As predicted by many ecological scientists the warming of the arctic region will result in a feed-back loop in which the warming induced by industrial releases of carbon based gasses, will provoke the production of methane, which will hasten global warming, ad infinitum.   The NY Times Andrew Revkin has a less apocalyptic view here.

US troops withdraw to Kuwait from IraqCliffs on MarsDiagram of black gravitational hole in space

POSTSCRIPT

In today’s emails came one from Michael Moore, which I think warrants as much exposure as it can get, so in case you did not get it, I print it below:

Friends,

It’s Saturday night and I didn’t want the day to end before I sent out this note to you.

One year ago today (December 17th), Mohamed Bouazizi, a man who had a simple produce stand in Tunisia, set himself on fire to protest his government’s repression. His singular sacrifice ignited a revolution that toppled Tunisia’s dictator and launched revolts in regimes across the Middle East.

Three months ago today, Occupy Wall Street began with a takeover of New York’s Zuccotti Park. This movement against the greed of corporate America and its banks — and the money that now controls most of our democratic institutions — has quickly spread to hundreds of towns and cities across America. The majority of Americans now agree that a nation where 400 billionaires have more wealth than 160 million Americans combined is not the country they want America to be. The 99% are rising up against the 1% — and now there is no turning back.

Twenty-four years ago today, U.S. Army Spc. Bradley Manning was born. He has now spent 570 days in a military prison without a trial — simply because he allegedly blew the whistle on the illegal and immoral war in Iraq. He exposed what the Pentagon and the Bush administration did in creating this evil and he did so by allegedly leaking documents and footage to Wikileaks. Many of these documents dealt not only with Iraq but with how we prop up dictators around the world and how our corporations exploit the poor on this planet. (There were even cables with crazy stuff on them, like one detailing Bush’s State Department trying to stop a government minister in another country from holding a screening of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’)

The Wikileaks trove was a fascinating look into how the United States conducts its business — and clearly those who don’t want the world to know how we do things in places like, say, Tunisia, were not happy with Bradley Manning.

Mohamed Bouazizi was being treated poorly by government officials because all he wanted to do was set up a cart and sell fruit and vegetables on the street. But local police kept harassing him and trying to stop him. He, like most Tunisians, knew how corrupt their government was. But when Wikileaks published cables from the U.S. ambassador in Tunis confirming the corruption — cables that were published just a week or so before Mohamed set himself on fire — well, that was it for the Tunisian people, and all hell broke loose.

People across the world devoured the information Bradley Manning revealed, and it was used by movements in Egypt, Spain, and eventually Occupy Wall Street to bolster what we already thought was true. Except here were the goods — the evidence that was needed to prove it all true. And then a democracy movement spread around the globe so fast and so deep — and in just a year’s time! When anyone asks me, “Who started Occupy Wall Street?” sometimes I say “Goldman Sachs” or “Chase” but mostly I just say, “Bradley Manning.” It was his courageous action that was the tipping point — and it was not surprising when the dictator of Tunisia censored all news of the Wikileaks documents Manning had allegedly supplied. But the internet took Manning’s gift and spread it throughout Tunisia, a young man set himself on fire and the Arab Spring that led eventually to Zuccotti Park has a young, gay soldier in the United States Army to thank.

And that is why I want to honor Bradley Manning on this, his 24th birthday, and ask the millions of you reading this to join with me in demanding his immediate release. He does not deserve the un-American treatment, including cruel solitary confinement, he’s received in over eighteen months of imprisonment. If anything, this young man deserves a friggin’ medal. He did what great Americans have always done — he took a bold stand against injustice and he did it without stopping for a minute to consider the consequences for himself.

The Pentagon and the national security apparatus are hell-bent on setting an example with Bradley Manning. But we as Americans have a right to know what is being done in our name and with our tax dollars. If the government tries to cover up its malfeasance, then it is the duty of each and every one of us, should the situation arise, to drag the truth, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the light of day.

The American flag was lowered in Iraq this past Thursday as our war on them officially came to an end. If anyone should be on trial or in the brig right now, it should be those men who lied to the nation in order to start this war — and in doing so sent nearly 4,500 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths.

But it is not Bush or Rumsfeld or Cheney or Wolfowitz who sit in prison tonight. It is the hero who exposed them. It is Bradley Manning who has lost his freedom and that, in turn, becomes just one more crime being committed in our name.

I know, I know, c’mon Mike — it’s the holiday season, there’s presents to buy and parties to go to! And yes, this really is one of my favorite weeks of the year. But in the spirit of the man whose birth will be celebrated next Sunday, please do something, anything, to help this young man who spends his birthday tonight behind bars. I say, enough. Let him go home and spend Christmas with his family. We’ve done enough violence to the world this decade while claiming to be a country that admires the Prince of Peace. The war is over. And a whole new movement has a lot to thank Bradley Manning for.

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@MichaelMoore.com

]]> http://cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/stepnfetchit-does-it-again/feed/ 1 jonjost bill-of-rights-part Bill-(Bojangles)-Robinson-HOLE2 Bradley-Manning-007 haditha8107_wideweb__470x352,0 deadkids1 Kilo_Co_The_Haditha_Marines Alaskan lake, bubbles of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, collect beneath the ice arctic-graphic CLIMATE US military leaves Iraq Cliffs and Clouds on Mars 06HOLES_cnd-articleLarge http://cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/unfit-for-print/ http://cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/unfit-for-print/#comments Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:18:23 +0000 jonjost http://cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com/?p=5177 ]]> Line-up

Demonstrating its illogical editorial policies, the NYTimes once again, on Dec 11,  declined to post most items I’d written in response to OpEd items, but did print one.  Here’s the censored items:

Reply to an Editorial on our bloated Pentagon and cutting its budget (a little bit):

America spends more on militarism annually than all the rest of the world combined. It does so in part because it has morphed into an over-extended and reviled empire; it does so in part because it is very profitable for a narrow sector of the population, usually called “war profiteers” in history books. It does so in part because the military-industrial complex hi-jacked the nation back when former General and Republican President Eisenhower forewarned us of what was happening. He was correct and our military-industrial complex has inflicted on the nation all the ills which he sagely predicted. Go read his Farewell Speech.

Ironically this editorial is an example of the damage, this mincing around this massive ugly problem as if it were a sacred totem instead of an evil burden.

We can cut the Pentagon down by 4/5ths and it would not only do no damage, it would be a blessing on the nation in more ways than we can count.

But we won’t do it because we are terminally ill and our military-industrial complex is a major component of that illness.

And then a silly Maureen Dowd item on the even more silly Newt Gingrich:

Ms Dowd unleashes a massive missive of meandering metaphors, carefully constructed in binaries, but unlike Kierkegaard’s Either/Or which enlightens, Maureen’s sinks under the weightlessness of her wit. Too clever by far, just like what I just scribbled. Sunday morning gruel.

And then a reply to another rather inane item by Ross Douthat:

I think most of the country, as say in the electoral stats of 2008, – ( i.e., that actually “liberal” majority which our pundits insist doesn’t exist in lieu of their “America is basically conservative” mantra) – what most of America wants from Republicans is that either they go away, or they magically turn themselves back into some variant of the last sane ones, like Eisenhower (who would be reviled by today’s version as some kind of commie for his Farewell Speech). They are not going to voluntarily go away, though they do appear to have voluntarily reported themselves into the loony bin, which even Mr Douthat hints at in his despair. And they most certainly are not going to morph into the reasonableness of Ike.

Obama is already a few steps to the right of Ike, however, so there’s not much solace to be found in having him beat Newt or anybody else.

Why these can’t be printed I don’t know, especially since other writers say essentially the same things.  Some kind of secret black-list perhaps…. Oh, those conspiracies.

UPDATE, December 18:

Once again, the scissors at the Times came out, yesterday, 12/17, and the following was unpublished:

By Gail Mitt’s-Dog-On-Roof Collins, on the National Defense Authorization Act signing by the inimitable Obama-bot.

The most important element you weave into this story (sorry, dog) is Mr Obama’s signing of the bill which demolishes what is left of the Constitution, and gives him (and future President’s) the right to call someone, an American someone, “a terrorist” and have them locked up indefinitely without a trial. King George should have such a dream! But here we are, doing it. (Do you imagine the warped Supreme Court would deem this “unconstitutional?”). Mr Obama is doing this, following his usual pattern of vaguely liberal feints, and then doing whatever the corporate military-industrial overlords have requested. Mr Obama is one slick Harvard trained Stepn’Fetchit, with a special talent for a dazzling tap-dance just before he says “yes, massa.”

Meantime in the broader world the Euro continues to be the focus of politicians and economists, and, well, frankly under attack by “the markets.”  Today Moody’s rating agency, a tool of “the markets” huffed and puffed about downgrading the AAA ratings of France and Germany.   Curiously this attack of the bankers, for that is what it is, has produced Europe’s new odd couple:

Merkel and Sarkozy cozy up in defense of the Euro

Every other day there seems, as there was today, to be yet another ominous report on the state of the Euro and the state of Europe: some countries are tilting towards authoritarian regimes (Hungary);  others, under economic stress have voted in conservative/rightist governments (Portugal, Spain) as if somehow the parties which produced their problems would magically become their opposite.  And others, in a bit of backroom banker’s maneuvers have been given newly appointed heads: in Greece a “technocrat” was not elected, but appointed.  He is of the banking community and was installed to impose “austerity.”   In Italy the odious Silvio Berlusconi was pushed out in a kind of coup engineered by, well, bankers.  And he was replaced with another so-called “technocrat,” a banker who once worked for, would you ever guess, Goldman Sachs.

Basically the minuet in Europe is one in which sovereign nations are being supplanted by the ever mysterious hidden hands of “the market.”   Of course we are not allowed to actually name names or actually define just what is “the market.”  Our conservative ideologues might call that “class warfare” or something, and we can’t have that.  And John Mills, whose words have been twisted beyond recognition by the corporate powers which are steadily engaged in a trans-Atlantic coup d’etat, would not likely approve of how his philosophy of “the hidden hand of the market” has been bent to the service of oligarchs.

One Euro pizza in Madrid

Meantime, back in the USA, the police have broken up almost all Occupy camps and the media, run by our wonderful corporate masters, have delegated their movement to the back pages, if not to oblivion or Foxxy ridicule.   Though the truth is Occupy continues to exist and grow, and has impacted the American political arena in ways far deeper than the faux Tea Party, despite not being supported with millions in Koch money.  It is, instead, supported by tens of millions of Americans who share their multi-faceted views and admire their willingness to stand up and be counted.

Occupy in Portland, Oregon

And in Russia, following a parliamentary election in which Putin’s United Russia party was found transparently rigging the vote with the usual ballot box stuffing and similar things, but was caught on cell-phone videos doing so (the old guard apparently is too old to realize that almost everyone has some kind of camera and video, and the means to upload it to the world).   And in turn, even in Russia there’s a Spring in December going on.

Protesters in Moscow

On a global level there appears to be something of a generational struggle in process, in which the entrenched powers that be, where ever and what ever ideology they claim, are being besieged by the young (and some of the old), whose futures have been robbed by a globalized transnational oligarchic system that developed since the Cold War began in the late 1940′s and mutated into a more harshly corporatized entity since the fall of the Soviet Union.  We note that in many areas of the world half the population is under 25 years of age.

Lottery ticket seller in RomeThe latest front-runner for the Republican nomination in USAFrom George Landow’s On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?

A few weeks back I chanced into a brief notice that George Landow, a.k.a Owen Land, and if I recall properly a few other name changes during his life, had been found dead in his apartment in Los Angeles in June. I guess I must have missed earlier notice as I was traveling in Europe then.  I recall visiting him in his apartment, shared with John Schofill (who also changed his name to Luther something), at the time a hot-shot cinema avant gardist , sometime in the early or mid 1970′s in Chicago, where both were teaching at the Art Institute.   I recall George being a rather weird guy, which fit perfectly well with his rather weird films.    John was a self-appointed genius, and when showing me clips of his upcoming “masterpiece” one sensed one should sit on knees before the screen in religious silence and awe, and comment accordingly.  I found his footage nothing special and failed to behave as expected (I found similar behavior in Stan Brakhage, who had servile acolytes at his feet and seemed to require it – I never found his work all that wonderful and failed to kiss his toes either).   John seemed insulted by my failure to genuflect at the altar of his genius, and George seemed uptight.  I do remember finding it all a bit too much, and finally giving Landow a big bear hug, lifting him off his feet and perhaps suggesting he loosen up a bit.    Some decades later I think, but my memory is hazy here, that I bumped into the new Owen Land in Los Angeles, at some film something. He said he was trying to make a movie there, which from what I read, apparently he did:   Dialogues, or A Waist Is A Terrible Thing To Mind

Owen Land, 1944 – 2011

Aside from the roller-coaster ride of the wobbling Euro – up-down-spinning apart – and the other economic news which animates the moment, the Department of Labor released the latest US Employment figures, showing a decided bump downwards in the percentage of unemployed, to 8.6%.   This from the alleged 9% which many observers suggest is something more in the realm of 17% or more.  As usual, these figures are inherently false and falsified deliberately, for political reasons.  It is normal practice that a month later “corrections” are made, usually making the figures a bit less palatable politically speaking.  On the other hand in the NYTimes, Floyd Norris, economics columnist, says of late corrections have been in the other direction, and he spins the figures this way.

The editors in the same paper of record, saw it this (edited) way:

The unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent in November from 9 percent in October in the jobs report released Friday. The economy added 120,000 jobs and job growth was revised upward in September and October.

Most of the decline in November’s unemployment rate was not because jobless people found new work. Rather, it is because 315,000 people dropped out of the work force, a reflection of extraordinarily weak demand by employers for new workers.

The job growth numbers also come with caveats. More jobs were created than economists expected, but with the job market so weak for so long, that is a low bar. It would take nearly 11 million new jobs to replace the ones that were lost during the recession and to keep up with the growth in the working-age population in the last four years. To fill that gap would require 275,000 new jobs a month for the next five years. That’s not in the cards. Even with the better-than-expected job growth in the past three months, the economy added only 143,000 jobs on average.

And most of those new jobs are low-end ones. In November, for example, big job-growth areas included retail sales, bartending and temporary services. (Note: Xmas is around the corner, duh.) Teachers and other public employees continued to lose jobs, and job growth in construction and manufacturing were basically flat. Indeed, work — once the pathway to a rising standard of living — has become for many a route to downward mobility. Motoko Rich reported in The Times recently on new research showing that most people who lost their jobs in recent years now make less and have not maintained their lifestyles, with many experiencing what they describe as drastic — and probably irreversible — declines in income.

Against that backdrop, the modest improvement in the jobs report, even if sustained in the months to come, would not be enough to repair the damage from the recession and its slow-growth aftermath. Help is needed, yet Congress is tied in knots over even basic recovery measures, like extending federal unemployment benefits and the temporary payroll tax cut.

The  other shoe falling

This past week saw a concerted effort on the part of so-called “Central Banks,” including The Fed, to make dollars more liquid in the face of the tightening of Euro credit in Europe.  This action was hailed by “the markets” with a one day jump of around 4%.  The next day stocks slumped slightly – a phenomenon that has been repeated many times since 2008.   This process is a mixture of the Central Banks printing more money and giving it to banks are far lower interest rates than they will then loan it for – in effect, free money for the banks.  This functions to keep the usary system working and capitalism humming, if only for another day or week or month.  The cruel truth, which our bankers and their politicians dance around, is that the entire system was “leveraged” into a massive self-serving Ponzi scheme in which those in the financial industry robbed the banks, and left the empty bag in the public’s hand.   In doing so it has toppled several governments – Greece and Italy – which in turn gave the keys of those governments to – drum roll please – the bankers.  The new head of Italy, Mario Monti, is a former Goldman Sachs man and of course, a banker.  Lucas Papademos, the appointed (not elected) head of Greece is a former member of the Trilateral Commission, and, well gosh darn, banker.

In the current scramble to save the Euro the manifest self-interest of the US is being willfully smudged: American banks are deeply involved with their European counterparts, and should the latter go bust, their Atlantic cousins will follow shortly thereafter – though American banks are moving as quickly as they can to dump Euro funds.  But for what?  Incredible shrinking greenbacks?  Renminbi?   The brutal truth is that there is so much outstanding manufactured debt in the system that it out “values” all the assets in the world by factors beyond counting.  Missing in the endless mumbo-jumbo arcanities of the “financial industry”  – bonds, sovereign bonds, CDO, derivatives, and many other even more esoteric acronyms – are the simple words “shell game.”  Though anyone familiar with any professional world knows that the jargon of the profession is essentially designed to hide the inner workings from those on the outside.

Occupiers in NYC

So today’s news titillates with the impending tilt of the “futures market” with hedge-funders making their bets on the crystal ball, where they win when others lose.  Meanwhile mere humans await news of their fates – whether their “savings” in the form of 401-K’s or cash in the mattress or a looked-for Social Security or European pension will be evaporated at the stroke of a pen, or the election of political Dracula’s looking for a fast fix.

Unoccupied LA

A few days ago all but one of the comments I sent in to the New York Times “response” section in the Op-Ed pages were not printed.  There wasn’t any of the customary notice “this has been deleted because…,” rather they were just ignored.  As usual I was early and the one they did print was #11 in line, meaning early enough.   So one surmises it is just censorship, plain and simple.  Then yesterday here at Cinemaelectronica, some one sent the following note:

“Quiver, quake and die, or resist.”

You’re getting censored because this kind of language is deemed “incendiary” by the Times. Avoid profanity and personal attacks on the writer, and adopt an academic tone, and you can say just about anything. Really! It’s your tone which is the trouble, not the actual content.

Now I know this is more or less the case, though I would object that being forced to adopt an “academic tone” is itself a kind of death.   An academic tone is a method of neutralizing content, making it Dead On Delivery – DOD.  It is a way of leeching passion out of something, and when something calls for passion – as do the things I write about below, to strip it of emotional force is to effectually censor it.  Which is exactly what the New York Times does.   Though it does so very inconsistently as there are often comments far harsher in tone than my own.  But, being a “regular” I note that of late some of the other regulars, often with sharp and intelligent commentary, are seen less often, and often down in the response 100 and something instead of their usual #1 to 10 place.  Now it may be they have tired of this, or have other things to do, or missed a week for this reason or that.  But given the treatment I seem to have been getting, my guess is they too are falling under the censor’s chopping block.

Here’s what I posted a few days ago:

In response to a David Brooks column called The Two Moons:

Wrong wrong wrong. Both Democrats and Republicans are diminishing because both are utterly corrupted, and corrupted by the same forces which constitute the new presumptive Sun: Wall Street and corporatism (Mussolini called it fascism).
And in its embryonic form OWS is entering to offer a totally other view, not in thrall to money and the bankers and the system (rotten crony capitalism) which they represent. We need a totally new paradigm, and OWS is struggling to find it. Meanwhile the black-boot militarized “police” (comes from Greek polis, to say, of the community) pepper spray anyone who dissents from the Wall Street line. Next will come the bullets.
Support OWS

And then this in response to an item by Roger Cohen dancing around cuisine and Europe.

It may be that Mario Batallie’s customers like hot pepper and that explains why their Gestapo troopers like to spray it on kids who are sitting quiet and unthreatening on a sidewalk in a display of good old American civil disobedience as part of the Constitutional rights they supposedly hold and those police thugs supposedly are to uphold.
OWS and all its off-shoots offer something for which to be thankful.

And then in response to an Editor’s Page commentary on the Collapse of the (inane) Supercommittee:

Face it: the American government no longer works, period. It is a go-between fixer for the military-industrial complex and its many corporate friends. It is totally corrupted. The solution is in the Declaration of Independence, wherein it states that when a government no longer represents the people it is their right and DUTY to overthrow it and establish a government which does represent the people. That’s what it says.

And lastly, in reply to an article on Lt JohnPike’s new starring role as pepper-sprayer supreme, this:

As an activist in the 60′s (imprisoned 2+ years for refusal to serve in Uncle Sam’s military) I have to say the police were the same back then, though their costumes were not so hi-tech and sci-fi looking. But the men behind the badges were the same, and they did the same things. Though with the advent of the DHS the militarization of the police forces across the country was amplified, and they are ready now to “serve and protect” the interests of Wall Street and the corporate state which has executed a coup d’etat in front of our very noses.

If Lt. Pike is not indicted for criminal assault with a chemical weapon, as cited in already extent criminal law in California with regard to the use of these materials, and in violation of police regulations for their use, then you will know for certain we have slid well the realm of a police state.  For those who didn’t already know.  I trust the ACLU and others are preparing a lawsuit against him, the UC Davis administration and whomever else is responsible.

Throughout this recent episode of attacks on Occupiers around the country, there has been a conspicuous silence from  Obama and those political figures who might in normal times be expected to criticize the heavy-handed actions of the police, and what constitutes an attack on the civil rights of those attacked.   This silence implies consent to the behavior of the police.  Just as has the failure to bring prosecution against those police who have violated both the law and the civil rights of those they have abused.   Not so long ago, when the tin patriots of the Tea Party, dressed in corporate paid-for costumes, demonstrated, often with arms not linked, but at their sides in the form of weapons, the press lavished attention upon them in about as equal manner as the police made themselves scarce.   Again, the implications are dark.

Here is the response that the New York Times deigned to print on the same day as those above were censored:

“The reason they are doing so is obvious: the science notwithstanding, no company wants to be cast as so heartless that it would deprive a seriously ill cancer patient of a drug that might offer hope, however slim.” And no company wants to be cast as so economically foolish that it would let a 90K a year drug be yanked off the market.

The drug operative here is money, as exemplified in the 9 “doctors” who are corrupt and sit on the panel which oversees the regulation of a drug whose manufacturer they are invested in. Conflict of interest? What a quaint notion in today’s morally and ethically derelict America.

Pepper spray, anyone?

www.jonjost.wordpress.com
www.cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com

Support OWS !

Indicating that the ruling elite of the United States is little different than that of the ruling elite of Egypt’s Mubarak, or Libya’s Gadaffi, or  Syria’s Assad, New York City’s billionaire mayor Bloomberg, having failed to resolve the matter of Zuccotti Park’s occupation by willfully ignoring of it, then by ridicule and the complicity of mainstream media’s attempts to trivialize it, and by numerous tactics intended to bring it into disrepute and dissolution, finally ordered “New York’s finest” to do what they are trained to do: bash heads.

In the days which followed the NYPD eviction of OWS from Liberty Park, similar police assaults were mounted on encampments throughout the country.   That these seemed more or less simultaneous promptly raised the suspicion that there was some kind of national coordination, and sure as heck, Oakland’s Mayor Quan, whose police forces had severely injured an Iraq war vet a few weeks ago (and did so to another shortly afterward), blurted out in a BBC interview that she had been in on a teleconference with 17 other mayors about what to do with the burgeoning Occupiers.   Subsequent information suggests the FBI, DHS, and other Federal “law enforcement” agencies were involved.  Among the tactics used were the release of prisoners who were told that if they went to the Occupy encampments they would not be arrested, and that there was free food, etc.  Likewise were people with mental disorders told to go.   As sure as the sun rises, not long afterward Occupy people were dealing with homeless and criminal people, and promptly the press began to discredit the encampments, saying they were really gatherings of the homeless and junkies, and, well, they really were a public dangers, dirty, etc.    This of course is standard psy-ops stuff, and doubtless our authorities, on seeking advice, got an earful of “good ideas” to use.  That they happened nationally points to a coordination.  For more on this see this.

Plain clothes cops in NYC

To serve and protect

Dressed in black Darth Vader costumes, with bullet-proof hi-tech fabrics, our current police no longer even pretend to be the friendly guy in blue, the cop on the beat.  Instead they are militarized forces, the purpose and function of which is to protect the ruling elite and their “property,”  and as has clearly been shown in the last years, to suppress dissent.  From the Bush administration’s “free speech zones” to the present, the area for exercising one’s supposed Constitutional rights of free assembly, and free speech have been steadily encroached upon by the government. The corporate forces which have purchased Washington and local governments, have long since seized control of the mass media, turning it into a 24/7 propaganda machine which works exactly like Pravda in the old USSR.  Where possible, as was the case in the first days of OWS, they simply ignore and do not report.   When circumstances make this tactic fail, they then do what they can to marginalize and dismiss – as the early reports that it was merely a bunch of latter-day hippies, bongo players and spoiled I-pad toting college kids.   The New York Times did this in spades.    When that failed to collapse the movement, and instead – thanks to the internet and social networking tools – it expanded and took root in many more cities.   At this juncture our authorities seem to have realized that their own propaganda was not true, and that Occupy posed some kind of serious threat to their “system” and the serious police harassment began, with the usual parade of plain clothes cops, provocateurs, and the criminal and drug elements arrived, directed by the police to do so.  Promptly came Bloomberg’s eviction notice on the grounds of hygiene and the need to clean up the place.   Later came the complaints of criminality.   And step by fumbling step, as if carefully planned, Bloomberg and authorities in other cities misread and mis-stepped their way – just like Mubarak – into taking measures which expanded Occupy exponentially.  The round-up on Brooklyn Bridge, a transparent trap, boomeranged and the next day OWS got much bigger.   And last week’s eviction served the same purpose, and several days later by police estimates (nearly always low) 32,500 people were out on the streets to close down Wall Street.   Not seeming to understand the dynamic in play, the authorities let loose their dogs of war:

Davis, California

Seattle Black-shirts in action

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mohandas Gandhi

.

“In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states (Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland), it is now illegal to record an on-duty police officer even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.”

The police state is coming.  No, it is already here.

And, back to an old story, once again, surprisingly on the Krugman column, I was censored by the dear old New York Times, once again.  Actually a handful of days ago they censored everything I sent.  Here’s what I wrote that was not deemed “fit to print:”

The Republican Party of today is totally against the national welfare while it is completely for the national warfare welfare system. It will cut anything that serves the community at large and feed the military-industrial complex (99% composed of Republicans in the corporations that manufacture our glamorous weaponry). That is it, plain and simple.

OWS is serving notice that this gaming of the system is over, while the corporate push-back to OWS is serving notice that a police-state is A-OK with them.

Watch it happen on a street near you. Quiver, quake and die, or resist.

For 3 decades America’s right-wing “conservatives” have successfully played their flim-flam game of shifting income and all wealth to a tiny percentage while directing the “lower-classes” to fight among themselves over matters of race, sexuality, religion, and dividing up the crumbs falling off the table.   As usual among such people, they have blinded themselves to the consequences of impoverishing the many while enriching the very few.  Though owning the media and the government, though vastly advantaged in the powers which govern most of society’s actions, they have done as nearly all plutocrats do and turned themselves into their own worst enemy.   Mayor Bloomberg, who quite literally bought his office, is a billionaire estimated to have assets and wealth equal to 17 billion dollars.  He is the second richest man in New York.  The first is David Koch, oil-man and right-wing ideologue who funded the Astroturf Tea Party (which we note has shrunk into near invisibility.)   In sending in the black-shirts of the NYPD Bloomberg has tipped his hand, and that of the oligarchy which presumes to rule the country.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

Franklin D Roosevelt, June 27, 1936

‘I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, 2nd President of the United States

    “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

-Louis D. Brandeis

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

From the American Declaration of Independence

[Addendum:

I read rather too much in the newspapers, trying to keep my fingers on the pulse of the present.  In the last few weeks or so, as the Occupy movement has been battered by the kinds of psy-war tactics described above, but as well by police-state actions such as those pictured – of cops dressed-to-kill as it were, acting out orders which need only another step before the “non-lethal” weapons are replaced by the other ones – I have noted increasingly items from across the political spectrum which are like the one I print below (taken from a NY Times reader-response section).   The references to the events in the Middle-East, the use of the words “police-state” – once reserved for those of us on the” far out hysterical fringe” – and the recognition that something is wildly amiss are now commonplace, as is the suggestion, not long ago considered unthinkable, that America is politically and socially disintegrating.   This would suggest that Occupy has served well as a trigger for the underlying social ferment of which major shifts are distilled.  The police, and those in the hierarchy which uses them, are doing their job well to help focus public consciousness on what is really happening.

I’d always believed that the United States of America was different from all other countries in the world because of our respect for and willingness to accommodate political protest, and that when that tolerance broke down, it was a rare aberration in a nation where the police were trained to deal with political speech and action with calm, patience, and understanding of the rights of the people to protest.Clearly, however, the response of the last 2 months to the “Occupy” protesters indicates that my former belief was a myth. The incidents of official over-reaction have been widespread, fueling a movement that probably would have died out, had the official response not clearly proven that the protesters have a valid point.

Had these been meaningless protests by a few malcontents, they would have been dismissed with a few insincere platitudes. But Occupy has clearly struck a nerve and the wounded beast is responding with violence.

Despite claims that they were threatened, it is clear that the Davis Police created a violent situation as did the police in Berkeley, Seattle, Denver, New York…

Until today, this lifelong Republican viewed the occupy protesters with ambivalence, if not disdain. But today and going forward, I am with them.

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man, owner of a dominant sector of its mass media, bunga bunga aficionado, multiple indictee for charges from sex with a minor to corrupting bankers and lawyers, famed lothario, clown at numerous great international summits, and, last but not least, Premier of Italy for most of the last 13 years, has finally been forced from office.  No, not by the politicians of Italy, who tend to match Mr Berlusconi only in their capacity for folly, if not on such a gradiose scale.  Nor by the voters of Italy, who despite Silvio’s odious reputation magically secured the votes of a majority, or at least of a coalition’s majority, time and again.   Silvio is a classic embodiment of a certain Italian tendency to love to place heroes on a high pedestal – higher the better – so they can have a longer time to enjoy themselves as the feet turn to clay and at the end the baying crowd can have at the corpse.

Crowds outside the Premier’s palazzo in RomeMussolini and friends at the end

That Mr Berlusconi, who began life as a crooner on cruise ships, and moved mysteriously to the pinnacle of his country, fits the mold of Italian politicians cannot be doubted, nor can his wily capacity as a businessman.   He had, as is customary, friends in high places.  And low.

Silvio and his friends near the beginningSilvio and Bettino Craxi, former PM, sent to exile in  TunisiaSilvio and ex-wife Veronica Lario who dumped him for playing around with girlsSilvio, modeling for Rodin or perhaps thinking of NoemiBillboard of Noemi Letizia, friend of Silvio

Silvio is not alone in the current crisis.  A skip away, in another Mediterranean country, Greece, another Premier has been shoved aside, and by the same forces as that which pushed Mr Berlusconi out.  Yes, the Magical Mystery Market, was the gravitational black-matter force that took control and in a swift little shell game replaced the head of Greece’s government with a banker, and while the Premier designate for Italy is not directly a banker, he’s awfully close to one.

Goldman Sachs, back a while, worked with the at-the-time right-wing conservative of government of Greece to cook-the-national-books so that Greece would qualify to enter the EU and the Euro zone.   Much of the subsequent problems of the country derive from this bit of chicanery – off of which, of course, Goldman Sachs profited.   Another kind of “derivative.”

And now, as the so-called PIIGS are put through the economic hoops drawn up by “the market” and imposed by its front institutions of the IMF and World Bank, we find the rickety edifice of “democracy” subject to a little pin-striped flim-flam job, just as happened in the USA in 2008 when the bankers shrieked “the sky is falling” and the Fed (a private bank that prints up greenbacks at the behest of…. itself, though it usually requires some political cover to do so), and Uncle Sam ordered up 16 trillion pieces of digitalized money, much of which went via Wall Street into the supposed safety of “sovereign bonds” – to say loans to actual countries instead of businesses.    Along the way, to celebrate this heist, the barons of Wall Street gave themselves nice fat bonuses: they’d made amazing bad bets, and then they, the uber-capitalists of the world, had conned the public (in the form of President Bush and his friends), to crank out a mere 16 trillion, no questions asked, at then Treasury Secretary Paulson’s request, so as to “socialise” their massive losses.   Mr Paulson, of course, was previously the CEO of… ta ta… Goldman Sachs.  Cosy little company.   And then they went and invested a ton of this in the supposed “safe” place of European sovereign bonds.  And lost again.   And so now, as the Euro totters and they stand to take yet another massive loss they have turned the tables, and it is not the Greeks who are offering lovely Trojan Horses, but our dear friends the bankers.

Why is this man smiling?

Soon we will doubtless be told that “the sky is falling” once again, and that Germany and France and the Euro Zone must move rapidly to shore up their crumbling currency (of which American banks hold massive amounts), and that the path to do so is to sell off public properties, to slash social welfare programs, and….. and to give it all to the bankers.

Mussolini and his mistressSic transit gloria, hanging out in the cool catacombs of Palermo

Following suit with the censoring nature of his colleagues in rightist arms, Ross Douthat and Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist David Brooks yesterday saw fit to whip out the censor’s stamp for my reply to his Op-Ed item on the virtues of fracking and the lack of virtue in democracy as exampled by people actually learning about and stopping it in their front or back yard.

“but rogue companies have screwed up…”    Rogue companies like, oh, BP. Like Massey Coal. There’s a long list of major corporations which appear to be rogue companies. There was even a US Executive administration that was “rogue”.

If our corporations acted in good faith, if they could be trusted for one honest word, if they did not litter the globe with their messes, then perhaps the conversation could be more civil. But they do lie, they do leave wreckage where ever they go, and they do so in pursuit of profit and as to the rest, devil take the hindmost.

Most of these corporations are firmly Republican in political inclinations. They have bought the government, the judiciary and the press. And Mr Brooks.

The extraction methods of “fracking” leaves ample room for doubts. But that never bothered an American capitalist before as the litter of industrial waste and destruction around our country testifies.

Fracking in the country

For an interesting insight into the nature of “fracking” see this piece, an interview with activist and theater and film director Josh Fox, on his work in making Gasland.

Fracking well, PennsylvaniaToxic fracking slurry pond

One imagines that Mr Brooks, in whatever privileged enclave he lives in, would promptly become a NIMBY were it proposed to start fracking in his neighborhood.  But for those redneck crackers “out there” it’s a bit of money (and a whole lot of money for his friends in the energy business which is the rip-roaring Republican capitalist business) , so what the hell?

How fracking “works”

Like most extractive industries, fracking is a dirty business.  You have to make roads to get where you’re going to drill (often, if not always, paid for with public “socialist” money); you have to get permits from those whose land, public and private, you are going to drill – often done by paying or bribing.  In the case of fracking you must truck in chemicals, water and build a small industrialized base at which you drill, inject your chemical/water/sand compound, blast, and then begin to pump out the gas you have freed up.  Along with the gas comes a slurry of toxics which you must then either store on site, or ship out to dump some other lucky place.   And once you’re done, you can pack up and leave the clean up to the government, or just let those who live around it suffer the consequences.  The good old All-American Way!

Berkeley Pit, Butte Montana.  The lake is highly toxic, and no longer pumped, it seeps into the earth, with houses below it having leakage come into their basements. Butte has a long history of industrial poisoning, quite visible on the streets  in its population.

West Virgina.  Not only is mountain top coal strip mining unsightly, it destroys the adjacent water shed with erosion and tailings being dumped into the local water supply.  Fish and animals disappear.  Humans and towns as well.  But money talks and Massey Energy, famed for its numerous violations of mining regulations and its periodic appearance in headlines over mining “accidents” owns the West Virginia government, as well as the Washington regulatory agency.

Along with many of his fellow 1% pundits, Mr Brooks has been blind-sided and puzzled by the Occupy movement.  Like the others he essentially ignored it until it became too obvious a Pravda tactic, and then like the others – the Time’s Bill Keller, former editor of the rag, being an exemplary of the I-don’t-get-it crew – who, like Mr Brooks, look more and more ridiculous each time they attempt to catch up, they began their diatribes about “class war”.  Living in the cocoon of their wealth, surrounded by like minded souls, they never see the America right before them.  Instead they exchange wisdoms on the golf course or in the board room or in the cozy confines of their gated community or penthouse.  In between they travel in dark glassed limos, surely avoiding an unpleasant neighborhoods, urban or rural.  Naturally, they just don’t get it.  It’s hard to “get it” from a private jet.

Coast to coast

OCCUPY !

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