The XL Pipeline: a Political Litmus Test for the Environmental Movement The Biggest Environmental Crime in History? by CHRIS WILLIAMS

OCTOBER 19, 2011

Called by Greenpeace ‘the biggest environmental crime in history’, the expansion of oil production from Canadian tar sands is likely to get a major boost in November, courtesy of the Obama Administration. The estimated recoverable oil trapped in low-grade deposits of tar sands that require ripping up Canada’s boreal forest, a major carbon sink, is second in quantity only to Saudi Arabian oil reserves.

The amount of energy and water required to make the oil useable, not to mention burning the oil itself, will put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that internationally renowned NASA climate scientist James Hansen has said that extracting and refining the oil means it’s “essentially game over” in the global battle to avoid catastrophic climate change. The question needs to be asked: how did we get from a president who once promised real action on climate change to a man who is complicit in the environmental crime of the century? And having taken on that question, how should environmentalists respond?

Extracting oil from tar sands has only become economical as we have approached the End of the Age of Easy Oil and the price has shot above $100/barrel. There’s plenty more out there but it’s dirty, dangerous, hard to extract and hence ripe for environmental calamities such as last year’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This explains not only the development of Canadian tar sands, which require mining two tons of tar sands to obtain a single barrel of oil, as Shell, Exxon-Mobil and that paragon of environmental responsibility, BP, are all in on the action, but also underpins the hunt for oil in deep-water deposits off-shore and in the new oil frontier of the Arctic as well as shale gas extraction from hydrofracking.

Furthermore, it brings sharply into focus the reality that under capitalism, particularly its unregulated neoliberal variant, massive transnational oil companies will not hesitate to bolster their bottom lines and appease their shareholders before any concern about the stability of the biosphere filters through into corporate head offices.

One tar sands mine in Alberta has excavated more rock and soil than was required to build the Great Pyramid at Cheops, the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal and the world’s 10 largest dams combined. Mining and processing is enough to heat three million homes and such is the electricity demand, it’s helping to fuel the requirement to build another environmental and health menace: more nuclear power stations. Water use is 349 million cubic meters annually; water that becomes so heavily contaminated that it can’t be put back in the rivers it’s bleeding dry. It must be kept sequestered in vast lakes of highly toxic effluent that already cover 50 square kilometers and are large enough to be seen from space. The negative impacts on indigenous land and culture, wildlife, forests, water, air and downstream pollution run on and on.

Considering some of the facts of tar sands mining, and the appalling environmental damage it will cause, this is surely an area where one would expect democratically-elected governments to step in and say: we must find an alternative. Yet, it seems almost certain that President Obama, who has the authority to stop the pipeline without recourse to Congress, will give the green light to further expansion as Canada seeks an export market to justify further production expansion. The Keystone XL project, a 1,700 mile pipeline that will be able to carry 700,000 barrels a day from Canada all the way down to the refineries in Texas, cutting through multiple states and risking the contamination of such essential fresh water sources as the Ogallala aquifer is essential to Canadian plans for tar sands development.

Yet we know from Wikileaks that the State Department has been in collusion with TransCanada, the pipeline company, to ensure favorable press and hired a state dept official formerly with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign team to guarantee that her new department won’t look too closely at the negative environmental implications. A company who count TransCanada as one of their major clients, Cardno Entrix, was hired by the State Department to carry out the environmental assessment.

Desperate to retain their members’ dues base and taking a nationalist and short-term position with regard to “American jobs”, the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters union, rather than actively campaigning for jobs with a real future such as those in an expanded renewable energy sector, energy conservation and infrastructure development are backing the pipeline.

Yes, we certainly need jobs, but why do we only ever get offered jobs when it’s in the interests of the fossil fuel corporations or the banks and we have to trade them off for environmental stability? Or when the government wants young American’s to go and fight and kill other young people in far off lands? What about the millions of jobs that could be created by manufacturing a clean energy economy, with a new energy grid, retrofitting buildings across the country for energy conservation and in building an updated and efficient sanitation system? Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of teachers we’d need to educate such a workforce. The bankers foreclosed on our homes and the capitalists and politicians that serve them seem intent on foreclosing on the planet.

Organized by Bill McKibben of 350.org, over 1,000 people were arrested outside the Whitehouse this summer to pressure Obama into refusing to sign off on the pipeline project. While this was a highly commendable and impressive action, it was also rather confusing as McKibben urged activists not to give up on Obama. Despite more than two years of unremitting disappointment on environmental questions (and much else) activists were encouraged to wear their 2008 Obama campaign buttons at the protests and on their way to jail. It was confusing because you can’t protest someone you simultaneously support and hope to build a robust and uncompromising movement for change in the teeth of corporate malfeasance and lobbying power. Either you protest and create a large enough oppositional movement that forces a rethink of government policy, as has happened in Germany with the German government’s u-turn on nuclear power, or you weaken the movement and bamboozle your supporters with misplaced calls for loyal protest actions to get our supposed friend in the Whitehouse on the right track.

McKibben has called Obama’s upcoming decision a “watershed moment” for his presidency and environmentalists who previously enthusiastically campaigned for him have vowed to sit out his 2012 re-election campaign if he doesn’t follow through and refuse to authorize the project. I hope they do.

In a statement that underscores the cynicism with which the Democratic Party take their most enthusiastic supporters, the New York Times quoted democratic pollster Mark Mellman: “Whatever qualms or questions they may have about this policy or that policy, at the end of the day the one thing they’re absolutely certain of–they’re going to hate these Republican candidates…So I’m not honestly all that worried about a solid or enthusiastic base.” In other words, the Democrats will simply run a negative campaign that only promises to be not quite as bad as the Republicans. Meanwhile, not quite as bad as the Republicans will fry the planet just as surely as if the Republicans had been in charge of the furnaces.

So this is a watershed moment not just for Obama, but also for McKibben and the mainstream environmental movement. Only a complete and irrevocable break with the Democratic Party will get us anywhere. In several articles written over the lifetime of the Obama presidency, including when he had super-majorities in both houses of Congress and could have acted with purpose on environmental questions, I have argued that, despite the rhetoric, Obama’s default position would always be to side with the corporations against a rational and forward-thinking environmental program. One that would protect health, create jobs and give us a chance of avoiding global climate meltdown. Obama has yet to provide any evidence that my analysis is incorrect.

In a coffin that should really have received its last nail some time ago, it is highly likely that he will further confirm my analysis with his commitment to the pipeline project. The question then will be, will the mainstream environmental organizations such as 350.org follow through, ditch the Democratic Party, make good on their promise not to campaign for an Obama second term, and help build the only thing that will save us: the construction of a broad-based but completely independent movement for real social and ecological change.

Paradoxically, the only force that might prevent President Obama from burning all his bridges to the environmental movement is Occupy Wall Street, which has already sharply moved the political narrative to the left in the United States precisely because it is independent of the two-party corporate duopoly that masquerades as democratic political choice. Yet, if OWS continues to grow and the Democratic Party are forced to respond by tacking to the left on environmental and social issues so as not to lose every last shred of liberal credibility, it further serves to underline my argument that we will only win real change when we categorically refuse to get taken for a ride by the Democratic chariot that is hitched so firmly to the corporate horse.

Chris Williams is a professor in the Dept of Chemistry & Physical Science, Pace University and author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2010)

Parrotting Data-Free Myths The Press and Panetta by WINSLOW T. WHEELER

OCTOBER 19, 2011

The silence in the press about the overheated rhetoric and dubious myths from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta makes for a very unhappy comparison of today’s defense journalism compared to previous eras when, for example, SecDef Casper Weinberger was the subject of serious critical analysis.

Prior to Tuesday of last week, Panetta had been sprinkling Washington D.C. with words like “doomsday mechanism,” “catastrophic,” and “shooting ourselves in the head” to describe any cuts in the Pentagon’s budget beyond the $450 over 10 years he and President Obama have already committed to. Panetta had set a new standard for overheated rhetoric to defend the Pentagon’s budget, and yet the press reported his words without suggesting anything out of the ordinary-thereby creating the impression that the rhetoric was completely appropriate.

Then on Tuesday October 11, a new Leon Panetta was rolled out in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. Gone were the apocalyptic lamentations proclaiming a return to 2007 levels of Pentagon spending to be the end of budget life as we know it-even if it is also true that 2007 was a post-World War II high at the time, $73 billion higher than spending in 2000, and $38 billion above average annual spending during the Cold War.

The new, more pensive Panetta called for “the thoughtful debate the entire country needs to have on how to sustain the nation’s strength.in a time of growing fiscal constraint.” He even eschewed hectoring Congress to go find cuts in entitlement spending to permit an unperturbed Pentagon budget. He used the “catastrophic damage” phrasing just once, and it was buried in the back of the speech.

The press kept itself silent. It is impossible to tell if any reporters discerned the new cooler rhetoric.

Panetta’s restraint and call for thoughtfulness didn’t last long, however. Less than 24 hours later, he was back at it, making an analogy that advocates of deeper cuts were the Nazis at Bastogne, Belgium in World War II and he was the storied US commander there who told them “Nuts” when they demanded surrender-a pretty outrageous assertion about both his critics and himself. A day later at the House Armed Services Committee, the overblown rhetoric was repeated, over and over again.

Again, the press remained silent, other than to repeat what Panetta said.

The Wilson Center speech also attempted to take the intellectual high road by putting budget problems in a strategic context and to prioritize solutions. However, the substance of these remarks was as ethereal as his transient attempt at rhetorical restraint.

He started with strategic pabulum straight from the bowels of the Pentagon bureaucracy. He read off a litany of threats: Iraq, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, “rising powers” in the “Asia-Pacific region” (that would be China) and cyber security without his (or the press) acknowledging the usual criticism such laundry lists attract. When virtually the same catalog of threats was offered in DOD’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, it was widely panned as having no identifiable strategic framework or priorities. As one more insightful critic, Franklin C. Spinney, pointed out, such lists-and the conventional wisdom critique of them-do not even recognize the Pentagon’s fundamental problems.

Now, the issue was content, rather than style. And, still no comments from any of the many press articles I read about the Wilson Center speech.

Then came the whopper. Panetta asserted “the American military today is without question the finest fighting force that has ever existed.” It is a phraseology commonly used by American politicians of both political parties to profess their support for the troops.

Apparently, seeing nothing worthy of comment, the press let it pass, as it has scores of times previously. I saw not a single article even hinting that Panetta’s data and logic had the slightest flaw.

Panetta’s “finest” US Navy “that has ever existed” has shrunk from 316 battleforce ships in 2001 to 287 in 2011, a decline of 10 percent. It is not a smaller, newer fleet; it is a smaller, older fleet-about four years older per ship, on average, than it was in 2001. Also, for the past year the press has been constantly reporting on severe maintenance and readiness problems throughout the fleet.

Panetta’s best ever Air Force declined from 142 fighter and bomber squadrons to 72 during the same 2001-2012 period, a decline of 49 percent, and the inventory has increased to an all-time high average for aircraft age: 23 years. Fighter pilot air training hours today are one-half of what they were in the 1970s, an era not touted for high readiness.

The Army’s brigade combat teams did grow from 44 to 45. But major Army equipment inventories are mostly older, and in 2006, the House Armed Services Committee leaked a memo documenting historic lows in the readiness of active Army units in the US. The analysis has not been publicly updated; we should worry that it has gotten worse, not better.

We got this smaller, older, less ready force not because of less money but because of more. In addition to the $1.3 trillion spent on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama added another $1 trillion to the “base” (non-war) parts of the defense budget.

One might see in the press the sometimes article about the age of the US air- and sea-borne fleets, but that is usually accompanied by implications that the defense budget is tight, not bloated.

Perhaps, if writers had noted the shrinking, aging, less ready to fight forces that resulted from higher, not lower, budgets, editors and readers would have asked for an explanation of the counterintuitive assertion. That, in turn, would have required some, but actually not a lot of, research and, worse, a discussion of how the conventional wisdom about the defense budget-that more money means better, stronger defenses-is badly wrong and misinformed. (One of the several places inquisitive reporters might have found their way to is a recent anthology I and nine authors with more than 400 years of defense related experience wrote: The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It)

Panetta’s empty “finest ever” rhetoric does not even stand up to a comparison of US armed forces to themselves ten years ago. The pretense that we outmatch the rest of the world (as much as we outspend it) relies on an absence of meaningful analysis, certainly none that Panetta has presented-or that anyone in the press asked for.

If an extra trillion dollars in the last ten years meant a decaying defense force, how does Panetta say he is going to prevent a hollowing out of our forces at the modestly lower budget levels he says he can live with? Again, no questions were asked.

He did list his general budget cutting recommendations; they were great fodder for scores of questions, none of which made it to my computer screen.

To his credit, Panetta’s Wilson Center speech’s first budget cutting priority was “ruthlessly pursuing efficiencies and streamlining efforts designed to eliminate overhead infrastructure, waste and duplication,” and Thursday at the House Armed Services Committee he said he would accelerate the Pentagon’s deadline for its meeting the Constitutional requirement-never before complied with-that it account for the trillions of dollars it has been spending. If actually done, he will permit himself and future decision makers to begin to understand how much spending is waste, duplication, abuse, excess overhead, doctored contractor spending records and much, much more. However, the audit Panetta says he wants to achieve is too modest to provide the comprehensive and detailed data he will really need to identify the overhead, waste and duplication he says he wants to ferret out. When you scratch his words, they seem a little hollow, but you would never know it by reading any articles about Panetta’s statements.

Then, Panetta’s budget cutting priorities went completely off the tracks. His number two priority-in agreement with much of today’s conventional wisdom-is to cut personnel costs. The number three priority is to cut force structure, which really means taking people out of the force, thereby reducing combat units and their support. Panetta’s last place to cut is “modernization,” meaning hardware.

He put a lot of rhetoric around his solicitude for the troops both at the Wilson Center and later at the House Armed Services Committee, but it is beginning to emerge that his real budget priorities are to cut people first and hardware last. It is no doubt true that pay and benefits costs are out of control in the Pentagon, but the same is true of hardware-in spades. The last GAO measure of hardware cost growth put it at $300 billion.

But again, nothing was written to question or even just probe Panetta’s recommendations.

Life is simple for Leon Panetta: he can say anything he wants without the slightest fear of probing questions. The place one would start is, of course, research, but there is not the slightest indication that the press is scratching the surface of what Secretary Panetta is saying. Casper Weinberger, rest his soul, must be seething with jealousy.

Winslow T. Wheeler is director of the Straus Military Reform Project and editor of The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It.

Jeb Bush's Advice to the Mortgage Bankers Banker Boyz Blues by ALAN FARAGO

OCTOBER 19, 2011

In Miami it is not considered polite or politic to criticize resident and former governor Jeb Bush, whose entire career was fueled by the mad housing boom and its campaign money that is now crashed to cinders. Bush spoke in Chicago last week to the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention.

These days, the speechifying of Jeb! can be interpreted for the direction of the Republican message machine. What was reported was that Bush urged the audience to climb out of their fetal position and go on the offensive. “Who better to advocate a policy to get us out of this mess?” Bush implored the same businesses that shipwrecked the economy on the reefs from which scavengers now ply their trades.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with their taxpayer trillions, sent nearly two hundred fifty executives to Chicago where they rubbed shoulders with the same mortgage rating agencies and mortgage execution companies that used speed in execution as the housing market inflated and speed in execution as the housing market collapsed to “move product” while tens of millions of Americans suffered the consequences. Speed in execution means diminished or eviscerated regulations; one of the GOP’s chief goals whether for the environment or for zoning and development.

Jeb Bush is an elder statesman in the Republican Party these days. Why, is a mystery. On the other hand, who can deny the magic tricks at the heart of American politics tied to campaign finance that Bush mastered and re-materialized as the destruction of so much equity and hope. That is what the Occupy Wall Street’ers in Manhattan, Miami and elsewhere are protesting. Corporations are too powerful. Corporations are NOT people. But Jeb Bush (and his chosen presidential candidate, Mitt Romney) believe otherwise, with the US Supreme Court at their backs.

“Business has gotten way too timid,” said the former governor whose first consulting contract was with Lehman Brothers, the biggest pusher of mortgage derivative debt to the state of Florida. Bush continued with the banker boyz in Chicago, “The natural inclination is to cover. I would encourage you to stand up.” Stand up to the protesters, hinted Bush without also mentioning that between Enron and Lehman, his appointees cost Florida and money held in trust for policemen, firemen, and state and municipal employees nearly a billion dollars.

There is where the 1933 inaugural speech of Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be mashed with the Wall Street whiners and the renewed competition for its campaign cash by both Democrats and Republicans. Roosevelt, speaking to America at the height of the Depression, condemned an earlier generation of bankers; “Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.”

It bears pointing out that the same protections advocated by Roosevelt and built up through the safety net protecting banks, American business and consumers are the target of the GOP, now swept up in a kind of madness aimed against the victims. It is partly President Obama’s fault– he neither presided during the incipient stages of the housing bubble nor had the acuity to understand the nature of its creators — that he cannot say today as President Roosevelt did then, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization… there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.”

In Chicago, Jeb Bush faced the money changers and what he told them was in effect; put more tricks up your sleeve, more pigeons to fly from top hats, more beautiful women to saw in two, to materialize wholesome and Christian with the swipe of a magic wand.

Magic tricks like this: “One of the things that we’ve got to do is to address problems straight on and deal with them in a way that helps us meet goals. And so I want to talk about … one goal and a problem. The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so… And so what are the barriers that we can deal with here in Washington? Well, probably the single barrier to first-time homeownership is high down payments. People take a look at the down payment, they say that’s too high, I’m not buying. They may have the desire to buy, but they don’t have the wherewithal to handle the down payment. We can deal with that. And so I’ve asked Congress to fully fund an American Dream down payment fund which will help a low-income family to qualify to buy, to buy. (Applause.) … (the problem is) that the rules are too complex. People get discouraged by the fine print on the contracts. They take a look and say, well, I’m not so sure I want to sign this. There’s too many words. (Laughter.) There’s too many pitfalls. So one of the things that the Secretary is going to do is he’s going to simplify the closing documents and all the documents that have to deal with homeownership.” (Bob Martinez, then secretary of HUD, would soon become a US Senator from Florida succeeded now by Jeb Bush protege, Marco Rubio.)

Those words, from a June 2002 speech by President George W. Bush, inspired the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. At the time Jeb Bush was governor of Florida, the same Jeb Bush who says, though a dismal decade has passed, that what is hindering the economic recovery are “regulations” and that the banker boyz need to get up out of their Fox Holes. Occupy Wall Street, take note.

Alan Farago is conservation chair of Friends of the Everglades. He can be reached at: afarago@bellsouth.net



Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch



One of the Greatest Descriptions of Farm Work Ever Written— Don’t miss Frank Bardacke’s marvelous account from the California fields. ALSO Linn Washington Jr. on the “Black Backlash Against Obama.”

Another Neoliberal Hoax Obama’s Jobs Bill and Other Fictions by ROB URIE

OCTOBER 19, 2011

Several seemingly well meaning pundits have asked: if Occupy Wall Street wants jobs, why don’t they come out and support President Obama’s jobs bill? Answering only for myself, the better question is: why doesn’t Obama support his own jobs bill? The White House is claiming that it needs sixty votes to pass the jobs bill in the Senate to overcome a threatened filibuster by Republicans. Maybe, but are these the same Republicans who just passed his toxic free-trade agreement with South Korea, Panama and Colombia with bipartisan support from Democrats? Why yes they are.

At this point in history, the evidence is in that these free trade agreements are a neo-liberal hoax to transfer jobs from the U.S. to low wage countries. Anyone who cares to can view the facts for themselves in the government statistics—the decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs has a very high correlation with the advent and implementation of free-trade agreements. Not only have manufacturing jobs been in absolute decline for more than a decade, the Participation Rate, the percentage of the working age population that is employed has been declining with it. As for the purported benefits of so-called free trade, where are they?

So Obama is willing to go to the mat with Republicans to send U.S. jobs elsewhere with a free-trade agreement but he is making only a symbolic effort to pass his weak, pathetic three-and-one-half-years late jobs bill because he needs more votes than George W. Bush ever needed to get his legislation passed?

But what has Obama accomplished with his jobs bill? The panel of pundits on a recent NPR roundtable agreed that he has gotten his poll numbers up on “who cares more about the economy, the president or congressional Republicans” by a full ten points. That is, Obama got what he wanted, an increase in his poll numbers, by creating the appearance of trying to create jobs without creating any jobs. And he did this while destroying jobs in the U.S. with a free trade agreement passed by the same Republicans he claims are holding his jobs bill hostage.

So, support Obama’s jobs bill? Thanks anyway, but Barack Obama and the dysfunctional political system that he represents is the problem. Getting cynical opportunists like him out of public office is the priority, not forever playing the patsy to his misdirections.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist living in New York.

Cease and Desist California’s Message to Obama by JACK RANDOM

OCTOBER 19, 2011

There is an unspoken law in modern electoral politics: Take care of your adversaries; your friends can take care of themselves.

In today’s political universe, progressives have no place to go but Democrat. So it is for minorities, labor advocates, environmentalists and antiwar protesters. There is no choice in electoral politics but to side with the milquetoast moderates of the Democratic Party.

In this environment of winner-take-all and take it for granted politics, the most populous state in the union is also the most neglected and under-represented. That is why a Democratic White House can get away with policies and programs that disregard the interests of California with a callousness that borders on disdain.

Things have gotten so bad in the golden state that even members of the Milquetoast Party are beginning to raise their voices: Thirty two representatives of the California congressional caucus recently went public with their plea for effective relief from the foreclosure crisis, an ongoing catastrophe that blocks any chance of real recovery from the Great Recession.

On the heals of that failure to take effective action, the Obama Justice Department has actively declared war on the one segment of the California economy that shows great promise: Medical Marijuana.

The Obama administration initially signaled that the federal government would not enforce drug laws against marijuana where voters had sanctioned it for medicinal purposes. Then, without cause or reason, Attorney General Eric Holder woke up one day with a new religion. He had seen the enemy and it was not Al Qaeda, it was not Mexican drug lords and the American gun dealers who supply them arms. No, it was California pot growers, suppliers and anyone associated with the expanding industry, including media outlets that accepted advertisements.

It is time for Californians to unite behind the common interest of economic survival. It is time for us all to speak out against the White House and its agents in the Justice Department. It is time to deliver a simple demand:

Cease and desist!

We are already suffering the effects of your failure to bail out the poor, the dispossessed and what remains of a disintegrating middle class. If you cannot help us and it is clear you have no intention of doing so, then at least get out of the way while we attempt to climb out of the ravine.

We have stood on the sidelines while your administration has churned out one Republican policy after another and called it victory. We have stood by in near silence as you extended the Bush tax cuts for the elite, rolled back soft-core Wall Street regulation, peddled a health insurance mandate as comprehensive reform and offered up Social Security to the Republican god of deficit reduction.

That you are speaking out for jobs now when you know it has no chance of passing congress is pure political theater. We know what follows: Another temporary payroll tax reduction financed by creative cuts to so-called entitlement programs. It will not be enough. It will not even be close to enough. You cannot plug the dam after it is broken.

As the Occupy Wall Street spreads and goes global, accomplishing more for the burgeoning victim class in four weeks than you will have been able to do in four years, what is your answer? With enthusiastic Republican support and the applause of chief executive officers everywhere, you push through Free Trade agreements with North Korea, Columbia and Panama.

We can almost see the smirk on your face as you confront your critics on the left: First comes the accusation of ingratitude, then the litany of alleged accomplishments, then the excuses, the endless excuses, a broken government, Republican obstructionism, the Senate filibuster rule, and finally, the ultimate rebuttal: What are you going to do about it?

We can rebut the former until the cow comes home but until we can answer the ultimate challenge emphatically and decisively, we will never get anywhere with the president, with the Democratic Party or with congress.

What are we going to do about it?

The White House can attack the California economy with absolute impunity. Wall Street is on the other coast and that is where the real money is.

What are we going to do about it?

Ask the president as he travels the land, his campaign for re-election already fully engaged: Where do you stand on Occupy Wall Street?

When he gives the standard, patronizing answer full of empathy and passion, ask him: What are you going to do about it? Will you refuse to accept contributions from Wall Street power brokers and the corporate elite? Watch him stammer like Rick Perry on the issue of immigration.

He gave his answer just last week. A president who could not be bothered to keep his promise to labor in actively supporting the fundamental right to organize the workplace by majority vote (the Employee Free Choice Act), a president who could not spare a moment to oppose Wisconsin’s prohibition of collective bargaining for public employees while it was happening, now signals a return to the Free Trade juggernaut.

We are not fools. We know what that means. Whatever the short term gains in certain sectors of the economy, the long-term effect is a continuation of job loss, union busting and lower wages.

What are we going to do about it?

The best immediate answer is Occupy Wall Street. The best long-term answer is to elect public officials who refuse to accept corporate contributions. Remove money from the equation and the stench of corruption will slowly abate.

Until we as a people are willing to reject money politics outright, we will have no power, no influence and no control over what happens next.

Jack Random is the author of Jazzman Chronicles (Crow Dog Press) and Ghost Dance Insurrection (Dry Bones Press.)

From Obama 2008 to Occupy Chicago 2011 Return to Grant Park by MARK T. HARRIS

OCTOBER 19, 2011

It was at Chicago’s Grant Park in the fall of 2008 that presidential candidate Barack Obama celebrated his election night victory with the people. Hope and change was in the air.

Three years later Grant Park is once again the scene of hope and change. But no thanks this time to President Obama or especially former White House chief of staff turned Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel. In fact, it was the latter who oversaw the arrest of 175 Occupy Chicago protesters last weekend for refusing to disperse after the park’s 11 pm curfew.

The new version of hope and change is found instead among the thousands of Occupy Chicago supporters who marched in the evening hours of Saturday, October 15, through the city’s loop to Grant Park. In conjunction with the day of global Wall Street protests, the occupiers made their way from their location on the hard sidewalks near Chicago’s Board of Trade and Federal Reserve Bank to the more inviting, grassy expanse of Grant Park.

But not so inviting, thanks to the repressive intervention of Mayor Emanuel and the Chicago police. Unlike Republican retrogrades like House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) or businessman Herman Cain, who condescendingly dismiss Occupy Wall Street as a mob of losers, Emanuel, as a Democrat with ties to both the Clinton and Obama presidential administrations, is well versed in feigning sympathy for the hardships endured by ordinary Americans.

Of course, as the former managing director of the investment banking firm of Wasserstein Perealla, Emanuel is also well versed in how to turn political connections into a financial windfall. It was in 1999 that Emanuel entered Wasserstein Perealla as a managing partner, despite having no experience in banking management. He left two and a half years later $16 million plus richer.

That’s how politics and banking work today. It’s a great club for the lucky few with the right political, business, and family ties. Indeed, for the one percent and their political hangers-on, the American dream is just a phone call or a business luncheon with the right person away. For the rest of the country, however, the system is a big disappointment, rigged from the get-go and getting worse. Indeed, for 30 years average Americans have watched their incomes stagnate, while the elite grow wealthier than ever.

Enter Occupy Wall Street. The 99 Percenters now mobilized in hundreds of American cities and towns represent a radical challenge to a corrupt and torpid status quo. In the broad, idealistic sweep of their demands for democracy and economic justice the movement embodies a better, more humane vision of the world and its potential.

“We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments,” declares the statement adopted by the New York City general assembly at Occupy Wall Street. In a sense, the occupiers are only the advance guard of a far more widespread American anger, percolating now in the fabric of the culture and earning these front line activists more favorable poll ratings in recent days than the man in the White House.

Their complaints are irrefutable in their legitimacy. Record profits and prosperity at the top translate not into an improved life for all, but into stagnant wages, jobs shipped overseas, students burdened with debt, and foreclosed homes. Massive bailouts go to Wall Street firms, given with few restrictions, yet despite record profits still they hoard their money, refusing to create jobs and showering lavish bonuses on themselves.

Instead of a humane, non-profit health care system, they give us corporate health care whose primary mission is not preventive medicine or care for the ill, but profits for private investors and insurers. Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars are poured into wars that generate only misery and death.

Predictably, some Democratic leaders such as former President Clinton and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) say they view Occupy Wall Street as a positive development. Such support is ethereal at best, the language of co-optation, familiar and second-nature to the Democratic establishment. How well it will play out this time is questionable. President Obama himself appears hesitant before the raw power of the demonstrating masses, offering only placid observations about how he understands the frustrations of Americans. Such sentiment is offered in the same breath as the reminder that it was right to bail out Wall Street.

The mass mobilizations in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this year against the right-wing governor’s plan to strip away public unions’ collective bargaining rights were a harbinger of the storm on the horizon. Unfortunately, the Wisconsin mobilizations (and the potential for strike actions) were aborted by the state Democratic Party and their allied union leaders, sacrificed to an ill-conceived recall campaign of elected officials opposed to collective bargaining.

Occupy Wall Street is different. This is a movement independent of any political party, rooted in grassroots activism, nurtured by mass mobilizations, and showing no signs of abating. The hope and change on display in Grant Park in 2008, stirred up by candidate Obama’s promise of “change we can believe in,” is now being called to account.

Where the Occupy Wall Street movement will be in coming months remains to be seen. But the least interesting question among all the questions raised is whether the Occupy Wall Street movement will help Obama’s re-election. How much more interesting instead to ponder the potential of the spirit of activism and idealism now finding expression across the land. As one young woman demonstrating at Grant Park told the Chicago Tribune (Oct. 16, 2011), “My soul has been touched in ways that I can’t even express. I believe it’s my civic duty. I am expecting to be arrested every time I protest.”

Such is the spirit of the burgeoning movement. The professional pundits who want to compress this oceanic social movement into the narrow straits of ponderous talk media banalities reveal only the limits of their petty social vision.

In the 1940 film, The Great Dictator, the great comedian Charlie Chaplin speaks out at the film’s conclusion against the tyranny then threatening the world. At the Grant Park rally, organizers played a recording of Chaplin’s short speech over loudspeakers. It was a telling moment. As Chaplin’s voice rose in passion and indignation, declaring “don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty,” denouncing the “machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts” who would destroy the world with their greed, hate, and violence, the thousands assembled in Grant Park roared their approval.

A social awakening has begun. Indeed, hope and change is in the air. This time it seems like the real thing.

Mark T. Harris is a former Chicago-area writer who now lives in Portland, Oregon. He is a featured contributor to “The Flexible Writer,” fourth edition, by Susanna Rich (Allyn & Bacon/Longman, 2003). Website: www.Mark-T-Harris.com. Email: Mark@Mark-T-Harris.com.

Letter to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope This is Your (Occupied) Land by REBECCA SOLNIT

OCTOBER 19, 2011

Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi,

I want to write you about an astonishing year — with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civil society.

I wish you could see the way that your small life and large death became a catalyst for the fall of so many dictators in what is known as the Arab Spring.

We are now in some sort of an American Fall. Civil society here has suddenly hit the ground running, and we are all headed toward a future no one imagined when you, a young Tunisian vegetable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you, burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state.

You lit yourself on fire on December 17, 2010, exactly nine months before Occupy Wall Street began. Your death two weeks later would be the beginning of so much. You lit yourself on fire because you were voiceless, powerless, and evidently without hope. And yet you must have had one small hope left: that your death would have an impact; that you, who had so few powers, even the power to make a decent living or protect your modest possessions or be treated fairly and decently by the police, had the power to protest. As it turned out, you had that power beyond your wildest dreams, and you had it because your hope, however diminished, was the dream of the many, the dream of what we now have started calling the 99%.


And so Tunisia erupted and overthrew its government, and Egypt caught fire, as did Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, where the nonviolent protests elsewhere turned into a civil war the rebels have almost won after several bloody months. Who could have imagined a Middle East without Ben Ali of Tunisia, without Mubarak, without Gaddafi? And yet here we are, in the unimaginable world. Again. And almost everywhere.

Japan was literally shaken loose from its plans and arrangements by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, and that country has undergone profound soul-searching about values and priorities. China is turbulent, and no one knows how much longer the discontent of the repressed middle class and the hungry poor there will remain containable. India: who knows? The Saudi government is so frightened it even gave women a few new rights. Syrians wouldn’t go home even when their army began to shoot them down. Crowds of up to a million Italians have been protesting austerity measures in recent months. The Greeks, well, if you’ve been following events, you know about the Greeks. Have I forgotten Israel? Huge demonstrations against the economic status quothere lasted all summer and into this fall.

As you knew at the outset, it’s all about economics. This wild year, Greece boiled over again into crisis with colossal protests, demonstrations, blockades, and outright street warfare. Icelanders continued their fight against bailing out the banks that sank their country’s economy in 2008 and continue pelting politicians with eggs. Their former prime minister may become the first head of state to face legal charges in connection with the global financial collapse. Spanish youth began to rise up on May 15th.

Distinctively, in so many of these uprisings the participants were not advocating for one party or a simple position, but for a better world, for dignity, for respect, for real democracy, for belonging, for hope and possibility — and their economic underpinnings. The Spanish young whose future had been sold out to benefit corporations and their 1% were nicknamed the Indignados, and they lived in the plazas of Spain this summer. Occupied Madrid, like Occupied Tahrir Square, preceded Occupy Wall Street.

In Chile, students outraged by the cost of an education and the profound inequities of their society have been demonstrating since May — with everything from kiss-ins to school occupations to marches of 150,000 or more. Forty thousand students marched against “education reform” in Colombia last week. And in August in Britain the young went on a rampage that tore up London, Birmingham, and dozens of other communities, an event that began when the police shot Mark Duggan, a dark-skinned 29-year-old Londoner. Young Britons had risen up more peaceably over tuition hikes the winter before. There, too, things are bleak and volatile — something I know you would understand. In Mexico, a beautiful movement involving mass demonstrations against the drug war has arisen, triggered by the death of another young man, and by the grief and vision of his father, leftwing poetJavier Cicilia.

The United States had one great eruption in Wisconsin this winter, when the citizenry occupied their state capitol building in Madison for weeks. Egyptians and others elsewhere on the planet called a local pizza parlor and sent pies to the occupiers. We all know the links. We’re all watching. So the Occupy movement has spilled over from Wall Street. Hundreds of occupations are happening all over the North America: in Oklahoma City and Tijuana, inVictoria and Fort Lauderdale.

The 99%

We are the 99% is the cry of the Occupy movement. This summer one of the flyers that helped launch the Occupy Wall Street protest read: “We, the 99%, call for an open general assembly Aug. 9, 7:30 pm at the Potato Famine Memorial NYC.” It was an assembly to discuss the September 17th occupation-to-come.

The Irish Hunger Memorial, so close to Wall Street, commemorates the million Irish peasants who starved in the 1840s, while Ireland remained a food-exporting country and the landed gentry continued to profit. It’s a monument to the exploitation of the many by the few, to the forces that turned some of our ancestors — including my mother’s four Irish grandparents — into immigrants, forces that are still pushing people out of farms, homes, nations, regions.

The Irish famine was one of the great examples of those disasters of the modern era that are not crises of scarcity, but of distribution. The United States is now the wealthiest country the world has ever known, and has an abundance of natural resources, as well as of nurses, doctors, universities, teachers, housing, and food — so ours, too, is a crisis of distribution. Everyone could have everything they need and the rich would still be rich enough, but you know that enough isn’t a concept for them. They’re greedy, and their 30-year grab for yet more has carved away at what’s minimally necessary for the survival and dignity of the rest of us. So the Famine Memorial couldn’t have been a more appropriate place for Occupy Wall Street to begin.

The 99%, those who starve during famines and lose their livelihoods and homes during crashes, were going to respond to the 1% who had been served so well by the Bush administration and by the era of extreme privatization it ushered in. As my friend Andy Kroll reported at TomDispatch, “The top 1% of earners enjoyed 65% of all income growth in America for much of the decade” just passed. “In 2010,” he added, “20.5 million people, or 6.7% of all Americans, scraped by with less than $11,157 for a family of four — that is, less than half of the poverty line.” You can’t get by on less than $1,000 a month in this country where a single visit to an emergency room can cost your annual income, a car twice that, and a year at a private college more than four times that.

Later in August came the website started by a 28-year-old New York City activist,we are the 99 percent, to which hundreds daily now submit photographs of themselves. Each of them also testifies to the bleak conditions they find themselves in, despite their hard work and educations which often left them in debt, despite the promises dangled before them that (if they played the game right) they’d be safe, housed, and living a part of that oversold dream.

It’s a website of unremitting waking nightmares, economic bad dreams that a little wealth redistribution would eliminate (even without eliminating the wealthy). The people contributing aren’t asking for luxuries. They would simply prefer not to be worked to death like so many nineteenth-century millworkers, nor to have their whole world come crashing down if they get sick. They want to survive with dignity, and their testimony will break your heart.

Mohammed Bouazizi, dead at 26, you to whom I’m writing, here is one of the recent posts at that site:

“I am 26 years old. I am $134,000 in debt. I started working at 14 years old, and have worked Full-Time since I turned 20. I work in I.T. and got laid off in July 2011. I was LUCKY, and found a job RIGHT AWAY: with a Pay Cut and MORE HOURS.
 Now, I just found out that my Dad got laid off last week – after 18 YEARS with the same employer. I have debilitating (SP! Sorry!) O.C.D. and can’t take time away from work to get treatment because I can’t afford my mortgage payments if I don’t go to work, and I’m afraid I’ll lose my NEW job if I take time off!!! WE ARE THE 99%.”

Some of the people at we are the 99% offer at least partial views of their faces, but the young IT worker quoted above holds a handwritten letter so long that it obscures his face. Poverty obscures your face too. It obscures your talents, potential, even your distinctive voice, and if it goes deep enough, it eradicates you by degrees of hunger and degradation. Poverty is a creation of the systems against which people all over the planet are revolting this wild year of 2011. The Arab Spring, after all, was an economic revolt. What were all those dictatorships and autocracies for, if not to squeeze as much profit as possible out of subjugated populations — profit for rulers, profit for multinational corporations, profit for that 1%.

“We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers,” was the slogan of the first student protest called in Spain this year. Your beautiful generation, Mohammed Bouazizi, has arisen and is bringing the rest of us along, even here in the United States.

The People’s Microphone

Its earliest critics seemed to think that Occupy Wall Street was a lobbying group whose chosen task on this planet should be to create a package of realistic demands. In other words, they were convinced that the occupiers should become supplicants, asking the powerful for some kind of handout like college debt forgiveness. They were suggesting that a dream as wide as the sky be stuffed into little bottles and put up for sale. Or simply smashed.

In the same way, they wanted this movement to hurry up and appoint leaders, so that there would be someone to single out and investigate, pick off, or corrupt. At heart, however, this is a leaderless movement, an anarchist movement, catalyzed by the grace of civil society and the hard work of the collective. The Occupy movement — like so many movements around the world now — is using general assemblies as its form of protest and process. Its members are not facing the authorities, but each other, coming to know themselves, trying to give rise to the democracy they desire on a small scale rather than merely railing against its absence on a large scale.

These are the famous Occupy general assemblies in which decisions are made by consensus and, in the absence of amplification (by order of the New York City police), the people’s mike is used: those assembled repeat what is said as it’s said, creating a human megaphone effect. This is accompanied by a small vocabulary of hand gestures, which help people participate in the complex process of a huge group having a conversation.

In other words, the process is also the goal: direct democracy. No one can hand that down to you. You live direct democracy in that moment when you find yourself participating in civil society as a citizen with an equal voice. Put another way, the Occupiers are not demanding that something be given to them but formulating something new. That it involves no technology, not even bullhorns, is itself remarkable in this wired era. It’s just passionate people together — and then Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, text messages, emails, and online sites like this one spread the word, along with some print media, notably the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

The beauty and the genius of this movement in this moment is that it has found a way to define its needs and desires without putting limits on them that would automatically exclude so many. In doing so, it has spoken to nearly all of us.

There is the terrible rage at economic injustice that is shared by college students looking at a future of debt and overwork, as well as those who couldn’t afford college in the first place, by working people struggling ever harder for less, by the many who have no jobs and few prospects, by people forced out of their homes by the games banks play with mortgages and profits, and by everyone the catastrophe that is healthcare in this country has affected. And by the rest of us, furious on their behalf (and on our own).

And then there is the joyous hope that things could actually be different. That hope has been fulfilled a little in the way that an open-ended occupation has survived four weeks and more and turned into hundreds of Occupy actions around the country and marches in almost 1,000 cities around the world last Sunday, from Sydney to Tokyo to Santa Rosa. It speaks for so many; it speaks for the 99%; and it speaks clearly, so clearly that an ex-Marine showed up with a hand-lettered sign that said, “2nd time I’ve fought for my country, 1st time I’ve known my enemy.”

The climate change movement showed up at Occupy Wall Street, too. What’s blocking action on climate change is what’s blocking action on all the other issues that matter: it would cut into profits. Never mind the deep future, not when what’s at stake is quarterly earnings.

A dozen years ago, after the wildly successful revolt against neoliberal economic policy in Seattle, the slogan that stuck around was: “Another World Is Possible.” I was never sure about that one because in crucial places and ways that other world is already here. In a YouTube video of the New York occupation, however, I watched an old woman in a straw hat say, “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” What a beautiful summation! Could any demand be clearer than that? And could the ways in which people have no value under our current economic regime be more obvious?

What Is Your Occupation?

Occupy Wall Street. Occupy together. Occupy New Orleans, Portland, Stockton, Boston, Las Cruces, Minneapolis. Occupy. The very word is a manifesto, a position statement, and a position as well. For so many people, particularly men, their occupation is their identity, and when a job is lost, they become not just unemployed, but no one. The Occupy movement offers them a new occupation, work that won’t pay the bills, but a job worth doing. “Lost my job, found an occupation,” said one sign in the crowd of witty signs.

There is, of course, a bleaker meaning for the word occupation, as in “the U.S. is occupying Iraq.” Even National Public Radio gives the Dow Jones report several times a day, as though the rise and fall of the stock market had not long ago been decoupled from the rise and fall of genuine measures of wellbeing for the 99%. A small part of Wall Street, which has long occupied us as if it were a foreign power, is now occupied as though it were a foreign country.

Wall Street is a foreign country — and maybe an enemy country as well. And now it’s occupied. The way that Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay for 18 months four decades ago and galvanized a national Native American rights movement. You pick some place to stand, and when you stand there, you find your other occupation, as a member of civil society.

This May in Ohio, a group of Robin Hoods literally lowered a drawbridge they made so they could cross a “moat” around Chase Bank’s headquarters and invade its shareholders’ meeting. Forty Robin Hoods also showed up en masse last week in kayaks for a national mortgage bankers’ meeting in Chicago. Houses facing foreclosure are being occupied. Foreclosure is, of course, a way of turning people into non-occupants.

At this moment in history, occupation should be everyone’s occupation.

Baby Pictures of a Revolt

Young man whose despair gave birth to hope, no one knows what the future holds. When you set yourself afire almost ten months ago, you certainly didn’t know, nor do any of us know now, what the long-term outcome of the Arab Spring will be, let alone this American Fall. Such a movement arrives in the world like a newborn. Who knows its fate, or even whether it will survive to grow up?

It may be suppressed like the Prague Spring of 1968. It may go through a crazy adolescence like the French Revolution of 1789 and yet grow beyond its parents’ dreams. Radiant at birth, wreathed in smiles, it may become a stolid bourgeois citizen as did such movements in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the reunited Germany after civil society freed those countries from totalitarianism.

It may grow up into turbulence as has the Philippines since its 1986 revolution ousted the kleptocracy of the Marcos family. Revolution may be assassinated young, the way the democratic government of Mohammed Mossadegh was in Iran in 1953, that of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and President Salvador Allende’s Chilean experiment on September 11, 1973, all three in CIA-backed military coups. On behalf of the 1%.

Whether a human child or a child of history, we can’t know who or what it will become, but it’s still possible to grasp something about it by asking who or what it resembles. What does Occupy Wall Street look like? Well, its siblings born around the world this year, of course, and perhaps in some way the American civil rights movement that began in the 1950s.

There was a national uprising in the United States no less spontaneous in its formation during the great depression of the 1870s, but the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was violent, while the Occupy movement is deeply imbued with the spirit and tactics of nonviolence. The last Great Depression, the one that began in 1929, created a host of radical movements, as well as the Hoovervillesof homeless people. There are family resemblances. The marches and actions against the coming invasion of Iraq on February 15, 2003, on all seven continents (yes, including Antarctica) are clearly kin. And the anti-corporate globalization movement is a godmother. And then there’s a sibling just a decade older.

Cousin 9/11

Zuccotti Park is just two blocks from Wall Street, and also just a block from Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 attack. On that day, it was badly damaged. This September 21st, my dear friend Marina Sitrin wrote me from Occupy Wall Street: “There are people from more diverse backgrounds racially, more diverse age groups, including not just a few children here with their parents, and a number of working people from the area. In particular, some of the security guards from the 9.11 memorial, a block away have been coming by for lunch and chatting with people, as has a local group of construction workers.”

If the Arab Spring was the decade-later antithesis of 9/11, a largely nonviolent, publicly inclusive revolt that forced the Western world to get over its fearful fantasy that all young Muslims are terrorists, jihadis, and suicide bombers, then Occupy Wall Street, which began six days after the 10th anniversary of that nightmarish day in September, is the other half of 9/11 in New York. What was remarkable about that day 10 years ago is how calmly and beautifully everyone behaved. New Yorkers helped each other down those dozens of floors of stairs in the Twin Towers and away from the catastrophe, while others lined up to give blood, desperate to do something, anything, to participate, to be part of a newfound sense of community that arose in the city that day.

There was, for example, a huge commissary organized on Chelsea Piers that provided free food, medical supplies, and work equipment for the people at Ground Zero and also helped find housing for the displaced. It was not an official effort, but one that arose even more spontaneously than Occupy Wall Street, without leaders or institutions — and it was forcibly disbanded when the official organizations got their act together a few days later. Those who participated experienced a sense of democracy amid all the distress and sorrow, a tremendous joy in finding meaningful work and deep social connections, and a little temporary joy, as they often do in disaster.

When I began to study the history of urban disaster years ago, I found such unexpected exhibitions of that kind of joy again and again, uniting the generative moments of protests, demonstrations, revolts, and revolutions with the aftermath of some disasters. Even when the losses were terrible, the ways that people came together to meet the occasion were almost always inspiring.

Since I wrote A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, I have been asked again and again whether economic crisis begets the same kind of community as sudden disasters. It did in Argentina in 2001, when the economy crashed there. And it has now, in the streets of New York and many other cities, in 2011. A sign at Occupy San Francisco said, “IT’S TIME.” It is. It’s been time for a long time.

No Hope But in Ourselves

The birth of this moment was delayed three years. Argentinians reacted immediately to the 2001 crisis and to long-simmering grievances with an economy that had ground so many of them down even before the government froze all bank accounts and the economy crashed. On the other hand, our economy collapsed three years ago this month to headlines like “Capitalism is dead” in the business press. There was certainly some fury and outrage at the time, but the real reaction was delayed, or decoyed.

The outrage of the moment did, in fact, result in a powerful grassroots movement that focused on a single political candidate to fix it all for us, as he promised he would. It was a beautiful movement, a hopeful movement, much more so than its candidate. The movement got its lone candidate into the highest office in the land, where he remains today, and then walked away as though the job was done. It had just begun.

That movement could have fought the corporations, given us a real climate-change policy, and more, but it allowed itself to be disbanded as though one elected politician were the equivalent of ten million citizens, of civil society itself. It was a broad-based movement, of all ages and races, and I think it’s back, disillusioned with politicians and electoral politics, determined this time to do it for itself, beyond and outside the corroded arenas of institutional power.

I don’t know exactly who this baby looks like, but I know that who you look like is not who you will become. This unanticipated baby has a month behind it and a future ahead of it that none of us can see, but its birth should give you hope.

Love,

Rebecca

Rebecca Solnit is the author of 13 books, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and this year’sInfinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. She is, from kindergarten to graduate school, a product of the California public education system now being decimated.

This article was originally published by Tom Dispatch.

40$ of American Adults Are Said To Be Functionally Illiterate

One of my face book friends posted this picture.

While it is easy (especially for us Northerners, and uber-especially for Ivy-league-graduated-Northerners) to mock the South (despite that they actually won the War of Northern Aggression - just look at American cultural bench marks - Presidents - all from the South, since Carter, or with ties to the South one way or another - Cart (GA), George H W Bush (TX), Clinton (AK) Bush (TX) Obama (oops, I messed that 'un up) {I rate GWH Bush president during the terms served by Ronnie RayGun - who was assuredly in the throes of Alzheimers for the last 5+ years he was elected to office - such a condition is NOT grounds for the American peoples to elect a Prez by popular request. We likes us our goofier than a bat preznits who tell us stories we can love about ourselves, and also points out how Black Welfare Queens are ridin' around in huge Caddies, poppin babies every nine months, and making over 100K a year from Social Suck-your-a-tea. Yeppers, yeppers, yeppers, the RayGun Demopublicans - we luvs us our 6-peckers of beers, our Nascar, our hot doggies, and our appel pie and country FLAG! And we luvs to laugh at dose po' dumb white crackers from dee South.

It is not so easy to spot the mote in one's eye, and thus, on my facebook page, telling a bit of why I shared the image, I included these remarks:

In Glenwood, Arkansas, where my grand parents retired in the early 70's, the high school valedictorian, the neighbor girl, scored 15 on her ACTs in math and 17 in English, while Governor Rockefeller brought culture to the state. Trust me on this - the people of Arkansas (and Mississippi) are NOT stupid, but they are a tad ignorant of stuff that keeps them down. Their educational systems have failed them in a spectacular manner, while OURS fail us in very subtle manners, leaving us in total ignorance of history, especially CURRENT ONGOING history, and leaving our elites with the legacy of intellectual inbreeding that is so insidious that Milton Friedman his own self was unable to conceive of MORAL CONTAGION in "the market." Talk about your ivory-towered fool / tool. AND, the Chicago School of Disaster Capitalism (read Naomi Klien's book) has created more misery, poverty, and ignorance than any other idea that has found an audience in the world.

On writing

I sent a high school friend, who had a major crush on my beloved brother, John Franklin Ganzer, copies of two of his CDs - his original Demo (converted to CD from 8-track by our ginormously talented bother-in-law Michael Offutt (U.S. Presidential Award Winning A.P. Chemistry Teacher, singer, songwriter, troubador, praise band team leader, story teller, science demonstrator - how much fun is it to brag on your relatives!!) which he cut at Streeterville Studios in Chicago circa December, 1974 - January 1975. I had the incredibly great fortune to watch him put the demo together at the sound studio. The inimical Matthew Ward, who played Piano with the Milwaukee symphony Orchestra as an 8th grader, was on key boards, and, while I'm not 100% sure, I think the legendary Ty Von Genoeff was the drummer (legendary for taking over the drums at a Stones concert in California when their drummer ODed; Ty was 16 at the time, and missed not one beat!)

And then John's Songs of Praise and Thanksgiving, which he recorded so that all of his family and friends might have a memory of him singing Thanksgiving and Christmas tunes.

There's also a tremendous CD of John performing his night club act, live, at the Restuarant Panache, in New York City, accompanied by two incredibly gifted pianists, a drummer, and two back up singers whom John got to know while performing in Godspell in Washington DC, at Ford's theatre.

Yes. I must confess, I come from an extremely talented family!

ANYWAY - Janet had such a crush on John that she switched from German to French to be in the same class with him, but then John went and complicated things by switching to Russian, where he had the great benefit of having Randy Nolde teach him Russian, and Russian Dance, and Russian Culture. Too bad Janet didn't follow him there. Too bad she never told him about the crush she had on him; he would have asked her out to Senior Prom in a heart beat, had but he known (the three lovely young ladies that he DID ask all had legitimate excuses for turning him down, but how is a homosexual 18-year old boy ever gonna confirm his sexual preference unless he has a chance to press flesh with nubile 16+ teen-aged nymphs? AND NO, Colleen did NOT deflower John (although they were in naked bed together).

Here's a cut-and-paste copy of the correspondence from Janet to me. Hope you find it illuminating.

Hi,

I just got the recordings and look forward to listening to them. I remember that adorable face.

So are you an author? I wish I loved writing as much as you do as there are a few academics who want me to do lots of research. I'd rather dance circle dances.

Be well,
Janet

Subject: YES, I ARE AN AUTEUR

Academic research - SHUDDER!

My favorite story in re: academic research is about D. J. Bennett (too soon deceased), wife of Dr Kenneth Bennett, PhD, emeritus Chair, Department of English Language, Lake Forest College.

While working on her Master's Thesis, D.J. created some original Blake scholarship. The experience was more than enough to convince her to not become a research PhD. And thus she sojourned to Soho, in the late 60's, early 70's, where she perfected her hand crafting - sewing, needlework, etc, etc, and eventually wrote an published two volumes on hand crafting! Both volumes can be found in the Lake Forest Public Library.

I've worked as a free lance writer doing answer keys for junior high school mathematics text books, writing questions for Jr Hi math texts, and script writing for Junior College Algebra and Trig courses. It was a fun gig, while it lasted, until I got a new editor who let one of my first drafts go virtually unremarked. HER boss told her "that's no way to be (an editor)," and thus she found manifold and a magnitude of methods to brow beat me to a pulp, all the while the new company (I think it was one of Rupert Murdoch's purchases) decided that rather than write SCRIPTS, I would write OUTLINES and rather than paying actors to read from scripts, they would pay Professors to teach from the outlines (although the "screens" - visual aids, those I still produced), that for all this "reduced" writing load (dontcha know?), they would cut my rate from $400 / chapter to $250 (or maybe it was $225 - what's too painful to remember, I simply choose to forget).

W E L L - a technical writer is NOT writing to illuminate, elucidate, or even educate, but to please his / her editor, and I had worked dozens of chapters (making thousands of dollars) with my previous editor and we REALLY had developed a good understanding, so that I could usually finish the first draft of the script, the screens, and the second draft in 6-10 hours. Alas and alack, with the new editor, it was more like 12-20. Sigh! It meant I had to forego about four regional duplicate bridge tournaments and thus finished in the top 775, rather than the top 500 master point winners for the year.

You're a writer? THEN WRITE! And write only to please yourself.

There are actually many opportunities to even get paid for what you write, but then, you've got to write about something somebody is willing to pay you for.

With the advent of the internet and blogging, however, a writer ALWAYS has a forum, and SOMEBODY will always find the writer.

These are my top three "writing" blogs:

MarkGanzersBlog.Blogspot.com - international affairs

This might be one of the most remarkable blogs ever published. I intended to kill it, after about 4,000 posts when my professional career, my politics, and my creative writing merged upon my decision to be a traveling minsteral / fund-raiser. I hadn't posted for about three months when I went back to view it and discovered I was STILL getting 200 hits a day! (At its zenith, it got 2,200 hits in one day). One of the big secrets is to write about stuff people are interested in - which pretty much devolves to sex and money. For many months my post on Marlon Brandon's co-star from Last Tango in Paris "I felt raped by Marlon Brando" was the most popular piece I had posted - and all I did was cut and paste an article from some French newspaper. Subsequently an aritcle I cut and pasted from PriceLine took over the #1 slot.

While I do a LOT of cutting and pasting here, I am more frequently offering my own commentary, ESPECIALLY when I think the article and its author are full of shit (and this happens frequently, as any who read the MSM can readily understand).

In point of fact, ONE of my pieces was published on the Black Activists Writers Agenda blog.

One of the most rewarding things about blogging is, especially when you have cut and pasted, to send the author or the article your thanks, and compliment them on what they have done. Invariably, when you have had something positive to say, you will get a fairly prompt reply. This has led, in my situation, to four invaluable pen pals, sadly, two of whom have died, and way too young.

DONT be shy Janet. Just DUET!

MarkGanzersInsanityBlog.Blogspot.com - US media criticism, social commentary, political commentary

MarkGanzersWritings.Blogspot.com - my own personal "stash" which I had started out to be a repository for my creative writing to help me orgainze the four volumes I was working on, simultaneously, of course, rather than serially. It ended up morphing into something altogether different, as I continue to uncover my writing (poetry, social commentary) over the last 45 years.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you. My inbox is crammed so full up, I must sometimes return to the end of the Queue to catch up.

Be well, and give full attention to all your endeavors.

With Love to You (agape), and ALL YOU LOVE,

Mark Raymond Ganzer

The Persian Paranoia Ploy 18 Oct. 2011 by Jeff Huber

I thought about calling this essay “The Boys Who Cried Iran,’” but that title had a cross-purpose parallel problem. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” parallel is that the townspeople eventually ignore the boy’s false alarms. It seems, on the other hand, that we the people will never tire of hearing the “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” mantra.

The Iranians vant to
drink your blood!
This time around, the Pentarchy’s bull feather merchants have manage to cull a confluence of Persian Peril Paranoia with our by now Pavlovian terror of terrorism. An Iranian-American used-car salesman is accused of being the key figure in an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. and to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Scary, huh kids?

The used-car salesman in question is 56 year-old Mansour J. Arbabsiar (aka “Scarface), whose apprehension by the FBI was in keeping with the legendary Homeland Security sting operations that netted the Dirty Bomber who turned out to be too retarded to make a dirty bomb, and the Panty Bomber whose panty bomb didn’t even put third-degree burns on his party favor, and the Times Square Screw Up who locked himself out of his bomb car and his getaway car andhis apartment.

Scarface, if that really is his international underground terrorist cabal code name, is a 30 year resident of Texas, a state renowned for another Justice Department fiasco of fame that unfolded in the town of Waco, a travesty during which Janet Reno’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) hooligans immolated 76 lonesome losers whose heinous crime was allowing themselves to be brainwashed by cult leader David Koresh. Scarface Arbabsiar inhabited Texas for three decades during which he racked up a string of failed businesses, a covey of angry creditors, and a furious former spouse who sought a protective order against him. His friends describe him as “perennially disheveled” and “hopelessly disorganized.” His socks never matched and he constantly lost his keys and cell phone. A rival used-car salesman described Arbabisiar as “worthless.”

Mansour J. Arbabsiar was a mark so perfect for a pre-election propaganda con game that the fool infested FBI couldn’t have overlooked him if they were wearing two blindfolds instead of the single one that was their standard issue in the years that led up to the 9/11 attacks.

Attorney General Holder and senior Justice Dept. Staff
At the uber-helm of this cockamamie caper was Attorney General Eric Holder, who is to Barack Obama’s Justice Department what Ford Sterling was to Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops: the chief buffoon. It was no doubt coincidence, it just had to have been, that the Scarface assassination scare story hit the mainstream fire hose the day after Holder was subpoenaed to do some ‘splainin’ to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, a gun-walking campaign that should have been dubbed “Faster and Funnier.” In the course of groping though an investigation trying to trace firearms from American gun dealers to Mexican drug gangs, Holder’s ATF-ups managed to lose track of 1,400 to 2,000 guns that migrated into the mitts of the Mexican drug gangsters they were trying to keep guns from migrating into the mitts of.

I’d characterize Faster and Funnier as a Petraeus-class fumble, but that would be incredibly unfair to Holder and the ATF. When then three-star general David Petraeus let U.S supplied guns tiptoe into the hands of Shiite militiamen, he didn’t just hand over a couple thousand of the things. Petraeus gave away 190,000 of the things, more than enough to arm 10 United States Army infantry divisions. Funny how the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee never subpoenaed King David to explain how that happened. It must have been an oversight on their part (heh).

It's the old "They can't
be that stupid so they
must be that stupid" ploy.
According to the Runyonesque scenario Holder and Company spin, the case just happened to fall together when some Defense Enforcement Agency Dunderhead had a chance meeting with Johnny Scars and a pair of Iran’s elite Quds Force baddies who just happened to be operating on American soil in plain sight of every federal, state and local law enforcement official and intelligence agent in the great state of Texas. Our best intelligence (double heh) alleges that officials at the highest levels of Iran’s government pulled stunts that prompted Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and author of several books on Iran, said there was “sloppiness about the case that defies belief.” “Sloppy” is a kind euphemism. According to Holder’s Heroes, top Iranian leaders left a paper and electronic trail leading back to themselves that Inspector Clousseau could have followed.

But incredulity is by no means grounds among the Obama inner-war party for stiff-arming a chance to pacify the Pentarchy with the citizenry marching on Wall Street and an election on the horizon. State Secretary Cruella Clinton said of the case “The idea that they [the Iranians, I guess she means] would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?” Wake up and smell the napalm, Hillary. Remember the whoppers Big Dick Cheney and his Delaware Destroyers fabricated about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his ties al Qaeda and his connections to 9/11 that got us into the Iraq quagmire that you voted for? Conjuring incredible tales so the American public will let you bomb or invade other countries is neocon de rigueur. If you ain’t lyin’ they ain’t buyin’, that’s the warmongery’s motto when it comes to constructing a casus belli from hydrogen molecules.

Holder's argument that top Iranian government officials were involved in a plot to hire Mexican Drug runners to assassinate a Saudi diplomat and bomb an Israeli embassy has more holes in it than Scientology dogma. But that’s okay because young Mr. Obama said in a 13 October press conference that, “the facts are there for all to see,” though he failed to mention what any of those facts are or where any of us might go to see them.

When Holder's Iranian/Mexican assassination/bomb plot accusations began generating guffaws globally, Obama’s spin physicians switched to another cherished wolf cry. Favored Pentarchy echo chamberlain David E. Sanger of the New York Times relays to us that “President Obama is pressing United Nations nuclear inspectors to release classified intelligence information showing that Iran is designing and experimenting with nuclear weapons technology.” If you crawl between the gutters in this puff piece you pick up that the “classified intelligence information” they’re talking about is the so-called “smoking laptop” documents that were proven to be forgeries five freaking years ago.

But young Mr. Obama’s story is that Iran wants to kill Saudis and Israelis and they’ll do it with hired banditos or nukes or trick-or-treaters or whatever it takes, and he’s sticking to it, and he’ll get away with this used mare's oats mendacity because beating war drums appeases the neocons and today's liberals are too vaginal to stand up to him.

Where do we find such candidates?
Why do we elect such men to the highest office in our land? Oh, that’s right. The choice was him and Bazooka Joe or Grampaw Pettibone and Patriotic Barbie. The difference between the two tickets doesn’t seem so clear in the rearview mirror, does it? This Obama person who promised to put the brakes on the neocon agenda is starting to make Barry Goldwater look like a peace pansy.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

On the taking of one's meds for one of the so-called "mental illnesses" (bi-polar)

Sent: Thursday, September 8, 2011 5:48 PM
Subject: Re: [The Power Of Prayer] I had a most worthwhile discussion yesterday with...

Dear Mark, 

I know it's been many years,

My memory suck but I actually remember you when we were young. Don't worry about
the Bi- Polar thing-- I know too many friends with the same affliction- Afuckchion including
my brother, nephew, father--- What ever--- Just please take the medication &be good!!!!! I
pray you follow this simple rule> Sure hope to see you at the reunion!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

No Really
Blairmo!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, as any of you who have followed my writing on this topic would know, I cannot let an opportunity to respond to such a suggestion left unremarked, and thus, I replied via e-mail:

But, what if, as is my contention, bi-polar is NOT a disease in the sense of those things about which Galen wrote, but rather an artificial construct (much like phrenology) which was conceived by a bunch of people who were smart with words, so smart, in fact, that they could fool themselves by inventing BIGGUNS (big words) and convincing themselves they had in fact made a discovery, when in fact, it was all Tower of Babel, making about as much sense as "Manifest Destiny" and causing perhaps even more destruction to life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness.

I submit that bi-polar is a construct, and that the DSM's (all four of them, or five if the fifth one has now been published) are mostly a crock of excrement, which serve the interests of 

(1)  Pharmaceutical companies (that have so little regards for the phsychiatrist - ahem - er - "Pain Management Specialist" that they freely advertise their wares on TV in order that the TV viewer might tell his shrink what meds to prescribe).
(2)  Psychiatric "medicine" practitioners
(3)  Psychiatric Hospitals (and the attendant ancillary functions - ambulances, social workers, etc, etc)
(4)  Lawyers (not guilty by reason of insanity - bull shit - guilty and probably feeling very much afraid of the potential legal consequences, because if you can afford an attorney who will wield THIS defense, you have committed one very heinous crime and will need to pay very big bucks to walk away without doing real prison time).

"All very strongly worded, Mark," your are likely thinking to yourself, "but also so very self-serving!"

Perhaps, but consider this.  In a REAL disease (and depression, Alzheimers, Schizoprenia, dementia, acute drug and alcohol poisoning ARE in fact real diseases - they have an etiology - a predictable path that the disease will run and follow) there is an ETIOLOGY - a predictability of outcomes in the event that no treatment is given.
In the made up "mental illnesses" (historically, the following have been included in the various and sundry Diagnostic and Statistical Manual(s) of Psychiatric and Personality Disorders:

1. Excessive masturbation (by whose standards? and if there is an excessive amount, then surely there must be an optimal amount - please let me know what the optimal amount of time spent whacking is, tyvm).
2. Homosexuality (which has been obersved in over 1,500 different animal types)
3. Chain smoking (how much does it take to become a chainer?)

there will be, under each diagnosed "mental illness" a laundry list of about 9-12 BEHAVIORS, of which, if the client (victim of slanderous and libelous labeling) of the psychiatric label is said to exhibit three (or more), then THIS is the disease the "victim" has, and, based on psuedo-scientific research, here are the meds (poisons) that are typically prescribed TO MASK THE SYMPTOMS; not to cure the disease, but to mask the symptoms.
Consider this:  With what other disease does the patient no longer needing to take medication to mask the symptoms (because the disease has been cured) receive the learned medical advice that YOU MUST CONTINUE TO TAKE YOUR MEDS -
Do you see the irony:  When you have a so-called "mental illness" you have it forever! You can never be cured of it.  WHY then, if you can never be cured of it, does anybody ever bother to see a doctor in the first place?

And WHO pray tell, is competent to judge whether or not I:

(a) drink too much (the capacity for holding one's liquor varies extremely from one individual to the next)
(b) mistakenly believe I talk with God and am protected by Him (church people take such a claim as their own, and for granted)
(c) sleep too little (according to whose standards?  Audobon slept two hours a night his entire adult life, and that was all)
(d) talk exessively and "inappropriately"
(e) dress "inappropriately" (compared to who, what, where, how, when)
(f) flits from one topic to another haphazardly (what if in my world the transition is seamless, because, as Chief Seattle once said, "All things are connected?")
(g) engages in reckless behavior (well, not everybody wears seat belts
(h) engages in "unusual sexual practices" (unusual by whose standards?)

So, rather than an etiology, what we have is a list of behaviors that are of varying degrees of concern to SOME PEOPLE.  But, once you've been labeled, they can now "BLAME" your "illness" and never have to look closely in the mirror to see if perhaps SOME of what is driving you "nuts" is their lack of respect for you, or their failure to appreciate that you have outgrown them.
Sure, first thing that happens when you go off your anti-depressants is that you start to "go nuts." But what an anti-depressant does is to DEPRESS the depressed feelings, and leave you with a certain uncomfortable numbness and an immensely limited range of emotional responses.  Of this, I know of what I speak.  After three years of being on anti-depressants, I gained 95 pounds, showered twice a week, changed into clothes twice a week, spent 12 hours a day in bed and another 10 hours at the computer, or vice-versa, stopped attending church, stopped going to the used vinyl record store, stopped going to the library, stopped riding the suburban commuter trains on the real cheap weekend pass, AND Ma and Pa were convinced that I was getting better; that the meds were working.
Whatever.
If any of this sounds at all familiar (oh, yes, the drugged "mentally ill" person ALWAYS wants to stop taking the meds - because the absence of feeling is a WORSE state, by far, than the presence of unremitting psychic pain - and when you go from the absence of feeling to once again being able to embrace all facets of LIVE and LIVING and LOVING, you become over-joyed, over-whelmed, in very short order, which will INVARIABLY signal to your loved ones who really do care, but SO much prefer that you be depressed, or live with the absence of feelings, that, "There (s)he goes again.  Another manic episode."
Here's how to get well.  YES, with severe depression, one needs to take anti-depressants to get to a place where one can at least function in the absence of feelins (most especially the absence of pain), but graudally, one should be weaned OFF the anti-depressant and GET COMPETENT TALK THERAPY - RAP SESSIONS with those who suffer from the same ill-begotten labeling, to share the experiences (here we enter the realm of the 12-step programs - which work well for a number of their practitioners, but not for everybody - the problem with 12-steppers is that they posit a "disease" where a set of behaviors exists; behaviors can be modified w/o the use of drugs, yes, when they have become habitual, it becomes considerably more difficult to change them, but, if one accepts the premise that "I am an alcoholic (and will always be an alcoholic)" one has acquiesced to surrendering one's autonomy and accepting a label in its place; a label which says, "You have one of those diseases from which you can never recover - in other words, FOR WHICH THERE IS NO CURE" and thus, why the fuck even bother with AA, NA, GA, etc, etc, etc.
And Blair, while I greatly appreciate your concern for me, I hope you will give what I have said here some very serious consideration.
Ultimately, the only way to be "cured" of the label is to move away from those who get upset about your behavior.  In other words, you must become BORN AGAIN - into the same self you had evolved into - but, in a new place where you are accepted for who you are, and what you bring to the table, rather than what they misremember you to have been, and hope that you might once again become.

With Love to you, and ALL YOU LOVE, 
Mark Raymond Ganzer

Tossing a home party / golf outing event

Yes, of course, BLAME BARB! Get those excuses in order. Hell, I don't care, we had a grand time. FIRST of all, while my dad and I were awaiting the maddening throngs at the Barrington Park District Golf Course, he said, "there won't be any body out here for golf. It's just too cold."

"I'll bet you a dime at least one player shows."

And show, she did, Nancy, with a laugh in her face!

So, we trotted over to the first tee (225 par 4, dogleg left - unless you hit your drive about 75 yards, in which case, it becomes a 150 yard par 4!) and I pull out my 7-iron, planning on hitting a high hard draw. W E L L ... instead, I get the damn low straight ball, right into the trap. Nancy (we had each taken three clubs - 22 degree metal, putter, 5-iron for Nancy, 7-iron for me) pulls out the 22 degree club and R I P S it, about 145 (we are into the wind) into the fairway bunker, about 4 feet behind me, also in the bunker).

So, she kind of muffs one out, and I show her my duck-billed platypus stance (feet spread out) for nipping a fuller shot cleanly off a fairway bunker. I lift my head and hit it all chuncky, we are still looking for the gawd damned piece of sheeit golf ball, but, I decided to toss one down, and play it.

Nancy muffs her third, I leave mine just short of the green. Nancy hits her fourth on, about 6 feet away. One thing is quite evident, she has IMPROVED from "back in the day," and is clearly better than Susan B. Gillies ever was when I played with her, ALTHOUGH, that was a long time ago, and if Susan ever retired to the land of luxury and took lessons from instructors as good as the one Nancy has, Susan is probably a single digit handicap player by now.

I chip it tight, take the putt. Nancy hits it a litte too far to the left, EXCEPT, that there is water (cold water, very cold water) in the cup, that she notes as she picks up her ball and we proceed to the next tee, #2, 157 yard par three, straight away, sand traps guarding the green both front left and front right.

I chilly dip a 7-iron leaving it about 50 yards short of the green. Now I must immediately beat nancy to the punch line: "Does your wife play golf too?" I inquire, of myself. "Yes, and she beats me like a baby seal," I reply, with disgust. Nancy hits a VERY high shot (the rubber tees under the mats are very high on most holes out there) but she hits it absolutely squarely.

"Move it wind, move it right," I exhort. YES, dammit, I talk to golf balls in flight. You think this is ridiculous, that nothing I can say will impact the ball after it is struck, its flight is begun, and gravity eventually reigns it in? Well, your thoughts sure align with much of modern scientific theory, but let me ask you this: If it doesn't matter whether or not I DEMAND great things of my balls (or any body else's balls) then so be it; BUT - what if it DOES make a difference, if CHAOS THEORY is correct and that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of a globe is the catalyst for a tsunami that emanates from the other side? In which case, do you now want to sit silent, sit passive, and wait while your loving golf ball is thinking to itself, "What's the matter, mon? Ye cannae e'en cheer me awn? You dun believe in me mon? Where is the laddie of yer yewt dat once played 54 holes wid me, and THEN ya cheert and and ya roart and ya extorted me on as if ya wuz a true believer. What happened to yer faith, laddie? Ah, would but that ya cud play wid your balls like ya wuz a chilt one and again."

And thus and so, I continue to play with my balls like I was a child again. And it is GOOD! And I call out to the heavens, exhorting them on, to do the aerodynamically impossible; to do the topographically unlikely; to do my fawking beck and call, dammit, mon, dontch know?

And, sumbit mutha humpah, there be daze when I swear by the daze still left, we'll not only walk in fields of gold, but the damn ball be LISTENIN' to me, and it HEEDS MY CALL because it knows that I believes in it, and thus, it believes in me.

All things are connected - (Chief Seattle)

There are more things on this earth than are dream't of in your philosophy, Horatio (William Shakespeare)

I get all fast and wristy in my chipper shotter and leave the piece of crap short. Shit. Then chip to 6", take the gimme. "Hole's full of water, Nancy," I tells her, jest to let her know. "Okay, I'll lag," she replies, and does, saving her fingers from the chillin' of the cold water in the cup.

Next hole, Nancy's honors. She hits a dishonorable shot, but, LIKE YOU CHUCK, she has her excuses all lined up. The tee is just too high for this club, which is actually a tight lies metal club. OOPS - my apologies Nancy - you wuzunt making excuses, you were stating a simple truth: Damn tight lies clubs are meant to get your ass out of tight lies, not to hit a ball that is 2" off the friggin mat!

"Take a mully," I tells her. She does, and hits a very solid shot, but, again, we are into the teeth of a Northwesterly gale force wind; has to be 35 mphs.

Now, I am gonna' show her how GOOD I am. Weight pressed forward, hands pressed forward, aimed plenty far to the right (235 yard par 3, slight dog leg left, OB left (the train tracks), 100' tall trees to carry over if you take a direct line from the tee to the pin, a little pond about 110 yards out just to annoy you if you hit a snap hook, with a fence line paralleling the rail road tracks. This is one of the two fence lines we need to take seriously, The other to-be-taken-seriously fence line protects the parking lot and nursery behind the fifth green from being invaded by a herd of raging golfers with bad backs that can't climb through or under its wooden rails, and can't high step over it. HOWEVER, the wooden rail fence behind #1 green is NOT OB, because it is still park district property, although, on a Saturday afternoon, there will be either lots of soccer players (as was the case), or baseball players (as would have been the case April-August).

I RIP the 22 degree club, with a draw, low trajectory, brilliant friggin' shot. The wind beats it down, like a field master on a southern plantation in the 1800's relentlessly giving 100 lashes to some uppity slave thought to be a rabble rouser. It is important to beat the hell out of the suspected rabble rousers, otherwise, their mind set will affect the throngs, and when you are out-numbered by a factor of 100's to one, it would not do for the slaves to come to realize that their numerical advantage alone was sufficient to overthrow their oppressor's yoke, and gain, ultimately, freedom for their race, freedom for their tribe, but a the very-much-alive threat of an early termination of this mortal coil.

When people are willing to lay down their lives for a cause greater than their own solipsistic selves, then they are truly empowered, even more so than when engaged in acts of procreation, or intercessory prayer, and because one is only willing to lay down one's life for a cause greater than one's own ONLY when that cause is righteous, in the end, RIGHTEOUS WINS, as would discover the peoples of French Indo-China (better known as Vietnam), the peoples of Afghanistasn (time and time and time and time and time again - the first three v. the Brits, the fourth v. the Ruskies, and now, finally, against us, the USA, the greatest force for military murder and military destruction ever unleashed upon the face of the earth. FINALLY, and thank fawking Gawd, lest the tear-or-eests win and the American way of life, Capitalism (okay, I'll concede, corporate welfare state), Democracy (okay, again, I'll concede, a Republic - if you can keep it), Christianity (okay, again, I'll concede, the founding fathers were deists, who believed in a Creator of the Universe, but further believed that He had withdrawn from active participation in the affairs of this world; the arrogant fools - they mostly believed in the righteous of the institution of slavery too, which should tell you about all you need to know about most of them; it was a convenience, and fortunes could be made upon the backs of slave labor - the arrogant fools never recognized the miracle God Almighty bestows upon human kind day after day after ceaseless day - the miracle of TIMING - the irregulars survived Valley Forge (Washington despised the irregulars - undisciplined, many had to be flogged, for their own good, of course, and they wouldn't even fight in nice taught lines, as was done in the theaters of the bloody (to the troops) wars in Europe, but fought from behind trees, shot, fell back; they would not stand to fight a vastly superior force, well trained in close quarters combat, they would not stand to fight a far-better armed force; no, they shot, retreated, reloaded, shot again, until their cover or their shells ran out, and then ran lie Calloway to safety. Hardly military men, these. BUT THEY WERE THE ONLY TROOPS HE HAD, AND HE WAS FORCED TO FIGHT WITH THEM, FOR THERE WERE NONE OTHERS ANSWERED THE CALL; these men were insurgents - by definition, an insurgent is a native to the soil that an imperial armed force seeks to control in order that the armed forces sovereign monarch rule and control the peoples and their resources by force of arms. The Brits (and the Hesseians subsequently, the Brits, having over-extended their forces in their always doomed and ill-fated quest to rule the world, and having VASTLY underestimated the resisting force that the guerilla war fare fighters would put up, the Brits would be forced to acknowledge eventually, got a small taste of defeat - by a nation of British-born subjects who merely wanted to make their fortunes in America and trade with Britain, which was a win-win situation for Great Britain, until King George III decided he needed to raise more money for the further imperial adventures in Europe, in Africa, in the Balkans, etc, etc, etc. The resultant loss of trade was perhaps 100 times greater than the tax revenues that would have been raised by the tea tax.

BUT, as my dearly departed brother John was so oft wont to say, "I digress."

Nancy hits her second on the green, checks out the cup, once again, a very wet landing spot. She makes an easy four. I hit a hard-low half-seven iron approach shot that lands 6" behind the hole, but it was so low, it can't stop in its tracks, and ends up rolling about 30' beyond the pin. I also make 4.

Fourth hole, 215 yards par three, straight away, OB left (well, no fence, but parking lot, Irish Bakery, Days Inn, parking lot strongly suggest OB left), gaping bunker protecting the front right half of the green. Nancy, still with the honors, tees off with the 5-iron. Sheeit, the broad was serious about that tight lies club being wrong. She hits a very nice shot, about 160. I take a very smooth, very slow backswing and RRRRRIIIIIPPPPP the best 22 degree metal club of my life, which lands just short of the green, and then, the muthah rolls off over the back edge of the green. One of the five longest tee shots I've ever hit on the hole, 235! What a difference a wind makes!

Nancy hits it on, observes that there is no water in the cup, and damn near makes her 8' putt. I look up and make a wrist wave at my chip shot which rolls 10' past the hole. FAWK, another friggen' Bogey, mon.

Last hole, 140, par three, bunker guards the left side, tree limbs hang out intimidating you into keeping it to the right of their branches, which requires that you aim 15 yards to the right of the pin.

We make two inauspicious fours, and after the first five holes, we are tied!

Nancy quips, "if I'd have known you were going to be counting, I would have taken it much more seriously."

"Hell, Nancy," says I, "If you'd have just quit missing your putts to keep your hands from freezing you would have kicked my butt!"

No reason to tell the players what the game is until after you've won, I always say.

And then we had a great time at lunch - my friend and long-suffering bridge partner Tom Sucher showed up, and brought me a Verner's Cola. Later, my sister showed up. Tom talked with my old man, which was a good thang. Ralph has had constipation (I think he calls it an upset stomach) for almost four weeks (Well, apparently his bowels are working again, I get a descriptive play by play account of "the movements" from him each day. Ralph has lots of friends, but they just want to take him out. Nobody really wants to talk with him (he's boring) or give him a chance to open up and talk about his feelings; his sense of loss having been with her for almost 65 years; but, Tom is very wise in the matters, and, besides, it was a chance for just us girls (Will, Mark, Nancy) to rip roar it up with yucks.

Mo to Follo'

All my best wishes for you and yours
May peace and blessing flow down upon your house like living waters
With Love to you, and ALL YOU LOVE,
Mark Raymond Ganzer