Silvio !!! Chapter MCMXXXXXLVII: The State Is ME!

Government By Commedia del Arte


Silvio! Salutes -- Himself, Of Course

To me -- and I don't think I'm alone -- one hallmark of These Days™ we're living through is the slow, steady erosion of things based on illusion, and lies.

The financial Bubble was spun out of caviar wishes and champagne dreams; it was a manipulation of each stage of the process from real estate sales to loan origination to the packaging of CDOs and pushing them on investors, by rentiers -- persons who

play no productive role in the economy themselves but who monopolize the access to physical assets, financial assets and technologies. They make money not from producing anything new themselves, but purely from [possession] of property (which provides a claim to a revenue stream)... (Wikipedia).

For the past three years, for some, this has become clearer. To other people, that same dawning clarity is threatening on a visceral level, an aberration.

This has been a global game, and in Europe, the results are the same -- political, corporate and financial illusions are beginning to come apart like the legendary cheap suit. And nowhere has the Illusory State been more pronounced than Italy, where a working Center-Right coalition in its Parliament has given the country its longest-lasting, most stable government in fifty years.

However, "stable" is a relative term. Silvio !'s government has been marred by accusations of corruption (expected in Italy, which has been a Kleptocracy on some level for centuries) and mismanagement, which Berlusconi's coalition was supposed to change.

Unfortunately, that coalition was brokered by a narcissistic Oligarch, pompous and vainglorious -- the Latin version of Sad Vlad The Putin: Silvio!

And unfortunately for Little Silvio, after besting his detractors and enemies and remaining the Prime Minister of that near-failed state, now the world's financial crisis is coming home -- to live with his people.

Not Silvio -- he's a bunga-bunga billionaire; personally, he'll be very comfortable. The Italian people? Not so much. And that could spell the end for Little Silvio's reign as the Clown Prince Of the European Union.

From today's New York Times:

In his narrowest escape yet, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi barely survived a confidence vote on Friday, saving his government from collapse but leaving it all but incapable of legislating effectively.

With 316 votes for and 301 votes against, Mr. Berlusconi’s center-right coalition won the vote. But it failed to secure a solid majority, making it increasingly difficult for him to pass legislation aimed at protecting Italy from Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Had he lost, Mr. Berlusconi would have had to resign, marking the end of an 18-year political era in which the billionaire businessman shaped Italian politics in his own image, entwining the country’s fate with his own.

...the Berlusconi government was now hanging by a thread and could fall at the next bump in the road — when enough disgruntled lawmakers from within Mr. Berlusconi’s coalition calculate that they would be safer jumping off a sinking ship rather than staying aboard and risking drowning...

Since 2009, the European debt crisis has felled governments in Ireland, Portugal and Slovakia, led to early elections in Spain and a cabinet reshuffle in Greece. So far, Mr. Berlusconi has proven to be a tough outlier — not least because the European Central Bank in August agreed to buy Italian debt. But the bank did this in exchange for promised structural changes that the government has not yet carried out, a mix of tax increases and changes to the pension system...

This week, opposition leaders — and the president of Italy, in an unusually strong statement — told Mr. Berlusconi that surviving a confidence vote was not the same as governing... the center-left opposition has repeatedly called on Mr. Berlusconi to step down.. [and] repeatedly accused Mr. Berlusconi of buying the votes of would-be dissidents within his own center-right coalition.

On Friday, Mr. Berlusconi was saved by loyalists who prefer to have the government limp along rather than fall and potentially be replaced by a group of nonpolitical technocrats with a mandate to carry out the structural changes including tax increases, changes to the pension system and a growth stimulus bill now deadlocked in Parliament.

Foreign investors and many of Italy’s business leaders hope for such a technical government, but lawmakers have resisted out of fears of losing power.

---

A Reprint: Art Clokey, Father Of Gumby: 1921 - 2010

So Long Until Next Time: Art Clokey (1921-2010)
(Photo: © Premavision)

Art Clokey, the animator / inventor responsible for creating Gumby, and sparking an entire stop-motion animation industry, passed away last night at age 88.

I didn't pay a great deal of attention to the Gumby cartoon series as a child. I did watch, and owned a rubberized, pliable Gumby™ figurine when they were sold in the 1960's, but Gumby (and his sidekick, Pokey the horse) didn't attract me the way classically-animated cartoons did.


Clokey Working On Gumby Goes To The Moon, 1956
(Photo: © Premavision)

In part, this was because it looked too much like what it was: Stop-motion animation. The Classic, Hollywood animated cartoons created cel by cel (Warner Brothers' Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes; Bob Clampett's or Tex Avery's work) for me were fluid, even graceful, chaos by comparison.

The Road Runner and Wyle E. Coyote or Bugs and Daffy presented things that weren't possible in reality -- which is what happens in a child's imagination. Gumby and Pokey seemed too much like what I would see playing with toy soldiers or cars in the back yard of my family's home.

It took a different kind of imagination to appreciate both the artistry in the stop-motion medium, and see Clokey's work in a different light. I loved the Wallace and Grommitt films -- painstakingly crafted, amazingly creative, and funny -- along with Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, or James and the Giant Peach; Corpse Bride; and the recent film 9.

Burton's work, even Thomas The Tank Engine (not quite stop-motion) and the ubiquitous Mister Bill of SNL, might not have been realized without Clokey's imaginative adventures of Gumby and Pokey, Nopey, and the Blockheads.


"I'm Gumby, Damnit" (Saturday Night Live)


Jack Thinks About ExMass (Burton's Nightmare)


The Classic Wallace and Grommitt

n 1955, a pupil of legendary animator Slavko Vorkapich produced a short claymation student film at the University of Southern California. The pupil was Art Clokey; his short film was Gumbasia (based on Disney's 1940 Fantasia), a Claymation, stop-motion animation starring a simple and oddly-shaped character formed out of green, plasticine clay, invented by Clokey and his wife, Ruth.

Ruth suggested to her husband that his film's character should be simple, based on the Gingerbread man -- and green, simply because it was Clokey's favorite color. Gumby's legs and feet were made wide to ensure the clay character would stand up during stop-motion filming, and the slanted shape of Gumby's head -- instantly recognizable, now -- was based on a hair style Clokey's father sported in an old family photograph.


Gumby And Pokey During The Classic TV Years.

Clokey's student film, and several subsequent short 'test cartoons', were well-regarded enough that they were shown during NBC's extremely popular children's program, The Howdy Doody Show, for test reactions from studio and viewing audiences in 1956. The first animation, "Gumby Goes To The Moon", didn't impress NBC executives; however, Clokey's second work, "Robot Rumpus", won them over, and Clokey signed a deal with NBC in 1957 for the first Gumby show.



The original Gumby Show only lasted for two years at NBC, but afterwards Clokey continued trying to bring his characters back to the small screen. He succeeded in 1961, and Clokey's production company created episodes of Gumby for the next seven years. Even after production officially ceased in 1968, these classic Gumby episodes were rebroadcast on local stations in America for decades.



After a long hiatus, Clokey and his production company entered into another contract with Lorimar Telepictures in 1988 to revive Gumby in new episodes with additional characters, which lasted into the mid-1990's. In 1997, Clokey's production group released "Gumby, The Movie".


2009 Advertisement For Clokey Documentary

Clokey fell into relative obscurity, and some financial difficulty (why America does this to its artists when other cultures don't is saddening and disheartening). It's good that people like Tim Burton acknowledge the debt they owe to Clokey's imagination and work. Clokey never stopped being his own foremost advocate, until old age and declining health forced him to depend on his son, Joe, to carry on his animation legacy.

Fortunately, there is a public who remembers and values Clokey's contribution; they remember Gumby and Pokey as part of the furniture of their imagination as children. In the past five years, there were retrospectives of Clokey's work in New York and San Francisco; a documentary film, Gumby Dharma, was made about him and released in 2006. His son continues to push to bring Gumby and Pokey back to television for new generations of children; and Clokey lived to see digitally-remastered DVD versions of his television episodes completed.

Anything which adds gentleness and laughter, particularly for children, in this world is an absolute good -- so I hope he's successful.

Thanks, Art.

---

"We Need A New System"

If they cannot address [the sovereign debt crisis in Europe] in a credible way, I believe within perhaps two to three weeks, we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system.

We're not just talking about a relatively small Belgian bank, we're talking about the largest banks in the world. The largest banks in Germany, the largest banks in France that will spread to the UK in part through the sovereign debt problems in Ireland.

It will spread everywhere because the global financial system is so interconnected, all those banks are counterparties to every significant bank in the US and in Britain, and in Japan and around the world. This would be a crisis, in my view, more serious than the crisis in 2008.

-- Dr. Robert Shapiro, economic advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama, now the IMF; on the BBC's 'Newsnight', October 5, 2011

At Media Matters, Ari Rabin-Havt recently posted an article entitled , "We Need A New System", which began with recounting a friend's arrival in Washington, D.C., eleven years ago, at the height of protests at a scheduled meeting of the World Bank.

From the back seat of a taxi, Rabin-Havt's friend saw one of the protestors, a woman, wearing a T-Shirt with the slogan We Need A New System! -- and the friend just happened to attend a dinner party that night, with " 'ambassadors, politicians, esteemed professors and what seemed like the entire combined senior economist staff of the IMF, World Bank and Treasury' ", including Larry Summers.

The friend recounted seeing the woman protesting the World Bank meeting; it turned out Summers had seen her, too -- he'd even spoken with her.

And so I asked the girl [Summers recounted to the other guests]: 'What is this new system that you want? Tell me about it!' And the girl had nothing. Nothing! She had no fucking clue what this magical new system was supposed to be. No one is saying that there aren't problems with the world economy the way it is today. But these kids out there -- they don't know what they want!

Rabin-Havt's friend then said to Summers, "You've got 50 economics PhDs in this room who pretty much run the world economy. And you're asking that girl for a better system? Aren't the solutions your job? You admit billions are living in hell, but it's up to that girl to fix it?"

Summers, working on getting a third set of jowls, chuckled and moved on.

Rabin-Havt continued:

Over the last twenty five days across the media -- with several notable exceptions -- we've seen elites point fingers, chuckle and play punch the hippy while covering the Occupy Wall Street protests. Whether it's reporters at CNN mocking protesters while sympathizing with Wall Street traders; Rush Limbaugh referring to protestors as a "parade of human debris"; or a conservative reporter acting as an agent provocateur at a protest in Washington, DC, at best many in the media seem desperate not to face the fundamental issues at the heart of the demonstrations, at worst they place blame for our failed economy at the feet of the protestors -- mocking them as unemployed drains on the country.

It also comes as no surprise that Fox, which actively worked to build the Tea Party movement, has attacked these grassroots uprisings as "astroturf," and "petulant little children," and compared protestors to the "Unabomber." The Tea Party and Fox News fight to protect our system's fundamental inequalities while Occupy Wall Street is a fundamental challenge to it.

In 2000, Larry Summers tried to outsource fixing a global economic system he bore responsibility for to a girl in dreadlocks. Elites in the media and our political system are now attempting to foist the same responsibility to those camping in Zuccotti Park.

As the New York Times astutely pointed out: "It is not the job of the protesters to draft legislation. That's the job of the nation's leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies."

If those in the media casting aspersions on the protestors had spent a decade covering the underlying problems with our economy, instead of cheerleading the housing bubble; worked to expose the lies that led our country to war, instead of taking an administration at its word; and not allow themselves to be manipulated by political and media figures whose goal was simply to distort our political processes, there might not be a need to Occupy Wall Street. Instead the dreadlocked girl is still right -- we need a new system.

I believe that everyone in 'mainstream' politics and the media has gotten #OccupyWallStreet wrong. In an attempt to categorize what's happening (and so control it with a label), they've forgotten what can happen when the difference between a lie and the Truth becomes so obvious.

At it's most fundamental, I believe #OWS is a statement -- something like The current system is based on inequality; it is more nakedly apparent now than ever before. It manufactures inequality, suffering, violence and penury in favor of a minority over the majority; profit over persons; and it has to change.

An economic and markets website, ranting and raving in favor of austerity the other day, noted that for #OWS to have happened in America (whose population he described as being the most politically apathetic on earth) is a sign of exactly how serious things are. I disagreed with almost everything else in his post, but not that observation.

...Boston Consulting Group confirms, the "muddle through" is dead. And now it is time to face the facts. What facts? The facts which state that between household, corporate and government debt, the developed world has $20 trillion in debt over and above the sustainable threshold by the definition of "stable" debt to GDP of 180%.

The facts according to which all attempts to eliminate the excess debt have failed, and for now even the Fed's relentless pursuit of inflating our way out this insurmountable debt load have been for nothing. The facts which state that the only way to resolve the massive debt load is through a global coordinated debt restructuring (which would, among other things, push all global banks into bankruptcy) which, when all is said and done, will have to be funded by the world's financial asset holders: the middle-and upper-class, which, if BCS is right, have a ~30% one-time tax on all their assets to look forward to as the great mean reversion finally arrives and the world is set back on a viable path. But not before the biggest episode of "transitory" pain, misery and suffering in the history of mankind.

Good luck, politicians and holders of financial assets, you will need it because after Denial comes Anger, and only long after does Acceptance finally arrive.

As Rabin-Havt pointed out, Lard Boy and the Little Rupert Goebbels Happy Channel, along with Rethugs in Congress, are working overtime to demonize the #OWS protestors as unemployed radical hippie scum. They're defending the Banksters and the right of one per cent of the population to amass even more wealth.

What's clear is that the present crisis has been created by a relatively small group of people. When the economy failed because of what they'd done, they were given essentially free money -- our money -- to bail them out. They've kept most of it. And, as it turns out, the situation is worse than anyone admits or even wants to know, and that things will simply continue getting worse.

Those who have will just manage to squeak through comfortably. The rest of us... well; ... are there not prisons and work houses? ...let them die then, and decrease the surplus population.

The knowledge that we are screwed beyond measure -- that there's no escape, no matter what we do, as if we were about to collectively be hit by a mile-wide asteroid -- is putting people into the streets, to Occupy, to raise their voice. And the battle lines in what is in fact class warfare -- waged by the defenders of a minority against the rest of the country -- are being drawn. They're clearer all the time.

---

Alabammy Whammy

They Lovin' Them Some Freedom Down Theah

Via The Great Curmudgeon:

Friday, October 07, 2011
Crazy And Evil

Welcome to Alabama.

The Montgomery Water Works and Sanitary Sewer Board began enforcing a section of the new law on Sept. 1 by requiring new ap­plicants for service to first prove they are legally in the United States, according to the filing. The water board suspended the policy after being notified that Black­burn had temporarily sus­pended implementation of the state law.

Allgood Water Works also posted a sign on its office that "to be compliant with new laws concerning immi­gration, you must have an Alabama driver's license or an Alabama picture ID card on file at this office before Sept. 29 or you may lose water service."

Freedom. Smell it.

by Atrios at 10:44

It's not very American and tolerant and fair-play and all, but if these crazy weasels want to secede from the United States, let them.

Yes, I know: These Klan-lovin' Mitwissers aren't supposed to be representative of what were once the Old Confederate states -- but, too, also, the people living in these areas who don't support this kind of thing should raise their voices in opposition. Strongly.

I'm tired of having to cater in any way to this racist, misogynistic, homophobic, You Better Get Raht Wit' Gunz-n-Jezus, Antebellum vision of Reality. It needs to be rebuked and rejected as any kind of vision for America... and if that's truly what the majorities want in these areas, let them go their own way in their own country.

You addled bunch of peacocks want to rebuild the 'Old South'? Want to put back the drinking fountains and bathrooms and separate seating in buses and theaters and at lunch counters for "Coloreds"? Want to restrict hiring and home ownership and college admission to Whites / The Right Kind O' Christian / Native-Born Only?

Then go ahead, you Troglodyte genetically-damaged inbred throwbacks -- here's your own little aryan nation; leave the rest of us alone. We have adult work to do. And when we restrict your coming back to the United States Of America, as 'tourists' or 'immigrants' or 'foreign guest workers', you can complain then, too.

Not to put too fine a point on it or anything.

---

...Do You, Mister Jones?

About Goddamn Time

Via digby -- and with this, we inaugurate a new Blog Category, The Right Stuff:

The New Yorker:

The next target is Wall Street,” an anarchist collective known as Black Mask wrote in its January newsletter, 1967. On February 10th, around twenty-five members of the group, wearing black balaclavas and carrying giant skulls, took to the streets of the financial district and handed out this statement:

WALL STREET IS WAR STREET

The traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers—but the coffins return to the Bronx and Harlem. Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange of death. Profits rise to the ticker tape of your dead sons. Poison gas RAINS on Vietnam. You cannot plead “WE DID NOT KNOW.” Television brings the flaming villages into the safety of your home. You commit genocide in the name of freedom.

BUT YOU TOO ARE THE VICTIMS!

If unemployment rises, you are given work, murderous work. If education is inferior, you are taught to kill. If the blacks get restless, they are sent to die. This is Wall Street’s formula for the great society!

The photographer Larry Fink was there. “They had nothing but their own stealth, and no support,” Fink told me. They hoped to stoke a revolution. “They were working from a massive historic misinterpretation,” Fink said.

Fink thinks that today’s Occupy Wall Street protests are different. “We’ve gone past the time when utopia seemed like a viable option,” he said. “There’s no hope for some kind of Marxist future, so it seems formless. They just know that it can’t go on like this: the greed, the inequality. It can’t go on, so we’ll sit here.”

And, One Of The Smartest Humans In America has a few things to say which Bear Repeating -- 'Over And Over Again, My Friend':

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.

When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.

It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point...

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins.

And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.

Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?

...But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies that failed to deliver economic recovery even as bankers repaid the favor by turning on the president. Now, however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over. All it has to do is take these protests as seriously as they deserve to be taken.

And if the protests goad some politicians into doing what they should have been doing all along, Occupy Wall Street will have been a smashing success.

The visual counterpoint in the New Yorker slideshow I've provided a link to shows the shift from hesitant, not-that-well-attended antiwar protests of 1966 and 1967, to the mass protests and marches of 1969 and after (Out Now! Set The Date!).

The mid-Sixties through the mid-Seventies were a reaction to the Cold-War paranoia and "button down" consumerist capitalism of the post-WW2 era, in the poetry of Ginsburg, the comedy of Lenny Bruce; the collision between Rock-n-Roll and Soul; in The Naked Lunch and On The Road.

There were a large number of people adrift within a culture based on following the rules, on climbing the ladder and corporate growth (American corporations; this was before the rise of the Multinationals). People were beating their brains out in jobs they really didn't like at the office or factory during the week, getting drunk at backyard barbecues on the weekends, eyeing their friends' spouses; smoking too much, and falling asleep every night in front of the teevee.

And somehow, everyone knew that no matter how swell the Formica counters looked or how dependable that new Chrysler was -- something was very, very wrong. There was a worm at the heart of the rose, and we were being told to ignore it. But eventually, things began to happen no one could fail to notice.

The Cuban Missie Crisis brought the world within a hairsbreadth of an actual thermonuclear war. Americans were just beginning to deploy to Southeast Asia. In his last television interview at Hyannisport with Walter Cronkite, JFK said, "In the final analysis, it's their [the Vietnamese'] war". Then they killed Jack in Dallas, and by 1966, 200,000 troops were sent to South Vietnam and war was once again, as it always has been, Big Business. So many American corporations were, uh, "making a killing".

Meanwhile, people worked at those jobs; drank more liquor and bought more things; what the hell was it all for? Inside themselves, people were checking out: They'd All Gone To Look For America and didn't even realize it. On the teevee every night were scenes of a war half a world away, and men -- mostly in their late teens and early twenties -- were being wounded, dying, in larger numbers every month... not to mention thousands of Vietnamese.

As the war continued and no one listened, those first timid protest Actions became more organized, more visually compelling and rhetorically forceful, and it didn't take long -- the point being, the antiwar movement became the nexus for change already happening in the culture and a real political force to be reckoned with.

Perhaps, just perhaps, #Occupy Wall Street is the equivalent of those early 1966-67 actions, of something larger -- a harbinger of America's Tahrir Square. It's clear this isn't a crowd of students and dirty hippies protesting in New York, and now in more and more American cities; a slideshow of portraits of people attending the protests proves it. This is broad-based; the circumstances that created it affect everyone.

But, much as the Old Red Dog in me would like to think of a protest movement sweeping away old ways of thinking and relating; of shrugging off the Rule Of Wealth; the workers of Greece standing in solidarity with those in England and America and around the world... that's not likely.

And, the Democratic Establishment isn't going to wear tie-dye shirts and talk about "Sticking It To The Man". They're not going to march and rattle the walls. My expectations that Obama, Reid, Pelosi and others will make common cause with the spirit and perspective of #Occupy Wall Street are breathtakingly low.

But, history -- that thing we're all living through, now (a bit different to experience something you just breezed over in a few paragraphs from a Civ-101 textbook, huh?) -- has a way of surprising us. Just look at the past ten years.

---

I'm Down With It

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".

- Isaac Asimov, Writing In Newsweek, January 21, 1980

---

Something Is Happening Here, But You Don't Know What It Is...

Multiple Choice Question, Mr. Jones


(#OccupyWallStreet Poster, 2011: Adbusters)

Q: The #OccupyWallStreet Action, Taking Place Across America, Is:

• The New Woodstock


• Given the climate of the times, a revolutionary act


• An expression of the awareness of cognitive dissonance between (1) The vision of America spoon-fed to its population through the Mainstream Media, political and corporate institutions, and financial structure; and (2) Reality, as experienced through daily life in the United States


• A conspiracy by George Soros


• Anger and resistance towards a system which devalues the collective good in favor of a small percentage of the population, in America and the world


• Derided and mostly ignored by American media and the Little Rupert empire


• An act of hope

Choose All That Apply.

---

Im Westen Nicht Neues

The Usual Suspects

News -- On The March !!

• Little Glenn Beck: I Not Dead! I Prove!
  Little Glenny, five years old and having lost even more viewing audience share following his dismissal parting ways from The Little Goebbels Rupert Network, now says the world is ending, again.
  
  Next week, in fact: The dirty hippies camped near Wall Street are going to do Bad Things. Unspeakable Things. Because they are dirty, and hippies, and anarchists and revolutionaries and listen to Groin Musik.
  
  Glenny has "verified" that there will "be an attack on Wall Street, next week", and urged all of his radio show listeners (three of them, and a semi-deaf Parakeet) to stockpile food and water, and to have cash on hand for the inevitable Ragnarok and Armageddon which will follow (I don't know about you, but I've always assumed the End Of Civilization would be on a pay-as-you-go basis).
  
  In his desperation to appear relevant to anyone and anything, Glenny Bubbled:
  

  
  ...Gang, may I warn you, again -- we are in for trouble, and I fear it is close. Ah; I will give you, um, some information that has been -- uh, come to my attention, today; Ammm, that, ah, I don't know if it's credible, or not. It has been verified, ahhh -- not by me -- it's coming from the right sources, it appears; and these people have credibility, who are releasing this information; and it is about an attack on Wall Street, next week.
  
  ... Ahhhhh, I don't know what that means, exactly; that the Unions will join this movement down on Wall Street tomorrow -- they are starting this movement in Washington, D.C., and all over; do not dismiss them. if you have money in the stock market... may I just recommend that you have some cash, uh, handy -- that you have your food and everything else ready.
  
  I hope to god that none of this stuff happens. But you, uh, have people who are anarchists, revolutionaries, intent upon collapsing the system... and I will share with you at the top of the hour a threat that you should take seriously.

  
  One thing I can say -- Little Glenn doesn't know how to speak to a radio audience. He doesn't. He doesn't modulate his voice; it's a droning near-monotone. And every third word is separated from the next by, "Ahhh" and "Uh", and "Umm" -- it's one of the basic lessons in Junior Broadcaster's School that you try to eliminate those bad sounds from your shtick, because they make you sound like a Moron.
  
  Beck also said something about "The Parakeet doesn't care," but I could be wrong about that.


• Chris Christie May Have Coupon For Free Liposuction
  In an announcement yesterday in New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie sat down with the press to announce that he was not throwing his supersized underwear in the ring in a bid for the Rethug nomination for president.
  
  Telling America, "Now is not the time", sitting down with members of the media, the chair underneath the Governor was heard to say, in a West Orange accent, "Hey Hey Hey; get offa me".
  
  Josh Marshall at TPM has noted
  

  A few times this year we've mentioned the 'Murdoch Primary', the all important race to get the support of Rupert Murdoch, various minions and capos of the Murdoch organization and of course the editorial support of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and so many other publications.
  
  Chris Christie, in case you didn't notice, was being backed in a big, big way by Murdoch, Ailes and the rest. So he wasn't just winning the Murdoch primary. He was the product of the Murdoch primary, you might even say a failed Murdoch/Newscorp effort to pull off a leveraged buy out of the GOP nominating process.



• Amanda Knox, Stylishly Dressed, Returns Home
  Justice was once again served, with an apple in its mouth; unfortunately, Commissario Guido Brunetti or Salvo Montalbano were not available to handle the investigation of the case in which American Amanda Knox and her boyfriend were accused of brutally killing Knox's roommate two years ago. The case against her, and the (former) boyfriend, overturned after two years in an Italian prison, Amanda flew home to Seattle. The New York Times noted
  

  The Knox family hired a public relations company specializing in crisis management soon after Ms. Knox was arrested in 2007 during her junior year abroad in Perugia, accused along with two men of killing her housemate, Meredith Kercher, during a sexual attack...
  
  At one point a Seattle judge was admonished for using court stationery to write to Italian officials on her behalf. And Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, championed her case, reaching out to both American and Italian officials...
  
  In some respects, her supporters had their work cut out for them. The crime Ms. Knox had been accused and eventually convicted of was lurid, her statements to the police were inconsistent and DNA evidence presented at trial seemed to link her to the brutal killing...
  
  But by the time she was freed from an Italian prison on Monday, her public portrayal was very different: Many media accounts in the United States, at least, portrayed Ms. Knox as a nice young woman, a linguistics major at the University of Washington, who had fallen victim to the Italian justice system while on her junior year abroad.
  
  No one can say for sure whether the painstaking and calculated rehabilitation of her image helped sway the Italian courts. Ultimately, it was an official report casting doubt on the DNA evidence in the case that led to her exoneration.

  
  Over the past four years, the case had turned into a predictable circus, and tried in the media -- and, Italians love a good Opera; you only have to sing the right songs and the audience will be on its feet.
  
  Amanda's roommate is still dead. There are no other suspects, but on an evening in Perugia in 2007, out of a group of four people, one ended up dead. What actually happened? The victim is still dead -- but, Justice is so passe these days; I guess no one cares, really. And Amanda does seem like such a nice young lady.
  
  And, Italy is a country that can't even get rid of an Oligarch Prime Minister who treats government as an adjunct to doing business. Italian officials have indicated they will appeal the court's decision, but I feel it's doubtful that Ms. Knox would return to Italy voluntarily to stand trial, again. So no one should be surprised.

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Deeply-Held Personal Beliefs

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MEHR: Paul B. Farrell, investment analyst, isn't particularly liberal, but he has been saying since the mid-2000's that an unsustainable Housing Bubble and derivatives market would explode and sink the economy. He has also said since that bailing out the Banksters was a Bad Idea, and that our collective future is heading for Unknown Territory.

...Warning: to Wall Street CEOs, the Super Rich, the top 1% who think they own our government … the party’s over. No matter who gets elected in 2012 and 2016, the new Lost Decade 2011-2021 will make life miserable for the president and Congress, as with Japan earlier.

Worse, this Lost Decade will make life miserable for everybody: corporations, investors, consumers, workers, small businesses and all our families, with the kind of economic suffering experienced in the painfully long Great Depression era.

...Yes, big shock dead ahead. The class wars like Arab Spring are accelerating across America. “Occupy Wall Street” is going viral, spreading through “Occupy Together,” expanding in dozens of cities across America and the world, growing bigger — in commitment, in mission, in boldness — a resistance movement waging war against our democracy-killing Super Rich.

Next, expect many more class wars, regional rebellions, uprisings against the wealthy — yes, this is the second American Revolution.

Wake up folks: The myopic media is trapped in 2012 “campaign mode,” in a time warp delivering mind-numbing reality shows featuring the latest soap-opera sound bites about Mitt, Rick, Chris, Newt, Michele and their endless games.

Meanwhile, off-camera something big is happening, in the real world, a historic, cultural shift exploding all across America and the world. Something the media, bankers and politicians still can’t grasp.

Get it? The people have lost faith in voting. Not just lost faith in the markets and economy. The public no longer has faith in democracy. They know voting is irrelevant, nothing ever changes. They now know their world is being manipulated by a powerful cabal of wealthy special interests, corporate bosses, bankers, lobbyists and self-serving politicians.

Voters know they’re being played for suckers. The game is rigged. And they’ve also figured out that change will come only after a revolution, one they’re triggering.

Warning: This revolutionary spirit is spreading across the world’s youth, the unemployed, disenfranchised and disillusioned, voices who’ve lost faith in voting democracies.

This historic wave is summarized here from Nicholas Kulish’s provocative New York Times piece, Forget the Tea Party, the new class wars will force America to change, as they’re changing the Arab world.

The bizarre thing is, Farrell's piece appears... in Little Rupert's Wall Street Journal.

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Don't Give A Damn About You

People Like This Run Your World


(John Currin, Park City Grill, O/C [Dimens. Unk.], 2000)

Ever dealt with these persons? It's amazing: All that inbreeding, and they're barely intelligent enough to remember to breathe.

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