“Joe in Ukraine while folks in an Ohio town can’t breathe the air or drink the water safely but have been denied federal emergency relief. This pretty much sums up how this government, despite party, values war over workers.” (-Dr. CBS on Twitter)
“There will never be a US anti war coalition that doesn’t include people with awful ideas. If you think that “legitimizing” them is more dangerous than having no organized resistance to war, then fine. I hope that comforts you next time we bomb a poor country into the stone age.
I’m sure there’s some Fed field manual that says “If a movement becomes broad enough, intervention is minimally necessary. Internal discord about purity politics will cause fractures within the coalition long before they present any sort of threat….(-Bryce Green)
“”Sanders said he would support Biden if he ran for reelection in 2024, adding that he has done “a good job” “
Bernie Sanders is trash. A lost cause. Move on people.” (-Dirtbag Leftist)
“Neither Trump nor DeSantis are coming to save you.
The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can start taking decisive steps to protect yourself & your loved ones from the coming political-economic shitstorm.” (-Sally Mayweather)
DAVID RYDER PRANGLEY
Did you ever see that funny as fuck flick, “Still Crazy”? It’s kindof like “Spinal Tap” but with heart and friendship. You should see it if you’re an aging rocker-really, really good stuff!One of the best remaining rocknroll still crazies I know of is David Ryder Prangley, who’s got like a little bit Brett Smiley, a little bit Michael Des Barres and A little Bowie in his sound, kinda like a Welsh Richard Duguay, maybe more goth, a death rock Marc Bolan-what planet did he come from? I dunno, he’s groovy, though! He used to be affiliated with Rachel Stamp and played bass for Adam Ant. Is he goth or glam or classic rock or prog? Who cares, he’s creative and cool, writes pretty music. “Forever In Starlight” is something special. He’s fabulous, I really love his jams! Ronald Koal meets the early Dimestore Haloes? He’s just great, part glam, part gloom, poetic like Donovan or Bolan, right?! Right on!!
SO MUCH EXCITEMENT! YA KNOW THE ROCKNROLL PEOPLE CAN’T WAIT FOR RICHARD DUGUAY’S NEW RECORD!!!
Wow, kids, the NEW RICHARD DUGUAY ALBUM “BEAUTIFUL DECLINE” is some fantastic rocknroll genius, if you heard his last last lp, and all my friends have cause I pushed it on to all their Walkmans, you already know this cat is really a master of the form, if yoyu like Alice Cooper, David Bowie, the Doors, or Rolling Stones, and who doesn’t, he’s like the last motherfucker who really knows how to make excellent records at that high level of both production and songwriting. Holy smokes, he’s so good-do yourself a big favor and pawn the dog if you have to, but get yourself a copy of anything by Duguay as soon as you possibly can.
“If anti-war protests made no difference, the US empire wouldn’t have completely abandoned full-scale ground invasions after 2003 and switched to sneakier, less effective means of warfare while launching unprecedented narrative management systems to suppress anti-war sentiments.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Don’t let some people who vote blue no matter who talk you out of supporting a cause you feel is just and worthwhile. Their idea of organizing is coming together to tear down other people’s hard work and effort. Notice how they never offer any type of better alternative…Do I like or agree with all of the speakers at this event? No, but I agree with the overall message. Like I said, it’s always the same people trying to tear these rallies apart. Don’t let them be the reason you don’t take part in something if you feel it’s a just cause.” (-Perpetual Shadow Ban)
“The Ohio train derailment & US attack on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline are two of the most devastating environmental disasters of this generation. Both are man made — one by a corporation & one by the CIA. Where the all of the major environmentalist groups & celebrities?” (-Anya Parampil)
I know…I know…if I’m gonna keep typing these kooky columns, I’m gonna need a proof reader. I know.
The way people like me used to love Iggy and Bowie, Lux & Ivy, Jeffrey Lee and Deborah Harry, Stiv Bators, and the New Romantics, man that’s how all these goofy college people in the new cars love Zelensky, Bill Gates, Kamala Harris, the batshit crooked Bidens, Dr. Anthony Fauchi and AOC. It’s batshit, the Thank Obamas. Elon Musk also has his devoted groupies. It’s all madness, I say. These rich people worshipping blue no matter whos and pink pussy knitted hat wearers are every bit as stubbornly blind and cultish as all those sad Qanon people who thought Trump was gonna arrest all the pedos.
Partisan Media is treating the toxic bomb story like a partisan issue. Breitbart, the rightwing Qanon, Steve Bannon, Trump associated page is like the only place where I’m reading updates about the explosion. My only theory is maybe the establishment wants shitlibs to associate the catastrophe with the right, so when Biden and the big money war Dems ignore it, the blue no matter whos can just ignore it, too. If the industry captured EPA says the air is safe, they’d never lie, they’re scientific! I kinda noticed how only rightwing blue blood. Tucker Carlson, will ever allow voices from the leftist antiwar movement to appear on his show, none of them are ever welcome on MSNBC or CNN, ya know, I gotta think it’s the same strategy-get inattentive Biden voters associating the antiwar left with Carlson, as away to take the momentum out of the movement among unconcerned, got-mine Democrats who still think WW3 is no big deal, cause Sean Penn and Letterman seem to love the overnight manufactured war celebrity. It’s a dark, dark time, and I see why everybody is so divided and confused. Toxic fumes are nothing to do with party prefrence, toxic fumes don’t care if you vote for this war party, or that war party. Or your opinions about gender reassignment surgery for children or wokeish pro nouns. Toxic fumes kill indiscriminately. WTF? Partisan media is fucked, can you imagine the Huffpost or NY Times outrage if Trump was in another country planning war escalations and shoveling more billions to corrupt regimes while so many people are homeless and sick and can’t pay rent here, and espcially, after the big train wreck chemical catastrophe in Ohio and nobody was helping those people?
Critical thinking humans I know have always understood you can’t blow up three buildings with two planes and wonder why the goverenment who destroyed so many lives with their phony drug war are now suddenly encouraging people, predominantly in tonier zipcodes, to smoke pot, and why they are even steadily legalizing psychedelics after screaming about them and locking people up and killing people over them, since the sixties. I am not one to just blank check trust big pharma or believe our so called representatives just want us mellowing out and having spriritual awakenings because they love us. This shit with the toxic fumes is beyond my belief. All my early morning thoughts keep straying to those poor people in Palestine (coincidence?) being stubbornly ignored by the war mongering government after getting sick from the bomb train chemical explosion that’s poisoned their community, one more ruined sacrifice zone of the capitalists, and the accompanying corporation news coverup, ya know those toxic fumes are also harming people in Pennsylvania, home to all those Amish folks, and organic farmers and seed protectors. What a shitshow. There’s been three other train wrecks since then. My ex classmates would rather defend some goony puppet rapper and his inappropriate for young people weird occult fetish behaviors, than even consider, what they might do if that was their hometown. I mean you kinda gotta get the kid in the car and drive as far away as you can, but what happens to your belongings? They trot out that secret police twerp asset Mayo Pete to do nothing, and pretend he did something, the old Obama playbook. “Nothing to see here, folks, get back to work.” It’s rough business, these tools are so awful. Ugh. Terrible people, how do they live with themselves? I mean I know they like the money. I get that.
Of course I’m bummed out MEDEA BENJAMIN let some dubious non profit industrial complex, PC scolding committee types talk her out of protesting the war machine on behalf of CODE PINK, but the venerable CODE PINK stalwart peace maker and former 29 year veteran, Col. ANN WRIGHT was there, she was great, a real heroic person of integrity and compassion. Dan Cohen, David Swanson, so many great speakers really hit it outta the park. Makes me a bit leery of CODE PINK as an organization, like who’s calling the shots from behind the scenes, which is what some local keeps saying about Antifa, and yeah every real grass roots people’s movement is infiltrated, that is true, but I’ll still be following ANN WRIGHT, MEDEA BENJAMIN & ARIEL GOLD, online. It’s really sad how the whole media has been weaponized by the owners and the Pentagon, even this morning, “Rolling Stone” which was once a platform for the antiwar counter culture, printing people like Michael Hastings who was probably asssinated and Hunter S. Thompson, now it has some sorta bogus article about how censorship and cancel culture are just wonderful, rather than manipulative devices used by the empire to silence dissent or real scientific method, or historical facts saying, or independent journalists; by the media programmed vigilante squad safesapce rubes who still cling to dominant think tank narratives they hear from authoritative sounding teleprompter readers on the tv. Most people do not understand that when they consume corporate media, they are being programmed by the evil marketing of the military industrial comlex. Most people are afraid to speak out. They have to fret about being Fascist Book jailed, or taken off Twitter by the many FBI information-police still employed by Elon Musk, for contradicting official narratives. Even some of my most sensitive and well intentioned peeps who loved R.E.M. and U2 in the eighties they never stand for anything but like, consumerism or celebrity feelings. Cable brainwash echo chamber tv and the Thank Obama culture have them believing this nonsense about how the Empire is made holy by the presence of some non binary people of color being seated in the front row. The intersectional fauxwoke empire is still just the wag the dog sideshow of the One Percent, who profit from the forever wars. Don’t fall for it. Say your thing, don’t fear the reaper, be true to yourself and your own conscience and instincts and core values-resist the goose-stepping, authoritarian bullshit. I know people who are afraid to protest war, cause the mainstreamers will call ’em dirty commies, or antivaxxers, or antisemetic, or accuse them of having cysborn heteronormative pass privilege, or of being disobedient, or impolite or whatever, who cares, fuck ’em. War is some horrible inhumane murderous atrocity. If speech is violence, how much worse is mass murdering for access to oil, lithium, opium, or the Devil’s Chessboard? I’m antiwar, not a pacifist exactly, but a human being who recognizes he’s being lied to by the same dark forces who always lie. Smedley Butler tried to tell us two generations ago. Don’t be a slogan repeating rube for the Bloodthirsty Plunderer’s Death and Carnage Machine! Yeah somebody might disagree with you about some shit. That’s how it is when you step outside the sensitivity safe space for rich people who don’t have to experience anything they might ever find “offensive”. The think tanks infiltrated the colleges, invented the P.C. scolding to take down anybody who remotely threatens the big monopoly shareholder’s advertising campaigns. The secret police are the pig media now. The techsurveillance globalists own the online media. The whole thing is used to manufacture consent for murder and theft. Stay strong, don’t believe the hype. I stand with the real human rights and civil liberties advocates. Like Howard Zinn said, and I paraphrase, they have the propaganda pulpits and guns and blind loyalty of the nazis of death but we got the poets and the troubadors. So we win. Don’t get baffled by your television. Your television millionaires are not gods, they’re just overpaid assholes who cash big checks for telling big lies over and over again.
“Our rulers pour so much effort into manufacturing consent because they absolutely require that consent in order to rule. Their worst-case nightmare scenario is the emergence of a large, robust movement of people saying “NO” to the imperial war machine, because military violence and the threat thereof is the glue that holds the empire together. It’s bringing public consciousness to the very most important aspect of the empire, which also happens to be the very least defensible.
Noam Chomsky said “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state” because over the centuries those who seek large-scale power over other humans have discovered that dominating people psychologically is more energy-efficient than dominating them with brute force, and is far less likely to see them wind up on the business end of a guillotine blade. If you can simply trick a profoundly unfree populace into thinking that they are free, you don’t have to waste any further energy wrestling their freedom away from them.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Of course a few thousand people at one protest is not going to bring peace to our world. Even a few million wouldn’t be enough. But public demonstrations are one of the many ways in which our society can be drawn toward awareness of what’s really going on in our world, what our rulers are really up to, and how much we’ve been lied to all our lives. From there health can follow, because with enough awareness people will cease consenting to things that they’ve come to recognize as being against their interests.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“BP had a 110% increase in profit over the year before even though Americans are struggling to pay for gas. Shell also had a 110% increase in profits. ConocoPhillips had a 131% increase in profits.
ExxonMobil had a 144% increase. This is an all-out war on American consumers.” (-Lee Camp)
JUST YOU AND ME VERSUS JEFF BEZOS AND BILL GATES AND ELON MUSK. THEY GOT THE GOVERNMENT, THE WAR MACHINE, THE WEAPONRY, THE UNIVERSITY CONDITIONING, AND THE PIG-MEDIA…WE GOT SARCASM, SONGS, BLOGS, AND COMMUNITY GARDENS. AND THE MEMORY OF JOE STRUMMER!
“George W. Bush killed one million Iraqis and gets to teach a Master Class. Julian Assange exposed Bush’s war crimes and gets a de facto life sentence in solitary confinement on the way to being extradited to the same US authorities seeking to murder him.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Life without an ideal is spiritual death.” ( ~ Emma Goldman)
“If I were hungry and friendless today, I would rather take my chances with a saloon-keeper than with the average preacher.” ― Eugene V. Debs
“Other than a few principled organizations, the Black liberation movement has almost no allies it can count on. Strengthening our organizations and ability to project independent power is an absolute historical necessity.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Is it even possible to get through to the remaining Democrat loyalists? Biden admin. working to set the stage for nuclear world war, and the lib kids say, “Cool.” (-DH Fabian on Twitter)
“They lied to you about Vietnam. They lied to you about Iraq & Afghanistan. They lied to you about Syria & Libya. They lied to you about Honduras & Bolivia. They lied to you about Assange & Russiagate. So why the hell would you believe what they’re telling you about Ukraine?” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“The US gov has admitted they are often reporting faulty intelligence in Ukraine as if it’s fact. They say they do this because they’re in an information war. Sooo, isn’t it time we all stop believing their false reports?” (-Lee Camp)
“China has cancelled 23 loans for 17 African countries. The U.S. has announced the permanent theft of $7 billion of Afghanistan’s assets. It’s quite clear which country practices imperialism, and which does not.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“When you are not grounded in anywhere, don’t build anything, don’t submit to any organizational discipline & this dangerous & serious movement for many us is only a petit-bourgeois game for you & your neocon friends on social media, you can wildly attack anyone with impunity.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
Yeah I know Bragg and Morrissey don’t get along, but they both impacted my conscience and consciousness as a young punk songwriter kickin’ against the pricks.
Another of my main songwriting influences is the haunted soul, tormented broken blooze and torch and twang, weary Western star, late night cowpunk of Jeffrey Lee.
FUCK GRUNGE
There’s a famous John Steinbeck quote about how if you are in trouble, or are hurts, look for other poor people for help because they are the only ones likely to ever help you, and even that gets dicey in dark times such as these, when us slaves at the bottom have to break our backs doing no joke hardcore heavy lifting and scrubbing and bending, general labor for fuckin’ bullshit electric bills or to put enough gas in the car to go to Wal Mart or to go see a doctor. Martin Luther King Jr. used to talk about the need for a real people’s movement, to unite the working class and poor people. You might as well just stay away from middle class people, because they are all so obsessed with looking upwards, becoming rich and vicariously “identifying” with either Trump, or Biden, or Obama, or Liz fuckin Cheney. Anybody who is getting in bed with the Cheney family is no ally of mine. I oppose mercenary imperialists secret armies and torture and human experimentation and false flag psy ops for wars, so you see, already…we got nothing in common. There are some new progressive parties raising money and integrating some old Green Party ideas but taking the teeth out of ’em, so really what’s the point to any of that? We already have Sanders and the Squad who pretended they were gonna push the Wall Street Dems left but instead, helped push the shitlibs to the right-they are complicit with the Cheney-Bush-Obama-Biden agendas. Which means big banks and billionaires write the laws and they love war and racist kkkops. What I have learned from Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Righteous Struggle of the Water Is Life indigenous water protectors of Standing Rock, is you can not organize an effective people’s struggle/movement if you allow torture apologist/police state copsucker, middle class preservers of the status quo, to senselessly sheepdog you back to the DNC, or allow them to waste your time with official narratives, debate team P.C. identity politics all talk/no action bullshit. You are a fool to ever follow anymore sugar talkin’ pretty faced pants suits who only ever obey the military industrial complex and do whatever their donor class shareholders instruct them to do. If somebody tells you they have come to “lead” your movement, shun those motherfuckers especially if they are big money preachers, or red carpet celebrities, or have Patreon sponsorships where middle class lady landlords give them money to play act as activists while watering down all the truth telling and always discouraging any kindof direct action as frowned upon Antifa tactics or Black Bloc forbidden antics. You can’t be a legit people’s movement activist or poor people’s ally if you are pro war or take big fucking checks from corporations like those phony baloney grifters at the top of the BLM organization who live in mansions now. You gotta stay free, stay street, be proud that you are not one of the rich pig oppressors. Stay with The People, like Eugene Debs and Fred Hampton and Joe Strummer.
“The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display”. (- Emma Goldman)
So yeah I hear that wounded beagle moaner Eddie Vedder released a cover of Joe Strummer‘s immortal “Long Shadow”, and I know that Pearl Jam took the Mescaleros on tour, which must have been marvelously gratifying for Joe and friends. His band were all peak players, he’d started out busking with Tymon Dog, as you probably know. I just never really liked Pearl Jam, at all. “Lemon yellow sun” was really all they had to briefly offer me, a couple stray lines. I liked Cobain’s lyric, “Leonard Cohen afterlife so I can sigh eternally”, but that was about it, and did not dig his friend’s bands much at all. Foo Fighters are terrible. They are still like The Beatles to these sadly programmed Hooters goobers in Ohio and Indiana. Korn, Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, Kid Rock. That’s most people’s idea of real edgy alternativeness in the fast food shithole towns I came from. Joe’s band were like these amazing all stars, reminded me of Morrissey‘s solo bands, everybody looked boss as hell and carried their own weight and contributed their part! Amazing to me, I still don’t personally know how that’s successfully accomplished, other than you gotta find qualified people and they are rarer and rarer, nowadays, or just wanna play for big name headliners, which I am not. I understand from watching my friends have bands, that you have to first be able to pay for a rehearsal room, if you hope to find competent players willing to sincerely dedicate themselves to rehearsing and recording, rather than just loafing around to meet girls or mooch your frozen burritos and beer or whatever. Somebody let my friend Paul K (RIP) teach his bands his set on a house boat! Anyways, I miss Joe, wish he was still here, can not stand all those moaners who got rich during the grunge hoax who still have never gone away. Let’s listen to Joe sing. “Some dreams are made for children but most grow old with us.” I was never into Rancid or D-Generation. So ya know, for me, punk’s been dead for a real long time. My old friends Howie, Adam, and Mark were true punks but they are all dead and gone. I can’t stand that corporate alternative shite, whatever that is. I’m glad UK Subs are still out there. And The Godfathers! I kinda like Amyl and the Sniffers from Australia. Anybody wanna start a real dangerous, heartfelt rebellious, true punk band with me?
“To stir the masses, to appeal to their higher, better selves, to set them thinking for themselves, and to hold ever before them the ideal of mutual kindness and good will, based upon mutual interests, is to render real service to the cause of humanity.” ― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs
“Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.” (-Emma Goldman)
IF YOU WANNA GET STARTED BY CLEANING THE URINALS, THAT WOULD BE SUPER!
“The greedy, profit-seeking exploiter cannot see beyond the end of his nose. He can see a chance for an “opening”; he is cunning enough to know what graft is and where it is, and how it can be secured, but vision he has none-not the slightest. He knows nothing of the great throbbing world that spreads out in all directions. He has no capacity for literature; no appreciation of art; no soul for beauty. That is the penalty the parasites pay for the violation of the laws of life.” ― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs
I am physically crushed, exhausted on a heating pad, I totally threw my back out but I made some halfway decent money that is all going straight to the electric company for our air conditioning bill. I was endeavoring to explain to an ailing bedridden relative that while television provides an illusion of continuity to boomer aged middle classers and thousands of deep state spooks have been deployed to spy on, censor, or shadow ban off script peasants challenging lies of known liars on social media, we poor people are getting fucking hammered hard out here in the streets. Hometown headlines say rents are doubling and people act like they just found out about this, though I’ve been telling them about it for years. I just have zero credibility in their eyes because I don’t have money, ya know? I’m stressed the fuck out most all the time nowadays, it can’t be good for my health. All this fucking Biden Admin Super Inflation, blamed by controlled media, on all purpose external boogeyman, Putin who has zero to do with what boomer aged middle class landlords and Wal Mart charge us slaves for necessities in the USA, USA; or on all purpose domestic boogeyman Trump supporters who do not trust the word of Dick Cheney’s daughter, all the price gouging has forced me to take any work I can get, which currently means, the hard work of deep cleaning a series of long abandoned houses for relators and potential home buyers, and I’m moaning and bitching involuntarily right now, because I’m physically exhausted, weak, fatigued, filled with dread, self-pity, class resentment, social anxiety and I’m not that adept at eating shit, and it’s thrown off my whole schedule, I’m severely underslept and my cells just wanna repair. You know, when your body just cries, “SLEEP!”
When millionaires get ready to flip some surplus properties they bought on the cheap, they feel compelled to repeatedly inform The Help of their Altruism because they decided to have The Help take some of the old crap left behind in the long empty houses to the Non Profit second hand store rather than the dump. The second hand store people seem bitter with burnt-out, they don’t like accepting donations, hanging clothes, or taking money, but they do seem awful concerned about charging E-bay prices for their second hand shit they got for free, if they are a non profit, why they gouging, at a second hand donation store, where us poor people shop? It’s a mad, mad world. All the booj pigs LOVE to cos-play as “social justice warriors”, kinda like Meadow Soprano, but ya know, there’s no real service, or helpful action, besides like, maybe some tut-tut online language policing, or moaning about Vlad Putin being a sexist manspreader. They act like they’re wannabe activists but they’re really just cops, snitches, informants, Judge Judys. I wish I could get away from gentrification rich people, they’re all such authoritarian assholes. Feels like they follow me from town to town. They like their arty poses and sometimes wanna pat me on the head and squeeze me for ideas they can assimilate into their Personal Brands. Mostly, they want to treat me like The Help, hand me the mop, then tell me how I am mopping incorrectly. Faux-woke booj peeps always, always act like they’re some Concerned Citizens, or some shit, but their causes are only ever: 1) Rich White Women Deserve More Stuff And They’re Doing You A Favor By Charging You Market Value Rent, Vote Blue No Matter Who And Orange Man Bad. 2) Pets. Their Pets Are More Important Than Those Yukky, Lower Class People Outside Who Should Have Gone To College Or Married Wealth. 3) How can we get rid of all these Ikky poor people? Can’t the police make them Go Away? In the sacred name of public health and public safety? “They are making me feel uncomfortable”. They all learned at their prestigious Shitlib University that they have the right as fauxwoke booj pigs to never feel uncomfortable. A couple of them might have a token Trans friend and make themselves their Educated Spokesmodel. Or hire them as personal assistants or “glam squad”. They feel certain they should no longer have to wear masks, but that your kids should. That’s about it, though. Their only cause is really guarding their luxurious lifestyles at any cost. They want you to know how they really, really like the Obamas, Oprah, and how they now suddenly “care” about children in a war zone-the Ukraine one. Lastly, they do love praising the Squad, Mayo Pete, that pink dress singer from “Hamilton”, and All Rich Evil Fucker’s Rich Wives. Example: “Melinda Gates is SO SMART!”, “Doctor Jill is SO educated!” or, “Penny Knight is SO philanthropic!” and my favorite, “Chelle Obama really CHANGED THINGS!”
Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to Liberty. ~ Emma Goldman.
“. . . the press and the pulpit have in every age and every nation been on the side of the exploiting class and the ruling class.” ― Eugene V. Debs
I GET GOOD ADVICE FROM THE ADVERTISING WORLD, TREAT ME NICE PARTY GIRL, COKE ADDS LIFE DEPARTMENT
“As the majority of the wealth in the U.S. gets even more concentrated at the top both capitalist parties are leaning into the culture wars & insisting that the problem is your neighbor to deflect from the fact that the problem has always been our capitalist & imperialist system.” (-Ryan Knight)
“We must not let the democrats confuse people with deceptive marketing ploys like the “inflation reduction act,” that is neither an inflation reduction bill nor a climate bill.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Feed the poor. Fight the power. Rock the f*ck out.” (-Tom Morello)
“Pure cringe The Atlantic Council is NATO’s warmongering think tank, funded by the US govt, EU, weapons industry, fossil fuel corporations Here it implicitly admits its goal is to maintain authoritarian US hegemony across the planet and keep Europe subordinated to US imperialism” (-Benjamin Norton)
“The US police treat American citizens as its regime treats the world. Then, warns you not to film the barbaric behavior. The world is fed up with the regime in Washington” (-Ahmad Noroozi) . https://twitter.com/incontextmedia /status/1561638832524648449
“They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. This is too much, even for a joke. But it is not a subject for levity; it is an exceedingly serious matter.”
“He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.” ― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs
“I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.” ― Eugene V. Debs
“Nearly all the lockdown leftists I know who cheer these demented policies on or pretend this is not happening as they defend the Covidian regime from their social media accounts happen to be childless.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“90% of the media outlets in the United States are owned by 6 corporations so no we don’t have a “free press” in our country. We have a corporately owned press that indoctrinates the masses to obey the decrepit capitalist and imperialist system that we live under.” (-Ryan Knight)
It is organized violence on the top which creates individual violence at the bottom. ~ Emma Goldman.
“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.” ― Eugene Victor Debs
Public school – where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression. ~ Emma Goldman.
“Beware of capitalism’s politicians and preachers! They are the lineal descendants of the hypocrites of old who all down the ages have guarded the flock in the name of patriotism and religion and secured the choicest provender and the snuggest booths for themselves by turning the sheep over to the ravages of the wolves.” ― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs
I used to work at a hipster pizza place that subscribed to Ad Busters magazine and liked the easy to understand “We Are The 99%” message they effectively used to bring attention to the main problem of wealth inequality in this country. White collar criminals and billionaires and corrupt politicians are almost never held accountable. No one who caused the financial crisis was prosecuted, Cheney and the Bush junta were never investigated for rigging that election, 9/11, or lying us into multiple wars, instead, Obama rewarded his bosses and gave ’em all bigass billion dollar bailout paydays and let Goldman Sachs pick his cabinet. His attorney general, Eric Holder who failed to prosecute any shady bakers or mortgage fraud sham merchants went back to work for the big banks. Shitlibs still love him for wearing a suit….while being black. Like that’s some big achievement-remember when Crime Bill Biden was so impressed he met a certain black senator who spoke in complete sentences? Now they let that old Jim Crow teleprompter reading motherfucker lecture people about race, like he is some kinda civil rights advocate. Identity politics is a big fuckin hustle-Malcolm X warned us about these token P.R., empty suited wolves back in 1963, he called ’em bourgeoise hustlers! Glen Ford called them the black misleadership class! Pharmaceutical Lobbyists were appointed to heads of the regulatory agencies that were supposed to regulate pharmaceutical companies. Steadily under Obama, and then again, under Bannon/Trump, industry men took over the agencies that were supposed to regulate them. So now, the fox are guarding the hen house everywhere you look. you know-like when Marvin Bush guarded the Twin Towers and Lucky Silverstein took out all that insurance and those art students spent weeks doing something in the basement and Dick Cheney called off Norad and had the air force doing drills somewhere far away.
Oil men, frackers, big pharma, private mercenary Blackwater proxy armies, tech surveillance scumbags, these 400 Wall Street predator Davos rich guys run it all now. Biden says the 400 people at the top “are not the problem, folks”. I disagree. They are all sociopaths and megalomaniacs. The saudi kings, all these inflated oligarchs with the dick rockets and super yachts and secret plots and bio weapon patent owners. All creeps. Yes, even and especially, your special, glasses wearing science friend, Bill Gates. Industry captured every government agency. Media continued to consolidate. Middleclass people worship Obama as a suave and virtuous GOD! Hedge fund managers and millionaires bought up entire cities and people like Giuliani helped kick out all the working class and poor people in places like Manhattan with ruthless rent gouging and Stop N Frisk Nightstick Robo-Cop Overpolicing. In places like gentrified Eugene, Oregon, if you did not present as sufficiently middle class, you got The Business, the shakedown, the aggressive hospitality, wherever you strolled. I was pedestrian and that made me a suspect. I had a child who ran around the kid’s department at the downtown public library likeall kids do and the pink haired librarians who were sick of homeless people would profile me as insufficiently whatever their preferred kind of person was, and follow me around, like I was doing something wrong, as my son ran merrily around the kid’s department. Especially after my expensive hat got rumpled from attending a protest for the homeless to have restroom access, in the rain. We would get followed home by the butch lady rent a kkkops in the uniforms with the walkie talkies. One time we asked to use a phone to call a taxi and they were needlessly hostile and hateful and again, sicced the rent a kkkops on us for our crime of not being I-Phone owners. “We don’t PROVIDE that SERVICE!” she shrieked at us, from behind the information desk, and when she got loud, here comes the screws. It was a Sunday so buses were running slow and since it was thunder storming I thought a civil and sane human being might not mind assisting us. These were self important title havers. The “ownership society”. “Educated People”! Where I came from, Smalltown Kentucky, we looked out for other people-especially very obviously struggling children with disabilities, in inclement weather. All these kkkops and pissed off lady librarians were Letting Us Know we were not welcome. I wrote letters to the entertainment weekly about these issues but they were never published because you have to have a phone to have a letter printed. How fucked up I that bullshit? If I had a phone, I coulda called my own tax cab, right? I thought it was fuckedup they did away with all public payphones and all the middle class people just shrugged and ignored Edward Snowden when he blew the whistle about the NSA listening to and permanently storing all our conversations. Rightwing Republikkkans would always screech online about how wrong it was when they saw homeless people buying beer with foodstamps, which of course, never happened, and is impossible, just dumb hate nonsense, and these hateful class bigots who claim to be eyewitnesses to the beer buying crime of the century think that foodstamps are still like paper currency, when they have been plastic cards for decades. They also love to claim that they were homeless once but overcame every obstacle with their manly bootstraps and hard work. And of course (drumroll please) the most popular screech from both shit don’t stink they/them shitlibs AND Donald Trump lovin’ upfront racist as hell rightwingers is how homeless people do not DESERVE to have cellphones!!! It really makes these power drunks crazy to see poor people with I Phones, but they never respond when you confront them with how else are poor people supposed to get jobs or apartments, without phone numbers.
Middle class people would rather talk about Beyonce some more and Jay Z and Chelle Obama and Gayle King and Kamala so you will see that they are “Not Racist”TM. I learned attending these gatherings that the most nauseatingly P.C. class snob gender obsessed know it alls in the world all think it is totally okey dokey to ridicule poor people and stereotype the entire low wage earning working class as rednecks, Low information “Trump voters” and “anti-vaxxers” and Russia sympathizing Conspiracy Theorists and dirty commies. Anyone not Facebook Ukraine Flag Posting and cheering for Official Nato/DNC/Gates Reset/deep state agencies must be ignorant “trailer trash”. I resemble that comment! But they go nuts(!!!) if you haven’t learned their Latest New Identity Politics/Gender Lexicon Rulebook Updates For Science And Diversity and AOC’s Feelings. I avoid ’em as much as possible.
Whenever poor people got together to discuss these problems in public spaces, middle class people showed up and changed the subject to Gender, which became a whole field of study and emerging industry, almost a religion unto itself. I was telling some early fellow occupiers about the hardships my family endured when my wife was abruptly fired overnight from the women’s shelter she had become so dedicated to-for not being gay or speaking Spanish or dark hued enough-she was laidoff and liberal guilted into going away quietly-they said they wanted more diverse counselors, so we were at risk of being imminently evicted. We lived in low income housing and the neighbors kept sending kkops to our door whenever our kid was loud, he has Autism. The middle class narrative managers from the college would insist I stop actively advocating about my family’s needs at Occupy gatherings, because they not so helpfully explained, I was a white privileged male. Of course, all this talk was all coming from actual privileged two parent college educated middle class and rich people who had businesses and rental properties and keys and credit cards. I had two leather jackets, a mattress, and some cassette tapes in a box and was hassled by kkkops everyday, while pushing my child around in a baby jogger to the library and art programs in the park. City hall gutted the library and art programs in the park our second year in town and gave big money contracts to some private kkkop goon squads “Downtown Guides” they called themselves, and Wackenhut security professionals, to start strongarming poor people out of what they openly declared the “exclusion zone”, downtown. They were paid big salaries to “guide” us away. Outta sight of the posh people.
I would bicycle to meetings they advertised as Occupy events but again, the middle classers were saying we needed to agree to speak in quiet pleasing voices, and “unpack privilege” and not trouble the nice liberal ladies of city hall with our disruptive and coarse neediness or complaints about police harassment. This was not a LEFT organization or proletarian protest struggle, so much as a hijacked identity politics/intersectionality/pro noun policing classroom. Nimby landlords and gender experts changed the topic to gender oppression, whenever we were talking about being poor, or again at risk of homelessness. They were tone policing. Complaining that the coarse and unsightly houseless community were not woke or liberal enough, and had too many males. No shit, motherfuckers. We saw ’em living in the mud puddles in wet tents down by the railroad tracks. The Namaste culture, college folks with the Buddha statues and new agey feelgood poses did not really want loud disabled kids, or any poor people, living near their gentrification boutiques or hipster reefer clinics-ya know? They were meditation retreat landlord classers, and fine arts majors, in bed with the rightwing fratboys really. It felt like A Purge. The shitlib answer to everything was always just shutup and vote for Hillary Clinton for woke folks intersectionality and safespace feelings. They were all for rainbow diversity so long as you were RICH. RICH gay folks, RICH Muslim folks, RICH black folks, and so on and so forth. Human Rights City, but you had to be rich for your human rights to be honored by the kkkops. Or pinkhaired fauxwoke librarians or Whole Foods loss prevention staff. We got a tattooed tree sitter appointed to city hall and she IMMEDIATELY started reciting bullshit sports tourism official talking points about how homeless people were “travelers” and it was a “lifestyle choice”. Outfuckingrageous, and the Occupy community refused to hold her feet to the fire, even though she was fake as fuck.
One real inspirational grass-roots activist organization emerged called Carry It Forward that was actively addressing the real life needs of homeless men, women, and children in that excessively rich and decadent, classist, navel gazing, gentrified town. It was followed by another organization that started passing out burritos for free to people who were hungry, no matter what their gender or skintone or college level or political party was. I loved those people. Heroic organizers and example setters. I always tell people they are a model for a better future and deserve all our support. Carry It Forward
I did not last long as an active participant in the Occupy Wall Street movement in Eugene, Oregon, because I don’t talk in soothing sing-song tones or wear happy bunny rabbits on my clothes ya know, these opportunistic grifters with pretentious Rainbow Family hippie dippy names all showed up wanting to get shit for free for having participated in a demonstration against wealth inequality, just based on their gender, there was all this non stop banter about so called privilege being babbled on and on about, predominantly by all the plainly oblivious, rich town, college educated property owners with way more privilege than we protestors they came to silence, and almost immediately, the city hall bureaucrats in bed with hotel owners and Nike sports tourism duped local gentrification middle classers into abandoning their initial Occupation, in downtown where it was supposed to be, saying it was inconvenient for Saturday Market vendors. They marched ’em into a woodsy park faraway from the banks and law offices downtown they were supposed to be(!!!) inconveniencing, that was the whole point of the protest. The hard fact was, the gentrified college town was dominated by rightwing pro war sports people, the fratboy tailgaters. The politeness scolding committees and ceramics majors and Democracy Now watching Whole Foods shoppers may have had many shitlib bumper stickers on their electric cars and perpetually claimed to be sensitive animal lovers and woke gender studiers, but they also did not want to see any tents or tarps inhabited by ikky, uneducated poors in the Wayne Morse Free Speech plaza, they frequently Kalled the Kkkops on panhandlers in the Trader Joe parking lot, yukky cigarette smokers flagrantly smoking cigarettes in the alley behind the live music bar, outside the Wow Hall. These were all self obsessed, me first, middle class, Thank Obamas. Way, way, way more concerned with their shitlib hipster image, of flaunting the Tibetan prayer flags and pink triangles and rainbow flags, Amish beards and pink hats, forever emphasizing the trending slogan of the week. “But Fuck Those Ugly Poors, They Are So Shabby & Disgraceful and Shoulda Gone To College!” They are the reason I always dropout, I would never wanna be around such asshole elitists. They are not interested in equality or solidarity-they are into being exclusionary, shit don’t stink, holier than thou, V.I.P.’s. There was one radical local leader named Kristen Carpenter who I admired. She understood our situation and did not hate the poor. Another helpful activist named Alley explained to me what cys born and heteronormative pass privilege were. I had no idea. I’m from Kentucky. I did not go to school for sensitivity feelings studies or Wokey McWokeness. Where I came from, nobody cared about our preferences or triggers or traumas or what we might find offensive. They told us to get over it. Moonshine, Coalmine, or Down the Line. Fuck you, Jack. “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ― Eugene V. Debs
“As long as he owns your tools he owns your job, and if he owns your job he is the master of your fate. You are in no sense a free man. You are subject to his interest and to his will. He decides whether you shall work or not. Therefore, he decides whether you shall live or die. And in that humiliating position any one who tries to persuade you that you are a free man is guilty of insulting your intelligence.” ― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs
“Russiagate conspiracy theory is dying & none too soon. Russiagate was the 1st step to manufacture consent for war w Russia, peddled by the same MIC tools now drumming up #UkraineCrisis. Screw warmongers pushing us to the brink. Pass the mic to the folks who got #Russiagate right!” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Democrats are absolutely fascists too, just consider who’s presided over the highest military budgets & police budgets in our history, along with the crackdown on dissidents & whistleblowers. Fascists purge the ballots of candidates they don’t like, as Dems have done to Greens.” (-Justin In BMore)
This reminds me a whole lot of TEENAGE DEVIL DOLLS playing that Boy’s Club Benefit for the soup kitchen in Springfield Missouri in 1987. We took the skinhead’s girlfriends skinny dipping at the resevoir that night. Tom Morello on Twitter: “Well I have a new favorite band now” / Twitter
They Demolished The Left And Burned The Blueprint: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
The empire’s information war against the left has been so successful that people don’t even know where “the left” is anymore. Most have it confused with things that are tangential like having pink hair and saying your pronouns, or outright right-wing like the Democratic Party.
Convincing everyone that communism is bad and unions work against your interests was just the first step. The next step was to confuse and muddy the waters of the political landscape so much that nobody even remembers where it was the left had been trying to get to — namely fighting and winning the class war that’s being waged upon the working class by the capitalist class, dismantling capitalism and imperialism, and creating a just and equitable society for everyone.
Now if you tell your average westerner to point to “the left”, they’ll point at “woke” hashtags and at political parties that are designed to support and protect the capitalist class. They didn’t just sabotage and destroy the left, they burnt the blueprints for how to rebuild it.
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The true left emphasizes the interests of marginalized communities with the goal of class solidarity. The fake left emphasizes the interests of marginalized communities with the goal of class division. You can sort out which is which by simple naked eye observation over time.
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Friendly reminder that no extremist group in the modern world is killing, oppressing and tyrannizing anywhere near as many people as the so-called moderates of the US-led world order.
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Find someone who loves you the way Americans love criticizing foreign governments that are far less murderous and tyrannical than their own government.
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Whenever I say the US is quantifiably the most murderous and tyrannical regime on earth, I always get a deluge of replies saying “Yeah well I’d rather live there than China!” Like where you live is the only issue that matters, not mass military slaughter. And I think that just says so much.
It genuinely never occurs to them that the people dying from military explosives being dropped on their homes and starving to death from economic sanctions are real human beings whose lives matter. All they can think of is what country they’d rather be using their smartphones in.
The fact that the US happens to export most (though certainly not all) of its murderousness and tyranny overseas does not make it less murderous or tyrannical than the governments the media have trained you to hate. The people it kills and terrorizes are just as human as you.
It says so much about how propaganda-addled that population is that the lives of foreigners don’t even register in their assessments of a government’s murderousness and brutality, skipping instead to the fact that they’re allowed to call the president “Brandon” on social media (which,as we’ve discussed previously, is not even a real measure of freedom anyway).
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Love how it’s almost universally agreed that Biden is knowingly starving people in Afghanistan for no valid reason and it’s still just happening anyway:
Virtually everyone who knows anything about the issue wants Biden to stop starving people in Afghanistan, even people who stand to benefit materially from their starvation. And he still just won’t:
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There’s a night and day difference between someone who wants the US to stop bullying and dominating the world and someone who wants the US to stop bullying and dominating some parts of the world so it can focus on bullying and dominating China. They’re really nothing alike.
Faux populists on the right oppose some aspects of the US war machine, but they support other aspects and don’t oppose the empire itself. Faux populists on the so-called left provide little or no resistance to the empire, they just want the empire to give them healthcare.
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Wealth is meaningless if everyone is wealthy. Power is meaningless if everyone has power. The kings of our day have a vested interest in keeping everyone poor and powerless, because if everyone is king, then no one is king.
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Imagine wanting to be a cop as a kid, wanting to grow up and get into the police academy so you can fight crime and bad guys, and then you get to the police force and you find out the whole job is writing tickets and destroying homeless encampments.
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Question mainstream politics and they’ll tell you to support the lesser evil. Question capitalism and they’ll say it’s better than any other system. Question the empire and they’ll say it’s better the US rules us than risk anyone else. It’s all lesser evilism, in support of evil.
Every time you point to the dysfunctional nature of our systems you’re told “Well it has to be that because otherwise it would be something far worse!” Oh yeah? Anyone benefiting from your believing that? Any powerful people pouring energy into mainstreaming that idea, perchance?
It’s like the abuser who says “Go on, leave! No one will ever love you like I do. You’ll fail and you’ll come crawling back!” And the victim stays out of fear of what’s on the other side of the unknowns inherent in that blind leap. But at some point you’ve got nothing to lose.(-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.” ― Eugene V. Debs
“U.S. politics under the duopoly is not about helping the people or planet. It’s about controlling the people and planet. And they control us by dividing us. They split the people into two teams (red vs. blue) while they are on the same team and serve the same corporate interests.” (-Ryan Knight)
Where I live now, some local complained to someone charging top dollar for a used weed whacker online, that he could get a new one for that same price, opining he will in all likelihood only be able to get like half of that price, to which the seller responded, “then it can sit in my garage until I die”. Ha. Too typical, all these old bastards have a dozen weed whackers. Entire arsenals of weed whackers. Weedwacking Hoarders of a Greedhead Nation. “Greed Is Good” they taught us. Bill Gates is the Decider Of All Things. He is Very Rich. A Saintly Super Savior Scientist Who Knows What’s Best Because His P.R. Companies Say He is Cuddy & Nerdy Philanthropic. Mass Hypnosis. Now, after selling all that shit from sweat shop laboring kids in China to all these consumerist boomers with the quadruple wide barn like garages full of RV’s and car collections, some corrupt little cabal in a desert ghost town’s passing ordinances insisting the code enforcement agency can spy over people’s fences via a private drone company, determine who owns “too many things” and declare one’s collections a “health risk” and come confiscate your belongings if deemed an “eyesore” by the town real estate titan or builder of overnight McMansions.
You know I always loved that Billy Idol song, “Catch My Fall”. Somebody told me it was based on “When You Were Mine” by Prince. “Trusted and broken my own word”.
I’m breaking my own main rule again, which is, “avoid any involvement with rich people”. Anytime I’ve ever, ever, ever so foolishly gotten involved or entangled with rich people, it costs me bigtime, I lose, they end up taking way more than just a pound of flesh, but here I am again, laboring for an egomaniac on a “spiritual enlightenment” moodswing powertrip, fucks up my whole week. Hopefully, I won’t get hurt. I’m depressed, beaten down, and my old lady does not want me to smoke or drink over it. I dunno, man. I’m sick of it all. All my muscles are sore from heavy lifting two days in a row, supposed to go houseclean an abandoned house full of spiders that’s been collecting dust for decades for get rich quick resell, but same boss lady that requires one pull weeds from the roots rather than weed whack, she does not want us to get the cheap flooring wet. Plus she is coming to stand over-supervise. How I got wrangled into this, I’ll never know. Some kinda punishment. Working for control freak, spare houses, art garden redecorating/remodelling millionaire heiresses is just Not my bag, at all, man. Desperate times for the desert dwelling, elderly goth, bad luck dishwasher. Somedays, when the kid wakes you up at the crack of dawn and you’re still sore from the days before, you just aint got it in ya to be bossed around some more by some insanely vain and inhumane rich person. That’s how I ended up spending most of my life washing dishes. If you get lucky sometimes you can just stand in the back, and stay busy and people will mostly leave you the fuck alone. Some asshole waitresses might splash you while uncaringly dumping their stacks of plates on the dish counter but when you finally mop up at the end of the night, there hopefully aint nobody round still keepin’ you hostage there off the clock with their Bullshit Narratives. Telling you how bad you suck and how great they are for having rich fucking parents. I can’t stand these nauseatingly self important rich motherfuckers. They always got a story bout how they got their castle with their karma by being so extra fancy artsy fartsy and Special. I’d stay outside on the stoop with the brown bag Unspecials, but of course, the Gentrification Police drove them all outta downtown years and years ago. The Corner Gang are all dead now, besides, like, maybe two guys who became big disappointment, boring sellout suckups to power. But I get it-that’s how they’re able to keep drinkin’ free now that they closed down the old dives, they hadda start kissin’ up to the sports goons. I hate this whole game, man, it hurts. Humiliating, degrading, hurts my pride, hell on the soul. Like Gore Vidal noted, it aint enough for these people to win, they got really dig their heel in the back of your neck and take more delight and glee forever about how bad you lost. If they can really hurt you bad enough, strip you of dignity, take away everything you ever loved, drive you outta town and away from their precious princeling in the ivory tower Turf they will still be gloating triumphantly about it on their narcissistic fame podcasts from their big white mama mansions, 25 years later. That’s their Main High, harming others. Rich people get so used to buying things, eating well, traveling, doing all the best drugs, seeing concerts, visiting museums, and bathing in all that fucking self importance champagne, that they end up needing to fuck with other people’s lives just for fun. That’s like their sport-meddling with the little people’s destinies. Driving wedges between people, casting some out, hiring others, sexually harassing all. That’s how we ended up with Jamie Dimon and Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein and Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab and the Cheneys and Clintons and Trumps and Gina Haspel. The people who rule over us are not caring nurturers or sensitive philanthropists, fretting about the well being of the delicate spotted owls.
They lie to us all our lives about what soldiers do, about what cops do, about what journalists do, about what presidents do.
They lie to us all our lives about how laws are made, about how kings are made, about how culture is made, about how norms are made.
They lie to us all our lives about what our minds are for, about what our hearts are for, about what our neighbors are for, about what foreigners are for.
The world is confusing and they make it more confusing, on purpose, because they thrive in confusion, and now we watch as the world turns to ashes carried on the back of confusion made by news men and corporate creatures who eat ashes.
And we stumble in confusion, eyes darting behind lenses made of confusion, trying to understand with minds made of confusion, trying to feel our way through with hearts shackled by confusion. Searching for an angel egg we know is there but can’t seem to find because who turned out the goddamn lights? And why can’t I figure out which way is up? And oop off we go chasing distractions again for the next news cycle the next election cycle the next spin cycle the next amnesia cycle.
They lie to us all our lives, and then when we catch them in a lie they just say, Oh, the person who gave you that information is bad, or, Oh, that came from Russian hackers, or, We made a mistake but we don’t do that anymore, or, Don’t be a conspiracy theorist, or, Hey! Look over there! or, We already knew that, it’s no big deal.
And then everyone forgets, and the confusion churns on.
But the angel egg is there in our mind’s eye, in our heart of hearts, haunting our dreams, calling us home, the embryo holding our original eyes for whenever we are ready to claim them.
They lie to us all our lives about what our country is, about what our government is, about what money is, about what nature is.
They lie to us all our lives about where the answers are, about where our friends are, about where our enemies are, about where our claws are.
They lie to us all our lives, and they make the world confusing, and beneath that confusion we are watching them with our original eyes, with our primal eyes, with our natural eyes, with our uncivilized eyes.
Watching them, like lions watching a gazelle, and waiting, with primordial patience, until it is time to make our move.
(-Caitlin Johnstone)
WHEN THEY SILENCE AND CENSOR AND SLANDER AND SMEAR THE COLLEGE PROFESSORS FOR TEACHING ABOUT WHAT PROPAGANDA IS:
BROTHERS AND SISTERS AND FRIENDS OF THE REVOLUTION, REMEMBER TO HELP YOUR NEIGHBOR WHENEVER YOU CAN, SET AN EXAMPLE, PASS ALONG THE VEGGIES AND HEIRLOOM SEEDS. BOYCOTT PIG MEDIA! DISOBEY EVIL BILLIONAIRES! THINK OF EACH OTHER AND NOT JUST YOUR OWN SELFISH SELFIE SELVES! STAY WILD! STAY FREE! GOOD NIGHT & GOOD LUCK!
I don’t know ’bout you, but I’m not really sleeping. Restless and upset about this Assange railroading. Call me old fashioned, I still believe in freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, legit democracy, free speech, and a free press-and REAL ROCKNROLL. I don’t know if you know, or noticed, or can even bring yourself to believe it, but since the perverse Citizen United shady supreme court ruling that made it legal for corporations to outright, straightup just buy politicians saying bribery money is free speech, the bad guy billionaires have bought up all the institutions and media and regulatory agencies and social safety nets that were supposed to protect us and weaponzized ’em against us. Even misusing the traditional lexicon of real people’s movements, hijacking that shit for profit. CIA people posing as journalists. Journalists kidnapped and killed. The whole shebang is fucked up and we are ruled by shadow tyrants we never really voted for. Stiv sang, “they take their pills and they never question why”. Today’s red carpet rockstars help The Man gaslight the people when they actively promote creepy elite abusive reset agendas, and act as propagandists brazenly promoting bullshit wars, police state spying, journalists in torture gulags, and official narratives, alla showbiz has been weaponized. If you want a job in the fields of media or entertainment now, you gotta be on board with the one world government sleaze-police. All the comedians, whistleblowers, truth tellers, even medical professionals and intelligence experts who deviate at all from strict top down narrative control are being relentlessly censored, deplatformed, smeared and demonetized. In the words of Lee Camp who’s been kicked off multiple platforms for his anti imperialist views, and advocating for Assange, “This is the most disgusting morally bankrupt decision in recent years. The UK Home Secretary just now signed off on extraditing Julian Assange to the US to be tortured for the rest of his life for the crime of journalism.” Never forget the champagne swilling fake punks and soldout cowardly politicians who never fought for Julian Assange. THANKS to Vivien Westwood, Banksy, Pamela Anderson and Susan Sarandon for championing a genuine free press that holds the powerful to account.
BOOTSEY X
Here’s a cool cat who never gets enough credit, the good brother BOOTSEY. He was a “Pusherman Of Love”. It’s funny ya know I met that dude through a weird series of events like twenty some years ago and did not “get” him at first. I remember looking at like, his low budget artwork and hearing all his machinegun speed raps and faster than light velocity and kung fu moves and James Brown kneedrops and elaborate high five handshakes and shit, and it took me awhile for it to set in, what a righteous rocknroll motherfucker he was. One of a kind. He’d drummed for a famous Detroit punk band called The Mutants and lobbied actively for the drumstool in one of my shortlived garage gangs, offered to put me and my old lady up when we were homeless. His apartment burntdown back in the day with all the rare records and shit and I told Brother Wayne and him n Margaret sent Bootsy a check to help out-how cool and right the fuck is that? Man, so yeah. If you like crazy goodtimes Motor City Motorbooty Motherfuckery, here’s some BOOTSY X & THE LOVEMASTERS for ya. I miss the brother, he was good people. (RIP)
Also really missing the midwestern legend “Cowboy” BOBBY CLOYD who played in summa my smalltown post punk and new wave bands back in the 80’s.
“Juneteenth’s only value is if it becomes a day of serious study and political education. That process can start with learning why “Jim Crow Joe” Biden received 90% of the Black vote or why the 2020 rebellions after George Floyd’s murder created a need for the state to placate Black people, if only symbolically. The Civil War is a perfect starting point for this practice. If there is a day off it should be used wisely and well. In the future, all people’s holidays should stay that way. Perhaps they should be kept secret so that commemorations aren’t used to give legitimacy to bad actors. It is too late for Juneteenth, but the hard lesson can be the beginning of something far more valuable.”
(-Margaret Kimberley) “Hard to express how much better US political discourse — and policy — would be if the left had an actual anti-establishment dissident-leader like
@JLMelenchon. But alas, it only has Dem Party loyalists like Bernie and AOC who play-act, then faithfully snap into line.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Even though I have some issues with Melenchon, this is a left position. Unlike the pro-U.S. imperialist collaborators & left opportunists we have in the U.S. You know, the ones who believed Russiagate, condemned Assange & get misty eyed when they hear Zelensky.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Venezuelan fake president Juan Guaido was attacked the other day, having his clothes ripped off. Only the US could create & continue to support such a clown. Only the US has the hubris to think we can announce a random hack as the president of another country.” (-Lee Camp)
“What a coward Anthony Albanese is. Julian #Assange‘s approved extradition has stirred not a peep from the new PM of Julian’s homeland, where Labor’s doe-eyed believe ‘Albo’ is different in Washington-sucking Canberra. No, he’s not. The killing of #Assange is our final surrender.” (-John Pilger)
“So Marjorie Taylor Greene is standing up for Julian Assange and press freedom while
and the squad remain silent. If this doesn’t wake you up to how phony and fake these so-called progressives are then nothing will. #FraudSquad” (-Ryan Knight)
“If I’m Prime Minister on Monday, Julian will be naturalized a French citizen and we will ask for him to be sent to us. Mr. Assange should be decorated for his services to the French people.” (- Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of France’s left coalition NUPES)
“Compare this statement to the complete and absolute silence from
on Julian Assange. This is what a proper, outspoken left sounds like, not that garbage they give you from the Democratic party.” (-Richard Medhurst)
FREE ASSANGE! RESIST THE HONKY DEATH MACHINE! FIGHT THE POWER!
Man, the empire could care less about freedom, democracy, human rights, the emperor is naked and none of the people I grew up with can even like THINK anymore, they just do and say whatever the tv tells them to, it’s REALLY “Twilight Zone”. They never even freed Leonard Peltier, and it seems these insanely sociopathic ruling class evil oligarchs are hellbent on crucifying Assange, it is sickening to me, that people are still insisting they live in any kind of democracy, when obviously, everything is being done now exclusively to benefit weaponmaker profits, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Harari and Schwab’s preferences, they own the media, the government, the regulatory agencies, the whole system is corrupt. It’s all a sham, man. The UK media even convinced the public that Corbyn was racist, same way Snaky Liz Warren smeared Sanders as a sexist. Now I don’t think Corbyn is racist and I think Bernie’s a sellout, not a sexist, but tv is a powerful drug, man, it just baffles the sheep into a helpless hypnospell. Black Rock and Vanguard are these obscene monopolies, buying up everything. EVERYTHING. Most people I know have never heard of either company. Like George Carlin said, THE OWNERS want to keep us stupid and have spent the past 25 years dumbing us down. I told myself and my imaginary constituents I was gonna step away from online content generating for awhile, but man, I’m so upset about poor saintly JULIAN ASSANGE, it affects my whole mood. I have to fight for whistleblowers while there is a breath left in my body. I think everybody with any kind of platform should do at least one thing for Assange everyday. He’s sacrificed everything for US Dumb motherfuckers who are fed a nonstop stream of pro war and police state propaganda, because they still impulsively watch legacy media, think they can be LEFTIST and not support ASSANGE, because their soldout, cowardly centrist shitlib politicians refuse to fight for him, and the tv people have slandered him so mercilessly. Hillary said she wanted to drone him-she said that IN PUBLIC and people I know are still peachy keen on her. Not me, man. I’m seeing people on THE RIGHT stepping up to defend ASSANGE, but not your pants suit mimosa brunching heroines of the squad, or fakeass, Biden endorsing, Sanders. BATSHIT! THAT IS BATSHIT! People I used to know are STILL making excuses for BIDEN and blaming TRUMP for everything fuckedup BIDEN does. Sheer madness! Lyn Cheney is a diabolical fascist, she is not your friend-her family privatized endless war by hiring all those proxy armies to topple other people’s governments, they built torture gulags and spy on your phonecalls and grope your granny in the airports but mf’s still think she is their special friend cause Trump said sexist shit to Billy Bush. No shitlibs stopped to ask themselves, why are BUSH relatives embedded in the legacy media. This country is hopeless. One of my activist comrades who was a powerful advocate for houseless people in the Pacific Northwest moved to FRANCE and says Murkkkans would SHIT themselves if they found out how much groovier and free it is there. I hope the Klaus Schwab puppet Macron loses his election, but fear the globalists in charge of the voting software will have it fixed. Nobody in my country besides the banking elites, military industrial complex and big pharma ever wanted Biden, and I’ll never believe he beat Bernie on Super Tuesday in Michigan, but here he is, the “nothing will change” guy, sniffing your daughter’s hair, playing chicken with nukes and allowing corporations to hammer us everyday people senseless with their ruthless price gouging under cover of Covid and their fucking played out “Russiagate!” narratives and Capitol Hill bullshit. Sanders tax the rich platform filled stadiums but he tragically got in line when the higher ups told him to. Won’t even stand up for Assange. PATHETIC! SAD! FRIGHTENING, really. I guess he really was just a sheepdog for the DNC, looks like it’s up to you and me, now.
I just finished Debbie Harry‘s autobiography that I got for Father’s Day and man it is so good-what a life she had! Did acid with Alan Watts and Timothy Leary. Living on Saint Mark’s Place in the sixties, going to the Dom to see the Velvets, hangin’ out with the Dolls, friends with Basquiat and Burroughs, muse of Warhol, brushing with Ali and Dahli, she waited on Miles at Max’s! Acted in “HAIRSPRAY”, John Waters best movie! Made her own clothes, lived by her own rules, did drugs, had sex, explored every kind of underground culture, helped invent punk rock and new wave. Took Duran on tour. Sacrificed her career to care for her loved one, something that she shrugs off as no big deal, just because she is a thoroughly decent and sincere, loving human being in a time when most people only give a fuck about their own money, property, fame or prestige. She basically did everything they torture and punish people for in the flyover states-she was a true trailblazing, hell raising, punk bohemian from way back! I love her! BLONDIE are still so great! Clem is probably my fave drummer. She’s so groovy, such a dream. Overcame all kinds of harrowing horrors and horrific experiences, and still shines bright from the inside out. Chris Stein did some production work for legendary Canadian rock star, Chris Barry from 39 Steps. None of these awful fucking McDonna mockingbird media mk ultra beta kitten techno hookers forced on us against our will nowadays can even hold a candle to her, man. She’s like 76 or something and she is still utterly fucking ATOMIC!
FLESH FOR LULU
It’s crazy listening to all the old music in these dark times cause even eighties bands we considered poppy lightweight fluff back in the day had so much better content than the toxic phony bullshit they hurl towards us nowadays. Can you imagine a rock group saying this kinda stuff getting ANY airplay now? Forget about it!
Me n Nick were Myspace pals and correspondents for years when I’d become primary caregiver of my two middle children and brought my older teenager into the house, but was still trying to get a little record deal on an indie label, and he even offered to let my tiny little, nobody band open for some dates when he and Rocco had scheduled like I dunno-a dozen reunion shows here in the states. A former bandmate put the ixnay on the opportunity, cause he was in several other bands already and kinda just probably spread himself too thin, already, which was always very sad to me cause I always looked up to Nick and Rocco, and had been a devoted fan of theirs from a young age. He’s another one of those blinding bright comets that you just always wish was still here with us “in the flesh”. I keep his wife and daughters in my prayers. We miss ya, Nick. I encouraged him to blow the cobwebs offa this old deep track and he brought it outta mothballs and started playing it again. (RIP) NICK
KARL ROVE BRAGGED ABOUT IT BACK IN THE 9/11 ERA-HOW THEY ARE AN EMPIRE NOW AND CAN ENFORCE ANY FALSE REALITY THEY WANT….
In October 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote a first-person article for The New York Times about the presidency of 43rd U.S. President George W. Bush, in which he included a grandiose quote from someone described only as a “senior adviser to Bush.”
Many have assumed the comment was made by Bush political adviser Karl Rove, though there isn’t any publicly available evidence to that effect. Here is what Suskind wrote:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
“On this day, it is worth remembering that corporate media outlets played a key role in condemning Julian Assange to his fate.” (-Alan MacLeod)
“Democrats spent years blaming their 2016 loss on Jill Stein and Susan Sarandon and then the second they got back in power they made their slogan “Vote for us because we’ll make everything more expensive and do absolutely nothing to help you.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
WIKILEAKS BREAKING: UK Home Secretary approves extradition of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to the US where he would face a 175 year sentence – A dark day for Press freedom and for British democracy The decision will be appealed.
“Hard to believe, but it looks real. Every serious press freedom group in the world has protested this. It is an appalling symbol of how far the British and American governments’ commitment to human rights has declined. How can we condemn authoritarian abuses abroad like this?” (-Edward Snowden)
“Home Secretary Priti Patel has approved the extradition of Julian #Assange to an American hellhole. A new appeal will now challenge the political rottenness of British ‘justice’. Either we raise our voices as never before, or our silence colludes in the death of an heroic man.” (-John Pilger)
“NYC is one of the most expensive places to live on earth. The median rent has risen to $4000 in Manhattan. Homeless services and the education budget was slashed by over $200 million. Meanwhile, NYPD gets over 10.4 billion and Eric Adams is wondering why there’s crime.” (-Olayemi Olurin)
“Assange revealed United States war crimes so he went to prison and not the war criminals.” (-Black In The Empire)
“We’re going to fight this… I’m going to spend every waking hour fighting for Julian until he is free, until justice is served” (-Julian Assange’s wife responding to decision to approve his extradition to the US for publishing, where he faces a 175 year sentence)
“Julian Assange’s case is so important because we’ve lost journalism. We’ve lost the ability now to find the truth.”—
“Extraditing a foreign journalist for exposing your war crimes is as tyrannical an agenda as you could possibly come up with. The US, UK and Australia colluding toward this end shows us that these are member states of a single empire. Assange keeps exposing the true face of power.” (-Caitlyn Johnstone)
“Increases for the pentagon, increases for the domestic army known as the police. It is quite clear that the capitalist rulers are going to fight to the last working class & colonized person to maintain white Western colonial/capitalist dominance.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“The Home Secretary’s decision to allow Julian Assange’s extradition to the US is utterly wrong and marks a very dark day for press freedom and the justice system. We will continue the fight to free Julian Assange.”
(-Jeremy Corbyn)
“(It) has really been a war waged via technologies and their masters to dissolve human culture and disempower human beings. It is a war on free thought and free speech — a war against our most fundamental beliefs.” (- Dr Naomi Wolf)
“We know one of the reasons the U.S. backed a coup in Haiti is because they were thinking of raising the minimum wage. And of course, multinational corporations could not have that.” WATCH
Man, I remember the suckshit nineties when it all started going downhill, ya know for a few years, big record labels just signed so much horrible shit, post Nirvana, I really do feel like they were trying to assassinate real rocknroll systemically. In all the even medium sized cities, all these franchise clone tribute acts killed any kind of genuine music scenes with their high school social jockeying richkid reindeer games and sadly derivative, second hand, trust fund garbage-rawk. One band from that time that was writing standout, standup, REAL HEARTFELT POP music, the likes of which we never seem to hear anymore were Material Issue, who were too good for this world. Of course their genius singer songwriter, JIM ELLISON killed himself over a loveless chick. (RIP)
They don’t write ’em like this no more:
THEY WROTE FROM THE HEART!
GARY SUNSHINE
My ace best pals and me used to follow CIRCUS OF POWER around as kids, I mean we’d drive fifteen hours to see ’em, no sweat, just loved their music and whole vibe really. They were like our Doors or Stones. They were all really nice to us, too, which was thrilling, cause at least a couple of us were much hated Edward Scissorhands outcasts in the hick town where we grew up. Meant a lot when some cool older rocknroll dudes kinda went outta their way to talk to us and ask us sensitive questions and let us drink backstage with ’em. Then they stroll out on stage and tear the damn place down. FREAK SOCIETY! Now Gary writes songs like a cross between Tom Petty and Paul Westerberg, lives in the midwest, plays intimate gigs at pizza places and bars, sometimes accompanied by his teenage daughter who sings. He guest starred on a recent CIRCUS OF POWER tune called “Magic Gator Boogie”. Ryan sadly passed away, Ricky is still in L.A., I think he sells guitars. No idea whatever happened to Zowie, but if you do, hit me up. You can find Gary on Facebook.
They got some comedian insisting cancel culture is relative but some voices are not even allowed near a microphone anymore because they contradict official narratives and that freak out the control crazy neocon deep state establishment. Like Hersh, who said the whole official Bin Ladin story was just fake ass fictitious boogeyman bullshit. Pulitzer prize winning old school journalist Seymour Hersh is shadow banned by big 5 corporations media. But your shitlib friends only watch tv and only care about official television narratives.
It is perfectly obvious by now, to anyone who cares to look, that mainstream media in America and the other Western powers are not reporting the Ukraine crisis accurately.
Let me try that another way: The government-supervised New York Times and the rest of the corporate-owned media on both sides of the Atlantic lie routinely to their readers and viewers as to why Russia intervened in Ukraine, the progress of its military operation, the conduct of Ukrainian forces, and America’s role in purposely provoking and prolonging this crisis.
So far as I know, this is the first war in modern history with no objective, principled coverage in mainstream media of day-to-day events and their context. None. It is morn-to-night propaganda, disinformation and lies of omission — most of it fashioned by the Nazi-infested Zelensky regime in Kiev and repeated uncritically as fact.
There is one thing worse than this degenerate state of affairs. It is the extent to which the media’s malpractice is perfectly fine to most Americans. Tell us what to think and believe no matter if it is true, they say, and we will think and believe it. Show us some pictures, for images are all.
There are larger implications to consider here. Critical as it is that we understand this conflict, Ukraine is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we have become. For more Americans than I wish were so, reality forms only in images. These Americans are no longer occupants of their own lives. Risking a paradox, what they take to be reality is detached from reality.
This majority — and it is almost certainly a majority — has no thoughts or views except those first verified through the machinery of manufactured images and “facts.” Television screens, the pages of purportedly authoritative newspapers, the air waves of government-funded radio stations — NPR, the BBC — serve to certify realities that do not have to be real, truths that do not have to be true.
This leaves us in a sad and very parlous place.
Sad: Is there some state more pitiful than having no genuine connection to one’s own thoughts, perceptions, experience—altogether to one’s life? If Americans are not a profoundly sad people behind all the smiles we see in advertising, idiotic comedy shows, and on Facebook, then I must be missing something.
Parlous: Over the course of some decades — from the mid–Cold War years, I would say — Americans have been rendered highly vulnerable to the manipulations of those who control the images through which most people have come to live. Anyone who has read a history of the 20th century knows where this can lead.
The five weeks that have passed since the Russian intervention on Feb. 24 have been shocking on both these counts. The derelictions of the press and broadcasters are without precedent in my lifetime, and with Vietnam, the Iraq War, and the covert operation in Syria among the wreckage in the rearview mirror, this is saying something.
I will let the American public’s enthusiasm for the sinkhole that is Ukraine, the Azov Battalion, and the ridiculous posturing of President Volodymyr Zelensky, the comedian who is no longer funny, speak for itself.
I dunno how I feel about these guys really, it’s mixed cause obviously they can PLAY and I get why Dweezil Zappa and the Van Halen News Desk love ’em, they share some of the same influences and style as me and my teenage cohorts, but what is it? I can’t quite put my finger on it, just for me, it feels like something’s missing, just hard not to smile when I hear these guys singing about the real nitty gritty with all their slickness and fancy shit. But def. worth mentioning.
The eleven-year persecution of Julian Assangewas extended and escalated on Friday morning.The British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, approved the U.S.’s extradition request to send Julian Assange to Virginia to stand trial on eighteen felony charges under the 1917 Espionage Act and other statutes in connection with the 2010 publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of documents showing widespread corruption, deceit, and war crimes by American and British authorities along with their close dictatorial allies in the Middle East.
This decision is unsurprising — it has been obvious for years that the U.S. and UK are determined to destroy Assange as punishment for his journalism exposing their crimes — yet it nonetheless further highlights the utter sham of American and British sermons about freedom, democracy and a free press. Those performative self-glorifying spectacles are constantly deployed to justify these two countries’ interference in and attacks on other nations, and to allow their citizens to feel a sense of superiority about the nature of their governments. After all, if the U.S. and UK stand for freedom and against tyranny, who could possibly oppose their wars and interventions in the name of advancing such lofty goals and noble values?
Having reported on the Assange case for years, on countless occasions I’ve laid out the detailed background that led Assange and the U.S. to this point. There is thus no need to recount all of that again; those interested can read the granular trajectory of this persecution here or here. Suffice to say, Assange — without having been convicted of any crime other than bail jumping, for which he long ago served out his fifty-week sentence — has been in effective imprisonment for more than a decade.
In 2012, Ecuador granted Assange legal asylum from political persecution. It did so after the Swedish government refused to pledge that it would not exploit the WikiLeaks founder’s travel to Sweden to answer sex assault accusations as a pretext to turn him over to the U.S. Fearing what of course ended up happening — that the U.S. was determined to do everything possible to drag Assange back to U.S. soil despite his not being a U.S. citizen and never having spent more than a few days on U.S. soil, and intending to pressure their long-time-submissive Swedish allies to turn him over once he was on Swedish soil — the government of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa concluded Assange’s core civic rights were being denied and thus gave him refuge in the tiny Ecuadorian Embassy in London: the classic reason political asylum exists.
When Trump officials led by CIA Director Mike Pompeo bullied Correa’s meek successor, ex-President Lenin Moreno, to withdraw that asylum in 2019, the London Police entered the embassy, arrested Assange, and put him in the high-security Belmarsh prison (which the BBC in 2004 dubbed “the British Guantanamo”), where he has remained ever since.
After the lowest-level British court in early 2021 rejected the U.S. extradition request on the ground that Assange’s physical and mental health could not endure the U.S. prison system, Assange has lost every subsequent appeal. Last year, he was permitted to marry his long-time girlfriend, the British human rights lawyer Stella Morris Assange, who is also the mother of their two young children. An extremely unusual unanimity among press freedom and civil liberties groups was formed in early 2021 to urge the Biden administration to cease its prosecution of Assange, but Biden officials — despite spending the Trump years masquerading as press freedom advocates — ignored them (an interview conducted last week with Stella Assange by my husband, the Brazilian Congressman David Miranda, on Brazil’s Press Freedom Day, regarding the latest developments and toll this has taken on the Assange family, can be seen here).
The Home Secretary’s decision this morning — characteristically subservient and obedient of the British when it comes to the demands of the U.S. — does not mean that Assange’s presence on U.S. soil is imminent. Under British law, Assange has the right to pursue a series of appeals contesting the Home Secretary’s decision, and will likely do so. Given that the British judiciary has more or less announced in advance their determination to follow the orders of their American masters, it is difficult to see how these further proceedings will have any effect other than to delay the inevitable.
But putting oneself in Assange’s position, it is easy to see why he is so eager to avoid extradition to the U.S. for as long as possible. The Espionage Act of 1917 is a nasty and repressive piece of legislation. It was designed by Woodrow Wilson and his band of authoritarian progressives to criminalize dissent against Wilson’s decision to involve the U.S. in World War I. It was used primarily to imprison anti-war leftists such as Eugene Debs, as well as anti-war religious leaders such as Joseph Franklin Rutherford for the crime of publishing a book condemning Wilson’s foreign policy.
One of the most insidious despotic innovations of the Obama administration was to repurpose and revitalize the Wilson-era Espionage Act as an all-purpose weapon to punish whistleblowers who denounced Obama’s policies. The Obama Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all previous administrations combined — in fact, three times as many as all prior presidents combined. One whistleblower charged by Obama officials under that law is NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who in 2013 revealed mass domestic spying of precisely the kind that Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (now of CNN) falsely denied conducting when testifying to the Senate, which led to legislative curbs enacted by the U.S. Congress, and which courts have ruled unconstitutional and illegal.
What makes this law so insidious is that, by design, it is almost impossible for the government to lose. As I detailed in a Washington Post op-ed when the indictment was first revealed — arguing why it poses the greatest threat to press freedoms in the West in years — this 1917 law is written as a “strict liability” statute, meaning that the defendant is not only guilty as soon as there is proof that they disclosed classified information without authorization, but they are also barred from raising a “justification” defense — meaning they cannot argue to the jury of their peers that it was not only permissible but morally necessary to disclose that information because of the serious wrongdoing and criminality it revealed on the part of the nation’s most powerful political officials. That 1917 law, in other words, is written to offer only show trials but not fair trials. No person in their right mind would willingly submit to prosecution and life imprisonment in the harshest American penitentiaries under an indictment brought under this fundamentally corrupted law.
Whatever else one might think of Assange, there is simply no question that he is one of the most consequential, pioneering, and accomplished journalists of his time. One could easily make the case that he occupies the top spot by himself. And that, of course, is precisely why he is in prison: because, just like free speech, “free press” guarantees in the U.S. and UK exist only on a piece of parchment and in theory. Citizens are free to do “journalism” as long as it does not disturb or anger or impede real power centers. Employees of The Washington Post and CNN are “free” to say what they want as long as what they are saying is approved and directed by the CIA or the content of their “reporting” advances the interests of the Pentagon’s sprawling war machine.
Real journalists often face threats of prosecution, imprisonment or even murder, and sometimes even mean tweets. Much of the American corporate media class has ignored Assange’s persecution or even cheered it precisely because he shames them, serving as a vivid mirror to show them what real journalism is and how they are completely bereft of it. And the American and British governments have successfully exploited the petty jealousies and insecurities of their failed, vapid and pointless media servants to get away with imposing the single greatest threat to press freedom in the West without much protest at all.
Free speech and press freedoms do not exist in reality in the U.S. or the UK. They are merely rhetorical instruments to propagandize their domestic population and justify and ennoble the various wars and other forms of subversion they constantly wage in other countries in the name of upholding values they themselves do not support. The Julian Assange persecution is a great personal tragedy, a political travesty and a grave danger to basic civic freedoms. But it is also a bright and enduring monument to the fraud and deceit that lies at the heart of these two governments’ depictions of who and what they are. (-GLENN GREENWALD)
“It’s when the woman of my dreams…oh my god, that’s the woman on the floor…” (-Jim Carroll)
I’m a diehard CIRCUS OF POWER super-fan. When Show-biz Al put his brown leather strides from the Motor video up for auction, I was asking myself if we really needed a car. They made anthemic classic rock for the sleazepunk generation. Their first record was perfect, in my book. Song for song, it was better than The Cult‘s “Electric”, Zodiac Mindwarp‘s “Tattooed Beat Messiah”, or Warrior Soul‘s first album. I loved every song, they inspired my smalltown friends and I to put together our first slapdash band of low budgeted, theatrical shock-rock, pancake makeup and black lacey glam, and cemetery loitering guttersnipes. We had a very short run as the flyover state people’s favorite makeup and leather wearing ghoulish garbagemen, but were banned from the bars for refusing to play Bon Jovi covers, so we busied ourselves throwing extravagant house parties and gigging at redneck hog roasts for overwhelmingly Republican bikers who never knew what to think about us, because while three of us could maybe even pass for bikers themselves all garbed as they were in the Mindwarp leather, and all our bodyguard roadies were very menacing and potentially dangerous motorcyclists; two of us were Nik Fiend and Lux Interior impersonator death rock drag queen, gawky androgynes that the Midwestern wrestling teams and preppies and dumbfuck rednecks all wanted to kill. We took many stabs at covering Circus Of Power tunes that always went over way better with the rowdy farm boys and aging VIet Nam vets that made up our core audience, than the Gun Club and Cramps tunes we also raved through, our originals were pretty dodgy back then. I mainly wrote many protest-songs primarily about how we should all have the right to wear blue lipstick and Aqua-Net in uptight church towns. No one outside of Lower Manhattan had ever heard of Rupaul back then, and the rural community suburbanites were furious over Annie Lennox and Dee Snider and Boy George. Circus Of Power were one of the only groups who ever made us mohawked gothniks, AC/DC hicks, and ridiculously safety pinned and fish-netted glam brats always pile into our desperately unreliable vehicles, paid for with Little Ceasar‘s pizza delivery tips and record store quarters to travel cross-country to see them, whenever they were in striking distance. We’d drive 12-15 hours on a school night! When Circus Of Power opened for the Ramones, we had to leave before the Ramones, to speed-demon our way back to Ohio to be at work in the morning, to pay rent on our tiny shoebox apartment, where we drank heavily, listened to records, wooed heavily hairsprayed women who liked The Cure, and dreamed of someday opening at the Lismar Lounge for our supreme metal gurus, Circus Of Power! They were all great guys, who wrote these beautiful and extraordinary, timeless songs about little witches and white trash queens, that connected with us, in a deeply personal way. Their All-American brand of greasy muscle car rocknroll was always equal parts Lower Eastside sleazepunk, heavy for your head ferociousness and Bowery hardcore matinee guts, but with a totally F.M. friendly, traditional pop songcraft sensibility, like Chuck Berry, Hank Williams Senior, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. When some fans put together a tribute cd to them some years ago, my hoodlum-thundering main henchman and I were crestfallen that our drummer was in the hoozgow, prohibiting us from contributing a track. No one thought to do the song we had picked-out, and hell, we ain’t dead quite yet, so I guess there’s even some faint hope that we might still record our version as a loving tribute to our Circus Of Power idols in the future. If we live long enough.
Former CIRCUS OF POWER guitarist, GARY SUNSHINE is a talented, thoughtful, observant storyteller with a very lovable and self-deprecating, bruised romantic, curmudgeonly personality. I can always relate to his hardluck stories and wry humor, we kind of have a similar worldview as weary, tired old fathers, who suck at lawn work. If you are a hardcore, signed on for life rocknroller-someone who’s been in bands, worked for years in dead-end record stores, had their heart broken by the business part of rocknrolll, or watched in horror these past thirty years as the billionaires bought up all the media to bamboozle us into okey-dokeying a police state and endless war, that constantly, abusively, bombards us with no-heart, push-button, advertisement-pop, and mindless consumerist lifestyle programming, his very humane and soulful songs will be of particular interest to you. He’s very eclectic and original, sixties soul, the blues, eighties college rock, heartland Americana, Wilco meets Tom Waits. A sensitive, smartass Dylan for aging gutterpunks. Bukowski as a pop star. He has so much genuine article heart, and an effortless ability to lyrically show you these sonic vignettes that are like little indie-films, the kind that don’t get made too often, anymore. He’s kinda like a novelist who plays really badass guitar. The modern lineup of Circus Of Power continues to churn out tremendously powerful, high-quality, socially conscious rocknroll motherfuckery, but there was something undeniably magical about that initial Alex, Gary, Ricky, Ryan, and Zowie lineup. Crooner Alex Mitchell‘s outstanding writing prowess, humor, charisma, nerve, and remarkable stage presence allows him to attract some of the best players in the rocknroll underground-people like cosmic space wizard, Billy Tsounis, but Gary Sunshine has surprised everyone with his own unique and distinctive solo songwriting, that has a really endearingly charming and down to Earth quality about it, much like Guy Clarke or John Prine, he has chosen the path of humility rather than the path of glory, and the fans have been clamoring for a new CD, so he has generously obliged us. Not everybody who watched Headbanger’s Ball or hungout at the Cat Club or Cathouse will probably like the worndown and torndown, astute voice of experience, it’s the lament of the everyday people, the working class nobodies-all us coffeehouse and truck stop loitering, haunted souls. A true confessions collection of wistful, heartfelt tunes about hangups and hangovers, endless and unstoppable grief, disappointment and regrets, lingering remnants and sad reminders of long gone dreams come true and the inevitably accompanying crash, out of proportion expectations, middle-aged uncertainty, screwtop convenience store wino poems, and a jumbled up clusterfuck, broken hearted, mental jigsaw puzzle of good times gone, scratched out year book pictures, souvenirs, half torn out stacks of stinky old rock magazines, empty cans, coffee cups, front porch rocking chairs, broken lawn mowers, and lost loves walking out the door, but I sure do. This disc is jammed with thoughtful prose and vivid emotions, sweetness and coolness and autumn time lamentations. I can strongly identify with Mister Sunshine-neither one of us are really the same skull ringed, all night rocker, highway storming, hedonistic hell raisers we once were, but people got used to that one dimensional cartoon idea they had of us from thirty years ago, so they seldom imagine the actual reality of either one of us wearing our kid’s construction paper and aluminum foil pirate hats while we vacuum the living room and do more laundry-the early wakeup calls and medications, feeding the cats and making more coffee, packing school lunches and muttering obscenities to ourselves while we step barefooted on little dinosaurs and Legos every morning. He always makes me feel better about my own confused and somewhat still pained and tortured awkward attempts at something like managing all these very demanding and stressful, taxing obligations and adult-hood responsibilities. I’m not very good at any of it. I got arthritis, bad eyesight, bad knees, and a mountain of persistently nagging memories and unresolved desires and torment and abandonment issues, while Gary always manages to find the comic divinity in all that stuff . The title track, “BEER, PICKS, AND OLD RECORDS” reminds me of America’s Greatest Unknown Songwriter: PAUL K. & THE PRAYERS, and if you know me at all, you know, how that is basically, my highest praise. “I should have gone to college, made something of myself…”, sings the guy who toured with Black Sabbath, starred for years on Headbanger’s Ball, played on Guns N Roses “Chinese Democracy” and taught Axl Rose how to play guitar. This is heart wrenching, feelings-charged stuff of intimate pain and pathos, that me and all my mortality-confronting, fifty-something, dishwasher amigos have all come to know too well. “Banging On My Head” talks about the accrued weight of one’s history, hijacked aspirations, unexpected forks in the road, when all your most cherished and beloved dreams are all casually shattered on the kitchen floor, betrayal, let-downs, failures, anxieties, coulda-beens, fuckups, and sadness. “But I Got My Feelings Hurt” is very sweet and countryish, Bob Stinson or Spencer P. Jones style, basement blues-imagine ole Izzy Stradlin jammin’ with Paul Westerberg and Dave Minehan on Mojo Nixon‘s Pabst patio. “Love Turns” is really deep and lovely, like all the best stuff by vintage Replacements. You can feel the acute agony and aching sincerity on this one, if you heard it drunk, it’d probably make you cry. “We Had Gold” is the kind of Tom Petty, Expensive Winos, Juju Hounds or early Soul Asylum type of rocker that all you leather jacket dudes from the heartland, showed up at the VFW Hall, hoping to hear. He’s so good, this one showcases his Stonesy, Georgia Sattelite style guitar heroics, it is both Cheap N Nasty. “Hell” is pained divorcee tears and longing, tenderness, debris, and helpless fixations, beautiful lyrics, beautiful music, he drinks a great big whiskey to us, anyways. “Some Days I Wanna Be Jimmy Page” is the Replacements for convalescent, elderly goths and fops and depressed old gutter dwellers and Motorcycle Boy fans, like cool you and me . “Your Beautiful Life” is a lot like the 500 songs I obsessively wrote when my ex wife ditched for a guy who wears khaki shorts, and my last of the last, lost-cause garage band broke up, again. It has a very down-home, Bob Seger, fireworks, donut shop, and bowling alley relatability to it. “She Hates The Blues”: I remember giving an unbelievably gorgeous woman a Sam Cooke record for Valentine’s Day, way back in my thirties, and her not being into it, at all. At all. Red flag! “All Hearts Break”…if you love PAUL K. & THE WEATHERMEN, even half as much as I do, Gary Sunshine writes songs in that same brittle, broken hearted, humble, ain’t got it all figured out yet, painfully honest, and sometimes irritable state of unrest and yearning and dawn’s early light introspection and hopeless melancholy, he has that very same kindred, tarnished, sad clown, survivor spirit. I’ll be playing this song many more times. I can feel it. “Three Good Tires” …Semi-reformed ex metal-heads, dropouts, castoffs, lost souls, over caffeinated, duty-bound ghosts procrastinating, and wrestling with neurotic outsider worry and dreading the two sink fulls of dirty dishes, afraid the school might call about Junior’s grades again, thinking about The Jesus & Mary Chain, struggling to get through another day. Beautiful losers, capitalist women who turned off all their feelings, smudged up sunglasses while driving at night with pilled-out companions, Leonard Cohen, Towns Van Zandt, Beat Angels, and the Gin Blossoms. He’s sort of like John Cougar with brains. “Young (Ain’t You A Rock & Roller)”. You know the vibe…more hangovers, hurts, Hollywood promises and blue valentines, empty cartons of Carling’s Black Label, ashtray butts, broken guitar strings, unopened stacks of bills, falling in love with the waitress again, all the girls who disappeared, all the innocent years of lighthearted debauchery and carefree tomfoolery and fun in the sun that ain’t never, never coming back, when every little bit hurts. Me, too, brother-me, too. Thanks for making this album.
In recent years, summa my stubborn old farmboy mechanic and over-caffeinated biker friends have stupidly told me how they still hate Morrissey, to which I’ve responded that “First Of The Gang To Die” was the second best Mott The Hoople song that Ian Hunter never wrote and that Mozzer was the only rockstar I knew of who rocked significantly harder in his fifties than he did in his twenties. Well…I may have been wrong about that last bit, ’cause Showbiz Al, lead mojo risin’ of CIRCUS OF POWER, is still churning out a steady and prolific stream of books, videos, and satisfyingly old fashioned, long-player, full-length albums on compact disc, that rocks every bit as hard as the classic lineup of Circus Of Power, and sometimes, even delivers exactly what you’d hope a modern-day CIRCUS OF POWER song would sound like-all shiny chrome, black exhaust, red brassieres, and voodoo dolls. I’m still not used to reviewing loosey goose individual tunes available on I-Tunes and Youtube and shit, but I think this tune was on his last silvery disc but only now made it to the big little screen, but it is positively anthemic and life affirming, even as it laments the death of our dreams of liberty and fairness, decency, and justice…I so vividly remember staring at that rising sun Circus Of Power album jacket for hours while I blasted “In The Wind” and “Call Of The Wild” and “Needles” through the p.a. speakers at my old jam house in the country, “come on baby turn up those jams, goddamn” was our way of life, back then.
Me and my buddies Bastard, Dave, Mick, and Cowboy Bob used to travel thousands of miles to see that band whenever we heard they were playing. We were totally into that band as an unruly teen pack of leather clad ruffians, we even covered summa their songs, but we were all aces and eights and had to play the hand we were dealt. After lighting many candles, waiting vigil for the other guys year after year, Al’s finally assembled another band lineup that sails under the old flag and while I haven’t learned their names yet, they bring the old danger, so even if you diehards are still missing Gary and Ricky, Zowie, and Ryan, or even Al’s chief henchman of more recent years, genuine space ace, Lunar Billy Tsounis, who co commanded that Battlestar Galactica rocketship, CAPTAIN ZAPPED, Al always manages to locate all the meanest mothers on the planet to fill out his snarling sonic and celluloid ranks and believe me, you wouldn’t wanna run into any of these guys on an L.A. overpass in the middle of the night. They all look like killers. Gang members. One percenters. People who failed their audition for Suicidal Tendencies. American Monsters. His tune is like an Allen Ginsberg cinematic protest poem from another time about how this country was built on Sitting Bull’s land and pillaged by ruthless honkies and slave owners and prison builders and deep state spooks who killed JFK and Martin Luther King on tv and crowned those MK Ultra’ed teenage queens and how even Superman can’t save us now, he’s released it with impeccably perfect timing, now that one of Howard Stern’s frequent old scandal spewing, outrage peddling, shock-jock, talk radio guests has become President and made Rex Tillerson, the Exxon exec, into Secretary Of State. Scotty Slam directed this kickass video, filmed on rooftops as a nod to the old “Vices” era, and featuring Finnish Vampire, Jyrki 69, muttering Manson girl witchy incantations, while Alex Mitchell and his latest motorcycle gang play the shit out of this driving, hooky song, that makes you wonder how the movie stars and muscle cars of Jim Morrison’s phantastic old L.A. all became the panopticon hellhole of present day NSA and NDAA and TSA prison-culture nightmarish modern ‘Murkkka, “ride that death machine, crown that teenage queen…” Even in his middle age, Showbiz Al is still a commanding and visceral screen presence with his Bryan Gregory bone necklaces and witchdoctor pimp sticks. They filmed part of this in what looks like some fortune teller parlor, and it really captures the dizzying, stopless, all night ambition of America’s coked-up population of stockbrokers, rats, dirty cops, acquisition junkies, control freaks, I-phone zombies, war profiteers, and hungry ghosts, all rat racing to nowhere, or Home Depot, or Hooters, flooring that pedal to beat you to the next red-light. Go! STOP! Go! STOP! Go! STOP! Go! STOP!! Alex Mitchell is a beloved underground anti-hero, one of our last really good, red blooded, brave hearted, all-in, lifer-dedicated rocknroll entertainers who can write, sing, and perform with style and class and an easy confidence and a social conscience and guts, urging us to freak freely even in the unblinking face of hateful fascism. Dig it!
“Everyone’s a fink in the new America.” (-Falling James)
“Be wary of those who are more concerned about the expression of your pain than they are the condition of your suffering!” (-Heber Brown III, Baltimore leader)
“The country’s moved so far to the right…..on domestic policy, Obama is to the right of Nixon. That’s just fact. So the center keeps shifting…” (-John Cusack)
“But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.”
(-Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times)
“As long as you’re scared, you’re on the plantation.”
(-Dr. Cornel West.)
“If there isn’t a sea change soon, then we really are fucking doomed. Unless of course, total compliance with authority at all times is your bag. It ain’t mine.” (-Ray Gange)
“TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.” (-John Perry Barlow)
“Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival….”
(– Frederick Douglass)
“There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things.” (- Hunter S. Thompson)
“Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”
(-Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces)
“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” (-Stokely Carmichael)
“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.”
(― Michael Parenti, Against Empire)
“Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” (-Lindsey Graham)
“My home is not threatened by ISIS, my home is threatened by the police. The police are licensed to kill us, children, old people…Nobody from ISIS terrorized us as a people as the police do daily and they get away with it.” (-Senator Ernie Chambers of Nebraska)
“FaceBook postings on the subject of the Baltimore uprising are being blocked; peaceful protestors in New York City are attacked and 300 demonstrators are arbitrarily arrested during a march against police violence by irony-impervious cops; the corporate press arrive on scene in Baltimore and display an obsessive focus on the sensational sans a scintilla of deepening historical and social context.
Yet we, in the U.S., are exhorted to show gratitude for our freedoms. Accordingly, you have the freedom to consume and submit to wage and debt slavery. You have the freedom to admire or loathe the celebrity of your choice. And to post pictures on social media of kitty cats positing positive affirmations or, if you dare to be so bold, bandying a bit of snark.
You have the freedom to express any opinion or work for any cause that you desire as long as said actions in no manner threaten (or even annoy) established corporate, police, or military power.
Withal, you have the freedom to shut your malcontent gob.” (-Phil Rockstroh)
“I fail to understand how so many Americans don’t seem to see that this country is now fully fascist aka corporatist or is now a government by corporate interests.
How can so many manage to deny so much reality?! We are spied upon continually with our tax money paying the surveillance industry; whistle blowers are prosecuted, but CIA torturers and bankers guilty of fraud are not prosecuted. Corporations are allowed to use this country’s huge prison population like slaves – simultaneously undermining labour standards for every working American. A new study by the IMF reveals that global fossil fuel subsidies come out to $10 million every minute, and there are also Big Agri business, and Big Pharma subsidies. You read that right, every minute.TPP is not going to benefit any American except the 1% and their corporate interests and to hell with the rest of us! We have a president who insists upon his ‘right’ to assassinate American citizens without benefit of a trial – a right no western monarch-has been able to claim since the 13th century, but – don’t worry, be happy – this country is still democratic and not at all fascist!
How more obvious can it be that when a Montsano exec is appointed to head the FDA, a cable lobbyist heads the FCC, a vocal proponent of fracking has been appointed energy tzar, and Wall St people run Treasury – this country is ran of by and for corporations. Americans have been lied into oil war after oil war. It is time to acknowledge that our political system has been the victim of a coup; it is now ran of, for and by corporations.” (-Kathleen Bushman)
“Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.” (-Derrick Jensen)
“Respectability
Rage
Righteousness
Ratchetness
Code of laws
Code of the streets
It doesn’t matter. You will kill us and justify our murder.
You see no humanity in us. You only see a window into your greatest fears and worst nightmares.
Therefore, is not our duty to convince you that we are worthy of life and protection under the law. That’s not our case to make. You are not God. It is instead our duty to hold you accountable to the reality of our power when you have let the fantasy of white supremacy consume you.” (-Rahiel Tesfamariam)
“If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.”
(― Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War)
“I’d rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.” (-Jack London)
“I can’t support her because I don’t support war, more war, Wall St. bonus bailouts, the NSA, the TSA, the drug war, asset forfeiture, for-profit prisons, drone bombings, domestic spying, militarized police and torture and I won’t support those policies no matter how they are packaged or marketed to me. She is as hawkish as any Neo-con on a bad day. Her record speaks for itself and is against the true core beliefs of most of those who support her as well as most Americans.” (-Bruce Fenton on Hillary Clinton)
“The poor in America are unorganized and largely mute. They are the least revolutionary proletariat in the world.” (-Gunnar Myrdal)
“The escalating deaths and sufferings in Black and poor America and the marvelous new militancy in our Ferguson moment should compel us to focus on what really matters: The life and death issues of police murders, poverty, mass incarceration, drones, TPP (unjust trade policies), vast surveillance, decrepit schools, unemployment, Wall Street power, Israeli occupation of Palestinians, Dalit resistance in India, and ecological catastrophe.
Character assassination is the refuge of… those who hide and conceal these issues in order to rationalize their own allegiance to the status quo. I am neither a saint nor prophet, but I am a Jesus-loving free Black man in a Great Tradition who intends to be faithful unto death in telling the truth and bearing witness to justice. I am not beholden to any administration, political party, TV channel or financial sponsor because loving suffering and struggling peoples is my point of reference. Deep integrity must trump cheap popularity. Nothing will stop or distract my work and witness, even as I learn from others and try not to hurt others.
But to pursue truth and justice is to live dangerously. In the spirit of John Coltrane’s LOVE SUPREME, let us focus on what really matters: the issues, policies, and realities that affect precious everyday people catching hell and how we can resist the lies and crimes of the status quo!” (-Dr. Cornel West)
“The corporations have taken over. Even in the recording studio. Actually, the corporate companies have taken over American life most everywhere. Go coast to coast and you will see people wearing the same clothes, thinking the same thoughts, eating the same food. Everything is processed.” (-Bob Dylan)
“That nothing is more insincere than purported U.S. concerns over political repression is too self-evident to debate. Supporting the most repressive regimes in order to suppress and control their populations is and long has been a staple of U.S. (and British) foreign policy. “Human rights” is the weapon invoked by the U.S. Government and its loyal media to cynically demonize regimes that refuse to follow U.S. dictates.” (- Glenn Greenwald)
“That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of… millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.
The innocent working families of all backgrounds whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government pay the true price, and ultimate price, and one that far exceeds the importances of any kids’ game played tonight, or ever, at Camden Yards. We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S., and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don’t have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans.”(-Orioles COO John Angelos)
“What I began to see is that the drug war is totally about race. If we locked up everybody, white and black, for doing the same drugs, they would have done the same thing they did with prohibition. They would have outlawed it.” (- former DEA agent Matthew Fogg)
“It’s not that I’m rebelling. It’s that I’m just trying to find another way.” (-Edie Sedgwick; Sixties Pop Art Youthquaker)
“Regarding White people, squinting through the gauzy confines of their bubble of privilege, and bandying words such as ‘thugs,’ ‘savages,’ and ‘animals’ at the denizens of the uprising in Baltimore who damaged a bit of property, yet the same White people remain (revealingly) silent when Blacks die at the hands of police —what else do you expect from the favored race of a nation created by a cabal of powdered wig-bedecked aristocrats, the so-called Founding Fathers, who, from the nation’s origins, made property rights paramount to human rights, and, in particular, the ‘right’ of White’s to deem African slaves and their progeny property?
In the White supremacist cosmology, internalized by the White majority, property is more valuable than the lives of African Americans. Such is the White mindset. This is the USA — a nation born in racism — a nation with a history that reeks of racism, and its present is defined by the mindset.
And, sadly, most White people are not going to change. They were born into a noxious, racist culture, their willfully and belligerently ignorant minds are marinaded in its fetid juices, and their shriveled, dead souls reek of it. There is no sense in trying to discuss the situation with them, for they will simply play victim when the evidence of their privileged racial status is laid out before them.
Deep down, they do not feel revulsion, rage, nor regret for the defacto lynching of US minorities by police, because they harbor this secret, that they do not dare reveal, even to themselves: Their privileged status was created and is maintained by acts of intimidation, enslavement, incarceration, and the outright slaughter of US minorities.” (-Phil Rockstroh)
“It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.” (- Martin Luther King, Jr.)
“Business associations, chambers of commerce, professional boards — don’t these work very much like the Soviet Party apparatus, an organizational parasite living off of the government and the people while claiming to be morally superior to it? What do these organizations do but create policies to further elite rule? Who has influence but those who nepotistically rise to the top?
What business, exactly, does *business* have in a democratic society? (Not commerce, mind you, which seems a general social exchange, but this culture of commercial interests organized around capitalism we call ‘business’.)
Business schools in particular — what exactly are these but training centers for the next generation of *managers* for global capital?
A business school is an empire management school.” (-John Monroe)
“Kanye represents all that is wrong with the current Zeitgeist. There is no substance, art or credibility to the man. To hear students defend the facile shit makes me want to weep.” (-Joseph Niven)
“All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.” (-Snow Crash )
“Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them – will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies…: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”
(— Eduardo Galeano, “The Nobodies”)
“Hillary Clinton is a ruthless neo-con warmonger and a heartless neo-liberal corporate operative. And no, she is not the lesser-of-two-evils (as if existence was… a binary phenomenon). She is the very embodiment of political arrogance, corporate despotism, and militarist imperium.
Any liberal/progressive who votes for her is as self-deluded about the nature of US cultural/social/political reality — and their own complicity in the fraud of the extant system of High Dollar owned-and-operated political duopoly — as is the Republican base that is peopled with country club elitist bigots and their low-end, sub-cretinous ranks of Teabag Party neo-Know Nothing dupes. And, no, the system isn’t broken; it was designed that way. Moreover, the economic/militarist elites who own and operate US political duopoly are pleased with the set-up. And they would thank you for your vote, that is, if they were not a cabal of psychopaths incapable of gratitude…..Obama has been worse than Bush/Cheney on human rights and civil liberties; has jailed more whistle blowers than all previous administrations combined; helped BP cover-up the Deep Water Horizon disaster; Obama has bombed seven nations — and drone murdered on three continents, and brags about his “Kill Lists” (Bush Jr.-style); He, Hillary and NATO were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands in Libya and left the nation a failed state. He bailed out Wall Street to the tune of more than a trillion dollars as he allowed Main Street to languish. He is, as we speak, attempting to implement a neo-liberal trade pact (Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement) that is even worse than corporate/bankster bagman Bill Clinton’s so-called free trade pacts that wrecked the US economy by shipping US jobs offshore. Obama restarted the Cold War by funding and setting into motion a neo-Nazi coup d’etat in Ukraine i.e., a single action worse than anything Nixon/Reagan/Bush 1 or 2 ever perpetrated. Yes, nice liberals, Democrats restarted the Cold War, and your complicity therein evinces a Tea Party level of political delusion. In short, Democrats are the more effective Republicans. ” (-Phil Rockstroh)
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”(― bell hooks)
“Jill Stein should also be suing the thugs who arrested her in 2012, tied her to a chair in a black site for 8 hours, and then dumped her on the side of the road at night, without her cell phone. What was her crime? Trying to be included in the presidential debates, in which she had every to participate, being a legitimate candidate, on enough ballots to win the election, if people had the sense enough to quit being scared into voting for evil.” (-Paula Densnow)
“When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is ‘correct’ or ‘wise,’ any more than a forest fire can be ‘correct’ or ‘wise.’ Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves.” (-TaNehisi Coates)
“I think that if you think things are better under capitalism than say, feudalism, you’re coming from a white, middle-class perspective in terms of privilege. Capitalism requires slavery and exploitation to function, and capitalism in America would never have taken off without the slave trade. Those who have suffered greatest under capitalism undoubtedly are people of color, both historically and in the modern day. The exploitation of white people (save or perhaps the Irish) has nothing on the exploitation of blacks under capitalism, and Asians as well in the 1800s. Our current system would not function without an undocumented immigrant underclass that holds up the capitalist pyramid and are treated little better than slaves for it while those who benefit do everything to try to have them kicked out, not understanding how the system works in the first place. Its not a state vs private ownership matter. What most people call ‘communism’ is actually state capitalism and it doesn’t work any better than private capitalism. You can have private ownership and private commerce without the system we have today. And its not like the church/state issue. I strongly disagree that ‘the problem today isn’t capitalism.’ The problem today is ABSOLUTELY capitalism. Capitalism is literally threatening our very extinction as a species right now. We’ve gone through 90% of our natural resources in less than 200 years under capitalism. I’m not opposed to a market system – I’m opposed to a market system where some can become ridiculously wealthy while doing next to nothing for it while others underneath them are being abused and exploited to produce that wealth. We do not need to exploit and enslave others in order to survive. I also don’t know if an ‘anarchist’ system is the answer. I do think that worker-owned enterprises are a crucial and necessary first step. The issue is who controls the surplus value. When its controlled by capitalists, workers are exploited. When its controlled by workers, those who actually WORK can actually enjoy the fruits of their labor.” (-Alley Valkyrie)
“No one else in Western media has covered the fact that five peaceful Palestinian protesters were shot in their lower bodies by IDF and are hospitalized now …. How on earth is that not news ?” (-Naomi Wolf)
“There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged”.”(-Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States)
“The Democratic Party’s apologists like to call it a big tent with room for Blacks and browns and gays and labor and peace-loving people. But it’s actually a huge trap designed to contain and politically neutralize the folks who might otherwise turn against the rich. The Party has always been a scam, but at least in the old days it put on a populist show to fool the rank and file into believing that they could actually influence the party’s direction. However, Wall Street is determined that there will be no serious Democratic deviation from the corporate agenda set by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton would represent the third Clinton presidency – which, for Wall Street, is just as good as the two George Bush presidencies. Maybe better, because labor and Blacks and that fuzzy cohort called liberals will all think they won the election, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Rank and file Democrats will see the fait accompli of Hillary’s nomination as a sign of unity among Democrats, when in fact it is the triumph of filthy rich campaign contributors. The rich have shown great solidarity in uniting behind a Democratic presidential candidate. Later on, they will unite around a Republican candidate, too. After that, it won’t matter who wins.” (-Glen Ford)
“So weird that French political leaders now, as US leaders have before, claim that by ‘declaring war on radical Islam’ they can forestall rather than foment more terrorism. What about declaring love, declaring peace, declaring openness, declaring engagement with the ideas of radical Islam in peaceful open democratic forums if you really want to win over young peoples’ hearts and minds? History shows that open debate kills off bad ideas and that censorship and violence just make them grow…also do we declare ‘war’ on radical Christianity or radical Judaism that can be just as violent and blind?” (-Naomi Wolf)
“Let’s remember that the United States bombed Al Jazeera in Afghanistan very early on after 9/11, then bombed the Sheraton Hotel in Basra, Iraq, where Al Jazeera journalists were the only journalists. Then they killed one of the most famous Al Jazeera correspondents in Baghdad in April of 2003, when Victoria Clarke, George Bush’s Pentagon spokesperson at the time, basically said if you’re an unembedded journalist, you’re with the terrorists, and if you die, it’s not our fault. They shelled the Palestine Hotel, killing a Reuters cameraman and the Spanish cameraman José Couso. So, yes, we should be condemning any and all attacks, especially when they’re killing journalists, no matter who the perpetrators are, but let’s not act as though the West’s hands are clean and that any one of those world leaders marching yesterday, that their hands are clean on these matters.” (-Glen Greenwald forgets to mention the tv station in Serbia, too)
“They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.”(-Howard Zinn)
“If Americans were honest with themselves they would acknowledge that the Republic is no more. We now live in a police state.” (-Ron Paul)
“I do not admire, respect, nor even believe in the utility of cops. Their only use…is to act as a coercive force to protect class inequity and White privilege. My enmity towards the police is both visceral and intellectual. I detest their hyper-authoritarian bearing; I become enraged at their bully boy modus operandi; and I can see the noxious effect of the police state upon this nation and its people.
I didn’t believe I could evince any less respect for cops…until I witnessed them — witless mass of blue arrogance that they are — turn their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio. Moreover, nor can I evince a scintilla of respect for Bill de Blasio — spineless, ass-suck liberal that he is — for allowing, sans a word of rebuke, these fascist cretins to proclaim to all concerned their noxious and obnoxious belief that they deem themselves above and beyond accountability. ‘Fuck you, Mr. Mayor and the citizens of NYC,’ this klavern of mouth-breather brutes in blue raged en masse, ‘for we will kill anyone we want to and whenever we want to.’
Their snit-fit was an egregious act of disrespect, a metaphoric jackboot to the face of civil liberties and even human decency. Only corrupt to core cultures countenance lawless cops. In short, if we do not struggle to end this reign of police terror, it will end us.” (-Phil Rockstroh)
“So 24 hours of fearful media catastrophe warnings and redundant superlatives add up to 24 hours of NYC commerce getting completely snowed under. I’m really tired of fear broadcasting. Mainstream media programming is obsolete, manipulative, costly and dangerous. Is there anyone here who has an alternative point of view to mine, that the U.S. news media is essentially dead and non-existent?”(-Danny Ray)
“One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and the unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.” ( -Howard Zinn; Chapter 24 of A People’s History of the United States)
“If you want something, you had better MAKE SOME NOISE.”
(-Malcolm X)
“America has some really annoyingly shit names. Tucker, Channing, Tag, Beau, Noah, Jeb, Mit… Irksome Republican white trash names synonymous with lies, drunk driving, fraud, coke dealing, tax evasion, menthol cigarettes, insurance scams, eyes like dead clams, bad breath, black nylon socks, erectile dysfunction and firearms.” (-Phil Staines)
“I don’t really care much what Hillary Clinton did with her State Department e-mail. I care that she is a violent authoritarian warmonger who supports bombings, drones, wars of aggression, the DHS, TSA, failed drug war, NSA, Gitmo, torture, bank bonus bailouts, corporatism, violations of human rights abroad and at home and now she wants to run for President of the United States on the “Ready For Hillary” campaign marketing plan which seeks to focus on gender rather than her track record of destruction and failure.” (-Bruce Fenton)
“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.In effect, the people who change our lives the most begin tosing to us while we are still in darkness. If we listen totheir songs, we will see the dawning of a new part of ourselves.”(-Rabindranth Tagore)
“The reason why Dick Cheney is able to go on ‘Meet The Press’ instead of being where he should be — which is in the dock at The Hague or in a federal prison — is because President Obama and his administration made the decision not to prosecute any of the people who implemented this torture regime despite the fact that it was illegal and criminal.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“The authoritarian culture of the US and the despotic, political jerk-rockets and media blowhards who are its public face are revealing their true nature, by their relentless and reprehensible — but agenda oriented — media pronouncements regarding the gunning down of two NYPD officers in Brooklyn by a lone assailant.
Their agenda is obvious: Cops should possess unquestioned power; those donning law enforcement uniforms should never be held accountable for their actions; and the public is hereby ordered to kneel before the boot of unchecked authority.
Also: In in typical, lickspittle liberal accommodation to authoritarian demagoguery, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has requested that anti-police violence activism be self-kettled and ceased. In a word, I say to these hyper-authoritarian despots and their liberal capitulation artist lackeys: No. In two words: Hell no.
If we back down and allow the officials of thugdom to rule the narrative and police to believe they have carte blanche to wield their vicious truncheons of unaccountable power — then the ongoing coup d’etat will continue unabated. And only willfully ignorant dupes and fascist-minded tools will deny that what we have witnessed in the US has been a police/national security state junta, with cops often outfitted in military garb and brandishing weapons of war.” (-Phil Rockstroh)
“Alcoholism is an infraction of social rules. Everyone tolerates it because the violation confirms the rules. This case is analogous to prostitution: neither the drunk nor the prostitute and her clientele call into doubt the rules the break. Their acts are a disturbance of order, not a criticism of it. The use of hallucinogens, on the other hand, implies a negation of prevailing social values. … We can now understand the true reason for their condemnation and its severity. The authorities aren’t suppressing a reprehensible practice or a crime. They are suppressing dissidence. … Prohibition is a battle against the contagion of the spirit – against an opinion. The authorities reveal, in their ideological zeal, that they are pursuing a heresy, not a crime.” (-Octavio Paz)
“We all get our chance to beat the odds–but who beats the odds?” (-Johnny Thunders)
LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH….
Gutted by the passing of Nick Marsh. He was one of my favorite singers and I never stopped listening to his songs that had played in the background as I fell in love with new wave beauties, or applied eyeliner alongside my Gene Loves Jezebel wannabe glam gang, or road tripped with now absent friends. I used to “sing”, perhaps poorly, for a long succession of deadend glam bands and borrowed liberally from the example of Nick and Rocco. Nick was like some kind of perfect new wave action doll–immaculate hair, tight trousers, black leather, Creepers, big Elvis microphones. He was the cat’s pajamas. It’s alarming how steadily death is coming for my friends, heroes, and loved ones, now. There seems to be some truth to the idea that the good ones die young, and the Bush, Kissinger and Cheney types all live to be like, 125. Flesh For Lulu were one of the groups that inspired me to want to be in bands-they were gothic, poppy, post-punk, melodic, rocknroll. I love all those old songs: “Golden Handshake Girl” which Nick resurrected onstage as per my suggestion in recent years, “Seven Hail Marys”, “I May Have Said You’re Beautiful”, the impeccable protest song, “Decline & Fall”, the sweetly shimmering and eternally rippling bubblegum anthem, “Time & Space”, “Postcards From Paradise”, “I Go Crazy”, on and on. Great band. Lovely bloke. So sad. Nick was involved with the heart, while most everybody else is in hot pursuit of the math puzzle, the strategy, the hustle, the will to conquer, the usual lie. I’m at that age where I know whatever anybody says to me is mostly bullshit, now. It’s all gotten real “Cats In The Cradle”, for me, at this age. “Let’s do lunch…” Probably won’t see too many of those faces again and when we talk of recording music together, or vacationing with each other, or going camping, or horseback riding, or getting together in real life to listen to scratchy old vinyl, any shit like that, it’s all just smoke rings and half hearted wishful thinking, at this age. We had our time together–I guess we had our chance, though it never really felt like much of one to me, and now, that time has gone. Amerikkka is like a high school popularity contest, everybody is desperately following the followers, even in our fat forties. Once, I had a rich, privileged girlfriend, just like in that Pulp song “Common People”, so it may have appeared to some people like I was also rich, and I could not beat the fake friends off with a stick, they showed up at my doorstep, uninvited, all the time. Guys who had kicked me out of bands, and like, my ex girlfriend’s sisters. Had some famous friends, as a kid–people just ruthlessly used me to get close to them. They are all still high school social climbing. If you ain’t currently seeming like you can “do something” for people, they vanish. If you work for a label, or a magazine, or have a a cool band, hot girlfriend, radio or tv show, D.J. night, or new toy, every eyebrow is raised. If you have some bad luck, or get hurt, or get sick, nobody wants to know. I spent like ten or fifteen years chasing yesterday-the hairspray and harmonicas, painted leather, and french kissing on the roof, before I realized people move on. Chickenwings on gas-grills and health insurance-watching sports and wraparound sundecks. No one’s alive, anymore. It’s just a blip, waaayyy to brief. Shattering how fast it goes by. When all my influences and favorite drinking buddies and intimates keep falling off, my own dumb youth flashes before my eyes. It was sortof a white trash trailer park version of an eighties John Hughes film; and like I always say, I went from relating to the Ducky character in the hip shoes, paisley suspenders, and funny hats, trying to get the girl from the far side of the tracks, “with poetry, bloodshed and guitars”, to feeling like the washedup, tragically abandoned, old geezer in a dirty bathrobe with zero ambition and a brokenheart, like Andie’s dad, as played by the masterful Harry Dean Stanton. It happened overnight. Whizzbang. That was a dud firecracker youth, if you ask me. A wet bottle rocket. “Poof”. Anti-climactic. Never really got off the porch. Nick Marsh was a roman candle. I’m grateful to have his music. It still sometimes consoles me, in this darkening period, where everything beautiful just incessantly recedes into the faroff horizon. He is still lighting up the sky.
WE CAN’T CONNECT TO OUTLOOK DOT COM RIGHT NOW. PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER.
Bob Dylan‘s right when he sings, “people are crazy and times are strange…” ‘Had some Slim Shady assbags throw a projectile out the car window at me and loop back around, hoping to start more shit. Had not been hassled by ignorant, testosterone drunk males in quite some time. Used to be a daily thing in my teenage wildlife androgynous Pete Burns years. Now, it’s mostly the suburbanized dames that object to my unmilitarized appearance–ponytail, overweight, plumber’s butt, no car, in ill fitting black clothes, and usually, the males are no longer threatened by my flagrant, middleaged, non conformity, but when the cops act that way everyday, when violence is all over tv and every video game, when the government does all that non stop rah rah flagwaving and fearmongering in the pig-media, it’s no surprise when dumbfuck little pricks in shitty automobiles imitate those behaviors and lash out at random, targeting any symbolic other. As Alice Bag has suggested, jocks wanted to turn punk into a mixed martial arts sport, (“go play football, motherfuckers”), so I endured a lot of static from all those jarhead buffoons and hockey-playing fortunate son cocaine-oafs, back in the post-punk, hardcore, and grunge-Tarzan eras, but it’s been awhile since some young, dumb fuckwits aimed anything metal at my face. The night a black President was elected, some good ole boy tweekers spotted me alone in a grocerystore aisle, ruining my knees for minimum wage while merchandising on the night-shift, and came up from behind abruptly jerking my braided hair as a gesture on misplaced anger, because racists in that part of the country had no respect for personal bubble space when they’re wired up on all that farmboy meth they manufacture in their rich daddy’s barn. David Letterman taped his last show, it’s the end of an era, and millions are crestfallen I was not chosen to be his replacement, perhaps as Little Steven expands his broadcast empire, I will find a new talk show and reunite Circus Of Power to be our houseband. (Ha. Since I first wrote that last sentence, weeks ago, Circus Of Power frontman Alex Mitchell has announced he will be hosting his own on-line talkshow called, “The Guest List”! Great Minds.)
I dunno, man, it’s hard not to get bummed out about all the suckiness that surrounds us. I still can’t afford that extravagant box-set, but If The Clash were around today, they’d be profiled by gentrification-pigs, stop and frisked, ticketed for mary jane possession and have their boom-box confiscated for disturbing the yuppie fucking vendors. If Richard Pryor was to perform his seventies material in my neighborhood, dozens of outraged and offended life coaches and grad student liberals would be clutching their pearls like Nancy Grace and admonishing him for not conforming to their p.c. prohibition squad sensibilities. Had some worn out ex rockstar tell me to quit talking about racism so we can get back to focusing on fame hags and glam blouses complimenting his twenty five year old songs. Bummed me out. The elites keep us competing and debating manufactured scandals and relentlessly keep scaring us with pharma-eyed boogeymen while they pass laws that undermine human rights, civil liberties, and basic protections from warmongers and corporate predators. While we squabble about second hand smoke and dirty jokes, the Pentagon quietly announces it will be assassinating “belligerent journalists” and the President and sold-out Democrats conspired with Republicans, billionaires and oil barons to pass this evil TPP secret “trade agreement” into law, just like they did with the Patriot Act and NDAA. We’re arguing about naughty language and whether there are racists in the South, meanwhile, we’re all getting fucked by the man. People seem oblivious to the N.W.O. corporate pact that undermines national sovereignty and forgot about the bogus wars, broken promises, warrantless wiretaps, extrajudicial executive kill-lists, indefinite detention, and stolen elections. I’m so bored with Kanye and the Kardashians.
There’s all these social programming shows on cable that demonize “hoarders”-people who reuse and recycle and repurpose objects rather then constantly dumping more shit into land-fills and incessantly “upgrading” and buying new shit every five minutes. Makes me appreciate my hillbilly upbringing, where we valued what we had, kept it organized, took care of things, and found ways to make old stuff new again, rather then waste money buying and throwing away every househould appliance every six months. I do remember how the old time answering machines were a great example of planned obsolescence because they were designed to break every ten minutes. Some vcr’s, were like that, too. And printers-what a ripoff with the sixty dollar ink cartridges. Had a relative visit who watched all that tv shit, and they were digging through our closets insisting we throw our used vinyl and old books away to make room for new electronic gadgets, trendy furniture from Ikea and shoe organizers. Turns out, shitloads of people we know still watch tv and obey it’s orders. You won’t find me at the sports bar with the big screen tv’s a-watchin’ the game and making dog woof noises on Sunday. I won’t be hanging around watching adult cartoons on a Friday night. I don’t play video games. I don’t hate gay people like the Republicans, or even smoke the Democrack like the sellout double secret Republicans, in the other wing of the two faced war party.
I ran away to NYC to make it in show business when I was 15. I had some promising bands, got some great reviews, accolades from my heroes, but never had the budget to self finance recording and pressing and manufacturing and touring, or the people skills to keep a beat combo together, long-term. Now I’m 45 and in bad shape, but will keep writing songs until I croak. Fame means nothing in the age of consolidated media. It’s not like authentic voices are heard anymore. Gil Scott Heron, ya think he’d have made it on American Idol? Or Chuck D., or Poly Styrene, or Kathleen Hannah, Or Phil Ochs? Patti Smith? Ari Up?? Mark E. Smith or Rowland S. Howard? Jim Carroll? Johnny Rotten? Think the judges of “The Voice” woulda turned their chairs around for Joe Strummer, or Billy Bragg, or Texacala Jones, or T.V. Smith? In this moment in time, being underground is a good sign. We all think money would improve our lot, but the problem with money is once you get it, you got to try to keep it. I know plenty of rich people who will tell you point blank they are miserable. White knuckled, uptight, uncool, no time to fraternize with the little people who are probably just after their lucky charms. Rooms and rooms full of unused exercise equipment and unplayed vintage jukeboxes–wouldn’t you rather stick with the truth?
Motel 6 is handing over lists of their customers to the man. Other hotels, too. It can be a tough lot traveling with all these hateful crackdowns on the poor and bigoted laws criminalizing homeless folks. TSA fondling your junk. NSA recording your calls. DEA gunning people down for being suspected of having weed. This country, the USA, is fucked beyond belief.
BE LIKE YOU….
Joey Pinter‘s distinctive guitar playing can be heard on Jungle Records’ boss reissue of The Waldos epic, “RENT PARTY” that also featured that suave old charmer,”Uncle” Walter Lure, who’s currently preparing a U.K. tour backed by various cult heroes from Gunfire Dance and Black Bombers, and even sharing at least one stage with the killer-diller, rakish dandies, The Bermondsey Joyriders. Old-school punknroll die hards also cherish Joey Pinter‘s 1977 punk band, The Knots. His brand new solo debut can be compared to solo debuts by Brian James (The Damned, The Lords) and Mister Ratboy (Motorcycle Boy, Pillbox), as it is an unexpectedly solid array of highly listenable songs from a talented songwriter who is primarily known for his outstanding guitar playing, with subject matter drawn from various chapters of his storied history, a stranger than fiction tale of hard livin’, frenzied performances, bitter disappointments, a flawless lp, bottles, dope, jail, sin and salvation, dames, kids, cigars, loud guitar, the whole a.m. sloppy, taco waco enchilada. His bluesy singing is somewhere in between David Johansen yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, and George Thorogood refereeing a little league game, sometimes reminding one of old Alice Cooper, even. His Chuck Berry/Johnny Thunders style, raunchy guitar playing and power-pop songwriting sensibilities drip with soul and his self titled cd is a must have for anybody who is serious about rocknroll. Planes, trains, automobiles, Vespas, magic carpets, or cardboard signs that say, “Bowery Or Bust”, punk rockers from all over are travelling back to New York City on Wednesday, August 26th to be present and accounted for at the JOEY PINTER RECORD RELEASE PARTY at the nightclub, Bowery Electric. He’ll be backed up by his friends The Hipp Pipps. Doors open at 7 p.m., showtime starts at 7:30. Tickets are $9 in advance or $10 the night of the show, and that’s a helluva lot of entertainment value for a ten spot. You got the mischievous lads, The Sweet Things, The Martinets, The NY Junk, The Waldos, and Joey Pinter. That is an awful lot of “ACTION”. Buy your tickets early, and come to dance, this is going to be a jam packed good time.
Some will tell you….a lot of things. Mostly, a lot of booieshite, they learned to parrot from their peer-group, all propaganda numb products of our sadly militarized schools, or from television. Me, I only like comparing notes with people who have some skin in the game, who’ve lived out loud, who’ve been full contact participants in this mad dash to the top of the hill, who’ve sailed well beyond the equator, who’ve lost everything and asked themselves rigorous questions, the crazy brave hearted actual first-person experience havers, who’ve raised a wolf and buried a parent.
Everybody else is just another bargain-bin Simon Cowell, and their opinions usually have less value, immobilized spectators, chickenshit Monday morning quarterbacks and cowardly slaves waiting around for orders from the man. Al Mitchell was a harcore punk rock bellowing, pharmaceutical Evil Knievel in the seventies; a top draft pick rockstar in the sleaze-metal eighties as cosmic crooner for Circus Of Power; NYC Agent Orange rat exterminator in the nineties–he built sets for Hollywood, taught other rock stars about Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, and formed a string of Credence Clearwater Revival influenced psychedelic biker bands like Fat Nancy and Plastic Gator Machine; and in the 00’s he’s been writing books, caring for his late pop, an extroverted Scotsman with Alzheimer’s, and fronting the outergalactic savior machine-Captain Zapped, licensed members of the Green Lantern Corps., who slay lizard people with guitars and harmonicas, in his spare time.
You can find him in Topanga Canyon, whistling while he works, or maybe even at the funky juke-joint with Captain Zapped if you need healing, but in the meantime, you gotta buy his books: “Life Is A Phanton K Mart Horse Starting Up In The Middle Of The Night”, “Working Class Superstar Redux”, and “The Strange Case Of The Flying Meatballs”, because he’s the absolute best rocknroll raconteur since Rollins, Roth, and Mindwarp. Really. Just order them all at once. …and be on the lookout for “Space Age Blues”, the hot new release by Captain Zapped. All the jetboys and jetgirls are dancin’ to the leaked single, “Brand New Revolution”, it’s gonna be the jam all winter.
“It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”
(-Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road)
“It is only the outcasts and the rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry alive. They alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give a voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the difficult questions. Most important, they expose the powerful, along with their liberal apologists, for what they are.”
(-Chris Hedges)
“We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets – like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that’s easier to win.Don’t give in to the temptation. I’m not saying don’t call each other on shit. But this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.”
(-Naomi Klein)
“If you want to be a recognized, credible, card-carrying member of the national security community what you have to do is buy into the received truths of the establishment and continue to perpetuate that stuff, This is what I call civilian subjugation to the military. We face it in this administration, we faced it in the Clinton administration…we faced it in the Bush administration.”
(-Gregory D. Foster, a former Army officer and West Point graduate who now teaches national security studies at the National Defense University in Washington)
“The easiest way to gain control of the population is to carry out acts of terror. The public will clamor for such laws if the personal security is threatened.”
( – Joseph Stalin)
” ‘The lawyer for the American plaintiffs thinks Homeland Security is gearing up to make lots of arrests of U.S. citizens, in anticipation that Middle East protests will spread to American soil.’
It is not true that Barack Obama single-handedly destroyed the rule of law in the United States. The savaging of the Bill of Rights was, in effect, a tag team effort between Obama and his predecessor, George Bush, two presidents united in a single-minded quest to remove all barriers to the imprisonment, without trial or charge, of persons anywhere in the world, including U.S. citizens. George Bush did the initial groundwork, interpreting the 2001 congressional mandate to strike militarily against al-Qaida as giving the president the power to hold foreign prisoners without charge in Guantanamo, and, in theory, to treat American citizens the same way. But that was a stretch, and only a presidential opinion.
George Bush knew that it would be very difficult to get a preventive detention bill through Congress; Democrats would raise holy hell, and protesters would call for his head. But Barack Obama accomplished what Bush could not: On New Year’s Eve, Obama signed a preventive detention law as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. Under a Black Democrat, the rule of law ceased to exist within U.S. borders. Obama had already declared the rest of the planet a killing ground.
Then, back in August, a federal district judge in New York, Katherine Forrest, slapped a temporary restraining order on preventive detention, ruling on behalf of a group of activists and journalists who said the they could be thrown in prison permanently simply for speaking or writing about groups targeted by the United States. What, precisely and under the law, constituted providing “support” for al-Qaida or related groups? Obama’s Justice Department lawyers refused to say, claiming they had not thought the question through. Clearly, President Obama, like President Bush, wanted leeway to interpret the law any way he sees fit, so he can lock up whoever he wants, whenever he wants, for whatever reason, or for no stated reason at all. But Judge Forrest wasn’t having it. On September 12, she made her injunction permanent, ruling that Obama’s preventive detention law was unconstitutional.
‘Under a Black Democrat, the rule of law ceased to exist within U.S. borders.’
For less than a week, the Bill of Rights returned to U.S. soil. But, this past Monday, a federal appeals court judge put the Constitution back on hold, removing Judge Forrest’s injunction [9] on preventive detention. The entire three-judge appeals court will begin hearing the case on September 28. Obama’s lawyers say the government needs to be allowed to detain certain prisoners without charge or trial in Afghanistan [10]. But Bruce Afran, the lawyer for the American plaintiffs in the case, thinks Homeland Security is gearing up to make lots of arrests of U.S. citizens, in anticipation that Middle East protests will spread to American soil.
That’s the evil beauty of these Bush-Obama laws: they cut across international borders and render all the people’s of the world equal in one important respect: President Obama claims the right to kill each and every one of them, or lock them up forever, on his own say so. In that sense, Obama recognizes no legal difference between U.S. anti-war protestors and anonymous targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia. All of our lives and freedom are subject to the whims of an American president.
(-Glen Ford; www.BlackAgendaReport.com)
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
(-Charles Bukowski)
“ME AND THE MOONLIT GHOST”…GARY SUNSHINE (is one of Anguish Young’s favorite American artists…)
Well it ain’t gonna be easy to write that much about Mister Gary Sunshine, he ain’t what you call a real go getter when it comes to publicity and audacious self-promotion. He writes these songs, records ’em, throws ’em up on-line, and then it’s up to those of you who know how to burn C.D.‘s, or purchase downloads, or who have decent speakers on your computers, to figure out how to listen to ’em. Seldom have I seen a guitarist of Gary Sunshine’s stature become such a strong lyricist and singer/storyteller. His newer originals are reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Neil Young, and Shane MacGowan. I saw Circus Of Power less than a dozen times, but they always blew our young minds with their swampy, blue collar motor rock, a greasy hybrid of MC5 dueling guitars, sixties blues, punk and hardcore, and Stonesy honky-tonk. They had one of the top ten singers of the hair-metal era, a Morrisonesque cosmic crooner by the name of Alex Mitchell, who was a soulful, baritoned poet-warrior, and two utterly badass guitar heroes, Gary Sunshine and Ricky Beck Mahler. My favorite line-up also included Ryan on drums and Zowie on bass. Their first album is better than the Cult’s “Sonic Temple” approximately as good as “Electric”, not quite as good as “Love”.
Only the Four Horsemen really rivaled Circus Of Power in their hell defying heyday. Yeah, Zodiac Mindwarp were fun, but they never had the humanity or soul of Circus Of Power. After a few solid major label albums and a live e.p., Circus broke up in L.A., and Gary went on to work with glam goddess, Brigitte West in NY Loose, he also did time with the Silos, managed an adult gift shop for Larry Flynt, and even worked with Axl Rose in Guns N Roses. I can’t tell you much about why they broke up, or what Gary’s been doing ever since then, because well. he’s just not a big chatty Cathy media whore, he’s a mystery man, a lone wolf, the enigma, but I can assure you he is not only one of the top guns of sleazy rocknroll, but he’ssteadily evolved into a talented and prolific, cinematic songwriter at a breathtaking level. He’s an under-rated, detail oriented, yarn spinning artist like a John Fogerty, or Steve Earle, quietly crafting a wide body of songs, that leave corporate rock wankers and nostalgia circuit headbangers, in the dust. And he’s a Dad. You never hear his tunes and connect them to “Beavis & Butthead” or the Aqua Net era. His songs resonate with a world weary defeatism and sly charm like Charles Bukowski and Tom Waits.
He’s definitely got a Mexican beer suppin’ beat-poet thing goin’ on. You ain’t the only one with the blues, kid. He’s cool like a Long Island ice tea. Circus Of Power have one of those extremely passionate, hardcore cult followings, with an unshakable devotion to that band, and I know many who were disappointed when Gary chose not to join the old gang for an anniversary reunion show some years back. You don’t have to abandon the dream of experiencing a genuine Circus Of Power reunion, to enjoy the contemporary works of wonder being constructed by the Circus alumni, for your listening pleasure, wolf brothers and moon sisters. If you’re familiar with Circus Of Power vocalist, Alex Mitchell’s sensational more recent works, with his various bands, Fat Nancy and Captain Zapped, and you hear Gary Sunshine’s solo music, you will inevitably be somewhat awed that these guys were so successful at merging their combined talents, for as long as they did. They’re both truly GREATS, in their own right. Yeah, Alex is my favorite hard rock vocalist besides oh, maybe Frank C. Starr (R.I.P.), Billy Idol, or Tex Perkins, as I have trouble fully connecting to whatever Ian Astbury sings about these days, but Captain Zapped provide all the crunchy kickass comicbook metal you’ve been missing since Iggy was screamin’ for “Power & Freedom”, and their freakolicious psychedelic biker punk is easily purchased online, and highly reccomended, but Mister Gary Sunshine’s moody music is equally as valid, it’s just coming from a less extroverted place. Gary’s like the quiet older cat you wanna be friends with at the bar, who rolls his eyes when you’re being loud in your pink shirt, cause he’s just not up for that much frat-boy buffoonery anymore; who is more serious and soft-spoken than you and your belligerent crew, and talks about old timey music and jazz and film and poetry and shit. Definitely a finger-poppin’ hepcat jazzbo bohemian dude but he ain’t no poseur beret, he’s one of those old-school NY downtown people. Only downtown ain’t downtown no more. So ya gotta go lookin’ for him on-line.
The first song you’ll wanna dig into is about the Ramones and Sex Pistols. It’s called, “The Sex Pistols And The Ramones”. It’s so, so good. It’s subtitled “A Love Story”. It will remind you instantly of your punk rock past and the golden Converse wearin’ romance that never faded away. His music is real gutbucket, washboard, kitchen sink oriented and brimming over with beautiful losers and recidivists and drinkers and divorcees, Gary Sunshine’s tellin’ OUR stories, and the music is equal parts Lefty Frizell, Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Pogues, and Woody Guthrie. I mean you know how there’s that bigarsed Americana scene, supposedly? Rich guys who’s NPR listening ex girlfriend hipped them to Chris Isaak and Royal Crown Review And Wilco and now they think they’re countrified downhome cowpokes? How the “NO DEPRESSION” bunch has missed Gary Sunshine is startling to me. If you like shit like the Jayhawks and Creek Dippers and Lucinda Williams and all those Replacements and Uncle Tupelo influenced, “insurgent country” bands, Gary Sunshine eats most of those bands best stuff for breakfast, ya know I can imagine Sunshine up with the cockadoodle doo, on first watch, listening to Mingus and Monk on low, slicing home fries, brewing coffee, spreadin butter on stacks of salt risen toast. Stoppin’ now and then to write something down, or honk on a harmonica. Gary is one of the tens of thousands of artists and intellectuals sadly pushed out of Lower Manhattan by the ruthless forces of po-lice state, real-estate, and billionaire gentrification, but you can put him in the Delta, down on the farm, in some dumbfuck Monsanto cornfed Midwestern football town, and all his front porch narratives are still gonna flicker with that seventies Martin Scorsese vibe. Rain wet alleyways and steam from gutters, and shifty lookin’ fellas with ducktails and porkpies and and Donnie Brascoe jackets makin’ big plans in 70’s coffeeshops. There’s just something very NY about the guy. Even when he grows a Skid Roper beard, his dignified geezer music still throbs with a Shaft pulsebeat. He was there the day the Stones made their “Waitin’ On A Friend video”. He waited on Woody Allen, who was searchin’ for cool jazz at an old Manhattan record store. He thrilled rabid heavy metal audiences all through the late eighties and early nineties, with the best band around. He’s been around. He’s definitely kept his D.I.Y. sensibility, crankin’ out song after song, long after the music machine is gone, he’s doing it all himself, just for you and you and me. “Be Careful What You Are Whispering” could be a Guy Clarke or Steve Earle out-take. “Listening To Heavy Metal (Day After Day) reminds me of Paul K. & The Weathermen, or David Olney, or Chick Graning from Scarce, it’s effin’ genius, makes me wonder about my own mulleted, ole Gary Moore wannabe, stonewashed metal bro from way back, who joined the Marines and disappeared. It’s probably the best thing Sunshine could have done for his art-vanish into the flyover states and make Peter Laughner and Robert Johnson influenced punk rock in a squalid basement room with his two kids playin’ on the swingset in the backyard and a one eared bloodhound named Muddy, ’cause you know how every suck shit perm from the spandex era who was ever, ever on MTV in the middle of the night still gets to strut around like he’s Jimmy Page? Sunshine just cast off all that pretentious major label metal dude celebrity with a shrug, sure, he could be sittin’ on a barstool with Chris Holmes and Riki Rachtman right now, hittin’ on Bambi eyed strippers from Des Moines at the Rainbow Bar & Grill, but instead, he’s got a spiral notebook and he’s gonna use it, he’s puttin’ it down, like Dylan, and Townes Van Zandt. He’s writin’ about “Cheap Champagne & Angry Names” and “Gettin’ Used To The Finer Things”, and really stirrin’ up the beatnik ghosts. You remember that jazzy college radio band from the grunge era, Morphine? He’s got summa that in here, too. “You Made Me A Criminal”, “Did You Move To New Orleans Or Texas”, etc., etc., are the keenly observant musings of a deeply sensitive American songwriter who’s been payin’ attention, who’s gotten older with the scars to prove it, and who still likes the Clash. Here and there, summa that old risqué voodoo and brimstone from the Circus Of Power years, naturally, leaks into his acute folk songs. If you loved his old band, this is the sound of his bruised soul in middle age, and it’s not as energetic as the raging punkmetal of twenty-five years ago, but it’s full of insight and awareness, and still has all that emotional impact, it’s just the grownup side of life, like Kristofferson, Gary’s feelin’ mortal, and thinkin’ ’bout what’s most precious in his time. I love it. If ya see ‘im at the donut shop, tell him I said hi.
Veglam 