Quick thought on the occupy backlash

Already the "hipster" personality type is being used to attack the various occupy movements. Like elections, this will be about personality, not issues. Yes, people protesting are more apt to read books, make scary references to banking law like the Glass Steagall Act and some might even inhale. If that's too much of a turn off, it makes perfect sense to bash those folks and side with the people who want to cancel your medical coverage when you get sick, destroy the last vestige of your union, foreclose on your house and pay you just enough to need two or three jobs.

Laugh until you cry

Has anyone noticed that with this bailout plan for the Masters of the Universe currently being discussed, the responsible idea of setting up a tax to actually pay for this Christmas present for bankers hasn't even been considered. If taxpayers actually got a bill for it, or even a reduced service, there is no way in hell this plan would fly. By adding onto the incomprehensible debt, the impact is more abstract. Also much like the Iraq War cost, which has been put on the credit card entirely and is completely ignored in the budget process, this plan to wipe out the bills of banks that made high risk/high return loans to most anyone to buy or borrow against obviously overvalued assets, adds $2,300 in debt for every man, woman and child, but in reality the burden will be shifted once again onto the younger generation. What is so hilarious, if it weren't so sad, is that these same people scream and moan for deregulation, but as soon as times get bad, their tune changes. After 9/11, the airlines received hordes of corporate welfare, and they responded by charging passengers for a second piece of luggage or for that threat to mankind, water. This situation makes me ill. My friend Shelly, an erstwhile Mt. Carmel teacher and the embodiment of the word itinerant, has a great take on this issue in her blog.

As for something more pleasant, the town I live is opening a spring training facility for the Cleveland Indians. I don't know why they're doing this now, but tomorrow they're opening it up to residents and Hall of Famer Bob Feller will be there to talk baseball and meet the fans. That sounds pretty cool to me. I'll be there.

My state of the union speech

"You never hear in the news, 200 killed today when Atheist rebels took heavy shelling from the Agnostic stronghold in the North."
- Doug Stanhope

America for too long has been run by the religious right and corporations. The former makes us judgmental about people, chides most everything fun, touts this precedent for faith as an ethos that leads us to both not question authority and subscribe to a lot of absurd fairy tales (Noah, Jonah and the whale, the Earth's creation took seven days) that are incompatible with critical thinking skills. The latter makes the country's landscape homogenous and dull, the people tired, boring and stressed out from working excessively in lust for all the latest toys that also pushes them to escape into a world of things like televised sports, reality tv or celebrity bullshit that distract them just enough for the corporations to rob the store blind. Iraq is all about corporations on a financial feeding frenzy on the government teet and the debate sponsored by the corporate media is still bogged down into whether you "support the troops." Exxon just posted the highest profits in human history. Read about the military contractors here. Read about the celebration of mass idiocy in our culture here.

I've spent a lot of time, too much time really, studying how the system works and what I've discovered only depresses me. There are people angry about it, but not nearly enough. Writing and reading about reality is a form of catharsis. Useless perhaps, but it helps ease the pain, though at other times it just darkens the mood. Others don't really recognize what is going on, but just focus on themselves intuitively. This is a large group and the group that most needs to change its ways in order to change the world. Another group, the most befuddling one to me, doesn't know, doesn't care, has no interest in knowing or caring and aren't really even taking the steps to "get theirs." The group I most loathe is the one that knows the game is skewed, but it is skewed to their benefit so they make the phoney arguments that take the real debate off the table. The "You hate America" crowd of Sean Hannity and other charlatans. Anyone who throws around the world liberal, which essentially means critical, in derision is especially awful.

America, and the CNMI for that matter, are great places, but they are also so disappointing because they could be so much better if there were a collective pulling of heads from asses.