The snow this time

Another snow is falling.

I have things to do, but I don't feel like doing them.

Watching the snow is peaceful, even with the roar of traffic going by; the sounds, not of quiet, but of tires on wet asphalt, punctuated by the whirrs of small motors, and the occasional groans of trucks.

I haven't been able to write much, and what I have been able to get out has been in orgasmic spurts on Facebook, commentary meant to attract the reader to news stories that seem important.

There are too many stories.
There is too much to try to understand.
There is too much to think about,
there is just too much.

One night last week, I watched 'Gojira', the 1954 Japanese movie that was altered for release in the United States, where it became known as 'Godzilla'. I dare say everyone knows the outline of the story: a few years after the atomic bomb, a monster arises from the seas, a monster that shows little use for logic, a monster bent on destruction.

Such plots call for a scientist who will quell the beast. In 'Gojira', that role was filled by Takashi Shimura, known to film buffs worldwide for his roles in the films of Akira Kurosawa. In his role as the scientist fighting Godzilla, every time the camera zoomed in for a close-up of his concerned face, all I could see was his face at the end of Kurosawa's 'Ikiru', in which he plays a bureaucrat struggling to find the meaning of life, his life, as he dies of cancer.

The picture I want to use as illustration shows the actor, in the snow, on a child's swing. It has a stock photo company's watermark on it. A lot of photos which used to be considered to be in the public domain are now claimed as the property of such companies. They want to be paid for their use, and the amount they want to be paid, even for a blog almost no one will read, is not cheap. I know the progression of this takeover for a fact, as for several years I have done occasional searches for particular photos, and watched as this has happened. In this case, a 65 year old photo from a Japanese movie is claimed to be under the ownership of a stock photo company. Much of the world seems to be becoming divvied up by owners who were not creators.

The snow outside of my window isn't sticking to the road yet, but is already piling up on the earth which had just started to suffer the appearance of crocus and the earliest signs of Spring.

About two weeks ago, I woke repeatedly throughout the night, which is not at all an unusual occurrence. That evening was different, however, in that every time I woke, I was in the same dream. I only remember the part at the end, from my stirring in the early morning. That's a metaphor, I suppose. In the dream, people were being rounded up. Color was draining out and everything was becoming, well, not black and white, but gray. Gradations of gray. Gray upon gray. People were being rounded up and sent off to somewhere. Younger men were being sent to the army, that much was known. Other people were being sent someplace unknown, to be unknown. I managed to sneak away from the roundup, and made my way down a long corridor which seemed an endless void. There were doors everywhere, lined up neatly, evenly, like some Levittown style apartment house. As I came close to my door, the corridor was flooded with people, people rounding up people, people trying to escape, there was a crush of people. I managed to open the door to my place, and snuck in, hopefully unobserved in the chaos. It was my space without a doubt. Except that my stuff had been largely removed. The furniture that was left had been covered by sheets and tarps, resembling one of those old closed up apartments opened years later with layer upon layer of dust covering everything. That was when I woke up.

The snow covers the world like layers of dust.

I feel stupid. I may have misread the situation, and the intentions of the Trump coterie. I just read several of the comments made by Nikki Haley, the new United States Ambassador to the United Nations. The situation in my country grows more surreal by the day, by the hour. I'd long assumed that the takeover by the reactionary right was an attempt to gut the government, to remove any help given to the working class, to move as much money and resources as possible to the rich, the oligarchs, the robber barons of our time. This seemed like the natural, and predictable, outcome of years of de-regulation, of lies and distortions by media representing the far right. A fight that had used the religious culture wars had paid off, but the cost was Donald Trump and the destruction of the Republican Party. I think I was wrong. I should have kept focus on the religious right. They don't just want to end abortion, or end gay rights (and gays). They don't just want their version of Sharia law, a world in which the husband will rule the home, with an obedient wife to wait on him (if she knows what's good for her - by now a working life in an often corporate culture should have taught women that they are expendable, their roles replaceable).

As I look at the proposed cuts to -this year's - budget, the toll in human misery can easily blind one to the toll on science, on the arts, on international aid, basically everything. I thought these people were simply ignorant of the interdependencies of the world, and had no understanding of the outcome of their actions.

But it's what they want. They are depending on it. Many of this crowd are fundamentalist Christians. The Bible is their word, their God, infallible, and Trump is His servant. They are not here to destroy the world so the United States can take over, so the moneyed class can acquire more than they already have. They are here to destroy the world. Period. They seek nothing less than to force Armageddon; they aren't looking for the end times - they consider that we are already in the end times. They are looking to hasten the end.

Mr. Trump isn't the intransigence and chicanery of the Republican Party come back to haunt them. He is their monster, rising out of the sea of their despair, come to destroy.

And me? I'm just another observer, a loser at life, swinging back and forth in the snow.

Fat Tuesday

Today is Fat Tuesday. When I was a kid (raised Methodist) we used to call it Shrove Tuesday. In Great Britain, it is a day to consume pancakes. We used to consume donuts. I rather liked having a reason to consume donuts. The word "shrove" is derived from "shrive", which refers to a confession of sins, a sort of summing up if you will, for the purpose of repentance and seeking the help of the Almighty to obtain Absolution for your sins. In the case of Shrove Tuesday, one seeks absolution starting the next day (Ash Wednesday). On Fat Tuesday, one parties, joins the greater Mardi Gras Carnivale, gorges on fattening foods, and marvels at the convenience and poetry of the human situation.

With Carnivale crossing my mind, I thought I'd wander over to You Tube and see if any clips were available from "Orfeu Negro", a.k.a. "Black Orpheus". It's the ancient story of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in Rio during Carnivale. The bossa nova score is by Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim. The film's attitudes towards the poor blacks of Rio are no longer acceptable to many, and I doubt that the film gets many showings now. Perhaps that is why, instead of film clips, the entire movie is available on YouTube - for Free! One used to spend years trying to see a movie like this, waiting for a screening at a revival house in the big city, or going to a museum, or an arts group showing a worn 16mm print. Now it is available at a click. (And, when there is commercial potential left, a fee.) It is unfortunate that today's films buffs will rarely get a chance to see movies like this on a big screen. But still.... Black Orpheus, for free.



Today is Presidential Primary Day in New Hampshire, the first actual vote by the great unwashed masses for this season. New Hampshire is a mostly white state that bears little resemblance to most of the country. Unlike, say, the just held Iowa caucus, in a mostly white state that bears little resemblance to the rest of the country. After today there will hopefully be a respite from the incessant commercials for those campaigning for the nomination. I live in a state which borders New Hampshire. We've been inundated with these advertisements for months. Both political parties, their supporters, their shady secret Political Action Committees, their candidates, the media, and the general populace will have plenty to repent tomorrow. Sadly, this Carnival simply picks up and moves elsewhere for a bit, before moving on again.

It's been a pretty shameful show this time around. Of course, endless campaigning means endless ad revenue to the media, which is now presenting the contest to select the leader of the country as something akin to the reality game shows which pervade broadcast and cable television. It's a constant onslaught of "who insulted whom, who's winning" reporting, presented in the style of a Facebookland Twitterverse of the nasty and belligerent scripted and rehearsed quote. The media companies are supposed to be impartial in their reporting, but that school closed a long time ago. It isn't difficult to figure out which candidates the corporate conglomerates are backing if one pays attention. One must remember, however, that to the media, this is still show business. Here's the Governor of one state, acting very much like the schoolyard bully he is by most accounts. Here's the Governor of another state, scion of a political family with two Presidents already in the till, who is doing so badly in the polls he has called in his 90 year old mother to shill for votes as she pushes forward with her walker - in the snow. I could go on and address some of the real issues, but that proves ultimately (and extremely) disheartening. Reality seems to have little to do with it anymore.

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Most of my radio show this past Saturday (February 6th) was spent visiting the airwaves and jukeboxes of late January to early February 1945. Frank Lowry, known for his whistling abilities, showed up a couple of times. The finale was a February 6th, 1945 broadcast with Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra. As always, I hope any listeners enjoy the show.

Time to change your underwear

As I write, it is April the 1st. March and its winds of folklorish legend have theoretically passed. The weather report suggests that by the end of the week, the temperature could rise to 60 degrees fahreneight. Much of the winter's snow has already melted, exposing  patches of ground large enough to easily spot this morning's frost. It was really a delight to have a good old fashioned snowy winter again. There have been some years recently in which I was already photographing daffodils and jonquils by this date. As it happens, I'm old enough to remember when such warmth was unexpected and a fairly rare event, as it was in Ticino in 1959 in this report from the venerable Beeb.



When I prepare one of my radio shows, I spend as much time as possible listening to old radio shows from which I might take an excerpt. Such clips are intended to illuminate the times from which the featured big band broadcast originates. Last Saturday's show centered on March 31st, 1946, and a broadcast from the New Meadowbrook in Los Angeles by Gene Krupa and His Orchestra.

From the time I was a baby until a month before my 9th birthday, we shared what had been my grandfather's house with my uncle and aunt. My uncle had fought in the Second World War. He never talked about it. It seems to me that most folks of that era didn't talk about it. The war was a job they had to do, a sacrifice that had to be made. It was over, and time to get back to the everyday business of living and dying.

The men and women who had gone overseas returned to find that the home they had fought for had changed. They returned to a world of shortages, which was to be expected. But there was also great unrest. The Labor Unions were calling strike after strike, and it could be difficult to find work. There was an acute shortage of housing, and what was available was overpriced. When England withdrew its troops form Iran as specified in the terms of a treaty, Russia did not. The War had not brought peace. In many of the March and early April 1946 radio shows I listened to, a recurring theme centered on the world spinning out of control - again. Thanks to the presence in every home of a radio, news stories were everywhere. The lead characters in both the comedies and the dramas all felt overwhelmed by the all too present world. All people really wanted was to be left alone. In peace.

I am a news junkie, always have been. I like to keep up on what's happening, what's going on, what's new, what's old, what's in, what's out, what.... and there's the rub. These days, it's just "what?". In capitals  "WHAT?".

There was one segment I prepared for last Saturday's show that I ended up not using for various reasons, including its length. It was an excerpt from a 'Songs by Sinatra' broadcast. In it, there was a recreation of a scene from a short subject which had just won an Academy Award. There were boys fighting, picking on one fellow who was 'different'. Sinatra broke up the fight, and noted that it was Un-American.  We had just fought a war - did you care about who dropped the bomb on the Japs, he asked? Or that we won? He noted that as a nation, we had come together, all races working together. Discrimination didn't have a place here in America, no sir-ee. The lesson was followed by the song, "The House I Live In".



Along with all the other news, local, national, and international which I wish I hadn't heard this past week, was the curious case of a law to protect religious rights in one of our states. Many states have instituted such laws or are in the process of adopting them. Religious liberties are being threatened, they say. People should not be required to do things which violate the precepts of their religion, they say. The particular legislation which hit the fan this time was signed into law by the governor of a state in a private closed door ceremony. In the photograph of the signing, several prominent anti-gay rights advocates can be clearly seen. The bill was quite clearly passed to allow businesses and corporations (which are defined as 'people') the right to refuse their services to others based on a religious objection. When the backlash started, as events planned in that state began being cancelled, the governor went on a media offensive tour, proclaiming that we all simply misunderstood the nature of the bill. You know, governor, I think we get it.

In California, a 'citizen's initiative' by a lawyer will make to the ballot. It will allow citizens to shoot and kill gay people on sight if the state doesn't put them to death first. Now, we all know this kind of nonsense doesn't have a chance of happening, said the people of Germany on November 8th, 1938. The question I have is why these stories are getting so much coverage. Is the intent to ferret out prejudice and bring us all together in the house we live in? To shock and get ratings? To distract us from something else that is going on? To reinforce the beliefs of the similar minded? Yeah, I understand the desire to be left alone, to putter around doing my own thing, to get back to the ordinary process of living and dying.

As always, I hope anyone who listens enjoys the show.

The Oscars, Sequestration, and The Age of Snark

Mercury is retrograde again. This is not good; Mercury is my ruling planet. Fleet footed messenger indeed. Harbinger of electronic frustration and disaster is more like it. One of my external hardrives has crashed with a loss of some data. An update to the Chrome browser to make it more secure has rendered it nearly useless. Yup, Mercury is retrograde. It's not that I'm a follower of things astrological. I'm not. I'm much too much of a Virgo for that.

If that comment came off as a little snarky, then I have accomplished at least one goal today. We are, after all, living in the Age of Snark.

The word "snark" is supposed to derive from the combination of "snide" and "remark". In other words, the intent is a sarcastic comment. i.e., one "marked by or given to using irony in order to mock or convey contempt" , "biting", "acrimonious", "snide". The key word is "irony" or "ironic". This implies that there is substance and thought behind the use of a snarky comment. Sadly, in the current practice of snark, there is very little thought or substance to be found. It is cynicism without experience or reason, used in an attempt to be "cool".

This year's Oscars strived to be different.

A perfect example would be last week's Academy Awards. The host was a properly handsome and multi-talented young man whose name already escapes me; I had to look it up. Seth MacFarlane is the man behind a couple of animated tv shows known for wiseacre characters who make pithy comments about modern life, which includes a talking baby genius of snark. And he was the creator of a top grossing movie in which a main character was the adult hero's hilariously potty mouthed teddy bear. I haven't seen the tv shows or the movie, but even without a working familiarity with them it was obvious that this guy wasn't going to be your average Oscar host. This year's show was produced by the guys from Storyline Entertainment. Storyline's mainstay is Craig Zadan who is an openly gay producer of Broadway, film and tv musicals such as the original "Footloose", and the movie musicals of "Chicago", and "Hairspray". With these folks behind the show, it amazes me that people were shocked at the occasionally infantile humor and inclusion of musical numbers. Why did they think these guys were hired?

Seth MacFarlane

In the entertaining, occasionally funny, but too long opening segment, MacFarlane had a song and dance routine tribute to the allure of the movies whose main refrain was "we saw your boobs". The song named names and films. There were reaction shots of many of the women who were named. Anyone paying attention would have noted that the reactions were previously recorded - some weren't even wearing the same clothes as in the live shots. The ladies were in on the joke, lame as it was. The number's finale included the Los Angeles Gay Men's chorus. Paid commentators, and a great host of tweeters, bloggers, and Facebookers went berserk. Negative commentary was literally flying with the speed of light, or at least dsl. The number was instantly denounced as sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, crude and so on and so forth. Excuse me, but what did you folks expect? First off, we're talking the Oscars here - a show famous in modern times for pairing Rob Lowe, just off a major sex scandal, with Snow White for a song and dance. The "boobs" number was as much a commentary on the attitudes of male moviegoers and the selling of an entertainment product by use of nudity as it was an exploitation. It was snark with something behind it. The response was an attempt to be snarky about it all, each writer trying to top the other and so find their fleeting moment of internet fame in what was basically humorless name calling.

The Oscar folks did what they were hired to do. They got the best ratings in years, and MacFarlane's presence brought in a younger demographic for the advertisers.

For anyone who is a reader, the word 'snark' references a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark" which is told in eight "fits". Varieties of snark are named. Some bite, some scratch. And one, the boojum, can cause someone to vanish away, never to be seen again. It has always been my suspicion that the boojum exists. It is the third named snark. As stated in the poem's preface, "what I tell you three times is true". The boojum does, in fact, make a baker disappear, and drives a banker quite mad. In the poem's original publication as a book in 1876, illustrations by artist Henry Holiday were included. In a moment of prophecy (and modern day snark), the banker bears a stunning resemblance to Republican puppet master Karl Rove. Rove famously engineered the two elections of George W. Bush to the US Presidency by the use of gerrymandering, voter suppression, distortion, misrepresentation, political action committees, and outright lies. In the most recent election, Rove was reduced to the madness of babbling idiocy on Fox News when election returns declared Obama the winner.

Babbling idiocy is very popular just now. It is especially apparent in the reactions to what is being called "sequestration". Technically, sequestration is a legal maneuver in which property is held by a court to prevent it from being disposed of before its proper ownership is resolved. The current use refers to a government policy intended to reduce the government's budget deficit by having the treasury hold back from spending an amount based on a formula set by Congress. We have been told by the commentators, tweeters, Facebookers, and bloggers that there was a political failure engendered by hard-nosed Tea Partiers and Republicans who refuse to budge on the issue of raising taxes, and Democratic ideologues who refuse to budge on issues of entitlement reform and social program spending. They have missed the point. It is all a nonsense poem.

All political sides owe their financial existence to sometimes different, sometimes the same, corporations and their financial aristocrat stockholders. There was no agreement to stave off the latest crisis because there wasn't intended to be one. These folks did the job they were hired to do. The rich are taking what they deem to be theirs. Even the financial publication Bloomberg News has been so appalled by all of this nonsense that they pointed out that the amount of the sequester (i.e. cuts in government programs) is strangely equal to the amount of financial bailouts given this year to the top Wall Street banks. That amount also happens to be the same as the amount of profit those banks are showing. (We're talking roughly $88 Billion here.) Ah, a co-incidence. Like the right horse coming in at the right time on the right track.

Of course, all this is slight of hand. The sequester is a snark. The money, like the 18 Billion cash that got lost from the books during the Iraq invasion, is a snark. "For the snark was a boojum, you see".

In order to form a more perfect - say what?

Continuing on from yesterday's post... this was going to be illustrated, but I've decided against that choice - it is really just distraction from what I want to say.

Okay, so here's the thing. I'm not an Obama guy. I voted for him last time, which I think (just off the top of my head) is the first time I ever voted for the winning candidate. But while the Obama administration has done a number of good things, there are a number of missteps and mistakes that are galling.

Obama may tout his first day in office signing of the Lilly Ledbetter act, but it was passed by Congress before he took office and really doesn't do anything to make certain that women receive pay equal to men in the same job. What it does do is extend the period of time in which women have the right to sue over such a situation. Provided they can find out about it. Then again, guys going for a job don't necessarily get paid the same starting salary as the guy before them either. Companies expect to hire cheaper. They expect the applicant to name a salary range, but they want to get by without mentioning what they are offering. The potential employee is at a disadvantage - the employer controls the information to keep an upper hand. Why not just do away with such nonsense and state upfront the salary range the employer expects to pay for the job without regard to sex, race & etc?

Obama did not close the facility at Guantanamo Bay as promised. Its use as a torture prison by the Bush administration, along with the policies exemplified by it, further sullied the reputation of this country. It is a symbol of what went wrong, of America itself gone wrong, and it needs to be closed and dismantled or burned to the ground - Publicly - for everyone to see. The terrorists held there have no rights. This country was based on having equal civil rights. It may seem odd to give such guarantees of treatment to those who wish to kill us but we need to do it - we need to live by our ideals - they apply to everyone, not an anointed few. These were the ideals for which we stood, and for which we  let ourselves, our neighbors, and our children die in wars foreign and domestic. They mean something, dammit.

The Obama administration had majorities in both houses but was unable to pass a decent Health Care bill. The administration settled for a bastardized piece of legislation that will prove a boon to the insurance companies which helped create the problems we have with our healthcare system in the first place. They say it's a decent first step. Yeah, sure. This situation will not be resolved until part of the expense of healthcare is removed from the employer, who offers a lesser salary in order to pay it. Healthcare should not be tied to one's job. Certainly, in my low wage case, I paid a larger weekly sum for healthcare than the contribution required of my employer. Just like most other people I know, my portion, with its sizable deduction, left me unable to afford to use my coverage to go see a doctor or to purchase many of the medications I had been taking before I took that low wage job out of necessity. My weekly deduction would have served me better if it had been pooled into universal coverage. The Republicans claim that such a move would financially destroy the country, yet it hasn't destroyed all the other countries which adopted such a system as noted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in the post World War II environment. (The United States has never signed that portion of the Declaration.) European countries afforded it while rebuilding after the destruction of war.

At the time of Obama's inauguration, the Republicans said upfront that they intended to stonewall his administration's legislation, and to do everything they could to make certain that he failed the country and become a one term president. And they delivered on their promise. They don't care about our lives. Yet Obama has never publicly taken them on, never used what was once called the "bully pulpit" to hoist the other rich bastards on their own petard. He should have used this situation to campaign, and lent the support of his person and office to Democrats, Independents, and Republicans willing to compromise who are running for the House and Congress. We don't need a passive aggressive President. We need a fighter, and a Leader.

I could go on, and I was prepared to, but there really isn't much point in it. People seem to think that Obama is some kind of populist President. He is not.  Most people who think this do so because the republicans and their o&o (owned and operated) media told them so. It is uncritical acceptance of an untruth as truth. He didn't start the bank bailouts, but he did administer them, and created and oversaw others. It should be noted that the work he did with the automotive industry was not a bailout, it was a bridge loan. The bailouts were probably necessary, and followed the system set up in the eerily similar Swedish banking crisis of 1991 brought on by the collapse of their housing/real estate markets engineered by speculators. The important thing here is that the Banks got bailed out. The mortgage companies got bailed out. The people did not. Most of the people who owned real estate were middle class. Obama, in his original campaign, talked a lot about the middle class. Too bad he didn't do much about it. In those campaigns, he did not talk about the poor. He barely mentioned the poor this time around. No one talks about the poor anymore except the poor. And Bernie Sanders. Under Obama, Wall Street came back and is enjoying record profits. Which means that the rich, and the corporations, oil companies, and etc. are doing very, very well. The big companies get to take out big loans through the non-government bank called the Federal Reserve  - loans backed by the government using our taxes - at 0% interest. When did we the people who pay the bills get that kind of service? The money the people lost (including pensions and retirement savings) in the banking crisis just "disappeared". That is mostly fiction. It was stolen. We were mugged, just not in a dark alley. Mr. Obama has continued many of the polices that created this situation, just as he has continued Guantanamo Bay, the onerous Homeland Security laws and etc. Do you really think that the financial crisis that came close to destroying us just happened? Do you think that Banks didn't learn anything from the Great Depression? Or the similar situation in Sweden in 1991 that was resolved by government bailouts? This crisis was less an accident than a managed event.

And the really sad thing is that none of this is new. It is a cycle that has repeated many, many times - and not just in the United States. This is the way things work. We pay taxes for services - most services are local - water, sewer, streets cleaned, etc. The larger share of taxes go to the government - for what? Only a small pittance goes to the arts, to education, to parks & etc. We are never asked how, or on what, we want our taxes spent. Why not healthcare? One thing I always adored about my country is that our forefathers chose the name United States. The initials read "us". It hasn't ever really been all of "us" now, has it? The rich and super rich are the 1%, the 5% or whatever. We outnumber them. We pay them to take care of things, but all they really do is take. It is time we demand more. Not request. Demand. Today is Guy Fawkes day. It used to be common to burn effigies of the disliked ruling classes on this day. We need to do more than burn effigies.

So why vote, and why vote for Obama? Because if you vote for the Republican candidate, things will get worse. Much worse. The republicans will use religion and morals (which they themselves do not follow) to make our lives completely miserable. The real reason they do this is to keep us busy trying to survive, and to distract us from the other things they are doing, like stealing everything they can.  I don't know about you, but with my meager income, I pay taxes. Money is taken out of my check. The government uses it without paying interest. I get a portion of it back as a refund - but by no means do I get the full amount back. Yet the Republican candidate states that 47% of the people of this country simply drain off the treasury, meaning the lesser than working men and women amount they put into the kitty. We work. We pay taxes. They stole our money, and they go unpunished. In voting for a President in this country, what you are really doing is voting for a philosophy. Do we the people want an almost illusory chance to move up the economic ladder, a chance to have a little trickle down to help our lives (acquired after the riots of the past), and a few paltry civil rights to attempt to live our lives with a modicum of dignity; or do we want to become serfs to the ruling classes which own the majority shares of the corporations in one giant company town? That's the choice we really have.

I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night

When I first started the process of moving from Boston to Brattleboro, the nurses at the Brattleboro Retreat had just won a long fought battle to form a union.

At the time, Vermont was the only state in U.S. not to have a Walmart. So Walmart built a store in New Hampshire, just across the river from Brattleboro. It destroyed the small businesses of our downtown, and changed Brattleboro forever. About the time I moved here in 1995, a few women were fired at that Walmart for daring to suggest the workers form a union.

About 10 years ago, there was a union movement at our local food co-op where I had once worked. My dear friend Laura over at Austanspace was one of the prime movers in that effort. Things got nasty. The co-op management brought in a team of very expensive lawyers to"advise" them - lawyers whose web page bragged of their ability to crush nascent union movements.

At the same time, there was also a union effort at our once well regarded local daily newspaper which had been decimated by new corporate ownership. There was another local union effort at the time, but I can't quite recall the details anymore.

All of the efforts failed.

In the last few weeks, the Union effort at the co-op was reborn, and is currently having a baptism of fire. Our local independent weekly, the Commons, has followed the effort. In this week's edition, which reported the refusal of the co-op's Board to accept the union and let the general manager demand a monitored vote, there was also a column which declared that "Not all the information is coming out, Not all Co-op employees embrace the union". It was written by a woman whose name I did not recognize, Elizabeth Julia Stoumen. Of course, I looked her up. Until recently, there was an Elizabeth Julia Stoumen who lived in New York City. If this is the same Elizabeth Julia Stoumen, she was Director of Operations and President of the NYC International Women's Writer's Guild, an organization under financial duress. She has filed suit against the Guild claiming fraud and slander over her dismissal from her leadership role after having acknowledged that she improperly used Guild funds for personal purposes. (She used a Guild credit card for expenditures of close to $5,000. and then requested personal reimbursement for those expenses. After it was discovered, she claimed it was a mistake, and repaid the monies. As noted on the IWWG's info page about the lawsuit, "Subsequent investigation has revealed multiple additional instances of improper expense reimbursements...")

Trying to form a Union can get messy. There are always accusations flying around. Management and/or ownership has historically used many nasty methods to stop workers from seeking any say whatsoever about their working conditions, their safety, or their pay.

One famous case of false allegations involved a Swedish immigrant who went by the name of Joe Hill. His is quite a story, even though not all that much is known for sure. We do know that he worked his way from New York City across the United States through a series of  low wage jobs. And we know that in California, he became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the "Wobblies". Stories, most undocumented, have him involved in Labor movement actions up and down the West Coast. Certainly, he was badly beaten by police in Fresno during a protest there. If he wasn't at a protest or strike in person, he was there in spirit as a songwriter. In those days, his songs were well known - at least by workers. Here's a couple of examples which explain why all the Misters Moneybags might not have liked Joe very much:

 

The footage in the above video is from a strike against General Motors in 1937.

In 1914, Joe Hill was working in a mine near Salt Lake City, where he caught pneumonia. While he was recuperating, there was a murder of a shopkeeper and his son. Joe Hill was accused. Evidence was planted, and he was framed. Rumors involved Mormon higher ups (the Mormons were heavily anti-union) as well as the mine bosses. Hill maintained his innocence, and during trial refused to cooperate,  claiming that his attorney was working with the court to frame him. There were numerous protests over the guilty verdict, including one by that well know Wobbly, Helen Keller. Protests to the Republican Governor of the state of Utah ranged from the Swedish Ambassador to the President of the United States. Whomever, whatever, on a November morning in 1915, Joe Hill was shot to death by a firing squad.

Before he was executed, Joe Hill sent a telegram to a Wobbly leader in Chicago. It read,
"Don't waste time mourning. Organize!"

Earl Robinson and Alfred Hayes wrote a song about him which has become fairly well known:



Today is Joe Hill's birthday, and it is important we remember him.
Happy Birthday, Joe.
The struggle still goes on....

Meanwhile... back in what passes for reality these days...

Okay, I had told myself that I would show restraint. I've tried, I've really tried. I don't want to spend my time preaching to the converted. But I just can't ignore the current political "news" any longer. There have been several fun images worth re-posting which have appeared since the 'Great Debate' between President Obama and President-wanna-be Mitt Romney. Romney came off as a preppy on speed, obnoxiously interrupting and speaking over both the debate moderator and the President of the United States. There is such a thing as respect, Mitt. It might help if you learned to show it, even if you can't quite connect with the concept of humility which goes along with it.   For his part, Obama seemed tired, first exhibiting the kind of patience a parent shows a child who has just discovered that there is injustice in the world, then tolerance, then peevishness, and only occasionally delving into momentary flashes of frustration. Romney constantly noted that the President was misinformed about his (Romney's) proposals, most of which were stunningly different than those on which he has been running since the start of the primaries and which are contained the Republican Party Platform he helped create. The President let him get away with it. Jeezus, Obama - when the hell are you going to stand up and tell these people off? It's time you called the Republicans on their lies and noted that it is they who have refused to work with you and your administration. You are letting them get away with re-writing your administration's history and spreading it as vote-for-Republican-propaganda-manure. Man up and fight back, damn-it.

As I have no money for cable and there is no broadcast television signal where I live, I had to rely on the internet to watch the debate. Every web-stream I found, including the one on YouTube, was provided by a partnership of Yahoo and ABC News. The anchoring was annoying, but no where near as bad as the constant popups and superimposed tweets of such sophisticated thoughts as "Go get im". The entire internet, once a wonderful resource, has become a constant corporate commercial of banners, roll over signs, and superimposed messages (some can't even be turned off - the only way to get rid of them to read a news story is to reload the page) supplemented by expressions of thought from people who are clearly not used to the process. Don't expect to be able to read much of the news on the internet without paid subscriptions any longer - reportage on the internet has gone heavily into web-streams of talking heads with annoying graphics and music - some as short as 20 or 30 seconds - in place of text. Aside from online sales, it is as though there were a prejudice against  people who can read. Perhaps that is why Romney felt bold enough to note that he would pull all funding from the Public Broadcasting Service (which gets about one one-hundredth of the US budget, less than the Pentagon spends in one day).

Okay, I guess I feel better now.
Maybe.

Earth Day musings and the new normal.

It is one of those days. Move the chair to get closer to the keyboard to type, knock something over. It is Earth Day. The early warmth we had made all the trees on my block leaf out very quickly, and much earlier than normal. Today, though, is cool and gray.

Spring on the Brattleboro Common - about a half a block from my apartment. I took this photo yesterday!

The lilac on the Common (not far from the crab apples in the picture above) as well as one growing in a 2 foot space between two older buildings on the edge of our business district, are both starting to open their blooms a month early. This is the new normal - there isn't any normal. Well, there is, but I find it depressing and try not to let much of it slip into my consciousness. Which is pretty hard to do when it is the major part of one's everyday existence. (And I'm thinking of the "new normal" in politics and economics as well as in the environmental sense.)

How to explain this feeling? Well, let's take Earth Day. Although there were a couple of similar ideas already out there, Earth Day as we know it was founded by US Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970 as a reaction to the disastrous 1969 oil spill in southern California and the lack of a decent response by the US Government. He based his idea on the anti Vietnam War movement's "teach ins", hoping that education would help raise enough public outcry that something would be done to stem what he saw as an approaching environmental crisis. How have things changed since then? In 2010, this day was celebrated by the sinking to the ocean floor of the drilling platform of the Deepwater Horizon BP Macondo blowout (after an explosion two days previous); an incident otherwise known as the Gulf Oil Spill. Haven't head much about that lately have you? Have you seen or heard of any legislation or regulations passed to protect against shoddy cheap bottom dollar is king construction work to try to help prevent this kind of thing from happening again? Have you heard about the continuing "persistent oil seep" in the Gulf whose chemical analysis identifies it as consistent with the make up of oil from the Macondo 252 well? The phrase in quotes is from an investigative piece published in March 2012. You haven't heard of it because the reporting was done by Al Jazeera. Three days ago, the New York Times reported that BP has, so far, paid out about $ 8 billion to individuals and businesses affected by the spill. (That's out of the $20 billion fund they were forced to set up, which the Times failed to mention.) BP claims to have spent an additional $14 billion in cleanup costs. BP's books show a $37.2 billion charge for their expenses. In case you're curious, the lawyers have so far collected about $600 million. One other thing, aside from the continued deaths of Gulf waters dolphins and whales at twice the normal rate, tar balls still continue to wash up on Gulf shores. According to the National Geographic Society and Ecowatch, the tar balls contain the bacteria Vibrio vulnificus, which can cause fatal blood poisoning and is the causative agent of cholera.

One of these days I'll get around to writing about what I see as the "new normal". In the meantime, I'd explain the phrase by mentioning Monsanto, the giant multinational conglomerate which manufactures rGBH (the bovine growth hormone which leaches into the cows milk and has been identified as an "accelerator" of prostrate, lung and colon cancers), and the toxic weed killer Round Up and much of the genetically modified Round Up resistant seeds (corn, soybeans, etc.) sold in the US. They dealt with the fact that their products are getting the major blame for the destruction of pollinating insects (think bees, among others) by buying the company that does much of the research into bee colony collapse. They made the purchase last September, but the news of it only came to light two days ago. I wonder whatever happened to their anti-trust investigation the US Government started in 2009? I wonder if that was affected by the 2009 appointment of their chief lobbyist ($8.8+ million in 2008) (and a former Deputy Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration) to the position of senior adviser to the FDA by President Obama? You know, the FDA. As in Monsanto's should be famous comment, "Monsanto should not have to vouch for the safety of biotech food Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is FDA's job." Oh, by the way,  they are also a former employer of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (who wrote the Court's majority 2001 opinion that genetically modified seeds were patentable). I won't go into their history of manufacturing DDT, Agent Orange or their worldwide toxic dumping and use of child labor. Happy Earth Day, Monsanto.

Earth Day is also the birthday of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. His studies of a range of subjects led directly to Nobel prizes for others. He was nominated three times, but was never given the award. In the early 1940's, he was called upon by the United States government to work on a specific task. He completed his mission, and is now known as the father of the Atomic Bomb. Horrified by the death and destruction his work unleashed, he agitated for organizations to oversee atomic development and for the then new United Nations to oversee and control atomic weapons. For that work, various interests in the US pushed him out of the way of the business of atomic money, and used the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950's to publicly embarrass and destroy him as they revoked his security clearances. It just wasn't any fun starting a profitably expensive arms race with a Communist liberal loving peacenick running around gumming up the works. Oh, by the way, the atomic arms race isn't over you know. But then again, no arms races are ever over, are they?

Shall we now discuss the new figures on poverty in the United States? Let's not. But if you live in this country, have you noticed a large upswing in crimes such as holdups of convenience stores and banks? We're having quite a few here in Brattleboro these days. Cause and effect and all that.

And as for our hopes for the future being based on education engendered by days like Earth Day, here are a few responses from an article on Facebook this morning about a bank robbery in town yesterday:

Person 1 ...can't see it taken very long to find him one dum ass bank robber

Person 2 - Well lets rember they never caut the guy that robbed to banks on a bike ane one day. So will see how long it takes this time

After a report of an arrest in the case:

Person 3 - Wow they did there job this time.

Person 4 - People really should judge the police when your not the ones putting your life on the line everyday in these situations every day


So much for education. And hope. It is one of those days.

The Way Things Work

Some years back, there was a wonderful book called "The Way Things Work". I seem to recall that it was very popular. Sadly, it didn't go into the way things really work. My case in point is the sad sad story of the young man in Florida who was shot to death by a a man who has been variously reported as being associated with, being the Captain of, or having no relationship with the local Neighborhood Watch of the gated community in which the event occurred.

Disclaimer: For the last several days I have been besieged by the grippe. Perhaps I'm just cranky from it. Perhaps it's the lack of sleep followed by sudden four hour naps. Whatever. Here's the story.

Late this afternoon, one of the web portals I use featured a news story at the top of its webpage. The headline read, "Public opinion shifts on Treyvon Martin case". It was the top item in a "News for You" section. The website/web portal involved is Yahoo. I read the story, which involved the shift of public opinion away from the idea of arresting the man who shot the kid (the kid obviously up to no good as he was wearing a hoodie and armed with a pack of Skittles). The basis for this news story was a study done by WPA Opinion Research two days after a CNN poll which showed most Americans thought the shooter should be arrested. CNN I had heard of. I decided to look up WPA Opinion Research. It turned out to be Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research. They have a website that is a little bit frightening, considering what I found in their own write ups:

"WPA's research is grounded in traditional research techniques but adds the latest behavioral science and communications science discoveries to show our clients how to change opinions and behaviors."

That was from their homepage. On one of their other pages, I found this:

 "Market research from Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research provides unmatched information that can make or break a politician, election, organization, lobbyist, or political objective."

Although their home page lists them as having been in business for a decade, it turns out that they've only been around for a year (formed March 2011). Previously, the company was known as Wilson Research Strategies. They used to have an entry on Wikipedia, but it was deleted by a user whose credentials are listed as being a translator of Portuguese to English.

The Wilson part of WPA turns out to be Chris Wilson. He used to be the Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas back when George W. Bush was governor. According to his Wikipedia entry, he worked for Karl Rove. (Which he seems to have forgotten to list in his WPA company bio.) Interestingly enough, he was also the person who leaked the story of former candidate for the Presidency Herman Cain sexually harassing a female employee of the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s. It was the beginning of the end of Cain's candidacy. Wilson is elsewhere listed as a supporter of Texas governor Rick Perry. He did the polling for the Super PAC that supported Perry's presidential candidacy.

The Perkins part of WPA is Chris Perkins, who ran the "Independent Expenditure" unit of the Republican National Committee. Before that, he was director of the Americans for a Republican Majority PAC, which was created by and run for the benefit of Former House Speaker Tom Delay. It was fined and shut down by the Federal Elections Commission.  Delay was convicted on charges of money laundering.

Now look, let's be clear. I can't afford lawyers and what not, and since this information was turned up in web searches, I am not saying that WPA is comprised of shady characters, and I am most certainly not saying that because they worked for a couple of the known lairs and thieves of the Republican business trade that they themselves are tainted. Guilt by association is not the kind of pejorative reference that should be used. But these things should be noted, that's all. I'm just sayin'.

Oh, before I forget, if you're wondering about the A in WPA, it's for third partner Bryon Allen, who directed political polling projects for the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies.

Now, I use two other web portals, both based on their various news providers. Neither listed this story nor the poll results from WPA.

I looked at the story again. Aha! It wasn't from a news source at all (even though presented along with the news). It was from a political blog called "The Daily Caller", which has been referred to as the conservative answer to the Huffington Post. It is run by conservative Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, and Neil Patel, former adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Now, while I like the idea that political blogs of various viewpoints are included in the telling of a news story, I do not like them being passed off as real news. Especially when there are so many "clues" from a bit of web research which point to manipulated opinion making news stories. Why on earth would Yahoo position this as a featured news story? Might it have something to do with the situation in which Yahoo has found itself? It's revenues and influence declining, its CEO was recently replaced with the guy who used to run Pay Pal. This was done after investors got a bit upset when the former CEO led the company to refuse a very lucrative offer to be bought out by (Oh, excuse me, I meant "merge with") Microsoft. One investment company which has a billion dollars in the Yahoo kitty is hedge fund Third Point. They started buying Yahoo last September. Their owner and CEO, Daniel Loeb (best known for writing publicly published letters critical of various businesses' management) insisted that Third Point get four new seats on the Yahoo Board. One of the seats would have been for Jeff Zucker, NBC-Universal's former CEO, who presided over that company's descent in ratings from first place to fourth. NBC-Universal has been bought by Comcast, who forced Zucker out.  One seat would have gone to a former MTV Networks executive. One of the seats would be for himself. Loeb, by the way, is a supporter of the presidentail candidacy of Mitt Romney.

So what I want to know now is why are these alleged movers and shakers of the Republican Party getting behind stories supporting the poor schmuck who did the shooting in this sad story down in Florida?

Have you heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight

Well.
The news is out, Dick Cheney has had a heart transplant.
My guess is that it won't help.
Considering how few people get heart transplants, out of a waiting list of thousands, I don't think it untoward to ask what part money, power and influence had in getting him a heart.  Especially when
there really isn't anything in that black bag for the rest of us.The rest of us includes anyone without healthcare, anyone struggling to make their bills due to the cost of healthcare, and etcetera.  The Health Care legislation that was the first priority of the Obama presidency, is about to have a hearing before the Supreme Court of the United States to determine if it is legal. The bill requires every citizen to have healthcare insurance, or to pay a penalty if not. It is based on a similar bill passed in the state of Massachusetts when Presidential wanna-be Mitt Romney was governor. The bill does not say how one is to afford the cost of such insurance. The bill does not create a low cost National Insurance policy. It does create business, and lots of it, for the insurance companies, who were big financial backers of Mr. Obama's campaign for the Presidency. And the rich get richer.

Speaking of the elite and reactions against them, the folks behind the "Occupy" movements (at least I think it is them) have called for a national/international strike on May the 1st. Mayday. A term with more than one implication.

Meanwhile, down in Florida, the case of the black teenager who was gunned down dead has stoked a new fire this time of righteous anger, and brought up old resentments. The usual suspects, leaders quick to find the closest network camera, were a little slow on the uptake, but are now busy fanning the flames. Protests are growing. So is an insane and reprehensible response as in this graphic found on Facebook:

Also found were claims that this skinny 17 year old was seen on top of the much heavier shooter as he was beating the shooter with his fists. And that the voice crying out in pain or fear on the tape of the 911 call was actually the shooter, not the dying 17 year old. Which doesn't explain why there is a witness who says that they saw the 17 year old, face down on the ground, with the shooter on top of the kid, knee pressed into the kid's back. The shooter only moved away when he realized there was a witness. The kid was found face down on the ground when the police got there, by the way. People are also pointing out media "bias", not just by using a 'less threatening' picture of the kid at 14, but in using a mugshot of the shooter. And there is a report that a new version of what was represented as the Black Panther party has offered a $10,000.00 reward for the capture and arrest of the shooter, who has gone into hiding.

The Associated Press reported last week that it is becoming commonplace for prospective employers to demand job seeker's passwords to their Facebook accounts so the prospective employer can rummage around in the job seeker's personal life. If denied their request, some prospective employers then ask the job seeker to "friend" the employers' personnel department, which gives access to anything someone might have restricted from mass availability viewing to just their 'friends'..

This past week, a Supreme Court decision found that workers in government jobs (federal or state) can not cite the Family and Medical Leave Act in lawsuits against their public employers. This means that anyone needing medical leave - or pregnancy or childbirth leave - has no recourse if they are then dismissed from their jobs. And, as a case which came up a couple of weeks ago in New Mexico made evident, there doesn't seem to be any protections from teachers publicly humiliating an 8th grade student for being pregnant and kicking her out of school.

How much more can or will people take? Especially when the flames are being fanned by the self righteous? We must understand that there is a war on in the United States. It is most definitely a class war. Over the last several years, we have had an economic restructuring which reduced the size of the middle class while enlarging the size of the poor and underclass. There are now more workers available for desperation wages, and the pool of National Guard soldiers and potential volunteer army recruits is larger for those bigger and better wars to come. I guess that's better than having so many folks forever on the public dole. Speaking of which, in 2011, around 36 states had some form of proposed legislation requiring any person receiving any form of public assistance to undergo drug testing. Better have a prescription for that pill there. If you smoke a little pot (which leaves a little traceable residual chemical something in your body for several months after smoking), no food stamps for you.
Forget assistance you out of work mothers of fatherless children. 

Silly sheeple - drugs, and their use, are for the rich who can afford them. 

On New Year's Eve 2011, at 9pm or so (when there would be little notice taken) , President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. It authorizes $662 Billion Dollars (I guess they were worried about the deficit) for the defense of the country at home and abroad. This includes the arrest and military detention of any US citizen - without charge or trial - if suspected of terrorist leanings. That part really isn't new, it goes back to the 2001 version if I remember correctly. But I think the part including arrests of citizens on US soil is new. There doesn't seem to be a part where what constitutes proper terror accusations are clearly defined. To a bank, say one of the banks bailed out at taxpayer expense, protesters demanding repayment of the government 'loan', or maybe the jailing of thieving executives, could be terrorism interfering in the country's business. When the President signed the act, he also released a lengthy signing statement disagreeing with provisions in it. But he still signed it. A few days ago, on March the 16th, he also signed the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order of 2012. It's an update of what is allowed in times of National Emergency, which has been around since pre WWII days. Most presidents have updated it. One of the changes is that the responsibility for many of its provisions have changed from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) to National Security agencies - like the Department of Defense, as well as the Secretaries of the Department of Commerce, of Transportation, of Agriculture, of Energy, and of Health and Human Services. So, what does all this mean? Not much. Unless there is war with Iran. Or North Korea. Or disturbances with civil unrest here at home. I wonder if that includes protests over a dead teenager, Mayday strikes, or demands to treat women as something other than chattel?

This post had been intended to be a reminiscence of the country wide Moratoriums against the Vietnam War in which I participated in the late 1960's, contrasted with the hopeful signs of mass protests and the call for Mayday 2012 strikes.  Like so many things today, things got a little out of hand. I started thinking, and I should have known better. Thinking, say, about all the unused trailers in camps FEMA has sitting in out of the way (i.e.otherwise inhospitable to human life and human habitation?) locations. And how it seems like forces are pushing the country to huge mass protests, which God (whose, one wonders?) knows are needed for various reasons. And how these executive orders are there for use by any president of any party, those currently in power, or those yet to be elected. I shouldn't think about these things, I guess. Because then I begin to wonder how long it will be before a leader of the people, not of the government, gets openly assassinated and turned into a martyr.
Or Poland gets annexed.