Whirling Steadily Down a Big Wide Culvert

Posted on April 19, 2008 by RagBlog

Slip of the Tongue
By Jim Kunstler

Barack Obama caught hell last week for daring to tell the truth about the ragged thing that the American spirit has become. He said that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” to work out their negative emotions. He might have added that the Pope wears a funny hat (see for yourself this week), and that bears shit in the woods (something rural Pennsylvanians probably know). Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed for those who slip up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to the reigning delusions), Obama was pressured to apologize for his statements.

The evermore loathsome and odious Hillary Clinton, co-owner of a $100 million personal wealth portfolio, seized the moment to remind voters what a normal, everyday gal she is — who would never look down on the small-town folk of Pennsylvania the way her “elitist” opponent had — forgetting, apparently, that the Clinton family’s consigliere, James Carville, famously described the Keystone State as a kind of redneck sandwich with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as the bread, and Alabama as the lunch meat in between.

As I mull over all this, I begin to think that Hillary is exactly what the USA deserves and, that should she manage to winkle away the nomination and get elected president, the outcome would be instructive and salutary. For one thing, she will be buried under an avalanche of political woe, beginning with the basic financial insolvency of everything in the nation except the Clinton family. Then she would proceed straight into an oil-and-gas clusterfuck that could take this society back to the eighteenth century economically.

This would have the positive effect of forcing the American public to look elsewhere for governance than the usual parties in Washington, D.C. It’s time for a national purgative, anyway. In fact, it’s way overdue. Are the Democratic and Republican parties anymore necessary than the Whigs? Neither of them can really articulate the problems we face (and when their honchos slip up and come close to the truth, they’re persecuted for it).

Read all of it here. / Clusterfuck Nation

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Obama Draws Massive Crowd in Philadelphia

Posted on April 19, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Barack Obama spoke before 35,000 wildly enthusiastic fans Friday night, April 18, at Independence Park in Philadelphia. This was the largest crowd drawn by any candidate so far in this marathon campaign. Photo by Ozier Muhammad / The New York Times.

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This Bill Ayers Matter : A Fresh Take

Posted on April 19, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Courage and Conviction: In Praise of Bill Ayers
By Dave Lindorff / April 18, 2008

The pundits are having a heyday with Hillary Clinton’s sleazy McCarthyite attack on Barack Obama during the April 16 debate, trying to link him to the Weather Underground because of his having served on a charity organization board with one of the Weathermen, Bill Ayers, who is currently a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois, and who is married to Bernadine Dohrn, another Weather Underground veteran.

What has them in a lather is Ayer’s comment, made a few years ago, that he has no regrets for the organization’s having set off several bombs back in the early 1970s, and that in fact they “should have set of more.”

(Incidentally, as Robert Parry notes, those comments were made before 9-11, not, as Hillary Clinton charged duplicitously in the April 16 Philadelphia debate, right after 9-11.)

In fact, it’s important to remember that while three members of the Weather Underground died at their own hands because of a failed bomb they were constructing, no one else died at their hands. The group scrupulously worked to make sure that their attacks were on property, not people.

It’s also important to remember that they were targeting a government that was engaged in a criminal war against a peasant country half a world away, that had killed nearly two million Indochinese people, most of them civilians, and that was well on the way to pointlessly sending 58,000 American troops to their deaths.

The actions of the Weather Underground may have been misguided and quixotic, but they were not terrorists in the sense of trying to cause mass terror among the American public, in the way that Al Qaeda terrorists or other terror groups indiscriminately attack civilians. They were much more carefully targeting the levers of power, and in effect, trying to “bring the war home.”

While many in the anti-war movement condemned the actions of the Weather Underground, I would argue that they, like the militant Black Panthers, performed an invaluable role by sending a loud, clear message to the nation’s ruling elite that if they continued the war, things would get worse at home.

Their actions made the peaceful mass protests against the Indochina War far more potent, because they forced the ruling elite in the US to have to ponder what would happen if those masses turned to the same kind of violent measures against them.

Ayers has long since earned the nation’s respect, whatever one may think of his youthful radicalism, by devoting his life to the challenge of helping educate those who have a hard time breaking the cycle of poverty and ignorance, which makes it obscene to criticize Obama for sharing a boardroom with him (Obama was 8 when Ayers was in the Weathermen back in 1970).

But Ayers and his comrades should also be honored for having been willing to go the extra mile and put their lives on the line to end a criminal war.

We could use that kind of courage and militancy today in the anti-war movement–if not in the form of another underground bombing campaign, then at least in the form of a willingness put bodies on the line to blockade and undermine an American imperial war machine that has chewed up the lives of tens of thousands of young Americans and killed over a million innocent Iraqis.

Five years into a war with no end in Iraq, it’s clear that just going about our business, and making periodic marches along the boulevards of Washington, New York or San Francisco is not enough.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His book of CounterPunch columns titled “This Can’t be Happening!” is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff’s newest book is “The Case for Impeachment”, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky. He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com.

Source. / CommonDreams

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Fries With That? : The Musical

Posted on April 19, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Thorne, I don’t know for sure if you’ll like this short comic video, but since you wade through so much serious stuff every day I thought you might like a change of pace. Cracked me up.

Larry Piltz

Food Court Musical

Larry, I have only one thing to say: COULD I GET A NAPKIN PLEASE!!??

Thorne Dreyer

[Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere has executed over 70 missions involving thousands of undercover agents. The group is based in New York City.]

Posted by The Rag Blog / April 19, 2008

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BushCo Violates Federal Law, Again

Posted on April 19, 2008 by RagBlog


President Is Rebuffed on Program for Children
By Robert Pear / April 19, 2008

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration violated federal law last year when it restricted states’ ability to provide health insurance to children of middle-income families, and its new policy is therefore unenforceable, lawyers from the Government Accountability Office said Friday.

The ruling strengthens the hand of at least 22 states, including New York and New Jersey, that already provide such coverage or want to do so. And it significantly reduces the chance that the new policy can be put into effect before President Bush leaves office in nine months.

At issue is the future of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, financed jointly by the federal government and the states. Congress last year twice passed bills to expand the popular program, and Mr. Bush vetoed both.

State officials of both parties say the policy, set forth in a letter to state health officials on Aug. 17, has stymied their efforts to cover more children at a time when the number of uninsured is rising and more families are experiencing economic hardship.

In a formal legal opinion Friday, the accountability office said the new policy “amounts to a marked departure” from a longstanding, settled interpretation of federal law. It is therefore a rule and, under a 1996 law, must be submitted to Congress for review before it can take effect, the opinion said.

But Jeff Nelligan, a spokesman for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said, “G.A.O.’s opinion does not change our conclusion that the Aug. 17 letter is still in effect.”

The letter told states what steps they needed to take to be sure the children’s health program would not displace or “crowd out” private coverage under group health plans. The White House cited the policy as a justification for rejecting a proposal by New York State to cover 70,000 additional youngsters.

What happens next is not clear. New York, New Jersey and several other states have filed lawsuits challenging the Bush administration policy. In addition, Congress may consider legislation to suspend the directive.

Deborah S. Bachrach, a deputy commissioner in the New York State Health Department, said, “The opinion from the Government Accountability Office vindicates our position that the federal government did not have authority to issue the Aug. 17 directive.”

The 1996 law, the Congressional Review Act, was enacted to keep Congress informed about the rule-making activities of federal agencies. If Congress objects to a new rule, it can pass “a joint resolution of disapproval,” which the president can sign or veto.

Under the Aug. 17 directive, states cannot expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover youngsters with family incomes over 250 percent of the federal poverty level ($53,000 for a family of four) unless they can prove that they already cover 95 percent of eligible children below twice the poverty level ($42,400).

Moreover, in such states, children who lose or drop private coverage must be uninsured for 12 months before they can enroll in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and co-payments in the public program must be similar to those in private plans.

The legal opinion was requested by Senators John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, and Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine. In view of it, they urged the administration to rescind the Aug. 17 directive.

The administration told states they must comply with the directive by August of this year or else they face “corrective action.” Compliance could mean cutting back programs.

The Justice Department contends that the letter is “merely a general statement of policy with nonbinding effect,” But Gary L. Kepplinger, general counsel of the accountability office, said administration officials had treated it as “a binding rule.”

© 2008 The New York Times

Source / Common Dreams / NY Times

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Leaving Behind the Bunker and Barrier Mentality

Posted on April 19, 2008 by RagBlog


Leaving Cheyenne Mountain: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Loathe the Bomb
By William Astore / April 17, 2008

It took more than four years just to excavate and construct that mountain redoubt outside of Colorado Springs, that Cold War citadel whose two huge blast doors weighed 25 tons each. Within its confines, under 2,000 feet of Rocky Mountain granite, fifteen buildings were constructed, each mounted on steel springs, each spring weighing nearly half a ton, so that, when the Soviet nukes exploded, each building would sway but not collapse.

When it became operational in 1966, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex was the ultimate bomb shelter. Its 200 or so crewmembers were believed to have a 70% likelihood of surviving a five-megaton blast with a three-mile circular error of probability, even if the surrounding countryside became an irradiated wasteland. Today, over four decades later, the Complex remains an important command center, though last year the military announced that it would now serve primarily as a back-up facility (on “warm stand-by,” in military jargon).

From 1985 to 1988, in the waning years of the Cold War, as a young Air Force lieutenant, my job took me inside that mountain citadel. The approach to it wasn’t in any way awesome, since the mountain, at the south end of the Front Range of Colorado Springs, is overshadowed by Pike’s Peak. Except for all the communication antennae blinking red at night, you’d hardly know that it was the site of a major command center for a future nuclear war. Yet each time I drove up its access road, its solid, granite bulk made an impression; so, too, did the security fence topped by cameras and razor wire, the security police toting M-16s, and the massive access tunnel, bored out of solid rock and paved for vehicular traffic that still leads inside the mountain to the actual command centers.

Like cereal box atomic decoder rings and “duck and cover” exercises, the Complex is a relic of the Cold War era. I entered on a bus which, though painted Air Force blue, was similar to the ones I had taken in grade school. On a few nights, I left work after the last bus took off and so had to hike the third of a mile out of the tunnel, a claustrophobic and often bone-chilling experience in the windy and wintry Rockies — until, that is, you emerged into a starry night above with the lights of the city twinkling below.

Of that “mountain,” meant to corral and contain our nuclear fears, what struck most first-time visitors were the huge steel-reinforced blast doors, ten feet high and several feet thick. They were supposed to seal the Complex, protecting it from a nuclear strike. Then, there were the enormous springs (1,319 in all) upon which each of the 15 separate buildings inside that mountain rest. I liked to think of them as giant (if immobile) Slinkies. As visitors got their bearings and looked around, they were sometimes disconcerted by the bolts embedded in the granite walls and ceiling. These held wire mesh, meant to stabilize the rock and protect against falling shards. Lots of exposed pipes and cables gave the mountain a style that might be termed “early industrial chic” — and one that you sometimes see echoed today in high-end lofts and dance clubs.

The blast doors were usually open — except, of course, during “exercises,” when the mountain “buttoned up” its self-contained world. Along with enough food and other provisions to weather any initial rounds of Earthly devastation, the mountain also had four freshwater reservoirs, each with a total holding capacity of 1.5 million gallons. The inside joke was that the Complex, technically an Air Force station, had its very own navy — the row boats used to cross the reservoirs (though, sad to say, I never used one). Today, when I think of them, the River Styx and Charon come to mind.

Images of the underworld were then, and remain, all too appropriate. By the time I was inside Cheyenne Mountain, we knew it was vulnerable to a new generation of high-yield, highly accurate Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). In case of a full-fledged nuclear war, as a popular poster of the 1970s put it, we had no doubt that any of us could “bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.”

The citadel that had been built to ensure official survival during a planetary holocaust was, by then, sure to be among the initial targets struck by those ICBMs — perhaps a dozen or more warheads — to ensure a “first strike kill.” Our job was simply to detect the coming nuclear attack by the Soviets and act quickly enough to coordinate a retaliatory strike — to ensure that the Soviet part of the planet went down — before we, too, were obliterated, along with Colorado Springs (a “target-rich” city that includes Fort Carson to the south, Peterson Air Force Base to the east, and the U.S. Air Force Academy to the north).

Launched over the North Pole from missile fields in the USSR, those Soviet ICBMs would explode over American cities in 30 minutes. Reacting before they hit placed a premium on decisions based on computers and early warning satellites. Due to the hair-trigger nature of such a scenario, human errors and system malfunctions were inevitable. One false alarm came on November 9, 1979, when a technician mistakenly loaded a “training tape” that simulated a full-scale Soviet missile attack. Two false alarms followed less than a year later, on June 3 and June 6, 1980, and were eventually traced — according to an official Air Force release — to a defective integrated circuit, a silicon chip costing less than $100. In each case, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) alerted ICBM crews and scrambled air crews to nuclear-armed B-52s, which were warming up engines for takeoff before the alarms were rescinded.

Read all of it here. / TomDispatch / The Rag Blog

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The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree

Posted on April 19, 2008 by RagBlog

Thanks to Juan Cole and Brave New Films.

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Brewing a Disaster with North American Agriculture

Posted on April 19, 2008 by RagBlog

Photo by Aimee Donnelly

Sowing Disaster: Why We Need a New Farm Bill
by Christopher D. Cook / April 18, 2008

Congress passes its share of boondoggles, but there’s a real doozy on the docket April 18. If the nearly $300 billion Farm Bill passes in its current form, the American public will pay billions of dollars to large-scale farmers and food corporations for the following end results: an oversupply of unhealthful junk food that worsens our national obesity epidemic; severe depletion of soil and air through overuse of pesticides and destructive farming practices; and the hastened removal of small farms from the land, eroding the spirit and finances of rural communities across the U.S.

To be sure, there are positive elements in the bill, which gets revisited every five years. There’s funding for conservation and nutrition programs, even small bits (in the $5 million range) for innovative community food security projects that expand markets for small farmers while making food accessible to poor inner-city residents. But the bill’s Commodity Title erases all that – using tax dollars of up to $20 billion a year to finance big growers’ production of corn, wheat, and other commodities that are used as ingredients in everything from cooking oil, to sweeteners and fattening agents in processed foods, to livestock feed and auto fuel.

While supporting farmers to produce basic foodstuffs is a laudable policy goal, our current farm-subsidy system accomplishes something far different, propping up profoundly unsustainable growing practices while undermining the nation’s health and its farming and food future. By upholding subsidies for big agriculture, Congress is not only wasting taxpayer dollars at a time of soaring crop and food prices; more fundamentally, it’s undermining vital efforts to make our food supply more healthful and sustainable, both environmentally and economically.

Read all of it here. / Common Dreams / The Rag Blog

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Hugo Chavez: Accomplishments of a Rebel

Posted on April 19, 2008 by RagBlog


Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism
By James Petras / April 17, 2008

Introduction

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez remains the world’s leading secular, democratically elected political leader who has consistently and publicly opposed imperialist wars in the Middle East, attacked extra-territorial intervention and US and European Union complicity in kidnapping and torture. Venezuela plays the major role in sharply reducing the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and Central America, thus substantially aiding them in their balance of payments, without attaching any ‘strings’ to this vital assistance. Venezuela has been in the forefront in supporting free elections and opposing human right abuses in the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia by pro-US client regimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia. No other country in the Americas has done more to break down the racial barriers to social mobility and the acquisition of land for Afro-Latin and Indio Americans. President Chavez has been on the cutting edge of efforts toward greater Latin American integration – despite opposition from the United States and several regional regimes, who have opted for bilateral free trade agreements with the US.

Even more significant, President Chavez is the only elected president to reverse a US backed military coup (in 48 hours) and defeat a (US-backed) bosses’ lockout, and return the economy to double-digit growth over the subsequent 4 years.1 President Chavez is the only elected leader in the history of Latin America to successfully win eleven straight electoral contests against US-financed political parties and almost the entire private mass media over a nine-year period. Finally President Chavez is the only leader in the last half-century who came within 1% of having a popular referendum for a ‘socialist transformation’ approved, a particularly surprising result in a country in which less than 30% of the work force is made up of peasants and factory workers.

President Chavez has drastically reduced long-term poverty faster than any regime in the region,2 demonstrating that a nationalist-welfare regime is much more effective in ending endemic social ills than its neo-liberal counterparts. A rigorous, empirical study of the socio-economic performance of the Chavez government demonstrates its success in a whole series of indicators after the defeat of the counter-revolutionary coup and lockout and after the nationalization of petroleum (2003).

GDP has grown by more than 87% with only a small part of the growth being in oil. The poverty rate has been cut in half (from 54% in 2003 at the height of the bosses’ lockout to 27% in 2007; and extreme poverty has been reduced from 43% in 1996 to 9% in 2007), and unemployment by more than half (from 17% in 1998 to 7% in 2007). The economy has created jobs at a rate nearly three times that of the United States during its most recent economic expansion. Accessible health care for the poor has been successfully expanded with the number of primary care physicians in the public sector increasing from 1,628 in 1998 to 19,571 by early 2007. About 40% of the population now has access to subsidized food. Access to education, especially higher education, has also been greatly expanded for poor families. Real (inflation adjusted) social spending per person has increased by more than 300%. 3

His policies have once and for all refuted the notion that the competitive demands of ‘globalization’ (deep and extensive insertion in the world market) are incompatible with large-scale social welfare policies. Chavez has demonstrated that links to the world market are compatible with the construction of a more developed welfare state under a popularly-based government.

The large-scale, long-term practical accomplishments of the Chavez government, however have been overlooked by liberal and social democratic academics in Venezuela and their colleagues in the US and Europe, who prefer to criticize secondary institutional and policy weaknesses, failing to take into account the world-historic significance of the changes taking place in the context of a hostile, aggressively militarist-driven empire.4

No reasonable and rigorous contemporary analysis can seriously provide an accurate assessment of Venezuela while glossing over the tremendous accomplishments achieved during the Hugo Chavez presidency.

It is within the framework of Chavez’ innovative and courageous political-social breakthroughs that we should proceed to an analysis of the advances, contradictions and negative aspects of specific political, economic, social and cultural policies, practices and institutions.

Read all of it here. / Information Clearing House

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From a Foreign Correspondent

Posted on April 19, 2008 by RagBlog

This came to us covertly and we don’t know who wrote it. But it’s pretty darn funny, so we hope you enjoy as we did.

The Rag

FUCK A DUCK
ANYTHING FOR A BUCK

I’m watching the financial channel here in Panama, in Spanish, in the middle of the night. On this particular night the financial pundits and talking heads are taking turns ruminating about the Bear Stearns bailout with taxpayer dollars. First Bear Stearns looked like it was alright, but they were engaged in a common business scam, borrowing money using accounts receivable as collateral. Most businesses do this and as long as there is sufficient cash flow to pay the vig, or interest due they get away with it. Accounts receivable has two faces, or two meanings, in one sense it is a number in the company books that shows what the company is owed. Then there is the real accounts receivable, money owed to the company that they will actually receive some time in the future. The former, the one in the books, is usually much larger than the latter; the money the company actually expects to receive.

Sometimes the company gets found out. And the people who are lending them money demand that they use the real accounts receivable numbers. This happened to Bear Stearns. It happened long ago to Billy Sol Estes, most of you don’t remember him. But you do remember Enron, their accounts receivables were from companies that didn’t exist except on paper. When Bear Stearns tried to roll over their short term paper, based on home loans that they claimed were receivable, it came to light that the loans weren’t receivable at all and the collateral on the loans (the homes themselves) weren’t worth what they said they were. The lenders refused to lend them more operating capital. And they began to go down the tubes.

J.P. Morgan offered to bail them out. Morgan offered them two bucks a share for the company. Morgan would then be the proud new owner of Bear Stearns accounts receivable, which wouldn’t really be receivable. This would leave Morgan holding the bag, an empty bag, making them vulnerable in the near future. Something had to be done, the big corporations in the lending business were setting themselves up like a row of dominos, and the first one was starting to tip over. Two dollars a share was probably generous, Bear Stearns was unable to continue to operate so in reality they were worth zip, squat, nada, they were bankrupt.

Uncle Sugar offered to jump in and take J.P. Morgan’s back. In effect pony up the money, two dollars a share, to cover Morgan’s bid for a worthless company. Whoa, wait a minute said Morgan, if the Fed was going to pass out free taxpayers’ money, then why not get while the getting was good. Next morning Morgan announced that they had made a mistake, seems the worthless company, Bear Stearns, was really worth ten dollars a share. The Fed went for it and promptly put up five times the original bailout money.

Well it was late and my mind was wandering, first it sounded like, “keep watching the show, there is no one behind the curtain.” Then it wandered to “fuck a duck, anything for a buck.” And I remembered the poster and how it all came down and all alone in my Panama hotel, stretched out nude on the bed, I began to laugh, and the more I remembered about it the more I laughed. I got a big shit-eating grin right now because I can’t wait to tell you this story.

Come on back with me now. This is Boston, its 1970. I’m living on Erie Street that runs out of Central Square in Cambridge. Sometimes I sell underground papers, and do some high level panhandling around Harvard Square, and sometimes around Boston City Hall, to pay the rent and keep food in my stomach, plus something to roll in the quite moments. But my real occupation is plotting the demise of U.S. imperialism. This was a very real struggle in those days and it seemed like it had possibilities. Like every great struggle it had many fronts. One of the fronts in that moment was the Troika Free Poster Factory. I was there at the beginning; actually I was a part of the beginning.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had a school. It was a small school, a few students who showed artistic promise attended, most if not all on scholarships provided by the Museum. A group of these fledgling artists, the politically aware and therefore anti-war ones formed a small collective within the MFA School to do something about the horrible Nixonian blood fest in Vietnam. Their politics motivated them to harness the means at hand and when they saw an opportunity, they acted. The school provided the tools for the artists to do their thing; paint and canvas, sculpting clay, knives, chisels, air brushes, silk screens, a copy camera and a dark room. Probably a lot more, that I don’t know about or don’t remember.

I knew about the copy camera, I also knew that in the evenings there was usually no one around and a door that wasn’t locked. I had more or less of an ID factory going over on Beacon Hill, just down the alley from Suffolk Law School, behind the State House. Also in this alley was the State Print Shop whose trash I regularly sorted through to garner State paper that I could use to bolster ID sets needed by deserters, anti-war fugitives, and people who needed to get out of the country. I found blank state licenses for all sorts of trades, blank state ID’s, official letterheads and envelopes, and sometimes rubber stamps, and embossing discs in the print shop trash.

One of the important pieces of ID in those days was a Draft Card. Every male citizen between the ages of eighteen and fifty had to carry around a draft card; it was the only ID that was required by federal law. I couldn’t just “find” these, although I suppose a regular visit to the trash behind some draft board offices might yield one. Since this was a common piece of ID I needed lots of them. Some friends in Texas had a printing press and were willing to run some off, but they needed a negative with which to make a plate.

I borrowed a nice clean draft card from a young man who had made the mistake of registering for the draft, and in the evening set out for the MFA School to use the copy camera. As usual the door was unlocked and no one was around when I slipped in and made my way to the camera and dark room section. I spent a while trying to get the right one hundred percent size and to locate the film and get it loaded right on the vacuum back of the camera and to get the exposure and developing right. I’d done some film developing but most of this process I was trying to accomplish by trial and error. While I was still puzzling my way through the door opened and two students came in. It’s a small student body, everyone knows everyone and they didn’t know me. For a few seconds we stood looking at each other, they were wondering who I was, I was wondering if I should bolt out on to Huntington Ave and escape to a friend’s pad over on Hemingway street. It was a guy and a woman, they didn’t look dangerous. I decided to hold my ground, I needed that negative.

The woman spoke first. “What are you doing?” She didn’t sound angry or suspicious more like inquisitive.

“I’m trying to get this camera to work.”

They stepped closer, “What are you trying to do?”

“I need to make a negative of this at a hundred percent, but it’s not working out too well.”

“Maybe I can help,” she came closer peering at the settings on the camera. The guy came over; he was looking down at the draft card. It took a moment but pretty quickly it all became clear to him, he tugged at her sleeve and nodded toward the draft card. Then she was looking at it too and then at me, back again to the card. All three of us stood looking at the card, they were trying to make up their minds, and I gave them the time, maintaining the silence. They looked at each other. They looked at the card. Silently they came to an agreement about what to do. I waited, eyeing the door, ready to move.

She reached up, “you’ve got to crank this up ‘til the two arrows meet.” The guy nodded his accent, about the arrows and about the card and about what I was trying to do. I stopped looking at the door. We had a conspiracy going. She moved the card and adjusted the focus, we killed the lights and he cut a piece of film, we took the shot, they introduced me to the “bump” light, the guy took the film into the dark room.

With the light back on she introduced herself, she was Pamela, Pam. She told me that he was Matt. She never asked what I was going to do with the negative, she didn’t need to. We talked about the school and about Boston and about the war. We each knew that this was a fortunate meeting of destiny. Matt joined us while we waited for the film to dry. They went to demos and had done some artwork for some anti-war leaflets, they wondered if they could do more. They helped me opaque out the typed in information on the neg. We went over to the Greek coffee shop and talked ‘til late. We made plans to get together in a couple of days. It didn’t yet have a name, but the idea was pregnant, soon there would be a birth, we would call it the Troika Free Poster Factory.

The next time we got together, they brought three other MFA School students and I brought a friend who had an idea. He wanted to make a poster, it was somewhere in his head, it was his vision of the government. He wanted to depict them as sycophant weirdoes in a way that he saw them. It was coming up to election time, but there was no hope that anything would change, kind of like now. We tossed his idea around and in doing so Troika was born. We had a name and set to work on our symbol, in this case it became a flag or more correctly a banner which we would silk screen, everyone contributing a part, a color, a design, according to their feeling for it.

We also defined how we would operate. We wouldn’t take peoples ideas and do the work, but we would work together with the poster creator, teach our skills, use our means and allow people the opportunity to express themselves. The posters would be produced by their authors, no names would be allowed and no organizations would be noted. Simply a person’s artistic idea produced as a poster, anonymously and with a view that would be anarchist and anti-war.

That first poster began to take shape that night; the artwork would be in the form of a photo depicting my friends view. When I moved into the Erie Street place I found a metal box full of fishing lures, or more aptly fishing plugs. There were three or four dozen of them, wooden or plastic plugs, three or four inches long, painted in various colors and each with eyes on one end looking like some underwater bug, all had fish hooks in various places. With the help of some modeling clay we stood the plugs on end, in even rows and files, with all their eyes looking in the same direction. Then we took a picture with black and white film and printed it using the MFA darkroom. The posters for the most part were all formatted to fit seventeen by twenty two poster boards. The copy camera blew it up to fit on the top two thirds of the poster and below we art-typed the words “The government has been elected.” From there we fabricated a silk screen, putting on the emulsion and burning and developing a screen. We printed a couple dozen copies and my friend hung them around town, where they drew puzzled looks, but left the desired impression. By the time we finished that one we had a half dozen more posters in the works. I don’t remember them all but I do remember that they were all poignant and expressed in an artistic way the feelings of many anti-war people.

Which brings us, in a long round about way to the poster I was thinking about, that caused me to start laughing while watching the financial news, in Spanish, lying naked on my hotel room bed, one night in Panama.

This was the inspiration of my friend Carl. We got a hold of one of the many renditions of Leda and the Swan. She was a figure in Greek mythology, impregnated by the “god” Zeus while he was disguised as a swan. We made this one a little bigger probably twenty two by thirty five, and silk screened it on twenty pound paper coated on one side. In the center of this poster was Leda and the Swan getting it on, we did that in black ink. Above Leda and Swan in red ink it said, “FUCK A DUCK” and below the graphic it said, “ANYTHING FOR A BUCK.” That in itself has a certain amount of humor in it. But there is more to it.

We printed a couple dozen copies. At night, armed with a half dozen cans of condensed milk we left Central Square and skulking up Mass Ave toward Harvard Square we began “hanging” them on storefront windows. There is nothing like condensed milk to attach paper to glass, it puts Elmer’s Glue to shame. It’s damn near permanent. By the time we got to the little coffee shop, (gone now,) in Harvard Square we were down to our last one. After a couple of cups of coffee and cigarettes, we stepped out to look for a good location. We were directly across from Coolidge Bank. This was the bank that had to contract to issue welfare checks to the poor in the Boston area; they were unfriendly and arrogant to the people who came there to cash their meager stipends. What better spot? I stood chickie, (lookout,) while Carl church-keyed open a can of milk and splashed it on the window of Coolidge Bank, then working together we put the poster up and rubbed it in real good. We walked back toward Erie Street admiring our work along the way and called it a night.

The next morning I panhandled my way from Central Square to Harvard Square looking for breakfast and cigarette money and maybe a start on a small bag of weed. Along the way I saw all the FUCK A DUCK posters we had distributed to the windows of shops and stores. At Harvard Square I noticed a small crowd in front of Coolidge Bank, there were about five cops fondling their night sticks, a couple of dudes in suits and half a dozen gawkers all gathered in concentric semi circles around the window with our poster. In the center one of the guys in suits was directing the other suit, who was trying to remove the poster by picking at the corner with his fingernails, making little headway. The picker was picking, the manager suit was directing, the cops were tsk-tsking, and the gawkers were giggling. I sauntered up to stand at the back of the gawk circle.

Finally the picker had picked enough to grab the corner with his fingers, and giving a tug he pulled off the bottom six or so inches that had the words, ANYTHING FOR A BUCK. Now everyone became a gawker. They all stared for about ten seconds. Then the manager suit said to the picker suit, “Let’s go, we got the important part.” With that the cops headed back to sit on their fat asses in their respective squad cars, the suits went into Coolidge Bank, and the giggling gawkers stayed for one last look at the swan doing Leda under the words, FUCK A DUCK.

Down in Panama, I laughed a little harder, picturing the suits at J.P. Morgan grabbing the check from Uncle Sam’s fingers and saying, “Let’s go, we got the important part.”

FUCK A DUCK, ANYTHING FOR A BUCK!!

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Ben Stein’s "Expelled" : A No-Brainer

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


He Blinded Me Without Science
By Chez Pazienza / April 17, 2008

Ben Stein has a message for Darwin: “Fuck you!”

It seems incomprehensible that Stein — former Nixon speech writer, game show host, eye drop pitchman and Neil Cavuto love interest — could find a way to further cement his reputation as the smartest dumb person alive, but, bless his heart, he’s done it. Today sees the theatrical release of a full-length documentary presented and narrated by Stein: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed casts the man with the velvet monotone as a sort of Michael Mooresque troublemaker — a mischievous imp out to rankle the establishment and challenge the suffocating status quo, all in the name of getting to the truth that they don’t want you to know about.

And against which authority figure is Stein playing the role of the uppity insurgent?

Science.

Feel free to stop reading if you’ve heard this one before, but Expelled assumes the position not only that the theory of evolution and the faith-based hypothesis known as “intelligent design” are on close-to-equal scientific footing, but that there’s an Illuminatian cabal among the science community, no doubt sitting in a Star Chamber somewhere, seeing to it that any developmental view but Darwin’s is suppressed at all costs. It’s a hell of a parlor trick really, and one the religious right has become admirably adept at exploiting these days: to turn the tables on their adversaries by adopting the tactics and lexicon traditionally associated with the mutinous left, casting themselves as the victimized and oppressed — the little guys, taking up the fight against (literally, as opposed to an omnipotent deity) “The Man.”

In the end though, that’s all it is — a really clever trick, and one that’s played to the hilt in Expelled.

Creating controversy where there is none is positively pedestrian by now, but taking it to the lengths that this new documentary does, and doing it with such a salient level of panache, borders on genius. The SNL writing staff, circa 1977, couldn’t have created a more audaciously comical premise than Ben Stein — a man so square he craps cubes — writing “I Will Not Question Authority” on a blackboard while dressed like Angus Young. Stein is a Dangerous Mind only if you see market-to-market accounting as a ballsy show of defiance, which makes him the perfect impertinent hero for the God-said-it-I-believe-it set.

Unfortunately, no matter how creative the packaging, the lesson being sold in Expelled remains little more than nonsense. Stein and company can wrap themselves in the American flag and the freedom to question that it provides; they can grab a handful of ostensible pop culture street cred by aligning themselves with the likes of Bono; in the end, it doesn’t make so-called intelligent design any more logically sound. It’s still a religious assertion, and not a scientific one. It doesn’t stand up to even the most rudimentary evidential scrutiny, and while it’s always important to ask questions and allow for healthy debate, no matter the topic, at some point a line has to be drawn separating fact from fiction — or distraction. The truth is important because it’s the yardstick by which we measure our reality, and Ben Stein — or anyone else — trying to pass off spectacular whimsy as legitimate fact is, yes, damaging. Not everything can be up for discussion, no matter how large a segment of the population might believe otherwise.

And that’s the best part of all this: Stein and his supposedly rag-tag little group of freedom fighters are neither rag-tag nor little.

In fact, the idea that we’re expected to believe that the religious in this country are few and persecuted is laughable, bordering on offensive.

Last Sunday evening, CNN aired something it called the “Compassion Forum.” It was a live event, broadcast from Messiah College in Pennsylvania, in which an entire roomful of religious leaders — mostly Christian — were granted an audience with the two Democratic candidates for president, one of whom may eventually be the next leader of the free world. For two hours, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talked not about war, education and the economy, but about how their faith guides them and, to some extent, who loves Jesus more. The fact that either candidate believes that he or she has the luxury right now to spout metaphysical platitudes is nothing short of staggering — though certainly not surprising. Just a few days prior to the “Compassion Forum,” the entire cast of American Idol, dressed in evangelical white, belted its way through Shout to the Lord not once, but twice on national television. And today, the city in which I live, New York, is at a standstill as thousands crowd the streets — streets which have been shut down by police — to reverently welcome an unremarkable man in ridiculous robes and a funny hat who believes that he has a hotline to the creator of the universe and who just wrapped up a meeting with the President of the United States.

In other words, don’t even attempt to claim that the religious suffer for their beliefs in this country. Hell, as long as you insist that you’re doing it in the name of God, you can swap wives and molest children in The Middle of Nowhere, Texas for years before somebody finally comes and hauls your lunatic ass off to jail.

Ben Stein can rage against the scientific machine all he wants. He can shake his fist and shout, “Don’t try to keep me down with your, your gravity, man!” It won’t make a spurious assertion — that intelligent design deserves a seat at the lab station — any more sound, nor will it make Stein anything more than a rebel without a clue.

Source. / Huffington Post / The Rag Blog

Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed (Expelled parody)

Backlash to Ben Stein’s Expelled Revs Up With Sexpelled
By Jenna Wortham / April 18, 2008

Just try to question sex theory and see what happens,” begins the trailer for Sexpelled: No Intercouse Allowed. The parody video mocks the Ben Stein-backed anti-Darwinism film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

The manifesto for the video states: “Sexpelled tells of how Sex Theory has thrived unchallenged in the ivory towers of academia, as the explanation for how new babies are created. Proponents of Stork Theory claim that ‘Big Sex’ has been suppressing their claim that babies are delivered by storks.”

The video (right) combines footage from the film and mock interviews with scientists, all set to the bluesy guitar riff from ’80s rock song, “Bad to the Bone.”

The conclusion of the clip plasters the words “Ben Stein is an ignorant fool” across the screen.

Source. / Wired / The Rag Blog

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Now you may kiss the brides…

Posted on April 18, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Nick Anderson / Houston Chronicle

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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