Hammer Mill Days

You hear that sound? A little subtle, eh? Well, it’s cotton on cotton. That’s me turning my pockets inside out and shrugging my shoulders. Bottom scraped, my friends.

What happened with Big Green’s massive coin salvage program? Well, all of the jars and old sofas have given up their treasure, and the booty is already spent. That’s right - we pulled together about $47, all of which went to the electric company. (No, I don’t mean the children’s television program from the 1970’s… I mean the fuckers who keep the lights on.) Then there was that fiver that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) found lying around the forge room. I don’t want you to think we’re turning on each other in our hour of need, but I will admit that there was a minor tussle over that bill. Mostly it was Marvin (who was too clueless to let it go) and anti-Lincoln (who was determined to get an absinthe over at the local watering hole), but before long we were all involved, flailing away like drunks, growling like mad dogs over a stolen soup bone. A pitiable sight, to be sure.

Yes indeed. Anti-Lincoln got his absinthe, for all the good it did him. (He’s mad already, I tell you…. MAD.) Once we all regained feelings in our extremities, we tried to take collective stock of our position. Not a very promising one. Matt asked Mitch Macaphee if he could invent some money - that drew a snarky look, and we all went silent. Most of our ideas had gone flat. The portraits with Lincoln didn’t pan out. People refused to believe he actually was Lincoln. I think it was because we had one Lincoln on both ends of town. (We nuked our own credibility on that one, I’m afraid.) There was a suggestion - I think it may have come from me - that we put the man-sized tuber up for sale, but that didn’t fly either. (The bottom fell out of the tuber market months ago.) It seemed as though the only thing left was to start searching for honest remunerative employment. Odd jobs, perhaps. Like bending pretzels and raising alligators. (Apologies to Mad comics.)

Then it struck us. Why don’t we try that thing that Dr. Smith did on Lost In Space when the Robinson’s went away and left him in charge of the Jupiter 2? (Need help on that? Oh, all right…) We can rent the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill out as a luxury resort hotel! Apart from the luxury, we have everything we need. I could print tickets. Matt could borrow some floral umbrellas from the local sporting goods store. John could stop by the lumber yard and pick up some groceries. We could rename the mill something like “Falcon’s Harbor” or “Happy Acres”, even though there’s no harbor and there are no acres. (It’s what’s called the “Pelican Cove” principle, after a planned community by that name that had neither pelicans nor a cove.) We could start selling reservations on the internets - just post a message on any old site and patrons will flock toward us like lemmings. It’s just that easy.

Or maybe not. But it beats working. Got better ideas? Send ‘em here.

As some of you know, I’ve been around more than a few years (get off my lawn, you kids!), so I’ve heard my share of triumphalist rhetoric about some military action against a “worthy” opponent. But the U.S. Navy vs. some teenage pirates… that’s about as lopsided a contest as I can imagine. Sure, they needed to get that ship captain out alive. Perhaps there was no other way to resolve the standoff - I can’t say, really. But this is nothing to crow about, and certainly not some enormous success that strikes a blow against tyranny. These pirates are desperate young men driven to a bandit’s life by circumstances we can barely comprehend. The very life’s blood of international commerce flows right past their shores in the form of these enormous freighters and tankers, and they see this as a meager opportunity to scrape some wealth out of a global system that passes them by. Not surprising that they grasp this nettle, even at risk of life and limb.

I, of course, have listened to NPR and other news sources in vain to hear someone give some meaningful background on why the Somali coast has become the piracy capital of the modern world. One would think we would hear something about the fact that the U.S. government had supported Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in December 2006, which overthrew the nascent national government of the Union of Islamic Courts. The Bush administration accused the Union of being in league with Al Qaeda, but (as was typical for them) offered no proof of same. In any case, the Ethiopians had received millions in military assistance and were happy to act on our behalf, with the support of U.S. air power, intelligence, and special forces participation. Perhaps 10,000 have been killed since then, with as many as a million refugees. Just as bad, Somalis have seen a return to near-total chaos, marked by growing civil conflict and a breakdown in even basic government services. Controlling piracy is not at the top of their to-do list, I’m certain.

It is in this context that young Somalis are taking to the sea with guns. Many may have formerly earned a living as fishermen, but without a functioning government to control their coastal waters, they have been unable to compete with unregulated fishing vessels from elsewhere in the region as well as Europe. Groups of Somalis have attempted to interdict illegal fishing, and these efforts have been conflated with piracy. There has also been a history of illegal dumping of toxic materials in Somali waters - something discussed in some detail on Democracy Now! just recently - which affects the fishing industry. In addition, with the increased presence of military vessels in the Gulf of Aden, any Somali in a small fishing craft is liable to be mistaken for a pirate; many are harassed. My point is, this is a desperate country filled with desperate people, and we bear a substantial responsibility for their situation.

Count me glad that that crew got out without serious injury. Now if we can start undoing the mess we made out of Somalia, that would be good for everybody.

luv u,

jp    

No coins? Hmmm… check my other pants. I was sure I had some silver in there. Valuable, precious silver. No? Oh well. There’s always the jar on my nightstand. What do you mean you knocked it over?!

Yes, yes, my friends - it’s just as it sounds. Broke again, fighting the mice for scraps of cheese. Matt just had a smack-down with a praying mantis that was making off with a fragment of stale halvah. (Did Matt prevail? Let us pray.) I’ve asked Big Green’s mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, to put his considerable skills to good effect and invent us some money (or maybe a pizza), but he can’t be bothered with such trifles…. not when he’s preoccupied with his unified field theory. (Not going so well, I perceive.) And now we’re rifling through drawers (not with real rifles, you understand), rummaging through garments, and shaking the hell out of every cup and jar in the joint looking for loose change with which to keep our lights on for another week. What? What do you mean you hocked the lights? You moron!

Sorry for the unpleasantness… I hope you didn’t find it too unpleasant. Sometimes it’s hard to impress upon Marvin (my personal robot assistant) just how much of a problem lack of money can be for us humans. Marvin, of course, has no need of crass commodities such as food, water, heat, clothing, etc. I’m certain he thinks we’re just obsessive and addicted to our well-entrenched consumer behaviors. Of course, he’s partly true - our fondness for Zenite snuff has proven a little difficult to shake. (I blame sFshzenKlyrn, who is always arriving from the Small Magellanic Cloud with a fresh poke.) But that exception aside, we’re really just talking about basic necessities here. Marvin - whose batteries are self-regenerating, drawing energy from gravity and the relative proximity of matzoh bakeries - fails to grasp our predicament. I swear, I thought I heard him grumbling as he fished around in the bottom of a storage crate, looking for stray quarters. (Sometimes the metallic squeaks his joints make sound like a gruff voice saying, “loser, loser“. Or maybe it’s me.)

The Lincolns have been of some assistance in this regard. As you know, their shared visage appears on certain denominations of U.S. currency. Now, we have quite enough of the coin that bears their likeness - virtually worthless, as you know. But the bill still has some value, and the fact that we have not one but two Great Emancipators in our entourage means that both can be put into service attracting $5 bills. Actually, John had the best idea - set up booths on opposite sides of town offering patrons the opportunity to have their portrait taken with Honest (or Dishonest, depending on which one you get) Abe for… well, for $5. So in a way, it’s like trading one portrait of Lincoln for another, but hey… it’s the best idea we’ve got, okay? And aside from the occasional meltdown by Anti-Lincoln (who rails against the very notion of being put to work like a beast of burden), it might actually help us make back all that credit default swap cash Loathsome Prick Records lost on our behalf.

Wasn’t that thoughtful of them? Anyway, back to the scavenger hunt. Seems like I kept a shitload of dimes around here somewhere.

Casting Pod. Yours truly (Joe) appears on the next (I believe) installment of the Bloodthirsty Vegetarians podcast, now in its fifth mad year. Check it out at http://www.bloodyveg.com/ and let me know if I sound stupid (’cause I’m hoping so).  

Another young person from my part of the world was killed in Afghanistan this past week - a Marine who grew up a stone’s throw away from where my sisters lived in one of the many small towns that dot the landscape of central New York. He’s the second local K.I.A. in the space of about a month or so, and it’s disgusting. What the hell are these kids dying for? How could we justify (if any justification were required before allowing it to happen) sending them into this hopeless situation, sacrificing life and limb for a cause most people in America wouldn’t give up a meal at Wendy’s to advance? Pundits and politicians never tire of telling us that we’re a nation at war, but it’s not so - we’re a nation whose all-volunteer military is at war, while the rest of us busy ourselves with other matters. This is the trap that empires are liable to fall into. The foreign legion will protect our overseas possessions, while the homeland is bled dry by the cost of underwriting the global projection of military power. Not worth that young person’s life… nor anyone else’s.

Not, may I add, worth the lives of those who inhabit the lands we invade, either. From the perspective of a well-insulated stateside public, they die nameless, sometimes killed by remote control from a command center in the heart of America where faceless technicians murder strangers with the wag of a joystick then drive home for dinner with the family. If there ever was a truer illustration of the moral bankruptcy of empire, I’ve yet to hear about it. War should never be risk free and tidy, particularly for the aggressor. It becomes too attractive an option, as we have seen in recent years particularly. I suppose by allowing us to see the returning coffins of military dead, subject to the consent of the family, the Obama Administration is at least providing some rudimentary means by which Americans may become better acquainted with the notion that we have wars going on, and that those wars are a major problem worthy of their attention.

As I write these lines - not long after beginning this column - news has come through of five more U.S. soldiers killed in Mosul, Iraq. This comes on the heels of a multi-billion dollar supplemental appropriations request from the Administration to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This feels like a perpetual motion policy machine to me. Bush is gone and Obama has climbed into the cockpit, promising to be a better, more thoughtful driver than his predecessor… but it is still this massive killing machine designed to do only one thing. The only thing powerful enough to stop it is, well, us. Only we have to be aware of the fact that it needs stopping. And right now we’re busy with other stuff. As Obama said, you gotta be able to do more than one thing at a time. Let’s take his advice.

Well… what are we waiting for?

luv u,

jp

Okay, it goes like this. Boom…. crack…. boom-boom crack…. Boom…. crack…. boom-boom… crack… crack! Got that? What…. you need to hear it again? What the hell am I, a beat box?

Momma, don’t let your babies grow up to be band leaders! Not that this band has any leaders, per se - we kind of pass the talking stick around, and who ever happens to be holding it has the floor. (In truth, we don’t really have a stick here in Big Green. We just take turns in non-stick holding ways.) However you cut it, it’s hard to make music in this abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill environment, particularly with patience running thin in the midst of such a serious economic downturn. Oh yes, my friends - it affects us, as well. Big Green is not immune, no sir. We put our pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else. Except the man-sized tuber, who doesn’t have legs. Or Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who doesn’t wear pants. (He’s made of metal, you see.) Or sFshzenKlyrn, who is a transcendental being of no fixed mass, location, or temporal displacement, and therefore does not need pants, not in the least. So that thing I said earlier about pants… well… just forget it.  

Anyway… we recently discovered, to our great dismay, that the corporate label that claims our allegiance at present has fallen upon some hard financial times. Yes, Loathsome Prick, who currently handles our intergalactic CD sales, ran into a little trouble with a small business unit they established some years back down here on terra firma. It’s called LP Financial Products and it specializes in something called, um…. let’s see…. credit…. credit default swaps. Yeah, that’s it. Whatever the hell they are. Anyhow, they ended up owing a whole lot of cash to somebody, and I’m not quite sure how or why. Interesting side note: I went over to their office the other day and saw our A&R rep leaving by the freight elevator with a large suitcase. Must have been in a hurry - he apparently closed the suitcase on some $100 bills he was packing. (Damned untidy, I thought. Curious thing.)

Here’s the rub - I’m told that most of what we’ve earned through intergalactic CD sales (an emerging market, to be sure) was invested for us by Loathsome Prick in what they called a “growth fund”. Fortunately, financial products division of LP guaranteed those investments with these here credit default swap thingies. Unfortunately, when those investments went bad (I believe they sunk most of it into a doomed asteroid - seemed like a good bet at the time) and LP Financial Products was asked to pay up, they… well… defaulted. Now they’ve applied for an AIG style government bailout. My guess is that, with a name like Loathsome Prick, they should have no worries. In the meantime, our reps have apparently decided to go on a hastily planned vacation to …. well, they didn’t say where, exactly. All I know is that they must have been running a little late. (Never seen a car take a turn on one wheel before….)

Anywho, our personal financial advisor - Geet O’Reilly - now tells us that they’re having some financial trouble. And that all of our earnings from the last three tours are down the toilet. Easy come… easy go, right?

More where that came from - For those of you who enjoyed our listener-penned reviews last week, you can read more at our little outpost on garageband.com - Our page is at http://www.garageband.com/artist/big_green/songs. Check it out. Some are even kind of… I don’t know… positive.  

A few miles from where I live, there’s going to be a demonstration of sorts sometime soon. Our local NPR station did a somewhat incoherent interview with the organizer, an elderly sounding gentleman who said he was bringing together people who represent a broad range of political tendencies, left to right, to protest taxes against the backdrop of Fort Stanwix in Rome, a tourist-oriented recreation of the Revolutionary War era outpost. His contention was that, like the colonists during the revolution, he was encouraging people to take a stand against taxation. Actually, I think the founding fathers took issue with the notion of taxation without representation, but nevermind. This is a very 21st Century type of revolution - a bunch of people gathered at a local tourist trap to complain about something that will be with us as long as we have an organized society. It’s kind of like protesting gravity. Jump as high as you like - eventually, you’ll have to come down.

I wonder if this is what Grover Norquist dreamed of when he was a College Republican (like his pal Jack Abramoff) - that we would adopt an ethos of almost childish self-centeredness. Nobody likes paying taxes, goes the cliche. Nobody likes paying for anything, right? (Wouldn’t it be awesome if everything were free, man?) And do I have to eat my oatmeal, mom? Seriously, in the last 30 years, taxes, like “tough on crime” legislation, gun control (or lack of same), and national defense, has been the stuff of legendary demagoguery. It remains true today, with a somewhat hollower ring. Republicans, for instance, are really only about tax cuts now, while intoning recently-developed concern about rampant deficit spending. These are the same folks who enthusiastically signed on to pirating the treasury during the first Bush term, voting for two major tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that contributed to growing deficits even during what they themselves refer to as relatively prosperous years - tax cuts designed to create far greater costs in the out years (i.e. right now) and which left us in a far weaker position to face down the current economic crisis. That’s the party of fiscal responsibility.

The truth is, they’re not against running deficits - their own alternative budget provides for a $1.7 trillion shortfall. They’ve just against the notion of that borrowed money going to benefit ordinary people in any tangible way. So I have to wonder what that guy who’s picketing Fort Stanwix hopes to achieve, except perhaps a completely dysfunctional government that still runs massive deficits.

Shoot ‘em up redux. Just down the road, in Binghamton, some lunatic shot up an immigrant services center on Friday, killing as many as 15. Where’d he get the gun? Who cares, right? These mass killings keep happening, and no one even attempts to address the flood of deadly weapons anymore. We’re being held hostage by 2nd Amendment absolutists who rail at any limits as an attempt to take away their firearms. Bullshit. Consider this, friends - the word “gun” never appears in the 2nd Amendment, just arms. If we consider it beyond any limitation, people will claim the right to buy rocket launchers and nuclear bombs before we’re done. Time for some common sense, before someone else dies for nothing.  

luv u,

jp 

Turn it down a little more. Little more. Okay. Good. Can’t hear that at all. Yeah, that’s right - nothing. Much better. And… hey! Don’t throw things at me!

Sensitive artists, these cohorts of ours. Take Marvin (my personal robot assistant)…. please. He’s been playing the pipe organ on our latest recordings, and, well… a little goes a long way, let’s put it that way. Ouch! Stop chucking stuff, man! Very sensitive. We’ve been asking him to go a little easy on the organ, and he treats that like an insult. (It does sound vaguely obscene, come to think of it.) So it looks like our patented arranging method of starting with every imaginable instrument and subtracting them one by one… that’s not working so good. Thus far, we’ve only managed to eject the glockenspiel, the tin drum, the specially-tuned half-sticks of dynamite, the kazoo, and hell, we’ve got a long, long way to go before we get down to what’s typically needed for a Big Green album. Even sFshzenKlyrn is losing patience with these sessions, and he has a life-span (or half-life) of 57 million Earth years.  

We’ll get it done, never fear. In the mean time, how are our current releases doing? Well, let’s check in on a few listener responses to our last single, “High Horse“. Here’s one from a guy who calls himself “UncleOutrage”:

I Hate To Be The Villian, But…..
I can’t quite tell if this song is supposed to be funny or not, but I’m sorry to say that I don’t like it in either case. Honestly much of it has to do with the genre, I’m really not a fan of honky-tonk country music in the least. But even as song writing goes, this was VERY repetitive and I might go as far to say annoying. I’m REALLY sorry, I hate to be negative as far as judging someone else’s work, but I just have to be honest. There was nothing I liked in this track at all.

Well,  “Uncle” - glad you enjoyed that. If you want to hear it again (and again and again), just drop by our Web site at www.big-green.net/highhorse. There’s even a ludicrous video. Go wild, son!

Here’s a Garageband review from someone who calls him/herself “SkelingtonBoot”:

ugh
I’m sorry this is just not for me. I don’t think this is indie rock, this is one of those red warning label genres like Country Rock or Comedy. Singer has a sturdy voice and given a willing spirit I reckon he could get you singing along to your granny’s armpits and the melody - very country - is very compelling in a very cheesy way. The lyrics are … ? I can’t talk about the lyrics. Overall the song sounds very proficiently performed and I do believe that humour belongs in music … but, that’s not a carte blanche!

Gosh, “Skelington”, not sure where to begin! Thanks for the kudos on the “willing spirit”, though you should know we eliminated all the “granny’s armpit” sounds kind of early on in the production process. We’ll definitely take your “humour… not a carte blanche” comment to heart, though. From now on, we’ll start editing ourselves more judiciously. We’re going to get all serious, now. Totally. No, seriously.

Well, that’s probably enough fun for this week, kids. We’ve got to interrupt the man-sized tuber’s monologue before people start getting too happy in the studio. Music is a serious business, you know. No time for all this hee-hee and yuk-yuk.    
  

News from the front this week hasn’t been so good. Deadly car bombings in Iraq (a.k.a. “normal land”). Policemen killed in Afghanistan, along with many others (including U.S. military people). Another unmanned drone attack in Pakistan, killing Lord knows who (sometimes the policy - like our weapons - seems to be on autopilot). And in Israel, chilling testimony from Israeli soldiers confirming the worst allegations about their attack on Gaza (euphemistically referred to by our media as a “war”), with stories of arbitrary, even random killings of Palestinian civilians, various acts of gratuitous brutality, a fanatical head chaplain from the settlements urging holy war. Pretty ugly stuff, all in all… though nothing all that surprising for the I.D.F. Despite their claims about “purity of arms”, they have a history of oppressive behavior dating back to the 1948 war. And now it seems likely their next foreign minister will be a patent racist who has toyed with the notion of expulsion of Israeli Arabs. Paging George Mitchell! You’ve got your work cut out for you, old boy.

Obama’s message to the Iranians was probably a step in the right direction, but it means little without a palpable change of policy across the region. That means some effort to promote Iraqi independence (from us) and reconstruction (from our assorted ravages), as well as a more speedy withdrawal of troops and military contractors. It also means rethinking the kind of policy that produces more hatred towards America amongst Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. And it means a stop to the uncritical support we have given the Israeli government regardless of how they conduct themselves in the territories they have occupied since June 1967 (i.e. Palestine). Let’s face it - we’ve always been on the wrong side of struggles in the developing world, even when “our side” has won. From the Congo to Southeast Asia, from El Salvador to Chile, from Kabul to Baghdad, and everywhere in between, we’ve engaged in the thoughtless application of military might to political disputes and social upheaval, with invariably disastrous results. When will it stop? When will the sun set on this empire?

As the Israelis have demonstrated through their actions, and as we are demonstrating through our own, occupations have a corrupting influence on the occupier. Now seemingly incapable of facing down even a moderately armed irregular force like Hezbollah, the Israeli military seems best suited to attacking captive civilian populations in areas they already effectively control - civilians who have no effective means of defense. For our own part, we have become so used to the idea of civilian casualties that they are almost never deemed worthy of media coverage unless they occur in the double digits. The fact that we leave crucial life-or-death action to pilotless drones illustrates how profoundly we have separated ourselves from any sense of responsibility to the people subject to our military force. The very experience of war and occupation is now limited to the relatively small number of families whose members volunteer for service, our collective knowledge of its horrors growing more and more remote as the conscripts of 20th Century conflicts grow old and pass away.

Leave us face it: the empire is failing. Instead of tinkering with it, we had best consider how to abandon it before it destroys what’s left of our democracy.

luv u,

jp 

Give me an A. Okay… how about a lower one. Yeah, that’s good. Now, give me a D. No, no…. that’s an H. There ain’t no H, so try D. That’s more like it.

Oh, hi. Didn’t notice you there on the other side of that flat screen. (Damn, it’s tight in here!) Forgive my inattentiveness - we’re just trying to work on Big Green’s next release, [INSERT TITLE HERE - FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T POST UNTIL YOU FIX THIS!!]. Quite an innovative title, eh? Took a long time to work it up, but that’s what we’re all about here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill - spending inordinately large amounts of time on stuff that should take five minutes. I know what you’re thinking. That’s why we live in a squat house, right? Well, well… it isn’t a squat house. It’s an abandoned squat mill. Just as easy to get these things right, you know. In any case, here we are, down in the dungeon, the musical dungeon, trying to make this thing scream. The drums are all miked up and ready. Matt’s bass is plugged in and buzzing. I’ve replaced the broken keys on my piano (all 47 of them) and sFshzenKlyrn is cranked up to 111. (Yeah, that thing goes up to 111).

And yeah, I did say sFshzenKlyrn. No, he’s not staying at the mill, chez Big Green, as it were. (Or, rather, as it weren’t.) Our ever-reliable, extraterrestrial friend from the planet Zenon is piping in his parts from many, many light-years away. How does he do this, you may ask? (And well you may ask.) Well… he uses the Zenite equivalent of broadband. It’s kind of like a beam of high-energy particles that slices through space faster than grease lightning. He just adjusts it to a particular frequency, points it at the Earth (or as many of us call it, the “oyt”), and the sound starts emitting from one of our abandoned speaker cabinets. It’s quite amazing. There is a slight latency problem - he actually has to start playing a note sometime last year in order for it to sync up with our performance. Fortunately, sFshzenKlyrn is a transcendental being of no fixed hairstyle and can slip from one place in time to another. (Yes, but can he go from one time in place to another? Huh? Can he?) So he simply dials himself back several months to the precise interval needed for transmission, and he’s right with us. (Monitoring is a little complicated - I’ll skip that bit.)

Then, of course, there’s the process of arranging our songs. You’ve already heard about how Big Green actually composes music. Arranging is a whole other thing. I call it the music-minus method. We start by giving everybody an instrument. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) gets an acoustic guitar, the man-sized tuber gets a trombone, anti-Lincoln gets a pipe organ, and so on. We literally fill the studio with noise, everyone playing at the same time, as many notes as they can squeeze in. Then we start to edit it down. You know - maybe a little less tuba in the chorus… not a constant stream of noise, but just a few notes… perhaps (preferably) none at all. We just keep slashing away at it until it gets close to something listenable. Funny… in the end, we always seem to end up with the three (or four) of us playing the instruments we usually play. So, I guess this whole arranging process is kind of a waste of time. Hmmm…. must re-evaluate. Bear with me, now.

Yeah, well… as we’re mulling that over, you can probably go back to whatever it was you were doing. Check back in a few days to see if we’re still mulling. If we are, kick the mill in the side a couple of times - that should do it.

When I first heard about the AIG bonuses - I think it was last Saturday - I felt sure there’d be hell to pay, but this is way beyond what I expected. Now that we’ve all been treated to six straight days of red-faced rage, I have to say - this is just fucking surreal. It’s not surprising that people are pissed off, but to see politicians, pundits, and news correspondents gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists at the sky is kind of hilarious. What - they’ve never heard of out-sized executive compensation before? Of top-level managers walking away from failed enterprises with a big bundle of cash? Where have they been for the past 25 years? It’s only been happening my entire adult life, practically. Oh sure, I know - AIG took public funds. But plenty of companies with obscenely over-compensated management teams suck off the public feeding tube. Just look at our defense contractors, for chrissake, or Agri-business, fed fat with subsidy. AIG is a dramatic example of something that’s been common practice for a long time, made possible by the very people who are screaming the loudest.  

It’s a pretty hollow pantomime, I’m sure, for most people. We’ve all been watching this feeding frenzy for decades now as our own incomes have stagnated or declined. These hubris-driven bonuses are just a parting shot - a little flourish on the longest and most profound looting of our nation’s treasure in its 233-year history. Since the start of the 1980s, business has called the shots and the wealthy have further enriched themselves at the expense of working people and the poor. What was good for Wall Street was good for the country, and it didn’t matter how convoluted and abstruse their methods became - if they moved the needle in the right direction, it was all good. We’ve just been subjected to a systematic fraud that’s measurable in the tens of trillions of dollars, and far from excoriating the beneficiaries, our political leadership and mainstream press have largely facilitated and celebrated their excess.

Sure, AIG cut themselves checks. But they also passed something like $13 billion to Goldman Sachs to cover outstanding contracts. I heard a G.S. spokesperson say that they would not have been substantially affected by the loss of AIG, but that they took the payout to protect the interests - get this - of the American people, who had bailed Goldman out and were, therefore, shareholders of the extremely well-connected investment bank. (Insert laugh track here.) When you view this in the broader context not only of massive bonuses (more than a billion to executives of bailed-out Citibank) and ongoing payouts via the Federal Reserve, but of the stuff that doesn’t get talked about at all, like the missing $50 billion or more in Iraq reconstruction funds (remember the pallets of cash?) and the other assorted wild commitments of public funds initiated by the previous administration, AIG is small potatoes. It also provides a good opportunity for the thieves to yell “thief”, if only for a few days.  

We’ve got a massive problem here, folks - one that’s causing upwards of 650,000 people to lose their jobs every month. We didn’t get here overnight. If we’re unprepared, it’s because the sluggards who run this country - Republicans and Democrats - have been asleep at the switch for too long. Wake up time.

luv u,

jp