featured posts

if, good netroots activist that you are, you observed buy nothing day this friday, you probably didn’t find yourself involved in a murder. thank you and congratulations!

but if you were one of several hundred shoppers mobbing up at the valley stream wal-mart before its 5am opening bell, maybe you did help kill somebody. could your foot on the neck or chest of Jdimytai Damour have been part of the straw that broke his 34-year old back? you may never know. or maybe you will, as police are now reviewing the surveillance tapes (hard to call them security tapes, since they ain’t seemed to make a fucking thing any more secure) in an attempt to identify the people who walked over — WALKED OVER — Damour after knocking him to the ground. criminal charges may result if any positive IDs can be made. unlikely, but i’m glad they’re trying.

i remember the first time fans were crushed to death at a rock show, almost thirty years ago, when 11 people suffocated in ohio when all they wanted was to see The Who live. since then, dozens more – from denmark to venezuela and london to indonesia – have died this way at concerts.

though the surface details of these killings are the same (too many too-eager people in a too-small, too-poorly-supervised space) there are stark differences at their core.

at a live show passions run high for two reasons: the love that the audience has for their artist, and the prospect of that artist taking unexpected risks to push that night’s performance over the top and into brilliance. it’s the anticipation of shared magic in a dark theater before thousands of sympathetic witnesses. there is a breathless pre-show exhilaration in the air, among the crowd, that is unlike anything else. i understand this feeling well, having spent countless hours on line in the freezing cold hoping to get belly-to-stage for patti smith, driving all the way to albany to see amanda palmer, sleeping overnight outside now-defunct tower records on 8th street in hopes of snagging a pair of tickets for mj’s Thriller tour. (what can i tell you? starting something was my twenty-something soundtrack.) so, while concert crushings are insane and utterly unjustifiable, the causes of the headlong fan rush are not incomprehensible for anyone who has been deeply touched by the work of an artist.

now consider what is at the core of something like yesterday’s wal-mart stampede. i must have that wii for johnny. i must save that ten dollars on the food processor. i must stretch those xmas shopping dollars far and farther and farther so that the kids can have more.

then consider what generates this bottomless need, what has turned us into a nation of eternally unsatisfied must-haves, where even houses with two dozen closets can’t contain one family’s shit, all the single-season wonders that simply must be had. that one must trample the part-time store clerk to get one’s holiday-shopping hands upon. people weren’t always like this, and it’s no accident: this eternally insatiable thing has been quite consciously and intentionally generated by the multibillion dollar advertising economy. it was not rockstar love pushing those black friday hordes forward; it was the glitz and seduction of nonstop, often subliminal, advertising campaigns. it was the neon sneakers in times square and dancing dinosaurs on the back of cereal boxes. that sweet recorded voice crooning over canned music at the mall.

consider the fact that even your bailout tax dollars are being used to fund corporate branding expenses. consider that some schools even sell ad space on their closed-circuit TVs and classroom walls.

we live in a culture so consumed and subsumbed by flashing ads lunging at us and over us and into our ears and onto our t-shirts and being sent home in brilliant four-color slicks with our kids from school and arriving in your mailbox and your email and on just about every single fucking page you visit on the web. 24/7/365, created by marketers with psychology degrees and billions of dollars of research at their disposal.

by all means, let’s hold the tramplers accountable if they can be found. by all means, let’s hold wal-mart accountable for irresponsible marketing practices like pairing “while supplies last” with a 5am opening time that guarantees a cold and impatient mob gathering for hours at their flimsy doors.

but let’s not forget the masterminds behind the monster of american consumerism and all its associated ugliness (not least of which is the environmental destruction caused by mindless mass consumption). we need to cut this kind of evil down at the root, and the root is on madison avenue. it’s time to regulate the where, when, how and how much of advertising in our lives. it’s time to take the public commons out of the hands of the advertisers who presently control it, and who do it, and us, absolutely no good.

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what strikes me most about the mumbai bloodbath is its apparent pointlessness.

yes, in a certain sense all terrorism is pointless, but in this case, where such a massive paramilitary operation goes unattributed, where no one is shouting the equivalent of “Free Mumia” in the streets, where there are no demands and the perpetrators could only maybe be tied to a group whose aims are equally murky, i can’t avoid the thought that this, that many terrorist actions, is little more than violence for its own sake.

objectiveless mayhem and murder. like a video game, where the player shoots down as many as he can because…he CAN.

i don’t like the word terrorism anyway. deepak chopra said on alternet that the phrase “war on terrorism” is an oxymoron, a war on war, and that terrorism is a word that is only applied to those on the other side (whatever side is “other” from the perspective of the speaker). he warns of the danger of going after the wrong people, and going after them too aggressively, in the aftermath of this attack. he talks about seeking peace, asking the muslim community (that would be one-quarter of the world, btw) for help in solving the problems.

and my mind keeps going back to events like the shootings at columbine and virginia tech. sick actions by a few sick boys, right? i don’t see that the attacks in mumbai or for that matter the 9/11 attack are so very different: sick actions by a few sick boymen. older, better financed, bigger guns, more complex plans, but at the heart of it i still see killing for the sake of killing. doing it because it can be done, actions born from an internalized rage at our increasingly unnatural world, practically an automatic reflex in response to the daily barrage of advertising and lies and hype that everyone other than the most remote and disconnected villagers (how many of those are left on this planet?) is bombarded with day in and day out.

i’m thinking out loud here, on a tiny computer with a tiny screen where i can’t see more than a couple of lines at a time, so i will apologize the inevitable disjointedness.

take los angeles street gangs or the KKK as examples. do teenagers take initiation with the crips because of their innate hatred for the bloods? i’d bet that in most cases the initiates don’t even KNOW any bloods, they join the gang because they are enraged and want, in the first place, to have some formalized communion with other enraged young men (and i am saying men deliberately in this piece, not just using the generic english-language catch-all) and secondly because of the opportunities gangs offer in acting on such generalized rage. membership gives you a target, an alleged reason to lash out: you are no longer a lone shooter on the grassy knoll acting out of your own pathetically furious mind, you are fearlessly carrying out acts of aythorized violence against a clearly defined opponent. just like soldiers in the army. i see the same with groups like the KKK — do most members join because their hatred for black people is so pure and strong that it keeps them up nights, or do they join because they want to walk through the woods heavily armed and completely disguised, searching with their brethren for targets to destroy?

i believe that dark underside of the brain is front and center in actions that we label as terrorist; that the violence is the end, not a means. and i believe that the electric sterility and growing impersonality that we have created in this 24/7 gimmequick anything goes winner-takes-all world is what has activated that dark underside for so many.

we need a healing so profound it almost defies comprehension if we’re going to get any kind of a handle on what is going on here.

and i don’t know if there’s time enough to do it: the results of our decades-long desecration of the environment are snowballing, and planet earth doesn’t have a button marked “hold”. when there’s not enough clean water, when the air is unbreathable, when crops don’t fertilize because all of the bees are dead, terrorism will come to seem a small and puny concern. men in white hoods? teenagers with bombs under their caftans? planes flying into buildings? minor details in the global megastory of suffocation, starvation, dehydration, irradiation.  the story of our extinction, a book there will be no one left alive to read.

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yes, after a bit of post-election decompression i have re-entered my life, dragged out the old goals list, and am getting very, very busy.

i’ve wanted to redesign the site for a while now. yeah, the original template was cool, but also a little buggy, and i’m no back-end CSS expert: i needed a template that would work for me, not against me, so i invested in chris pearson’s Thesis theme and you are looking at the preliminary results.

what does all that have to do with you getting free shit? everything! two contests are in full force and effect on getangrywithme right now.

WANT TO WIN A $25 AMAZON GIFT CERTIFICATE? then take a few minutes to browse around this site then leave a comment here with your best suggestions for how this design can be improved and the best suggestion wins! only two rules — the comment must appear on this post, and it must be at least somewhat within the realm of possiblility. for example, “make this site more like huffington post” are not within that realm, as i am one non-programming-professional blogger, not a cadre of geeks like what they’ve got working at huffpo. that’s it! easy, right? so put on your most critical and creative thinking cap, take a couple minutes to browse around the site, and make a suggestion or two. the winner will be announced on this blog on december 1st.

FOR BLOGGERS ONLY: COMMENTLUV IS GIVING AWAY iPOD SPEAKERS, HEADPHONES, MEMORY CARDS AND CASH! and they’ve made it really simple to enter. here’s what you have to do:

• register your blog at CommentLuv.com and get the url registered and verified (registration is free, of course)
• be sure to fill out a profile description
• you do not need to have CommentLuv installed on your blog
• then leave comments at any or all participating blogs – that’s it!

once you’re all set up at CommentLuv, visit the contest tab for a full list of prizes and participating sites. you can leave comments at ANY of the contest blogs, not just this one. the more (non-spam) comments you leave, the better your chances of winning. this contest continues until all the prizes have been given away. and it’s a good way to find interesting blogs that you might have come across otherwise.

of course, commenting daily here on getangrywith me increases your chances of winning! if you do win, of course, it would be mighty kind to leave a hat-tip for getangrywithme.com on your blog.

IF YOU HAVE BEEN READING CAREFULLY you will realize that leaving a comment here about the site redesign ALSO gets you an entry in the CommentLuv contest. nice, huh? just be sure to register your site at CommentLuv before commenting here, and then you’re off.

regular readers know that this is very new territory for me. a contest rather than a rant? giving away a gift certificate rather than drilling AIG a new one? likely not the kind of thing i’m going to do on a regular basis, but it did seem worth a shot, especially if i can get some great suggestions on how to improve this site and you can get some swag out of the deal. besides, as John P says in one man’s blog, ”specialization is for insects”.

ready? set, go!

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who the FUCK are they kidding here? on the same day that AIG received another $40,000,000,000 taxpayer dollars to bail out their business, they skipped off to another upscale luxury executive retreat — one that is estimated to have cost close to half a million dollars.

that’s right, people. YOUR money just bought these bozos all the filet mignon and champagne in the world. YOUR money is still paying for AIG’s luxury suite at madison square garden.

pissed off, much? TELL CONGRESS WE WANT A REFUND.

and what do we get out of this deal? apparently not much, as AIG’s alleged financial crisis has already led to the cutting back or elimination of critical public transportation services like the washington metro and new jersey transit, to name just two.

corporate law experts predict a slew of indictments as a result of both corporate malfeasance before the crash and misappropriation of bailout funds after the fact. it can’t happen soon enough for me: let the perp walks begin with ceo robert willumstead.

can you tell that i am beside myself over here? these fat cat motherfuckers walking away with multimillion dollar bonuses that come out of OUR pockets. 

and it ain’t just AIG.  goldman sachs GAVE AWAY THEIR ENTIRE BAILOUT GRANT IN EXECUTIVE BONUSES. in other words, all they had to do was skip the bonuses this year, and they wouldn’t have needed a bailout. the people who mismanaged goldman sachs into near-bankruptcy get huge checks after running that company into the ground. and YOU are paying for it. I am paying for it.

new york city is cutting transit workers and cops and slashing every bit of fat out of its budget. a record-breaking 1500 newly homeless families entered the shelter system in september alone — and that’s just here. how many new homeless are there in your city?

but we sent over a hundred billion dollars to AIG. nine billion to goldman sachs. how many homeless people could be rescued (or at least housed safely) with a billion bucks? i can’t even begin to do the math.

who else is getting your money? unbelievably, the government refuses to tell us. get that? two TRILLION dollars have been distributed by the fed in some kind of deep throat operation, and they don’t want us to know where it has gone. further, the treasury department is even redacting the terms of the agreements they’ve made: the documents released so far look like letters that were censored by the KGB. and the way the bailout bill was structured means this kind of secrecy is par for the course.

and now the totally incompetent auto industry is revving into high gear and begging for a bailout of its own. NO FUCKING BAILOUTS FOR DETROIT, BARACK, OKAY? i mean, what’s next? DHL just announced it’s cutting 40,000 US jobs (yes, forty thousand, you read that right), virtually going out of business entirely in this country. should we be propping them up as well, putting the whole company on life support just because it failed to compete effectively with UPS and FedEx?

when i make bad decisions or follow a poorly thought-out strategy, i suffer the consequences. corporations should start to do the same.

if not, we’re all going to end up living on the streets:
**

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dear george,

you made it happen! the unmitigated evil of your putrid rule rose such a stench that even lifelong racists held their noses and supported barack obama. yes, george, you are responsible for scenes like the one described on fivethirtyeight.com, where a smiling white man told a canvasser “yup, i’m voting for the nigger” — and meant it.

last night my neighborhood exploded in joy and strangers hugged each other on the street, as if a long war had just ended, and i watched the final returns through tears: finally, tears of joy and not of despair or rage over stolen votes and the manipulations of a kangaroo court. this morning, in another first, i watched president O’s acceptance speech a second time. he gets it. he understands how to hold this country and this world together, not tear it apart as you have for the last eight years.

how did you do it, dubya? what magic did you use to catapult a nation known for nooses and lynchings into the arms of its first black president?

a couple of examples come immediately to mind. i don’t have time to list them all. it would take days. years. your ugly legacy.

you fabricated an entire mythology of WMDs and forced us into a disastrous and unnecessary war. did you know, george, that more than 650,000 iraqis — citizens as well as military — have been slaughtered since your invasion? more than half a million people murdered and an entire country blown to bits. for nothing. nearly 5,000 american soldiers dead and tens of thousands maimed for life. some may never get out of hellholes like walter reed, the so-called military hospital best known for its mistreatment of returning wounded vets. on your watch. with your blessing.

you forbade the use of federal funds in any program, domestic or international, that provided birth control or abortions. hell, you even sanctioned organizations that counseled women about these options, much less provided them. why does it matter so much to you? why would you rather see people die than use a condom? we’ll never know how many american girls and women could have avoided unwanted pregnancies and STDs without your interference. how many africans would not have died and continue dying from AIDs for lack of rubbers.

you actually approve of torture. APPROVE of it. i can’t quite get my head around it, george. i’d like to stand YOU on a milk crate and electrify your balls, like that (in)famous photo that came out of abu ghraib. well, no. actually i wouldn’t like to do that. i really can’t imagine torturing another human being, not even one as vile and hated as you. you’re not quite so picky. how many taxi drivers and goatherds are still trapped in guantanamo bay, gibbering in their lightless concrete cells with broken fingers and limbs and scars they didn’t have when they arrived? not even one conviction. not one.

did i say abu ghraib? did i say guantanamo bay? yes. on your watch. with your blessing.

you have lied to the american people whenever it suited you, and as you see we are pretty well fucking tired of it george, sick and tired of you and your cronies and minions, of your patriot act and your prying eyes. what does it say that the famously antichoice government is the same one eavesdropping on the intimate phone calls of its soldiers? like a bunch of impotent old men at a peep show, grunting and pulling; an ever-flaccid penis in a bespoke suit, dropping quarter after quarter into the slot.

i don’t believe you give a damn about any of it, of course. as much as you may dislike the thought of handing the reins to a democrat. at the end of the day it doesn’t affect your life in any way; you can just go back to the ranch and tend your millions. insulated.

i just went downstairs for a smoke and got a high-five from a stranger, a white woman walking down 116th street with a big stupid grin on her face. i knew why she was smiling, just as surely as i knew why people on the subway were crying on 9/11/01. we are as united now in joy as we were then in grief, and it’s all because of you, george bush. you made the election of barack obama not only possible, but inevitable.

and this country, finally, has something to thank you for.

sincerely,
jackie

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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last night i dreamed of the economy. except it wasn’t the economy, it was a landfill. this is how dreams work: you’re walking through a castle and dream says “this is your office”. rather, dream makes you Know this is your office. dreams are all about knowing, vivid slices of Real in the sleepy night. dreams can be ecstatic, terrifying, repetitive, confusing, erotic — the only thing a dream can never be is uncertain. dreams always know.

i dreamed of the economy and the economy was a landfill but it wasn’t a sparkly new separate-your-recyclables landfill, no. it was a seething, boiling, fetid lake of filth abubble with disintegrating plastics and grease and stale medications. i held a cloth over my face. i couldn’t breathe. i was there, alone, at the edge of the poisonous landfill of our economy. it was a long, long dream. i stood and watched the noxious lake in a landscape that held nothing else, grey and barren as the moon. i saw heat squiggles rising off the black swells. i took small breaths and shivered in the freezing cold.

how many of us believed that the US economy really could collapse? how many of us understand that it has already happened, nothing but the details of it to be worked out….and worked out, and worked out, as savings vanish and opportunities for livelihood cease. a few months ago i wrote here that it’s too late for everything, environmentally speaking. i might have missed the whole point in that post, climate change may be the least of our problems. not that i’ll stop recycling or taking a tote bag to the grocery store.

our next president, whoever it may be, will be stepping into an impossible job. john mccain said yesterday that he knows how to fix this problem. maybe he doesn’t yet understand, or simply doesn’t want to admit, that this isn’t fixable. that to bail out all of the failing firms means mortgaging not just your future and your children’s futures, but several generations of futures. it means writing checks that we have no way of cashing. it means china cuts off our credit. (it’s abominable that this country has even come to rely so heavily on loans from china in the first place. but we have. how the fiscally conservative republicans who started this practice square that with their financial philosophy is beyond me.) conversely, not bailing out the failing firms means that insurance policies and savings accounts become worthless. means that mortgages vanish completely and only those wealthy enough to pay cash can buy a place to live. it means owners walk away from rental properties and throw up their hands when the shivering residents scream that they need heat. blood from stones. suing the landlord doesn’t accomplish much if he’s as broke as you. lawsuits never filled a furnace or changed a lightbulb yet.

nor fixed a bridge nor paved a road nor repaired a levee. 

but hey, mudd & syron will still get their multimillion dollar kisses on their way out the door. the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

and last night i dreamed of a landfill.

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the phrase comes from a famous poem written by langston hughes in the 1950’s:

Necessity

Work?
I don’t have to work.
I don’t have to do nothing
but eat, drink, stay black, and die.
This little old furnished room’s
so small I can’t whip a cat
without getting fur in my mouth
and my landlady’s so old
her features is all run together
and God knows she sure can overcharge—
Which is why I reckon I does
have to work after all.

that meme has become so rooted in american culture that its origins aren’t generally known. just an old black folk saying, the polar opposite of “free, white, and over 21” — one expecting, if not the worst, at least not much; the other expecting pretty much everything, and on a silver platter while you’re at it. there are no equivalencies to these phrases, for it’s gonna be all good if you’re black or it’s all gonna be bad if you’re white. (none that i know of, anyway — please chime in if you’ve got any.) (well there’s this one from the jews, who understand better than any other people the humorization of gloom & doom: “If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.”) stay black & die, these days, is most often shortened to stay black, and rings in the halls of ivy league schools as easily (if not as frequently) as it does in the welfare office.

yesterday in the health-food store, a conversation about obama’s berlin speech started up while we waited to pay for our soy milk (most of us, i’m pleased to note, having brought our own re-usable bags). all the chatterers were black except for me, a gorgeous young scandinavian woman, and carlos, the puerto rican proprietor of the store. we’d all voted for obama in the primaries and were pleased with the results of his european tour. the young woman was especially earnest about her feelings for the campaign (i might even use the term “worked up”) and, at the back of the line, like unruly schoolchildren, me and a big aretha franklin-looking mama were giving each other the wink and the nod, half enjoying and half infuriated by the extremes of this girl’s apparently untested idealism.

but it was carlos who nailed it, with a brand-new two-word meme, as she gathered her purchases and headed out of the store. “take care,” he told her, “stay blonde.”

we managed not to laugh until the door swung shut behind her.

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our food supply is seriously compromised. three times in the last two weeks I’ve been slammed with the SPLS*, one instance bad enough to seriously compromise my father’s day visit with dear old dad. in each case I’d eaten salad the evening before in a decent restaurant.

(*Screaming Projectile Liquid Shits)

in a recent article on alternet, allison kilkenny writes:

In 2007, a California produce company recalled bagged fresh spinach after a sample tested positive for salmonella. Nearly a year before, an outbreak of E. coli in fresh spinach killed three people and sickened 200. The recent tomato salmonella outbreak has affected at least 145 people, resulting in 23 hospitalizations, and many believe water contamination is the cause of the affected tomatoes.

It’s not the veggies that are to blame. The problem is the meat. Salmonella is an animal pathogen, so it doesn’t originate from tomatoes. Most experts agree that the bacteria probably come from groundwater contaminated with animal feces.

You read that right: Cow shit is in your tomatoes.

and it’s getting there via the aquifer, at the exact same moment that many large US cities are signing a pledge against buying bottled water.

these days my apocalyptic daymares are a combination of hurricanes, earthquakes, lightning
storms (such as several hundred this week that set half of california on fire), and an exodus of terrified pedestrians fleeing the cities in a world that’s run out of gas.

you are here:

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THE MTA JUST PAID BOOZ ALLEN THREE-QUARTERS OF A MILLION DOLLARS to measure its carbon footprint so that any available credits can be sold.

there are so many things wrong with this picture that i hardly know where to start.

the fact that the carbon offset market exists at all is obscene. this is a market in “unused pollution” — in other words, your business pollutes the planet, but pollutes it a bit less than the law allows. the difference between your pollution (your carbon footprint) and the legal limit are your carbon offset credits, which are now not only sold but around which an entire new stock market instrument has been developed.

I COULD PUT ON MY ROSE-COLORED GLASSES and view this as a positive thing in that it the potential profit encourages businesses to keep their emissions below the legal limit. but what is the legal limit? in the US it’s whatever the state says it is, and limits are typically set as high as possible in order not to piss off the corporations. because we did not sign the kyoto protocol, there is no national standard — even wikipedia is unable to articulate america’s policy on emissions.

IN PRACTICE, the limits are far too high. the environment has already sustained an intolerable amount of damage and, in order to reverse that, we need to dramatically — not minimally — decrease emissions. yet corporate influence and outrageous political gamesmanship combine to obscure this reality, opting to protect the almighty dollar rather than the earth under our feet.

carbon trading permits even these artificially high limits to be routinely exceeded, as dirty industries buy credits on the open market. this is the equivalent of leaving such industries almost entirely unregulated — and with far less incentive to adopt cleaner alternative standards, as they are now meeting the so-called legal standard.

the MTA is a perfect example of another insidious way that the carbon credit market works against energy conservation. the MTA implemented a number of conservation strategies simply to save money on their electric bill. in other words, they ALREADY had an incentive to lower their carbon footprint, without resorting to the sale of carbon credits. upon realizing they could sell those credits for profit, they hand booz allen big bucks to officially measure their footprint.

CARE TO GUESS how this NYC commuter feels about $750,000 of metrocard money going to a big consulting company, just so that some other company can buy the right to contaminate the environment more than it already does?

if
individuals were allowed (god forbid) to participate in this kind of insanity, you buying a prius would give me the right to buy an SUV — when in reality, the use of SUVs for casual commuting should be outlawed altogether.

what’s your carbon footprint? mine is 8.3, but a lot of that comes from plane trips that i am required by my employer to take. without that travel, i rate a very nice 4.4 — far below the national average of 7.5.

clearly, the best way i can reduce my carbon footprint is to take a job with a company that isn’t headquartered on the other side of the country. (i’ll get back to you on that!)

can you think of ways to reduce yours?

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