Memorial

Last days
seem often to be occasions of assemblies prefacing disassembly,
as of the tired, too late loved bridge,
a spare, utilitarian grace soon to be substituted
for the gentle arches and tapered towers.

Many feet
and paws that daily trod, and some that never did,
the grated walkway that borders the venerable spans, will later.
But now, as dawns the day before the gates are closed
and the work of the cutting torches begins,

The moon,
whose perfect nickel shape will tonight, from its zenith, illuminate
peeling paint and rust and thick black grease, descends to the horizon,
the glowing orange mass poised at the approach
like a molten steel wheel.

— John Simon
© 2012 by John Simon, all rights reserved.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011 — Sonatrach’s Rhourd Enouss is shown entering Portsmouth Harbor at about 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 14th, and leaving at about 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, December 18th. The ship is 670 feet long, has a beam of 108 feet, and carries a little over 2 million cubic feet of propane. Owned by Sonatrach, Algeria’s government-owned petroleum company, it was built by Kawasaki Shipbuilding of Kobe, Japan, and delivered in 2008.

The video is made up of a succession of screenshots taken from a pair of webcams owned and operated by Sebtec, of Derry, NH, and converted to a .mov file by our Newsreel Division using QuickTime Pro. The video runs 1:08 minutes; the span of time covered in the video is just over 28 minutes.

The Super Committee,* Congress’s latest gimmick for dodging its responsibilities, announced last week that it had failed to reach an agreement to slash the federal budget deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next decade.

Most Republicans promptly blamed the Democrats, citing their refusal to slash spending on social programs — which did not cause the deficit. They also blamed President Obama for not being a part of the negotiations. If he had taken a more active role, they would have complained that he was meddling.

Republicans were not quite unanimous in blaming the Democrats. Former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) said that anyone who would put Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge ahead of the needs of the country had no business being in Congress. Norquist explained to TV interviewers that Simpson’s anti-pledge position was attributable to his being either senile or drunk.

All six of the Republicans appointed by their Party leaders to the Super Committee have signed Norquist’s pledge to “oppose any and all efforts” to raise tax rates or lower or eliminate loopholes. It’s not as if the leadership can be faulted for cherry-picking, though — in the Senate, pledge signers outnumber non-signers by nearly 6 to one. In the House, the ratio of signers to non-signers is nearly 40 to one.

Negotiation by Fiat

Republicans began the Super Committee negotiations by saying they would permit the Democrats to raise an additional $300 billion in new revenue — but only if the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named† tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were made permanent.

It must be borne in mind that when dealing with Republicans, the meanings of words are determined not by the dictionary but by the National Committee. Negotiating means staking out a certain aggressive position already known to be unacceptable to the other side, declaring it to be non-negotiable, then shifting that position further towards their ultimate goal: a return to monarchy and feudalism.

The ultimate failure of the Super Committee represents, to a certain extent, a victory for the Democrats. For a change, they didn’t give anything away; a laudable improvement in their performance overall. And, theoretically, the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named tax cuts will end on schedule December 30, 2012.

So, petty politics aside, if the aforementioned tax cuts do end in 2012, the largest single cause of our current deficit woes will have died a natural death, at the end of its alloted lifespan.

As for the rest of our deficit woes, if only we had gotten the job done promptly in Afghanistan, and stayed the hell out of Iraq, they would never have arisen.

It is Sweet to Forget

If the Republicans can’t live without these damned tax cuts, why on Earth did they ever put an expiration date on them in the first place? It goes entirely against their — well, what passes for their principles.

A Senate rule nearly forty years old allows any Senator to block legislation during the Reconciliation process if it significantly increases the federal deficit — for a period of more than ten years.

Republicans knew the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named tax cuts would wreak havoc on the deficit, so they gave them a ten-year drop dead date to sneak them past the Byrd Rule — named after Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a Democrat.

Italians sometimes say dolce far niente — it is sweet to do nothing. Republicans, though they will neither say it nor admit it, believe è dolce dimenticare — it is sweet to forget.

Oh, That Catastrophe

While we wallow in not-so-sweet reverie, let us also recall the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, aka Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Call it GLB.

GLB repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, thereby ushering in the financial free-for-all of 2000 – 2007, creating the financial freefall that began in 2008 and continues to this day.

One would not think that having voted for GLB would constitute a qualification — unless one happened to be a Party leader in Congress. Of the six Super Committee seats allocated to the Republicans, leaders filled five with Members who had voted for GLB. Lest Democratic heads begin to swell, two of the six assigned by their Party leaders did the same.

Wheels Within Wheels

As the Super Committee shuffles offstage, let us recall its larger context.

Just about the time President Obama was elected, Republicans determined that raising America’s debt ceiling would be tantamount to national suicide. An amazing coincidence.

Then last spring the debt ceiling actually approached. Even Republicans could see the awful consequences that would ensue if they walked their talk. They needed a face-saving way to do that which they had promised not to do. Being Republicans, that wasn’t hard: create a Super Committee! It will miraculously undo all the damage.

But wait — $600 billlion in defense cuts? The poor defense contractors will starve!

No problem. The cuts don’t kick in until January, 2013. Congress has a whole year to move the goal posts. Again.

* Officially but prosaically named the United States Congress Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, or JSCDR. The Members who drew up the enabling legislation clearly did not have their hearts in it, since they failed to give it a trick name spelling out something clever. They had but to ask; we would have suggested Committee to Research Alternative Procedural Options for Legislating Appropriately, or CRAPOLA.

† Since Republicans become terribly upset — and understandably so — at every mention of our 43rd President’s name, we offer this circumlocution in lieu of the name of a man whose face they once claimed ought to be on Mount Rushmore.

In less than a week most Americans — assuming they have roofs over their heads, paid-up utility bills, and the price of a Butterball® — will re-enact a legendary encounter between British colonists and the indigenous people whom they would later displace. And why not? That shared meal is certainly more pleasant to recall than a lot of their later encounters.

Mayflower descendants whose enjoyment of the day may be tarnished by guilt can easily, if only partially, assuage it at the Foxwoods® Resort Casino, conveniently located just seven miles north of the hilltop where hundreds of Pequots were massacred fifteen years after the first Thanksgiving.

The survivors of those who were killed there can never be recompensed adequately — certainly not with a license to run a gambling hall. They could console themselves with the notion that they, and the children of their former oppressors, are now in the same sinking boat. But that would be a cheap triumph — just as dropping a week’s pay into the slots would be cheap expiation.

Both groups would be better served by ignoring whatever slight differences might remain nearly four hundred years after those first encounters. As fellow humans, the offspring of the native peoples and the colonists alike are being subjected to a new form of colonization. All we humans are now chattel to the newest species of predator on the planet: legal fictions called corporations.

Colonization by Corporation

In this, the only world we have, we mere humans, being both mortal and finite, are at an enormous disadvantage. Corporations, though, appear to have no natural limits as to size. And, if they can engineer enough taxpayer bailouts, they may be immortal as well.

It is no consolation that corporations are an invention of humans — so were land mines, nerve gas, and H-bombs. If we could ever accurately calculate the proportion of human ideas that turn out to be terrible, we might be tempted to outlaw invention.

Neither does it come as any comfort that corporations are run by humans — Norway was nominally run by a human named Vidkun Quisling. His death before a firing squad, to the extent that it is remembered, remains unlamented.

Corporations are required by their charters to maximize shareholder value. In effect, this means they are obliged to behave in a psychopathic manner; if a company can make a killing in the first quarter of a fiscal year by ending the world in the last, that’s good business. Which is why so many of them are busily converting both the atmosphere and the oceans into poison.

The Enemy of My Enemy

No single corporation could colonize the Earth by itself. It seems, though, that they cannot resist the temptation to do it together.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce probably has a position paper somewhere claiming that competition is the very soul of the market. It has lies for every occasion.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi are perceived as rivals; but, if voters somehow euchred Congress into banning corporate sales of carbonated sugar-water, the truth would soon come out. They have more in common with each other than they do with their customers. When attacked, they circle the wagons and defend each other.

The interlocking interests of these immortal psychopathic beasts, as interpreted by the generously-compensated quislings who run them, are the force that ultimately drives the world’s public policies — right into the ground.

Reasons to be Cheerful

Even so, there are reasons to be not just thankful, but cheerful.

The ancient Romans believed that “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Those gods must be on the side of the humans, because the party most in thrall to the corporations has clearly lost its collective mind.

CNN’s Monica Crowley recently quizzed Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus on polling numbers showing that 69 percent of the public believe that the policies of the GOP in Congress favor the rich. Priebus claimed that “it’s not true…the party doesn’t favor the rich.” Anyone who believes that — or expects anyone else to believe it — is certifiably insane.

Michele Bachmann, formerly a front-runner for her party’s Presidential nomination, suggested on Sunday that the U.S. should ditch its un-American programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and emulate China instead.

Rick Perry briefly followed Bachmann as the party’s not-Romney darling. His star quickly sank thanks to his bipolar performance: wooden in debates, but suspiciously liquid while speaking before a family-values audience. His poll ratings, when he suffered near-fatal brain freeze in a debate on November 9th, dropped from high to mid-single digits. Incredibly, not one of the liberal media’s character assassins thought to bring up the famous 3:00 a.m. phone call which Hillary Clinton would have been unprepared to answer.

Meanwhile Herman Cain, the current non-Romney, has introduced a new gambit to the old game: the Charlton Heston card. “I prayed and prayed and prayed,” he said, describing his decision to run for President. “And when I finally realized that it was God saying that this is what I needed to do, I was like Moses: ‘You’ve got the wrong man, Lord. Are you sure?’”

Whoa — stop the presses — this just in: Cain’s numbers are dropping, and Newt Gingrich is the new non-Romney. Turns out the Republicans believe in recycling after all.

Ooops — spoke too soon. Gingrich said during a recent debate that he “earned a $300,000 fee to advise Freddie Mac as a ‘historian’ who warned that the mortgage company’s business model was ‘insane.’ ” Bloomberg reports he was actually “asked to build bridges to Republican lawmakers and develop an argument on behalf of the company’s public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it.”

Clearly the Republicans desperately need help. Here’s a free ad.

“Wanted: Credible Presidential Candidate. Contact Republican National Committee. No Romneys need apply.”

The question now is how to proceed.

We propose the continuation and expansion of the occupation, by means of Inescapable Newspapers. Allow us to briefly explain.
(Again. See previous discussions of this idea here, here, here, and here.)

Information that Shimmers

If you were to ask a fish what is the most important thing in the world, the last thing it would think of would be water.

We humans swim in a sea of information; in fact we’re drowning in it. Ninety-nine percent of it is propaganda designed to induce us to either buy something, like a car that will get us laid, or buy into something, like the concept that our nation/state is superior to all others.

On a subconscious level we know most of that information is crap, and so we ignore it as much as possible.

If we have not become completely numb, the one percent of information that is actually relevant to our lives tends to shimmer just a little bit.

Occupy Wall Street succeeded because it shimmered like crazy.

Inescapable Newspapers

We propose to make shimmering information ubiquitous and inescapable. This can be easily done by the use of a long-established technology: newspapers.

Creating newspapers is easier than most people think. All that is required is a small number of people with technical skills, and a somewhat larger body of people with editorial skills.

The real challenge is distribution — making a newspaper so ubiquitous that it becomes inescapable.

It’s only challenging because it’s never been done — but it could be. All that is required is a very large number of people with an hour to spare each time a paper is published, and an online distribution management system that could probably be assembled in a week.

Free publications are ubiquitous in American culture. Indeed, they are inescapable. Just because most of them are full of crap is no reason not to create one that shimmers.

#InescapableNewspapers

Since that day, forces beyond the control of our community have made it impossible for RiverRun to stay in those premises. We can keep the bookstore, but a similar effort must be mounted. This time it’s money, not muscle, that’s needed.

The amount of money needed to set things right is not trivial, but neither is it out of reach. One month’s worth of forgone frivolities would do the job.

This is not a test of whether or not RiverRun deserves to survive these times.

This is a test of whether or not Portsmouth deserves the bookstore to which it has become accustomed.

Come to RiverRun on Wednesday, November 9th, at 7:00 p.m., and do your part.

About eighteen years ago we complained that engaging in the American political process was like being strapped in a cheap seat at the glacier races.*

Those days, we are pleased to report, seem to be over. Wall Street still rules the country today, but for the first time in living memory it begins to look as if its grip might slip.

Analysts for Google™ reported on October 27th that interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement “jumped ahead of the Tea Party on September 24 [just one week after it started], and hasn’t looked back.”

In a New York Times poll taken in mid-October, 43 percent of respondents said they agreed with the views of the Occupy Wall Street movement, while just 27 percent said they disagreed.

In stark contrast to the Occupation, support for the Tea Party, the only comparable public movement in recent years, is clearly waning. Respondents in the same Times poll were asked if they considered themselves supporters of the Tea Party. Just 24 percent said they did, while 60 percent said they did not.

And Occupation support is not all coming from dreadlocked hacky-sackers. On October 24th, New York State and Albany police were ordered to arrest protestors at that city’s Occupation. They chose not to comply.

“We don’t have those resources, and these people were not causing trouble,” a state official told RawStory.com. “The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor.”

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post reported October 27th that “New Yorkers support Occupy Wall Street and the extension of a millionaire’s tax — and it isn’t just the Democrats backing a levy on the rich. A Quinnipiac Poll released today shows state voters agree with the views of the protesters, whose primary concern is income inequality, by a 58-28 margin.”

Perhaps most telling, a poll taken for Investment News found that thirty-nine percent of Wall Street investment managers — objects of the Occupation’s wrath — support it.

For a movement often criticised for its lack of a clear message, a lot of people seem to think they understand it just fine.

And Why Would They Not?

Over the past thirty years the American public has gradually gotten used to a news diet made up mostly of carefully engineered talking points, misleading anecdotes, and lies. It took an economic collapse — fueled if not caused by Wall Street — to turn their attention to the basic facts of the economy.

With exquisite timing, the Congressional Budget Office [CBO] — an indisputably nonpartisan agency — issued a study last month titled, “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007.” In this history of our Class War, the CBO report details how nearly all of the nation’s income growth for the past three decades has gone to the top one percent of earners. For everybody else, it’s been a race to stay just barely ahead of inflation.

The Economist, a decidedly conservative magazine, wrote in its summary “the data are powerful because they tend to support two prejudices. First, that a system that works well for the very richest has delivered returns on labour that are disappointing for everyone else. Second, that the people at the top have made out like bandits over the past few decades, and that now everyone else must pick up the bill.”

Media Shift to Non-Fiction

If the last few decades have proven anything, it is this: what people think is happening matters as much or more than whatever really might be happening. Which is what makes the drivel that comes out of the television so damned important — the idiot box dominates what the country thinks is happening.

Fortunately, for once, there’s some good news on the news front.

In an analysis of news coverage on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News during the last week in July, the website ThinkProgress.com found that the word “debt” was used more than 7,000 times, while the term “unemployed” was used just 75 times. Amazingly, these data just happen to reflect exactly the dominant concerns of the 1 percenters who fund propaganda mills like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

A review of the same networks in mid-October found that “debt” had dropped to just 398 uses. “Jobs,” on the other hand, was used 2,738 times, “Wall Street” 2,387 times, and “Occupy” 1,278 times.

Wanted: Concrete Steps

If public awareness and intent were all that it took to bring about change in this country, there would have been no need for an Occupation in the first place. What’s required here are concrete steps that can actually be achieved and that will have real effects. For a movement without any leadership or message, it’s surprising how many of those have already surfaced.

Anyone with money in a big bank can yank it out and put it in a local credit union. Some credit unions are reporting that applications are up from 30 to 50 percent.

Sen. Tom Udall [D-NM] introduced a Constitutional Amendment on Tuesday that would give states the power to regulate campaign contributions and expenditures. If passed it would effectively answer the Occupation’s October 7th demand for a reversal of the Citizens United decision.

The Glass-Steagall Act prohibiting banks from a variety of risky shenanigans should be reinstated immediately if not sooner. If we got nothing else from this attempt, we’d be entertained by a chorus of howling Republicans.

And, obviously, all Tea Party-Republican dingbats should be flushed form the Halls of Congress one year from today.

We believe the current physical Occupations can and should be transformed into an unprecedented free media space, uninfluenced by and impervious to corporate power, and covering the entire nation.

Properly done this plan would not only extend the presence of the Occupation everywhere, but would give the people of each district a powerful tool to dislodge Members of Congress who do not serve them.

There are about 100 million households in the U.S, and 435 Congressional Districts. Each district therefore averages about 230,000 households.

With volunteers doing the distribution, we could put a copy of a free, 8 page fortnightly newspaper in every household of a given district at a cost of about two cents per household ($4,600).

The Occupations have shown, in a manner no one would have believed possible a few months ago, that the 99% of this nation can do remarkable things. The only remarkable thing this new media space would require is the organization of volunteer distribution networks.

Compared to what has been accomplished already, that is a negligible challenge.