I'm really looking forward to expanding the conversation over there. Tom Brokaw, moderator of Tuesday's presidential debate, said earlier this year that 2008 is an echo chamber of 1968. What I think he was saying there is that our current political landscape first formed back in the late 60's. I know that as my understanding of the late 60's has increased, my thoughts on the issues of today have come into sharper focus.
So if you like talking politics, culture and comics, come on by the new forum. And bookmark it. It's just starting up, so it's your chance to get in on the ground floor of the new thing. All points of view are welcome and encouraged to attend.
Moving on...
It's the Cisco Kid vs. Wyatt Earp release party! Yes, my comics appear in print-form too. Cisco Kid vs. Wyatt Earp is my latest Western book through Moonstone. It's available for purchase now, hopefully at a comic shop near you. But if you're somewhere near Chicago's southwest suburbs, in Frankfort, IL, buy the book in style at the official release party.
Like everyone else, no doubt, I've been thinking a lot about the economy lately. Interesting how this government bail out of the investment banks with tax payer money has radicalized the general public. Just pulled this political cartoon off the CNN website. Politics is politics. But money is money, apparently.
So if Joe Six-Pack is ready for a revolution, then the conspiracy nuts are starting to sound strangely mainstream. These are interesting times, indeed. A new Zeitgeist conspiracy film debuted on the Internet last week, Zeitgeist: Addendum. And if you're looking for some straight talk about exactly HOW OUR ECONOMY WORKS and JUST WHERE DOES MONEY EVEN COME FROM, then the first hour of this movie is really one of your best resources. It comes at all these economic concepts from a distinctly fringe-y point of view, to be sure. But the information is sound. I learned something. It gets a little speculative near the end, though. It's cool that they actually provide an alternative to capitalism. I've read ideas similar to this "resource based economy" elsewhere on the internet. I'm just not sure if I "buy" into it (so to speak).
All things considered, I don't think violent revolution is really necessary. Probably not even that effective. Gandhi and MLK were nonviolent, and also the most effective change-makers of their respective generations. I think the biggest lesson of some of the failed 60's movements is that militant pacifism is, indeed, an oxymoron.
1. I understood the part, where you said Republicans wanna campaign on their "NO" vote [on the bail out]. But what about the Dems? Why the fuck would they vote "YES" in the first place? I thought they cared about the middle class. Sorta like saying that there was a vote, deciding whether Malcom X's birthday, should be celebrated as a national holiday, and more KKK members than Black Panther members, voted, "YES." Okay, dreadful analogy, but you get my meaning... 2. Also, what is the bailout, in the first place? Who are these rich guys, that the government considered helping them? I'm sure there are a lot of rich people who invest and end up losing money, but I don't think we hear about the government bailing them out... what made this time, special?
So I sez to him, I sez...
1. Somebody more cynical than me could always argue that neither party really cares about the middle class. But it is true that the Democrats owe more votes to the middle class than the Republicans, because the Democrats have always been the party of labor and unions.
According to what the Republicans said after the first vote, it was Nancy Pelosi's speech that turned them off. (I agree with every word of her speech, by the way.)
I don't really buy that.
Reason the Republicans felt less pressure to vote for it is because the bail out is so unpopular. So rather than go out on a limb with rest of (a Democratic majority) congress, they'd rather cover their asses with the voters back home.
It isn't as if the Democrats like the bail out anymore than the Republicans do. Fact is, philosophically, Democrats are more opposed to the idea of a bail out than the Republicans. Except for libertarian Republicans, who are opposed to all forms of government intervention in the economy. But the lines in this battle were drawn not because of philosophy but of election year politics. The House Republicans had more of a free hand to muck up the bill because it separates them from the policies of their unpopular president. And in an election year where being Republican is an uphill battle, it was a move to score political points on an unpopular bill. A vote-getting play. Plain and simple.
So now they're free to make the bail out seem like a Bush-Democrat scheme, which, like you said, doesn't make much sense when you really think about it. But a lot of these Republicans don't have very many cards left to play in the coming election since they've been on the Bush team for the last 8 years.
2. Why is the bail out necessary? They're trying to prevent banks from failing like they did back in the Great Depression. There's only a handful of mega-banks left now, and if those go under, then the economy will grind to a halt. Businesses won't be able to pay their employees. There will be no credit left to go around. The Great Depression.
After the first Great Depression, Democratic saint/president FDR put tight regulations on the banks to keep them from merging and consolidating and becoming "too big to fail" so that the Depression would never happen again. But free-market Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush (and even Clinton a little bit, I'm sad to say) spent their time in office undoing all the work that FDR did, so that banks were free again to make a ton of money in all sorts of crazy new ways. They believed in "trickle down economics," which is the philosophy that it's the rich, and not the middle class, who are responsible for the financial health of the country. The exact opposite of what FDR believed, when he created jobs for the middle class building highways and dams and stuff in the New Deal's WPA program.
So, once again, we have financial institutions so big and powerful that the entire economy depends on them staying alive and healthy. Some think we should do nothing and let the market correct itself - that if people loose the money they invested, then they'll learn not to invest that way again. Problem is that this recession is a cancer that's no longer localized on a single part of the economy, and more than the people who invested will feel the sting. Foreclosed homes drop property values in an entire area. Innocent people with a 401K tied to the stock market and the rest of their wealth tied up in their homes will get royally fucked by this recession. Far more than any CEO with a golden parachute ever will.
Anyway you look at it, the bail out is a band-aid solution. A finger in the dike of our leaking, collapsing economy. It's a short term solution that will get cheap money circulating in the economy and encourage foreign investors, like China, to hang tough for a little while and not pull out all their money.
After the election, though, it's up to we progressive minded citizens to get on the government's ass to break up these banks. "Too big to fail" is "too big to exist" in my book. And even if you're completely cynical (and I don't blame you if you are) the Democrats have a better track record of regulation than the Republicans do. A tiger can't change his stripes. Since Reagan and before, the Republican mantra has always been deregulation.
I'm not against government intervention in the economy per se. Wall Street needs a beat down. They let this shit get out of hand quick.
I foresee the necessity of a New New Deal. No more bail outs or hand outs or gimmicky stimulus checks. Invest tax payer money into something of more value than foreclosed mortgages, which is essentially what the current form of the bail out is having us do. The government should put people to the work improving our infrastructure and invest government money in the middle class instead of the richiest rich on Wall Street. Stimulate the economy from the bottom up, instead of hoping the wealth will trickle down. And the things these programs will create will be of real value, not worthless paper traded on Wall Street. Let's get the working poor out of Walmart and put them to work building windmills and solar panels and shit. Just like FDR did.
We need to break up these investment banks that've hijacked our economy. There's only, like, three big banks left now. And didn't treasurer-guy Hank Paulson used work at one of them? People need to be put on trial for this. The FBI is already starting to investigate. People need to go to jail.
Is the bail out a hostile take over by the rich of the United States? Maybe. But the nice thing about being on the bottom of the pyramid is that there's more of us than there are of them.
Over the weekend I watched the Abbie Hoffman biopic Steal This Movie (2000). The acting talent on the flick is top notch. Scary brilliant Vincent D'Onofrio plays the manic Abbie Hoffman. Janeane Garofalo delivers a career performance in her portrayal of Abbie's better half, Anita Hoffman. And Super Bad Michael Cera, future star of the Scott Pilgrim movie, plays Abbie's son, America Hoffman - it took me a minute to recognize him because Cera was just a kid back in 2000. Man how time files...
But beyond the acting, Steal This Movie is like an American car - very poorly put together. There's an awkward frame story involving a reporter tracking down Hoffman's associates to get the full scoop on Abbie's life. But the frame, rather than providing structure, only makes a film already lacking focus seem even more chaotic. Huge chunks of Steal This Movie are no more than montage strung together by sloppy exposition. Scenes zip by giving only the most superficial treatment to major historical events. Important people like Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale pop in and out of shots like extras. And the character development is similarly short-changed. With the exception of Abbie and Anita, the other characters are just scenery.
The third act of Steal This Movie is probably the best because it goes into some of the less-publicized areas of Abbie's life. Reading most of Abbie's books, or seeing him in his various media appearances, it's easy to forget that beneath the cartoon character persona he created for himself, Hoffman was a real, sometimes tortured man who struggled with bouts of depression. And long after his career as an activist had peaked, Abbie's marriage and his relationship with his son suffered the fallout of his crazy Yippie days.
On the whole, Steal This Movie is only an above average flick. But it's a must-see if you have an interest in Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies to begin with. Still, in this depressed economy, I wouldn't recommend buying the DVD like I did. I'd say you should "rent this movie." Or, better yet, be a 21st century Yippie and "illegally download this movie."
In a Yippie "press conference" held in Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Jerry Rubin mused, "The cops are like the Yippies - you can never find the leaders!" And beyond the magnetic personalities of its founders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Yippie, in fact, had very little in the way of an organizational structure. Yippie was not an organization, but an idea. Yippie was a cultural phenomenon.
Here in 2008, the "protest group" that (un)identifies itself as "Anonymous," with its total lack of a focused goal or conscious cohesion, would, indeed, make the activist/artist Yippies seem no different that the paramilitary Chicago Police. If Yippie was an act of theater invading the world of politics, then Anonymous is a meme hack on all reality - merry pranksters, minus the "merry." Some of Anonymous' more high profile "reality hacks" have recently begun to arouse the interest of mainstream media. They made a (non)name for themselves earlier this year by becominga thorn in the side of the Church of Scientology.
Anonymous, like Yippie, is primarily a cultural phenomenon, rather than a political one. So instead of continuing to sift through the blogs and online articles about the legal ins and outs of The Incident (as the Palin caper has come to be called), it's much more interesting going right to the source of all this post-millennial tomfoolery - the /b/ message board on 4chan.org. (<--Purposely not linked. Abandon all hope ye who enter here.) I'll not spend too much time explaining 4chan. Put simply, it represents all the potential and all of the horror that this thing we call "Internet" is capable of. It is both the birthplace and the meeting place of Anonymous, because people who post there need not even register with the forum, and more often than not choose to contribute to "discussions" using the "Anonymous" handle. In one of their rare contributions to the good of humanity, /b/ is responsible for creating the lol cats meme that has spread like wildfire far beyond its original electronic borders. But when Bill O'Reilly railed against the Internet trolls for invading Palin's privacy in one of his trademark temper tantrums,/b/ didn't just get mad, /b/ got even.
For his part, Alan Moore has expressed approval of Anonymous' appropriation of the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol of the "movement." So what would Abbie Hoffman have thought of all this? Back in 1968, the Yippies galvanized the apathetic youth of the hippie scene, very briefly, into a palpable political force. Though Anonymous flirts with anarchic extremes even Hoffman himself might never have dared to tread, it's essentially doing the same today - energizing the ADD generation into concentrated action in these newly politicized times. Hoffman once famously quipped, "freedom is the ability to yell 'theater' in a crowded fire." Via creepy youtube videos, message board trolling, absurd photo-shopped images and even real life V-masked antics, it seems that Anonymous is doing just that, carrying on the Yippie legacy in this bizarre century of ours.
