Saturday, May 19, 2012

NEWSMAX - can be very unenlightened!

Newsmax

Gallup Analysis: Obama’s Chance of a Loss Greater Than a Win
By: Henry J. Reske

With an approval rating stuck below 50 percent, a sour national mood, and polls showing him tied or trailing rival Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama's re-election bid faces an uncertain future.

Gallup polls show that Obama’s job approval rating in the first week of May averaged just 47 percent and a May 3-6 Gallup poll found only 24 percent of Americans were satisfied with the way things are going.

A poll released Thursday in the battleground state of North Carolina showed Romney leading the president, and the same day another poll showed Wisconsin — which Obama won handily in 2008 — is a toss-up, with Obama and Romney in a dead heat.

All this signals bad news for the incumbent president.

“Comparing today's economic and political ratings with those from previous years when presidents sought re-election reveals that today's climate is more similar to years when incumbents lost than when they won,” Gallup noted.

The 24 percent satisfaction rate is similar to the 20 percent found in May 1992 under President George H.W. Bush, who lost his re-election bid. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both posted satisfaction rates above 35 percent in the May before their successful re-election bids.

“The extent of Americans' concern about the economy — as evident in their top-of-mind mentions of it as the nation's ‘most important problem’ — is greater today than for any president seeking re-election since Jimmy Carter in 1980,” Gallup found.

“The current 66 percent mentioning one or more economic concerns is substantially higher than it was in May 2004 or May 1996, and moderately higher than at the same point in 1992 and 1984. Americans' mentions of the economy did surge in August 1984 to 65 percent — comparable to where they are today — but fell to 51 percent by September.”

Karl Rove, in an editorial published in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday night, noted that Obama is showing up to events in battleground states like Ohio that feel like "an aging rock star" is performing, with seats often going empty.

And earlier this week, his campaign announced his April fundraising dropped by about $10 million in April from the month before.

"The news was that Mr. Obama's fundraising dropped to $43.6 million in April from $53 million in March. At this stage, he will be hard pressed to reach his 2008 total of $750 million, let alone the $1 billion goal his campaign set last year," Rove notes.

Gallup found that the direction of its Economic Confidence Index — a summary of Americans’ views of the economy and its direction — “for the remainder of 2012 could determine Obama's re-election.”

However with a battle against Republican Mitt Romney looming, assessing Obama’s chances of re-election based on his job approval rating is problematic.

All presidents since Lyndon Johnson who won re-election had job approval rates of 49 percent or more in May. All those who lost had approval ratings of 43 percent or lower. Obama, at 47 percent, does not neatly fit into either camp but is close to the younger Bush’s 49 percent in 2004.

“President Obama is running for re-election with Americans feeling about as dissatisfied with the country and the economy as they were in 1992 when George H.W. Bush lost,” Gallup concluded.

“However, with a modest 47 percent job approval average in early May, his approval rating is nearly the same as in 2004 when George W. Bush won. This makes Obama's re-election prospects quite uncertain, but supports the results of Gallup's trial heat tracking showing Obama and Romney essentially locked in a statistical tie.”

Regardless, a May 10-13 USA Today/Gallup poll found that Americans believe Obama will be re-elected by a margin of 56 percent to 36 percent.

“It is unclear why Americans are more inclined to predict an Obama than a Romney victory when the two are essentially tied in Gallup’s latest election polling,” Gallup wrote.

“It may be that Americans recognize the advantages Obama has as the incumbent and that historically, presidents seeking re-election usually win. For example, in March 2004, when President George W. Bush and John Kerry were about tied in voter preferences, more said Bush (52 percent) than Kerry (42 percent) would win. Or, Americans may expect in the months between now and the election that conditions in the U.S. will improve, which would make the incumbent's re-election more certain.”



Editor’s Note: Get Ed Klein's 'Amateur' Obama Book, Save $23, Cheaper Than Amazon



Facebook is a sucker’s stock. Why? Because The media hyped it and the only folks who seem to be itching to snatch it up are the inexperienced stock investors.

Newsmax

Sean Hyman: Facebook Is a Sucker’s Stock

Friday, May 18, 2012 06:48 PM

By: Sean Hyman

Facebook is a sucker’s stock.

Why do I say that?

The media hyped it. And the only folks who seem to be itching to snatch it up are the inexperienced stock investors.

All my friends who aren’t stock investors are the ones who were looking to potentially buy it. All of my other friends who have a ton of years in the financial industry all shunned it. It’s simply overpriced.

Editor's Note: Join the 3.5% of Americans who are truly wealthy and financially secure.

There’s a reason why. Professionals in the industry know how this all works.

For starters, the pros who did want some shares of Facebook got it years ago (as early as 2009) through SharesPost or SecondMarket Holdings, which are ways that accredited investors can own positions of private-company stock.

So the ones who wanted it already had it…and at a much more favorable price than the IPO price.

Secondly, the underwriters of Facebook’s stock increased the number of shares available by about 25 percent, or about 100 million shares. Well, that just cut up the overall pie into much smaller pieces and that’s not good for the individual investor.

Thirdly, Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global Management and others decided to sell half of their positions as it debuted in public.

So the “smart money” is selling it at a time when the hype is so huge that the “dumb money” will want to take it off of their hands.

If Goldman thought it was such a great deal then they wouldn’t be cashing out of 50 percent of their holdings in Facebook. So the “big boys” are selling and only the inexperienced investor is trying to snatch it up. That should tell us all we need to know right there.

But there are other concerns that I have with Facebook as a stock. For instance, its revenue per monthly user is declining.

For instance, back in the fourth quarter of 2010, Facebook earned $1.20 of revenue per monthly user. In Q4 of 2011, that rose to $1.34. But in the first quarter of 2012, it’s down to $1.17. So the revenue is dropping off. That’s a concern of mine.

Also, it’s price-to-sales (P/S) is way to high. My buddy, Michael Carr, had this to say about that:

At the offering price, the P/S ratio on Facebook should be about 26.

Historically, the top 5 percent of P/S ratios has been about 12.2 and companies reaching this level of overvaluation have underperformed badly over the next five years. Almost all companies (more than 1,400 since 1986) with P/S ratios greater than 12.2 were small companies.

Since 1986, about two dozen companies with sales over $1 billion have reached the lofty level that Facebook will be at and almost all of them underperformed the market over the next one and five years. The half dozen that did not underperform matched the market and that was during a bear market so they still lost money.

Because of the lofty P/S ratio, FB cannot meet investor expectations unless sales top $1 trillion in 10 years. Fundamentally, the stock is doomed.

I couldn’t have said that better.

Besides Facebook being over-hyped, over-priced and too many shares outstanding, Facebook has no real success at selling to its 900 million users per month.

 
People don’t go there to “buy” like they do on Amazon, eBay or even Apple’s iTunes. No, they go there to connect and chat with friends.

 
In fact, this past week, GM has been honest enough to say that Facebook ads simply aren’t working.

 
And the new revenue ideas that they have are stupid too. For instance, in New Zealand, Facebook is testing something called “Highlight,” which charges NZ$2 (US$1.50) to be sure your friends see a post of yours. This way it doesn’t get pushed down in the news feed, etc.

 
But honestly, if you want to make sure your friends see something from you…email them or Facebook Message them for free!

 
I believe there’s a reason why Facebook traded over half a billion shares on its first day of trading and essentially went nowhere. It’s because it’s going to be hard to push this stock up from its overvalued levels. You’re going to have to find a “bigger sucker” to take it off of your hands.

 
That could happen for a bit in the near-term but over time, it’s not going to be sustainable.

 
But in the near-term, the market makers in Facebook stock can temporarily keep it propped up like they did Friday.

 
At one point, once Facebook had sunk to its IPO price the market makers were buying at $38 to the tune of 11-to-1. So they were almost all on the “buy side” to keep this stock from looking like a failure on “Day 1” or else it would have fallen below its IPO price by the end of Friday’s trading session.

 
Keep in mind that IPOs can go on a wild ride…and the ones that get overhyped are the ones that usually start out overpriced and have a hard time regaining those lofty levels afterward.
A key example of this is LinkedIn’s stock (LNKD). It has never regained its intraday high on its IPO day even until this day (almost a year later).

So don’t buy the hype. There are better places for your money.
Look, I love Facebook. I’ve reconnected with friends and family that I haven’t seen in years. But just because I like a concept doesn’t mean that it makes it a “good business.”
Facebook isn't a good business even though it is a great “social connecting” idea.

About the Author: Sean Hyman

Sean Hyman is a member of the Moneynews Financial Brain Trust. Click Here to read more of his articles. He is also the editor of Money Matrix Insider. Discover more by Clicking Here Now.

© 2012 Moneynews. All rights reserved.



Friday, May 18, 2012

History of Beer and its impact on the conservative-liberal dichotomy (a digression of humor, as suggested by one of my "conservative" friends, who, as a youth, was a perpetual fuck up, who seldom got caught.)


History of Beer

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups: 

           1 . Liberals
           2. Conservatives. 

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed. 

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to BBQ at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement... 

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly BBQ's and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement. 

Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. They became known as girlie-men. Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided. 

Over the years conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass for obvious reasons.

Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. Tofu and French food are standard liberal fare.. Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn't fair to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer, mostly Bud or Miller. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, engineers, corporate executives, athletes, members of the military, airline pilots and generally anyone who works productively. 

Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America. They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for nothing. 

Here ends today's lesson in world history: 

It should be noted that a Liberal may have a momentary urge to angrily respond to the above before forwarding it. 

A Conservative will simply laugh and be so convinced of the absolute truth of this history that it will be forwarded immediately to other true believers and to more liberals just to piss them off.

And there you have it. Let your next action reveal your true self...I'm going to have another beer.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

I am quite pleased that my high school alma mater has seen fit to confer Distinguished Barrington High School Graduate Awards to the brothers Jim and John. Jim and I caddied at Barrington Hills Country Club together for years. If we could go back in time, and tell some of the principles, coaches and teachers that he would receive this award, 44 years after graduation, they might find it most difficult to believe.


Brothers and fellow firefighters Jim and John Feit were honored May 15 as the DistinguishedBarrington High School Graduate Award winners.



Principal Steve McWilliams introduced them to the standing-room only audience during the annual Awards Night program.Their plaques will now be displayed on the high school's wall of fame.
The two brothers (Classes of 1968 and 1976) have gone on to distinguished careers with the Barrington Fire Department after school/military service. They have faithfully served and protected students, staff and families of the Barrington community.
Related Topics: Barrington High School and Firefighters

Liberal or Copservative? Why must it be only one or the other? Only because our political discourse has been so degraded that things have evolved into a state that neither word carries any sense of it's historical meanings and distinctions.

Playing duplicate bridge with a group of grade school students, my own partner being a delightful 10-year old Irish Dancer with a significant apptitude for the game of bridge, one of the older girls asked, "Why are you playing bridge with us?" To which, I replied, "Because I believe that children are God's most precious gift to humankind." Which ought to have ended the conversation, but, the enquiring one had one more inquiry: "Are you a liberal?" Immediately, I replied, "Yes. A FLAMING liberal," which is really not true at all, I just love children and find their company more gratifying than that of (most, but, surely none of my F/B friends who have not yet defriended me) so-called adults with whom I have contact.

There is a perception that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are mutually exclusive, and this is a terrible shame, because, in a real world inhabited by fleshed and boned human beings (and other breathing creatures), there are good and righteous reasons to want to conserve (hold on to) institutions, beliefs, and myths that help societies to better themselves, while it is equally important to liberate, change, renew, those institutions, beliefs, and myths that put human beings into bondage and keep them impoverished of healthy nutritious food, clean air, unpolluted waters, common spaces, and enough free time (time away from labor) to consider just what it is that the Lord God Almighty wants us to do.

For many reasons, Detroit is one of the most special cities in America, for me. (What do concepts like freedom, democracy, and social justice even mean in today’s world?)


A Ghost Story

Restructuring Detroit

by THOMAS STEPHENS

Dedicated to the students of the Southwest Detroit Freedom School, for taking personal responsibility! 
“…the more you have, the more you can have.”
- Arundhati Roy, “Capitalism, a Ghost Story
“… money is the right to have rights.
Raj Patel, “The Value of Nothing; How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to do…”
- Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee
The World of “There Is No Alternative!”

In a recent article, the brilliant essayist and novelist Arundhati Roy describes current political economic trends in her native India.  “Capitalism, a Ghost Story[i] focuses on the role of corporate-funded foundations.  It has much to teach us about our world beyond India, as well as the strange humanitarian colonialism of philanthropy.  What do concepts like freedom, democracy, and social justice even mean in today’s world?    With a full-on global corporate push to grab and hold all the riches and power everywhere, regardless of consequences for “the 99%” or even for the fate of the Earth, what choices, dreams and terrain may still be available for us to survive and fulfill our humanity?  Big questions she’s not afraid to address.
Capitalism, a Ghost Story” portrays an incredibly confusing new phase in social evolution: a toxified, bioengineered, robotic precariat, ruled by the privatized neoliberal Corporate State; irredeemably corrupt; immune to grassroots democratic advocacy from below; colonizer of the popular mind; and techno-logical arbiter of reality itself.  The ideological, spiritual and psychic consequences are revealed in a passage that echoes throughout our planet’s shrunken spaces for thinking, feeling and acting on any impulse to genuine human freedom: 
“Gradually, one particular imagination—a brittle, superficial pretence of tolerance and multiculturalism (that morphs into racism, rabid nationalism, ethnic chauvinism or war-mongering Islamophobia at a moment’s notice) under the roof of a single, overarching, very unplural economic ideology—began to dominate the discourse. It did so to such an extent that it ceased to be perceived as an ideology at all. It became the default position, the natural way to be. It infiltrated normality, colonised ordinariness, and challenging it began to seem as absurd or as esoteric as challenging reality itself. From here it was a quick easy step to ‘There is No Alternative’. ” 
Restructuring Detroit, a Ghost Story
Meanwhile here in the heart of the Great Lakes bioregion of North America, leading corporate and government figures bloviate endlessly about “running government like a business” (a sneaky, demonic program for demoting “citizens” and “People” with civil and human rights to mere “consumers”).  Consequently, the ordinary working People of Detroit have, once again, been going thru a very tuff time.
In the face of the city’s longstanding disinvestment, racialized poverty and post-industrial blight, Michigan’s new Republican Governor Rick Snyder has a plan.  He’s applying a unique version of his “Emergency Manager” statute to Michigan’s largest city.  A straight takeover of this historically crucial community would bite off much more political and social backlash than Snyder can chew.  So he did the next best thing.  While Arundhati Roy was publishing “Capitalism, a Ghost Story,” in March and early April he strong-armed local officials into accepting what the Emergency Manager law calls a “Consent Agreement.”
Detroit’s version of this document (which lacks actual “consent,” and is not really an “agreement”) is entitled a “Fiscal Stability Agreement.”  The underlying digitally archived file itself, that went thru various revisions and negotiations in March before being signed and approved by Mayor  Dave Bing and a narrow 5-4 majority of Detroit City Council, is somewhat more accurately labeled the “Master City Restructuring” document.
Detroit’s “restructuring” will begin with state oversight of its local government, by a powerful Financial Advisory Board, Program Management Director, and Chief Financial Officer, jointly appointed by state and local officials.  They have the (far more than merely “advisory”) power to take over city government programs, if “reforms” and “restructuring” are not being pursued to their satisfaction.
“Restructuring” the political, social, and economic life of Detroit, a city which, in spite of its vibrant culture and political life, has long been plagued by ills associated with mass poverty, official corruption, physical blight, and bitter racial conflict, would arguably be a good thing.  But by whom and in whose interests?  How?  With what consequences for Detroit’s People, especially the most vulnerable victims of poverty and racism?
“Restructuring” without accountability to, or respect for human rights of the primary victims of social injustices, in favor of members of the elite corporate community (who view the city’s deep and severe crisis as offering opportunities for profit), is quite another matter.  So is doing it thru the backroom mechanisms illegitimately conceived by “Emergency Manager” legislation.
Detroit’s reality is already the neoliberal nightmare; relentless cutbacks in education, health, and other social services.  What seems inevitable is that “restructuring Detroit” (unless resistance can prevent it – as I have previously argued elsewhere[ii]), will look an awful lot like the now-notorious “structural adjustment” programs imposed on the developing world by the major multilateral financial institutions – the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank – throughout the neoliberal era.  Systematic privatization of common public resources; deregulation of corporate power; savage attacks on social services, working standards and basic quality of life for ordinary People; all as a way to even further enrich and empower elites.  The infamous “Shock Doctrine,” in Motown rhythm.  This is the noxious, authoritarian political reality of “restructuring.”  No wonder they hide the term behind comforting lies like “consent” and “fiscal stability.”
It’s bitterly contentious, highly emotional and utterly perplexing when powerful white elites move aggressively to implement their neocolonial agenda against poor, people of color communities that are virtually defenseless.
Inspired by Arundhati Roy then, presented for your consideration; a tragicomic treatment of 21stcentury Detroit.  It features (with sincere apologies for appropriation, outright theft and license) diverse human spirits and voices, attempting for real to face our issues and challenges: 
Dramatis Personae:
Crazy Horse       
Harriet Tubman
Gandhi
Emma Goldman
Coleman Alexander Young
Grace Lee Boggs
Karl Marx
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Malcolm X
Toni Morrison
Arundhati Roy
Raychel Gafford
Other characters to be developed by Detroiters and to enter the action as it goes forward…
Settings: Streets, parks, union halls, church basements, civic and neighborhood groups, living rooms, government agencies, cyberspace, anywhere and everywhere Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is “working well together” with his supporters, as he vapidly puts it, on their version of “development.”
The action begins with a CHORUS of Detroiters milling about discussing: the new “Consent Agreement;” the latest mass school closings; the suburban takeover of the city’s water system; the lack of decent job opportunities; continual reductions in bus transit; rising violent crime rates; burnt-out vacant houses and weed- and garbage-strewn fields salting neighborhoods everywhere in Detroit’s enormous 139-square mile footprint; repeated uncorrected odor violations produced by the world’s largest trash incinerator in the middle of the city; privatization of the corrupt Detroit Department of Human Services; “austerity” budget cuts to already-inadequate city services (including police, fire and ambulance); the state elections board of canvassers’ refusal to place a popular referendum against the “Emergency Manager” law on the ballot (by a straight party-line vote, on the ridiculous pretext that  a portion of the petitions’ typeface allegedly bears the wrong font size); foolish government officials and unscrupulous corporate special interests conspiring together against the general welfare; and other matters of injustice experienced as stressful daily reality…
CRAZY HORSE:[iii] We live in the shadow of the real world!  In the darkest shadow of this shadow, the white government authorities scheme to take away what’s left of our freedoms.  They talk endlessly about the “invisible hand of the market,” while they lie, cheat and steal in these dark shadows.  And they get away with it because we’ve forgotten the nature of our relationship to power.
My People learned long ago that nothing White Fathers sign their names to on papers is worth anything when they are after our land, resources and community.  Then when they take away the land we lived on in common, the White Chiefs divide it up and use it to dominate, oppress, and serve themselves at the expense of all others.
I was stabbed in the back and killed when I agreed to come to their fort and talk with them.  My People took my heart away and buried it in secret.  I live on as a symbol of spiritual freedom and physical resistance to racist attack.
Somehow the owners of a sexually oriented business in suburban Dearborn put my name on their sign.  Malt liquor manufacturers put my name on 40-ounce alcohol beverage containers.  At least the rock band they named after me isn’t half bad.
When it comes to foreign invaders annihilating and using you for their selfish, destructive purposes, I believe I may have some things to teach the People of Detroit.  In life I was never at the strait formed by the river between Lakes Huron, St. Clair and Erie, that the French called “détroit.”  If not for my “red” tinge, perhaps I would be a suitable candidate for the new “Financial Advisory Board,” which seems to be open only to non-Detroiters!
CHORUS: “No Justice, No Peace!”
HARRIET TUBMAN: Before People can become free, they have to realize that they aren’t free.  I freed thousands of slaves, and could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.   I told them, “If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”  That seems like pretty good advice for today as well!
I see an incredible amount of confusion in Detroit about what it could mean to be free.  This group wants industrial jobs to come back and support a so-called “middle class” lifestyle.  Other groups want a revolution, whatever that would mean to each of them.  Yet others want African-American self-determination and –government.  Some are working toward building the new world to come, while others are fighting against the injustices of today.  Most are numbed by glowing screens portraying the world as an oppressive farce. It reminds me of slavery.
Many social movements and changes followed the times of human slavery and abolition when I lived.  There are complicated, interrelated issues: education, violence, work, nature, relationships between women and men, parents and children, different races and classes and nations.  None of it’s covered by what they call “education” today.  It’s impossible to imagine all these people in their different groups and tribes, beset by corporate propaganda and electronic thought control as they are, agreeing on everything.
Can you get a taste of what you want most, by refusing to stop in front of glowing screens or boasting, self-important leaders, by continually moving toward goals you identify and define for yourselves?  If you understand that you are modern versions of slaves, you can begin to identify and define the things that could set you free!
CHORUS: “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”
GANDHI:  Decolonization is about People first remembering what it means to be human beings, and then acting on that knowledge.  Whether it’s India or the United States, government or education or spirituality or the environment; the basic dynamic is the same.  We have to take responsibility for our lives in order to experience what we call “freedom.”
Saying “no” to the “restructuring” program of leaders in Detroit and Michigan, from the deepest conviction, is better than saying “yes” merely to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.  This question of saying “yes” or “no” to the Governor’s “Consent Agreement” is the superficial one.  The real question is whether or not our human spiritual principles and moral convictions have a place in our political economic life, and the public affairs of our society.  Answering “no” to this question leads to the rule of “Emergency Managers” and the imperial privatization of life.   Answering “yes” is the next step on the road to freedom.
That’s why Governor Snyder and his State Treasurer Andy Dillon confused the issue by pushing a so-called “Consent Agreement.” Instead of taking the city over via an “Emergency Manager,” they needed officially designated local leaders to say “yes” to their program for “working together” to “restructure” Detroit.  The distinction has no actual substance for People, but they can claim they have “consent” for what they want to do anyway.
The violence of poverty; the injustice of racist, patriarchal and class oppression; the impunity of official elites who lack anything even resembling a realistic program for change and reform; these are the evils today, the rotten heart of colonialist social relations and political domination, slowly killing a great city and its people who suffer the highest concentration of childhood poverty in North America.  The single “no” to these evils leads to many, many “yeses” for the city and its People!
CHORUS: “The People United Will Never Be defeated!”
EMMA GOLDMAN:[iv]  They called me an “anarchist,” and it’s a label I wear proudly.  But what is this “debate” about politics, really?  One is called a communist, another is a conservative, yet another is a liberal or some other superficial label for ideas spoon-fed to powerless children.  Think for yourselves!
What matters is the living essence of things.  During the very same six months when Michigan’s Governor and his business cronies devised their “restructuring” of this city, a new surge of popular resistance rose up – claiming kinship of “99%” of the People against the rich and powerful “1%” all over the world!  This after decades of corporate domination of People’s communities, your livelihoods, your very thoughts!  How clear at times like these that the accepted, official version of reality is false, and that all self-proclaimed authority is based on fraud!  What an opportunity to really live, and to do so in entirely different ways, if we seize it!
They call it “restructuring:” It is merely paranoia, rooted in the impulse towards centralization—the absurd, unjust idea that one decision-making structure should be legitimized at the cost of all others; that difficult conversations about social structure and conflict should be avoided at virtually any cost; that all decisions need to be approved by a higher power; that ordinary working people cannot be trusted to organize themselves in decentralized networks.
The old fraud of the State demands a concentration of power, exclusion, elitism, and repression.  The scientific basis for the idea of centralization has long been undermined, in complexity theory, in economics, computer science, the understanding of collective intelligence and emergent behaviors, and even in military strategy.  After the “Occupy Everywhere” phenomenon of 2011, it should be dead.  But the ghost of self-interested Hobbesian myths about “needing” a single, strong leader to keep everything from falling apart persists, as long as that power continues to exist.  Thanks to its control over education and media, even those who claim to oppose it have been indoctrinated in its values and lies!
CHORUS: “Smash the State!”
COLEMAN YOUNG:  Who let her in here?
Most People remember me as the first African-American big city mayor in Detroit in 1974.  But I got my start as a public figure in the Red Scare in the ‘50s, when the goddamn Un-American Committee came to town.  I basically told them to kiss my ass.  I never would have dreamed Detroit’s Black leaders would let these Republican “Emergency Mother Fuckers” (EMF’s) come back into Detroit and take it over like this!
When I told those motherfucking HUAC rednecks how to pronounce the word “negro,” and made them apologize to me for their disrespect, I was coming out of the industrial unions in the depression.  The CIO was the first important interracial organization that fucked up white power.  Those motherfuckers never forgave us for that.  Detroit was the birthplace of the UAW/CIO and the first motherfucking major US city governed by its African American majority.
Sure I made some mistakes.  How the fuck could I have known workers’ wages would stop rising – permanently – just when I won the mayor’s office?  I wasn’t fucking Jimmy Boggs!  If I’d known what these motherfucking corporations were gonna do to my People – even to the White workers – you bet your ass that as Mayor I wouldn’t have been so quick to kiss up to ‘em!  Anyway, without struggle there’s no progress, and you don’t struggle fucking perfectly; you fight and learn from your motherfucking mistakes and fight again until you can’t fight the sons of bitches any more.  That’s my education.  Aloha, Motherfuckers!
CHORUS: “We are the 99%!”
GRACE LEE BOGGS:  I may be 96 years old now, but at least I’m the first character here who’s actually still alive!  It’s an incredible, hopeful, terrible time to be alive in Detroit, now that we’ve been brought so far down there’s no choice except to begin to do things differently, to make a different way to live.  Detroit has taught me many things.  Our time is like thousands of years ago, in the transition from hunter-gatherer society to what would become known as “civilization.”
Now is the time to grow our souls, as an essential part of making the next American revolution.  We no longer have the luxury of petitioning government to reform politics and make things better for us.  We have to do things for ourselves.  Create re-imagined spaces and institutions, where healthy relationships with other People, with nature, and with our selves can be rebuilt – transformational organizing revitalizing and creating “beloved communities.”
Education – real, interactive, relevant, place-based and transformative learning – is a huge part of the broad renewal of our selves and our world.   We have to probe deeply beyond familiar concepts like “racism” and “jobs,” to understand the link between our country’s passion for economic growth and slavery.  We talk about enslaving people as if it were only a matter of racism.  It was not just racism.  In the 17th and 18th centuries, this country’s rapid economic growth depended on having many more people doing the work.  That’s why we enslaved Blacks.  And it depended on getting more land.  That’s why we exterminated so many Native Americans.  That fundamental contradiction – of dehumanizing ourselves while degrading others, for the sake of rapid economic growth – was built into the founding of this country.
Confronting issues like that means confronting organized power, as well as the false myths many People live by.  But the ruling powers of our nation and our world are themselves powerless to deal with our real problems: our youth without hope of a decent future; our planet’s ecological crisis; our unsustainable, unjust, unequal economic system.  The rulers are powerless, because they don’t believe another world is possible.  Our power comes from the belief that another world is possible, and the determination to get together and create it!
CHORUS: “This is what democracy looks like!”
KARL MARX:  I’m glad sister Grace mentioned confronting the system of organized power, because we often forget that our real issues and problems are not about one person or another, about Obama or Bush or Bing or Snyder or any individual or group of People.  The problem is not People’s behavior or attitudes (although Mitt Romney’s bullying behavior as a teenager should perhaps be considered an exception).  It’s the system that causes People to behave and believe in violent, unjust, dominating and prejudiced ways.  Making another world is about conflicts between classes, not individuals.
In Capital, Volume 3, I wrote that “The realm of freedom can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind force of Nature, and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature.”  Such rational collective action of “the 99%,” based on ecological health instead of financial or industrial greed, is still ultimately the only answer for places like Detroit, which is the proverbial ‘canary in the coal mine’ for the rest of the world.
Groucho Marx (no relation) defined “Politics” as “the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”  How did he know about Obama, Snyder and Bing and their silly, selfish systems of “There is no alternative”?  When you are threatened with despotic rule by “Emergency Managers,” perhaps the infamous idea, “You have nothing to lose but your chains” takes on a more concrete reality!
CHORUS: “Solidarity Beats Austerity!”
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.:  Every January 15 we are reminded that in 1963 I had a “dream” about racial equality and desegregation.  How many remember that by the time I was killed in 1968, I focused on the “triple evils” of materialism, militarism and racism?  That I had publicly opposed the imperial US war in Southeast Asia, not because it was too expensive, strategically misguided or lost, but because it was fundamentally wrong and immoral?  That I called for “a radical revolution of values” from a “thing-oriented” to a “person-oriented” society?
My evolutionary journey from the dream to radical revolution seems to have begun in a Birmingham, Alabama jail, where I wrote about my People “smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.”  Will the “restructuring” of Detroit change, or even acknowledge or address this unjust inequality that so obscenely persists for most of the 80%-plus African-American population of this city fifty years later?  What about the silenced Latino and profiled Arab populations?  Are they merely seeking “restructured” cages?  Or will this century finally see the Promised Land of air, land, water, food, shelter, education and justice for all?
What I wrote in the Birmingham jail applies today to Governor Snyder, State Treasurer Dillon and their bland platitudes: “I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block is not the White Citizens Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,’ who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom…”  Michigan EMFs – “Emergency Manager Fascists” (after all, I was a man of the cloth) – seem to be confused about which century they are living in.
When I scribbled those words on scraps of paper that were smuggled out of the jail by my attorney (who thought at the time I might be losing my grip on sanity, by the way), African Americans had already been waiting over 300 years for their basic human rights.  It’s now 50 years later, and the white power structure of Michigan is systematically expanding various forms of “emergency” rule over most People of Color in the state!  Rebellion and civil disobedience are the only honorable and intelligent options they leave us!
CHORUS: “We Want the World and We Want it Now!”
MALCOLM X:[v] What I said in life applies very well to Detroit today: “If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing.”  To read the papers or watch their corporate-bastard cousins on TV news, you’d think the only thing Detroiters want is to be like Black suburbanites, and the reason they can’t achieve that exalted status is because they’re completely incompetent fools.
I lived a life of controversy and reinvention, and was assassinated by my former allies, after I broke free from their dogma and tried to follow my own path.  Today I’m remembered as the most articulate spokesman for a new way to think and talk about race in America.  The same controversy and conflicts that shaped my life and my death continue to dominate race relations in the Detroit region, between the overwhelmingly Black city, the white-dominated suburbs and state, and the Latino, Native American, Arab and Asian minorities caught in the middle.
What Detroiters need, and what their state overseers refuse to tolerate, is Detroiters’ self-determination; the fundamental human rights of all Peoples to decide for ourselves the best political and social arrangements for our communities.  Without it, talk of “freedom” is a lie!
This isn’t rocket science.  Governor Snyder and his latter-day white supremacist buddies “get it.”  They demonstrate their lack of trustworthiness because they refuse to accept People outside their circle as true equity partners.  Fittingly, Detroit was where I articulated the difference between the “house Negro” and the “field Negro” in my “Message to the Grassroots” speech at King Solomon Church in 1963.  Old habits apparently die hard!      
CHORUS: “Black Power!”
TONI MORRISON:  As a worker known for specializing in both language and ghost stories (and the second character here who’s still actually living!), let me offer a few thoughts about the language of the Governor, and the wealthy and powerful animal spirits he represents.
As I said when I accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, I reject language of money that drinks blood.[vi]  What do I mean by that?  Here’s an example: “The Program Management Director acting in the place and stead of the Mayor and the City Council with respect to a Reform Initiative in the event that the Financial Advisory Board finds a Reform Default of this Agreement.”  That just makes me want to reach for a silver crucifix to ram thru some vampire’s heart!
If what they really mean is, “When corporate capital says ‘jump!’ You say ‘How high?’,” then (with due respect to the vernacular, as Soulman Young would’ve put it:) just fucking say that!  Drop the dead, unyielding language that’s content to admire its own paralysis. Statist language, censored and censoring, ruthless in its policing duties, with no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance, is a lie, and an evil lie that’s calculated to enable oppression, dispossession, injustice and racist domination of weakened human beings.
Detroit’s People get no benefits from this misprision of language.  The official language of the state’s “Agreements” is smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege; it’s a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability and harmony among the public.  They speak the malign language of law-without-ethics only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.  Their obscene, misused and distorted language falls on utterly deaf ears!
In place of “restructuring” let’s have liberation.  Economic fairness in place of “fiscal stability.”  Not fraudulently coerced “consent.” Rather freely embraced desire for justice, passion for truth and beauty, wisdom and integrity.  “Emergency managers” (which would better be called “dictators”) have drunk enough of the People’s blood!  Cut them off!
CHORUS: “Don’t be afraid![vii]
ARUNDHATI ROY: I too am still alive, and very happy to see ghost stories spreading beyond India in our interconnected world.  The whole world is spinning out of control around a concept of “value” created by capitalism.  A thing is valuable only if the far-seeing, self-possessed and energetic representatives of “the 1%” – the rich, the capitalists, the leading men and some women of Governor Snyder and Mayor Bing’s “business community” – can find ways to use it to get more wealth and power for themselves.
This is a totally crazy way to “value” ourselves and our world.  That seems to occur to us intermittently, but it is the normal way things work, so we submit to it.  The fact that it’s getting out of control is the good news!
As cunning, brilliant, wise, far-seeing and energetic as the representatives of the business community like Governor Snyder often are, in spite of their vast, historically demonstrated capacities to innovate, adapt, ally and do business with fascists, socialists, despots, military dictators and freakish scumbags of every description, even with “Emergency managers,” they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact.  Capitalism is destroying the planet.
The current crisis of capitalism, democracy and the living Earth is making a very few very, very rich, while spreading socioeconomic and personal disaster throughout “the 99%” everywhere.  If not for these predatory “externalities” of capitalist dealings, the specter of Detroit’s “restructuring agreement” might be funny; like I described India’s relations with global capital: “an unequal partnership in which [Detroit] is being held in a bear hug and waltzed around the floor by a partner who will incinerate her the moment she refuses to dance.”
CHORUS: “No Incineration! No Dancing Bears!”
RAYCHEL GAFFORD:  I’m alive too.  [PROUDLY!]  I led the walkout of hundreds of students from Detroit’s Western International High School on April 25, 2012, and we started the Southwest Detroit Freedom School in Clark Park across the street.  Our voices are the most important of all!
When we not only walked out of school, but started our own Freedom School, Detroit’s school/jail administrators talked about us as if we were merely “truant,” as if what we did was somehow wrong, by some warped version of social values.  They prohibited us from holding our freedom school sessions too close to the school building, as if such a foolish restriction would stop us!  How can one who’s unable to admit a distinction between conscientious civil disobedience and anti-social misconduct be entrusted with responsibilities for education?
More questions: What are we supposed to look for in terms of an “education” in this community, in this time, under these circumstances?  What kinds of values create a system that closes dozens of school every year and leaves young people with no vision or hope for a decent future?  By what authority do selfish and greedy political climbers claim moral and intellectual high ground from which to lecture us?
Some answers:  We will learn what we need to know thru our actions, our self-determined confrontations with the actual conditions of crisis in our communities, our creativity and spiritual quests, and our respect for those who demonstrate that they deserve our respect!
The authority we recognize will come from service to others; from honesty; from solidarity with those we love and trust because they love and trust us.
Our values are clearly stated in our Freedom School, in our demands to the school system, and in the tradition of collective, transformational action that we proudly inherit.
CHORUS: “WE DEMAND RESPECT!!!![viii]
“Challenging Reality Itself” is the Only Alternative
“They’re selling postcards of the hanging/They’re painting the passports brown…” – Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row
Those particular lyrics – the first two lines of a mind-blowing and unique rock song – didn’t really hit me for many years.  The universally compelling themes they evoke with such astonishing brevity: coercive laws of competition in commerce (“selling”); terrifying images of mob violence consequences for victims of the dominant reality (“postcards of the hanging”); an imaginative life of consciousness, art and the mind (“painting”); distorted beyond recognition in a funhouse mirror version of reality hurtling toward fascism (“brown passports”).
Until living thru the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist crimes against humanity, the visionary depth and wealth in just the first two lines of Dylan’s great song ( a composition that had already turned my brain inside-out once when I was a teenager), never occurred to me.  Now I see the terrifying prejudice, fear and hatred of the mob, combining in real time with the State’s violent, indifferent opportunism, to destroy lives, freedoms and justice.  Robotic drone massacres at the push of a button, based on a single all-powerful leader’s merest whims, and my People shrug as if it were just another titillating mock-story about celebrities’ sexual misconduct measured by hypocritical, self-righteous personal moralism.  History happened, and continues.  In blood tones.
Desolation Row” is sort of an heir to Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording “Strange Fruit” – perhaps the most important single recording of the 20th century, taking inspiration from horrors of lynching victims under Jim Crow terrorism. (“They’re selling postcards of the hanging…”)  Both are melodic and poetic vocal performances that challenged not only brutality but reality itself.  I am struck again and again by the immense power of music, and all art, to change and reframe daily life.  What can the rest of us take and use from such geniuses’ creative confrontations with the oppressive realities of our common world?
Imagine the great Lady Day, a woman raised in poverty and taken into whorehouses, become an African-American musical genius, in the bloody fascist heart of the 20th century, confronting a microphone and the deadly evil of Jim Crow with heart-stopping lyrics as well as unsurpassed vocal artistry, transforming the legacies of folk and jazz music with a single soul-shattering performance:
Blood on the leaf and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter fruit!

What a strange, terrible and wondrous thing.  What an awful price she paid.  Consider the unbreakable cultural chains that connect such courage, suffering and brilliance to the magic of Motown and the Afro-centric cultural consciousness of Detroit.  The political indecency of the likes of Rick Snyder and Andy Dillon the “turnaround expert,” presuming to talk down to People who learned in the school of hard knocks what life is really about.  “Restructuring,” indeed!
In the words of the great, martyred Native American leader Crazy Horse, we live in the shadow of the real world.  Stepping out of that shadow – into a history of our own making, by any means necessary, creating whatever meaning we can wrest away from the flimflam turnaround men – would be a fine way to take personal responsibility for this reality.
The world corporate capital constructed and maintains for us – the world of “There is no alternative” and “Fiscal Stability” – is not the real world.  The real world is a place where we are taken seriously as People and as agents of our own reality, our own history and our own future.
Freedom is impossible for those who can’t even conceive of inhabiting this real world.  Freedom means actively and energetically challenging claims to “reality” itself, the technological, corporatist reality of the “too big to fail,” the “homeland” and the “war on” drugs, terror and us.  It means reshaping not only our conceptual categories, but our political economy along more democratic, equitable and egalitarian lines, derived from the ancient beneficial human institution of the commons.
That’s what “restructuring” Detroit will require.   I wonder every day, all day long, if in Detroit today we have it in us to reject the hypocrisies and exploitation of Snyderism, and embrace real alternatives?
The Commons
Approaching the end of this long ghost story, it’s clear to me that part of our answer, if we have one, must be rediscovering the ancient institution of the commons, and putting it in place of the depraved, soulless market- and corporate-based socioeconomic principles and institutions to which there is supposedly “no alternative.”
The world of the 21st century is not that of the so-called enlightenment in the 18th, the early industrial revolution of the 19th, or the fascist, genocidal horrors of the 20th centuries.  Our world has been reduced in size by modernity, and expanded in scope.  We see the things we need to live – not only food, shelter and other material things, but also education, health and just coexistence with our natural environment and other species.  They’re right there in the shadows, behind the misleading symbols and caricatures of reality on glowing screens everywhere.
We need – and can transform! – an economic system based on equitable sharing of all these things, in place of the spiritual wasteland of high-tech industry governed by capital.  Toni Morrison’s “Beloved Jazz Paradise” made flesh – and water and soil and spirit.
As Arundhati Roy recently put it: we “live side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden [Indian] farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us.”  This is our global reality.  It’s time we start challenging it, and keep doing so, until all that’s left of our common wealth, our rights and values and our world of humanity and nature are restored to us.  Or die trying and haunt the EMFS forever.
”Any idiot can face a crisis — it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” – Anton Chekhov
“Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man’s struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this Earth.” – Thomas Carlyle, “The French Revolution
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…” – “Me and Bobby McGee
Mothers’ Day May 13, 2012

END NOTES:
[i] http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280234 (March 26, 2012)
[ii] “There is no Plan! The Structural Adjustment of Detroithttp://www.countercurrents.org/stephens240910.htm, andhttp://www.counterpunch.org/2010/09/24/the-structural-readjustment-of-detroit/[iii] Channeled in part by John Trudell
[iv] Channeled in part by Kenneth Rexroth, and Peter Gelderloos
[v]  Channeled in part by Manning Marable
[vi] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html[vii] The first 3 words of Toni Morrison’s novel, “A Mercy
[viii] The 29th Demand of Southwest Detroit Freedom School:http://detroitevolution.com/2012/04/southwest-detroit-freedom-school/

Much thanks to Peoples’ Lawyer extraordinaire Terry Lodge for ideas, inspiration, encouragement & all that…

Thomas Stephens is a lawyer in Detroit.