Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted:
Thu Oct 03, 2013 10:15 pm
by admin
BUSH ASKS NEW ORLEANS: "WHAT DIDN'T GO RIGHT?", by Charles Carreon5:40 pm, September 5, 2005
Bush's handlers are eager to show that their boy is not “out of touch.” This becomes more difficult daily, as it becomes apparent that the handlers are also out of touch. The raft of stories coming out of New Orleans shows that FEMA and the Dept of “Homeland Security” are completely out of their element when dealing with a job that demands pasting your ass to a chair, sitting at a desk, and manning the phone lines to direct an enormous logistical effort.
On the issue of the top dingleberry being out of touch, I guess it's a matter of “like mother, like son.” For real, orbital, out-of-touchness, Barbara Bush can't be beat — listen to the sound clip of her below, expressing the opinion that the evacuees are really quite fortunate to be flooded out of house and home, have their relatives drowned, and be treated like drowning rats — better off in the drink. But her son the president is not far behind, as Nancy Pelosi made clear when she reported his delivery of an amazing Bushism, as reported in the Houston Chronicle quote below.
Houston Chronicle
At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had “absolutely no credentials.”
She related that she urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Brown.
He said, “Why would I do that?” Pelosi said.
I said, “Because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.”
And he said “What didn't go right?”
You can play a very short video of Nancy Pelosi relating Bush's statement using Winamp. There are many other Katrina-related videos at
Katrina Little Movies (You have to sign up to join this website, but it is really worth it for all of the incredible material there.)
The reason this boondoggle is going to blow up in Bush's face is simply because it is so damned obvious that no only do they not give a flying fuck about New Orleans or its people — they also view this as an opportunity to prove that you can, in fact, fool all of the voters all of the time. The media has spun this story six different ways from Sunday, but regardless of the spin, the atrocity of contemptful neglect that Bush has demonstrated toward the injured Southerners should chap hides all across America. With Senator Mary Landrieu threatening to punch Bush's lights out if he criticizes Louisiana authorities one more time, Bush could be in for the celebrity death match of his life.
Pride cometh before the fall, and certainly pride has been the Ace up Bush's sleeve in one surprising deal after another. This time, though, being out of touch can be terminal, as when he joked that New Orleans would rise again and become a place where rich kids can “have too much fun.” Yes, and all of the manicured lawns and beautiful golf courses will be restored, and then he'll come back.
I have often thought to myself, “What will Bush's Falklands be?” You'll remember that it was the misbegotten adventurism of an Argentine junta at its wits end for further distractions that led to its destruction. The future history might read like this:
Encyclopedia Liberalica
”By September 2005, Bush had destroyed the nation's financial solvency, declared war on Islam internationally, sent the entire National Guard to depose Iraq's government, alienated the European nations by feeding the fires of international warfare, invited a trade war with Canada over softwood, and directed his proxy Pat Robertson to announce a jihad against Venezuela. Then G-d decided to open yet another front in the worldwide conflict, and directed his armies of wind and waves to destroy the entire Biloxi staging base for the Iraq war, to destroy New Orleans in one day, to create a huge demand for the absent National Guard, to choke off the nation's supply of crude and refined oil by devastating Louisiana and Mississipp, and killed the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, all in just over a week. G-d also saw fit to assure the destruction of the Bush junta by hardening the hearts of the Pharaoh's men, so that their TV messages were not at all reassuring, and their sound bites were like stones, and broke the teeth of viewers who sought to consume them. So a great wave of anger rose up in the hearts of the people, and like a tsunami of rage, destroyed the Bush junta."
Click here to download Nancy Pelosi Speaks.wmv.Click here to download barbarabush.mp3.
Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted:
Thu Oct 03, 2013 10:23 pm
by admin
MATT WELLS' BBC OP-ED PIECE IS A LITTLE TOO SANGUINE 4 ME, by Charles Carreon12:28 am, September 6, 2005
Matt Wells, of the BBC, has his own optimistic take on the media situation, in the article quoted below. He thinks the media is going to redeem itself by getting a grain of social conscience and learning to talk back to the Bush spin machine. Somehow I doubt it. Rove and his double-dealers will be calling in every favor, threatening every troublesome newsperson with exposure for small or large crimes, endangering their jobs, grabbing short hairs and whispering soft threats. Soon the media will remember its place.
I mean, I like Matt's article, but the idea that FOX is gonna come to Jesus over this issue is quite fanciful. They'll be blasting away at Cindy Sheehan, and supporting Pat Robertson, and hefting the Grand Inquisitor Gonzales into his Supreme Court seat in short order.
Matt has other fantasies, like how there'll be so many new Louisiana voters in Texas after this exodus from Louisiana, but I hate to tell you, after they register in Texas, they're all going to turn out to be felons!
Matt believes that the Bush administration's true colors have been revealed, and that is going to rock the corporate kleptocracy to its foundations. That is all too optimistic. Right, and the supply of suckers being born every minute has recently been reduced to a trickle. I think not. People remain as stupid as ever, and if the worst fears of the Libertarians take shape, and large internment camps are set up to hold the evacuees under military guard like the INS interned the Haitian boat people for years, who will stop that? The media hasn't even rebelled over the mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and at Abu Ghraib.
Now that the civil rights violations are happening here on home turf, it will take tremendous intelligence and dedication for the nation to use this opportunity to unseat the hegemonic forces that have settled astride the people of the nation. Haliburton has already got its snout into the feedbag for the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, and ultimately we are going to see a land grab so big it will make the theft of California from Mexico, the purchase of Alaska from Russia, and the Louisiana Purchase itself, seem like small change. Trump is already waiting to start firing people. This will be reality TV like you never imagined.
Matt Wells
Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?
BBC News, Los Angeles
As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.
Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing. But unlike Watergate, ”Katrinagate“ was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis.
Instead of secretive ”Deep Throat“ meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power.
Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.
National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.
They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.
Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.
It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.
'Lies or ignorance'
But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.
The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland. This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the ”mainstream liberal media elite“.
But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.
On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference.
As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance.
And you did not need a degree in journalism to know it either. Just watching TV for the previous few hours would have sufficed.
Iraq concern
When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing ”a heck of a job“ and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.
The president looked affronted when a reporter covering his Mississippi walkabout had the temerity to suggest that having a third of the National Guard from the affected states on duty in Iraq might be a factor.
It is something I suspect he is going to have to get used to from now on: the list of follow-up questions is too long to ignore or bury. And it is not only on TV and radio where the gloves have come off.
The most artful supporter of the administration on the staff of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, has also had enough.
He and others are calling the debacle the ”anti 9-11“: ”The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled,“ he wrote on Sunday.
”Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield.“
Media emboldened
It is way too early to tell whether this really will become ”Katrinagate“ for President Bush, but how he and his huge retinue of politically-appointed bureaucrats react in the weeks ahead will be decisive.
Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation.
Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash.
Black America will not forget the government failures, and nor will the Gulf Coast region
Beyond the immediate challenge of re-housing the evacuees and getting 200,000-plus children into new schools, there will have to be a Katrina Commission, that a newly-emboldened media will scrutinise obsessively. The dithering and incompetence that will be exposed will not spare the commander-in-chief, or the sunny, faith-based propaganda that he was still spouting as he left New Orleans airport last Friday, saying it was all going to turn out fine.
People were still trapped, hungry and dying on his watch, less than a mile away.
Black America will not forget the government failures, nor will the Gulf Coast region.
Tens of thousands of voters whose lives have been so devastated will cast their mid-term ballots in Texas next year - the president's adopted home state.
The final word belongs to the historic newspaper at the centre of the hurricane - The New Orleans Times-Picayune. At the weekend, this now-homeless institution published an open letter: ”We're angry, Mr President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry.
“Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been, were not. That's to the government's shame.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/w ... 214516.stm Published: 2005/09/05 16:48:01 GMT
© BBC MMV
Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted:
Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:14 pm
by admin
CRANK, CRAP & CRUELTY, ERIC SCHLOSSER'S FAST FOOD NATION, by Charles Carreon
7:42pm, September 11, 2005
Crank, Crap & Cruelty
A Review of Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation”
It may only take a village to raise a child, but it takes an entire planet to build a Big Mac. That’s the message of Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction thriller, “Fast Food Nation.” Nonfiction, as in every line of it is true. Thriller, as in, money, power, drugs, oceans of spilled blood and shit, and a runaway train loaded with biological weapons set to destroy the entire planet. It’s a cliffhanger, a role-playing story for all humanity. It turns out that, a couple of million years after we left the trees and conquered the savannahs with our omnivorous appetites and tool-making ways, it’s time to return to eating like gorillas.
Just the Facts, Ma’am
Schlosser is a big magazine writer, but don’t let that turn you off. He writes like a good cop thinks. His style is tuned liked a Kawasaki 1000 police motorcycle and he investigates like he’s got a grudge against corporate evil. He chases down the bad actors other reporters call boss for the same reason every muckraker rakes muck – he hates what he sees because what he sees is ugly as hell. But he’s a diligent professional. He doesn’t babble jargon like a zealot. He builds his case. He bags and tags his evidence meticulously, unobtrusively footnoting his extensive sources. Then he presents it all in a very detailed and convincing exposition that reveals a complex criminal conspiracy operating an ongoing criminal enterprise. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll be ready to issue indictments.
We’re a long way even from defunding the fast food industry, much less indicting it for its crimes. Our parents didn’t eat the way we do. We don’t know why we’re eating corporate burgers, munching oil-soaked fries, and downing vats of iced sugar soda. We don’t know why we eat in plastic environments built like school cafeterias, attached to plastic playgrounds. We don’t know why we don’t find fresh foods attractive, why antacids are the most popular over-the-counter medicine.
Knowledge is power, and knowledge is often difficult to acquire, which may be why so few people have any power. This book makes acquiring vital knowledge easy, with crisp chapter titles and a story that starts at the beginning, studying the deeds of four old white guys — Walt Disney, Ray Kroc of McDonalds, Carl Karcher of Carl’s Junior, and Colonel Sanders of KFC. These four men each streamlined their products, automated production, marketed uniformity, and anonymized their employees to proselytize their visions of life and commerce. Although Kroc approached Disney solicitously with a plan to operate McDonalds restaurants in Disneyland, and was painfully rebuffed, Ronald McDonald is now far better known than Mickey Mouse. Indeed, the surrealistic purveyor of Happy Meals is giving Santa Claus, the number one imaginary being, a run for the money.
The Mechanization of Food Production
Kroc didn’t invent Ronald McDonald out of whole cloth. The original McDonald brothers operated a massive drive-in burger joint in San Bernardino, complete with young waitresses bringing trays of food to those enormous rolling fortresses they called cars. The cars were filled either with families or young men looking to hit on the carhops. The business was very successful, but the brothers tired of hiring platoons of carhops and replacing broken glasses and stolen silverware. So they closed the place for retooling, installing bigger grills and a burger production line, so skilled cooks were no longer needed. They threw away all the glasses and silverware, and henceforth served only foods that could be wrapped in wax paper or sucked through a straw. They ditched the carhops and made everybody line up at the window, but the burgers were cheap and business took off like a rocket. Kroc, then a traveling salesman in his early fifties, admired the McDonalds operation because they bought enough mixers to make forty milkshakes at one time.
The formula that Kroc bought from the McDonalds and franchised to the masses was a hit, and others followed the trend toward assembly-line food preparation. Carl Karcher copied McDonalds because they were just twenty miles away from his successful barbeque restaurant down in Anaheim, and Karcher knew the future when he saw it. Harland Sanders reinvented himself as a Southern gentleman, adopting the string tie and white suit as a marketing gimmick, and achieved his goal of putting at least two drumsticks in every bucket by adopting the new method of mass-produced cooking pioneered by the McDonalds brothers. Southern California loved the new way of eating, that fit perfectly into the seventy-mile an hour lifestyle, and soon the era of monumental sign architecture began to mark the landscape. Kroc built Golden Arches so big they dwarfed the stores, but they could be seen from a distance in time to let freeway drivers maneuver to the next exit. Eventually, the profile of the fast food industry has come to loom equally large over our entire civilization. Schlosser summarizes the numbers: “In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2001, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music – combined.”
The mechanization of food production turned people called cooks and waitresses into something much less dignified – burgerflippers. Burgerflippers are underpaid, and generally work a job less than six months. Small wonder. The job is statistically incredibly dangerous, like late night cashiering in a gas station or liquor store. Bet you didn’t know that the largest cause of employment death today is homicide. That’s because security at your average McDonalds sucks, because the money handling system is as uniform as the food, and sometimes angry employees come back to take their share of the loot they used to count, and sometimes decide to even the score with an assistant manager or two. Schlosser interviews one McDonalds employee who matter of factly packed a pistol to work and expressed no concern about a possible holdup, since he intended to act proactively in any armed encounter.
The Cruelest Business
The philosophy and method of manufacturing fast food turned into a machine with such tremendous money-moving power that today, when McDonalds says “jump,” the meat industry says “how high?” For years the USDA has been unable to obtain clean ground beef for the school lunch program, and it still can’t. But when McDonalds saw European store sales falling off the chart, and Jack In The Box demanded clean meat for its restaurants, the meat packers fell into line. Fast food ground beef at Jack and Mac’s are much cleaner than the cow crap laden meat that the nation feeds to its schoolchildren. And it make them sick, by the thousands. Food poisoning is far more common and deadly than you would think, afflicting 200,000 Americans every day, sending 900 to the hospital, and 14 to the morgue. For those whose eyes glaze over when they see latin names like Salmonella, Listeria, Staphylococcus, Clostridium or E Coli, Schlosser boils it down into “a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.”
The meat is full of crap and the meatcutters are tweaking on methamphetamine, aka “crank.” Crank is the drug of choice for immigrant slaughterhouse workers that have to “make a knife cut every two or three seconds, which adds up to about 10,000 cuts during an eight hour shift.” The pace of production is insane, surpassing any prior known levels of cattle butchering: “The old meatpacking plants in Chicago slaughtered about 50 cattle an hour. Twenty years ago, new plants in the High Plains slaughtered about 175 cattle an hour. Today some plants slaughter up to 400 cattle an hour – about half a dozen animals every minute, sent down a single production line, carved by workers desperate not to fall behind.” No matter how much meth you do, though, there is no way to gut and extract the gastrointestinal system of a cow that fast and not make a regular mess of it, spraying shit all over the beef that is destined for America’s dinner table.
What’s A Prion?
In an afterword entitled “The Meaning of Mad Cow,” Schlosser updated his first edition of Fast Food Nation. In the afterword, Schlosser establishes that the destructive power of the meat machine has not been fully unleashed, because the truth about mad cow disease – its causes, vectors of transmission, and incubation period, are still unknown. Similarly unknown is how many people in the USA have in fact eaten meat infected with “prions,” the nearly-indestructible protein-based agents for the transmission of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (“BSE”). The answers to these unknowns will determine the number of victims and the scope of the cattle-destruction effort that the USA will have to undertake. The answers are lacking of course, for the same reason we don’t know how many Iraqi civilians have been killed in our liberation operation – bureaucrats aren’t good with big numbers.
Since the date of Schlosser’s afterword, published in 2002, we have been treated to a continuing coverup by the USDA about the extent to which BSE has afflicted the American cattle population. In case you thought your meat was cleaner because you live in the Pacific Northwest, where everything is better, it’s time to take a reality check. On August 20, 2005, the Associated Press reported that “slaughterhouses in Oregon and Washington have been cited at least eight times for breaking federal rules to protect against mad cow disease, putting the Northwest above average for violations.” The federal rules to protect against mad cow disease don’t require testing to be sure that BSE-prions aren’t in the meat, they just forbid the meatpackers from feeding people any “tonsils or small intestines,” or if the cows are over thirty months old, “the ban extended to the brain, skull, eyes and parts of the spinal column,” because these parts are “the most prone to mad cow infections.”
Are you surprised that the USDA tells you there’s no risk of BSE turning your brain into a mass of spongiform encephalopathy, but it still doesn’t test to see if cows have it? Well don’t be! It would be way too much trouble to test every one of those cows for mad cow disease. What’s a priority with our current President, as he made clear in one of his “State of the Union” addresses, was testing athletes for drugs, because an athlete on drugs would be far more dangerous than a hamburger full of BSE. Hmmm, now that I think about it, “athlete on drugs” describes California governor Schwarzennegger pretty well, and may be a good description of Bush himself. It just goes to show, politicians often know what they’re talking about.
More Than The Meat Is Rotten
Speaking of politicians, it’s not just the food supply that’s contaminated, my friends. The consolidation of food production forced by the fast food industry’s demand for uniform goods has turned potato production, beef production, chicken farming, and flavoring production into highly concentrated industries, each dominated by a handful of corporations that fix prices, suppress wages, and jointly wage a pitched battle against government regulation. But for the European ban on “Frankenfoods,” genetically engineered potatoes would be in every bag of French fries, and Taco Bell would still be feeding people corn that was meant for animal feed only. We know more about the industry’s insane drive to act as a law unto itself due to the heroic efforts of a couple of London Greenpeace activists who defended themselves, with almost complete success, against a libel suit McDonalds filed in England, by proving the truth of their harshest accusations. After eight years of litigation and a trial, Justice Rodger Bell concluded, in an 800 page judgment, that McDonalds advertising exploited children, McDonalds food endangered diners, McDonalds wages were unreasonably low, and McDonalds was to blame for animal cruelty violations by its suppliers. Through the litigation, the Greenpeace activists learned that their London group had been infiltrated by at least seven private detectives hired by McDonalds, so many that sometimes half the people at Greenpeace meetings were working for the Big Clown. At trial, Sidney Nicholson, a former South African policeman who supervised the Greenpeace spying, testified that McDonalds enlisted Scotland Yard’s Special Branch to track Greenpeace as a subversise organization, who then passed the information on to McDonalds.
Time To Take ‘Em Down
Like cancer, the fast food industry has taken over the productive capacity of the planet, and is busy reproducing its own cells at the expense of the entire organism. Like the tobacco companies, the fast food industry has been attacked for its policies, but has more successfully controlled the media and obtained government protection. Of course, when you can get a fat pig like Limbaugh to ridicule lawsuits filed by obese people, you’ve got a pretty good weapon. The fast food industry and its minions, agribusiness and the cattle and chicken tycoons, contribute disproportionately to publican candidates, seeking and obtaining the deregulation that makes the assembly lines move faster, keeps the crap in the meat, the grease in the fries, and all of their workers underpaid, uninsured, and at risk of violent death. Fortunately, Schlosser notes, we can vote with our feet. Here in Ashland, the voting has already started. A&W shut down a decade ago, McDonalds closed last year, and last week, we bid adieu to Dairy Queen. Perhaps 2005 will mark the high-water point for the industry that currently sits astride the world’s population like a huge, gross parasite. Do your part. Eat beans.
Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted:
Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:17 pm
by admin
EVACUEES NEED CLOTHING? "LET THEM WEAR KNOCKOFFS", by Charles Carreon
10:00pm, September 13, 2005
This just in from the Dept of Homeland Security website — the Customs arm of the Dept of Homeland Security is delivering $17 Million worth of clothing seized because it was "in violation of trademark laws." That is to say, these clothing are fakes, knockoffs of famous brands like Adidas, Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, and other popular consumer names.
From the DHS website: "Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement - U.S. Customs and Border Protection(CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) trucks delivered several thousand items of clothing to Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Jackson, Miss., Houston and San Antonio, Texas. The clothing, seized in violations of U.S. trademark laws is worth estimated at over $17 million."
One of the problems of clothing like this is it's not just got fake brands, it's shitty apparel. It falls apart quickly. As Bruce Sterling described this phenomenon in a recent Wired article:
"They say you can't understand people until you've walked a mile in their shoes. I just walked across Belgrade in a brand-new pair of Nikes. Now I understand something: The citizens of this city are the vanguard of a new phase of capitalism. They're busily subverting conventional multi-national commerce and creating a dark parallel process - call it black globalization.
My new shoes look authentic, but they're a scam of ominous sophistication. The insole logo is silk-screened on; my socks erased the Nike swoosh in a single afternoon. The stitching is coarse and sloppy - the pull tab at the heel ripped loose the first time I tried to use it. The sporty soles are slippy, not grippy. The tag proclaims MADE IN KOREA, although the product is almost certainly a fake churned out by a Chinese factory. Adding insult to Nike's injury, the phony barcode denotes a pair of Reeboks."
So, while FEMA is actively turning away donations of decent clothing being offered by people all across America, DHS is rushing them all the fake, crappy apparel they have on hand. It must strike the guys in Customs as very funny: "And ye shall know them by their phony baseball caps and pirated pants." Other good jokes, "Hey whaddaya mean you're not from New Orleans. You tell me you bought that Louis Vuitton on Rodeo Drive?"
I should also point out that all of these counterfeit goods are, in ordinary times, a total liability. When I worked for Louis Vuitton at an LA lawfirm, we paid big, big storage bills on "millions of dollars worth" of Vuitton luggage we'd seized. That was a drag on the system. We couldn't give it away, or give it to charity, because that would defeat the purpose of seizing it — to keep poor people from sporting wealthy people brands. We couldn't burn it because it was an environmental hazard. So we stored it. The people at DHS are very clever, because this is going to free up a lot of storage space.