lumpen 111Restarting

ISSUE 111the 21st century

The Oligarch’s Escape Plan Page 37 Comics! Page 49 An Olympic Paradox Page 12 Aya has returned to us Page 18

Lumpen magazineEd Marszewski Editor/Publisher

Ed Marszewski Pixels and Text Dumper

Aron Gent Arts Editor

Brian Meir World Correspondent

Patt Wrenn Music Editor

Ringo Man Behind the Curtain

Brunerd.com Technology

1984 Mike Evans

Lumpen RegularsAdmiral Pip • Renay Kerkman • Art Fag • Aya

ContributorsTexts: James H. Ewert Jr, Paul Craig Roberts,

Hairy Freedom, Ben Speckmann, Steve Greco,

Michael Hudson, Amy Goodman and Juan

Gonzalez, Patrick Cockburn

Comics: Ryan Doherty, Andy Burkholder, Al

Burian, Grant Reynolds

Illustrations and Images: Gregory Calvert, Chad

Kouri, Ben Speckmann, Aron Gent

CoverRod Hunting www.rodhunting.com

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DepartmentS

04 heLLO

13 gunfire

By Admiral Pip

17 One COmiC

By Ryan Doherty

18 hOme far away By Admiral Pip

23 many mOre COmiCS Ryan Doherty, Andy Burkholder, Al Burian, and Grant Reynolds

30 expLOSiOnS Of the hyDra BLue By Renay Kerkman

46 phOtOgraphy By Ben SpeCkmann And a text too

54 interView with parSLey fLakeS By Steve Greco

xx many CaLLS fOr partiCipatiOn in VerSiOn 09 immODeSt prOpOSaLS Sprinkled throughout

featureS

an OLympiC paraDOx By James H Ewert Jr

DriVing OVer the CLiff By Paul Craig Roberts

Diy pOLtiCS with tOm treSSer

By Hairy Freedom

the OLigarChS’ eSCape pLan By Michael Hudson

rememBer iraq? iraq reCOnStruCtiOn: the

greateSt frauD in uS hiStOry? By Patrick Cockburn

interView with max rameau By Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez

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Please ReadISSUE 111some texts are hard!

Tag tag tag

205 East Randolph Drive

notE location

Meet the musicians

and composers at

the post-concert

reception with free

food and drinks!

Symphony cEntER pRESEntS A r t i s t s , p r i c e s , a n d p r o g r a m s s u b j e c t t o c h a n g e .

312 -2 9 4 - 3 0 0 0c s o . o r g

MusicNOW receives leadership funding from IRVING HARRIS FOUNDATION, Joan W. Harris. Major support is provided by Cindy Sargent and Sally Hands.

Media Support:

Food and beveragesprovided by:

Musicians from the

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Pierre Boulez conductor

Jo ellen Miller soprano

Mantovani Streets

Kyburz Réseaux

In honor of Elliott Carter’s

100th Birthday:

Carter A Mirror on Which

to Dwell (On Six Poems

of Elizabeth Bishop)

Or better yet, imagine what would happen to Chicago as the international tide of tourists subsides and the city is left with a giant swath of dormant buildings and sports arenas that were to be quickly bought up after the Olympics by savvy real-estate developers looking to pay top dollar for handfuls of tacky, slipshod buildings. But, most importantly, imagine these scenarios playing out publicly over that global audience Mayor Daley is so aggressively seeking.

Ask a typical Chicagoan what they think about

Chicago’s opportunity and bid to host the 2016 summer Olympics and they

(much like I did at first) might say it’s a good idea, an interesting notion, a dis-

tant and far-off dream.

Shortly thereafter, a little dialog on the actual economic and practical implica-

tions further, and that typical Chicagoan (once again like I did) might conclude

that it would be a fascinating sight—an inevitable disaster—but nonetheless

an alluring possibility. Imagine throngs of athletic, corporate and international

tourists descending on the Windy City during its most vibrant and busy time of

year to applaud Chicago as a “city that works”, as the “global” and “green” city

Mayor Richard M. Daley has always envisioned it to be. It would be spectacular,

oh yes! Imagine a group of drunken and rowdy foreigners being beat senseless

by power drunk cops, or imagine a foreign dignitary’s car being illegally towed

away and sold as scrap metal, imagine an overcrowded subway car catching

fire and hundreds of panicked spectators being trapped underground without

any clue of an emergency exit. Wouldn’t that be fantastic? As Mayor Daley

saunters into Soldier Field holding the Olympic torch he stumbles, starts a fire

and all the helplessly terrified spectators stampede to the exits only to find that

they locked with chains or open inwards.

read more

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It shouldn’t take long for most Chicago natives with the slightest knowledge of history, current events and Chicago’s reputation for corruption and geographical segregation to realize that hosting the 2016 Olympics would be an awesome urban calamity with frighten-ingly serious economic consequences.

Both fortunately and unfortunately, it is 2009, which means that while the potential 2016 Olympics are nearly eight years away and local opposition to the games is already beginning to swell, initiating that all-important public dialog that will invariably lead Chicagoans to understand what is at stake is a proposition more easily said than executed.

Even though we’re talking about an event that isn’t set to take place for nearly another decade, time is of the essence and Chicago’s actively-inclined have only until this October, when the International Olympic Committee chooses the 2016 host city, to make their dis-senting voices heard.

As Chicago 2016, the nonprofit entity saddled with developing Chicago’s bid, ratchets up its pro-construction, pro-development and pro-business rhetoric in the lead up to the IOC’s April visit to Chicago to evaluate its bid, so too have Chicago’s opposition. No Games Chicago, a group of civic, engaged and otherwise con-cerned citizens has emerged as Chicago 2016’s earliest, organized and formidable opponents.

The group has begun holding public forums on the topic in the hopes that simple conversation (like that at the beginning of this piece) will lead citizens to understand the impending, albeit eight years down the road, magnitude of Chicago’s 2016 Olympic Bid.

Most Chicagoans having paid casual attention to recent news stories about the city’s bid might not yet grasp the significance of a global sporting event to be held years down the road.

But one simply has to listen to the warnings from other upcoming and former Olympic host cities like Vancouver B.C., Athens, Greece, Beijing, and London, to recognize that what we were being told right now by the corporate, business and political interests with a vested stake in having the games in Chicago is not unlike what was heard in these cities as well.

Because of cost overruns and a stagnant economy, Vancouver, a city whose taxpayers were also told they would be off the financial hook for costs incurred by the games, is now on the verge of go-

ing bankrupt—yes the actual city—and yes—bankrupt. Now numbers regarding the Olympics naturally are all over the place depend-ing on the source, so to make it simple lets just look at the figures being floated by No Games Chicago, which may be a bit high, but nevertheless concerning. The estimated cost for Vancouver to host the 2010 winter games: $600 million. The actual cost: $2.5 billion. The estimated cost of the 2012 games in London: $4.3 billion. The actual cost: $16.6 billion. The point is clear and consistent, not even Olympic officials would argue that the estimated costs to host the games run according to plan. Chicago, which has already broken its promise to leave taxpayer money out by backing its bid with $500 million “if necessary”, estimates that it will cost $2 billion to host the games. (Why don’t you take a second and let that sink in)

There is also the issue of doling out the conservatively estimated $2 billion in construction contracts to developers so that the infra-structure to sustain such an event can be built. Does anyone really believe that heinously corrupt Chicago politicians and insiders, in conjunction with the IOC, an unaccountable, secretive and often controversial entity will handle that task appropriately and in a fair and unbiased manner? Chicago 2016 is already attempting to silence public dissent according to a January 16 article, telling the IOC there is “no organized opposition,” but merely groups that have “expressed concerns.”

And money is just the most attractive tip of this complicated and nascent Olympic iceberg. There are not enough pages in this maga-zine or precious moments of your (the reader’s) attention to fully impart the full breadth of reasons to oppose or at the very least call into question the idea of Chicago hosting the 2016 summer Olym-pics.

Assuming that Chicago does host the games and millions of taxpay-er dollars are used to pay for and build a massive Olympic Village near McCormick Place, what then becomes of these buildings? Can the city really be relying and the real-estate industry to pull Chicago out of debt incurred by the Olympics? You bet your ass it is.

So if I still have you, I offer you this (as a rabid Chicago Cubs and sports fan myself): Who really gives a shit about sports? And more importantly, is it worth $2 billion?

Perhaps a better question to ask a typical Chicagoan to gauge pub-lic opinion would be: What city service needs the most attention, the CTA, public health, police or the prison system? Take your pick.

Image S

ource: Chicago W

eekly

s a native Chicagoan I know a

crappy police force when I see

one and I am going to call the Rio

de Janeiro cops the world’s worst.

I won’t just do it because they

“officially” killed 1300 people last

year and the government’s own

study shows that most of them

were slum dwellers shot execution style at close range in the

back. I won’t mention that Rio de Janeiro police are involved in

all levels of the cocaine and weapons trade, and that “militias”

of off duty cops took over 100 shantytowns last year and started

collecting “security fees” from the residents. That would be too

abstract. Instead, I’ll just talk about how I almost got my fucking

head blown off last Monday by two bumbling fools.

I was stuck in gridlock in a taxi with my son. It was around noon

time and we were in front of Largo Carioca, the busiest square

in Downtown Rio. It was drizzling and traffic was backed up

on Chile Avenue. It’s a huge square. There might have been

10,000 people on it. Street vendors, businessmen and women

going to lunch. Suddenly we heard the familiar pop pop pop of

police revolvers. I looked forwards and two overweight, clean

cut white guys in plain clothes were angling in front of our car

shooting straight forwards at a restaurant that was full of din-

ers. The driver and my son, who were in the front seats, ducked

down. Everything turned to slow motion. I looked around, saw

the men run past our car and ducked. If there was going to be

any return fire we were directly in the line of it. My son, I thought,

was in a pretty good position. If someone shot back and hit his

end of the car the driver would take the brunt of it. At this mo-

ment I didn’t think about the driver. Still ducking, I opened the

door and thought of either running for it or ducking behind the

wheel, which I surprisingly remembered is what they told us to

do in this kind of situation in my corporations’ travel risk mitiga-

tion seminar last year. Traffic opened up in front of us and things

started moving at regular speed again. My son said, “what the

fuck!” I yelled, “Drive man. Let’s get out of this shit right now.”

The taxi driver came out of his daze, said, “it’s OK, they’re not

shooting back,” and pulled out. We became instant friends as the

car filled with our nervous laughter. Later I found out what hap-

pened. It was a jewelry store heist. The two gunmen were off-

duty cops who had apparently either never been trained to not

shoot directly into a crowd of people or were too full of shit to

care. I was happy to see that the thief, who the cabbie spotted

at the time and described as a “teenager wearing a Flamengo

soccer jersey” was not hit by the bullets. Miraculously, none of

the diners or anyone else on the street were hit by the 6 or 7

bullets that were shot into the crowd. I am now the last foreigner

working out of our Rio offices. Our communications director

moved back to Argentina last week after being caught in police

machine gun fire in Ipanema and held up at knife point (possibly

by an off duty cop) during the same week. Another guy moved

back to Belgium after been beaten up so badly by spoiled and

drunk rich kids in Copacabana that he thought he had been

shot. I am pretty sure that if the cops didn’t have their heads

stuck completely up their asses it would be one of the nicest cit-

ies in the world.

Admiral Pip’s Column

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Is there intelligent life in Washington, DC? Not a speck of it.The US economy is imploding, and Obama is being led by his gov-ernment of neconservatives and Israeli agents into a quagmire in Afghanistan that will bring the US into confrontation with Russia, and possibly China, American’s largest creditor.

The January payroll job figures reveal that last month 20,000 Ameri-cans lost their jobs every day.

In addition, December’s job losses were revised up by 53,000 jobs from 524,000 to 577,000. The revision brings the two-month job loss to 1,175,000. If this keeps up, Obama’s promised three million new jobs will be wiped out by job losses.

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that this huge number is an understatement. Williams notes that built-in biases in seasonal adjustment factors caused a 118,000 understatement of January job losses, bringing the actual January job loss to 716,000 jobs.

The payroll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed as some people have more than one job. The Household Survey counts the number of people who have jobs. The Household Survey shows that 832,000 people lost their jobs in January and 806,000 in December, for a two month reduction of Americans with jobs of 1,638,000.

The unemployment rate reported in the US media is a fabrication. Williams reports that in changes since 1980, particularly in the Clinton era, “‘discouraged workers’ those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had--were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been ‘discouraged’ for less than a year. This time qualification defined away the bulk of the discouraged workers. Adding them back into the total unemployed, actual unem-ployment, [according to the unemployment rate methodology used in 1980] rose to 18% in January, from 17.5% in December.”

In other words, without all the manipulations of the data, the US un-employment rate is already at depression levels.

How could it be otherwise given the enormous job loss from off-shored jobs. It is impossible for a country to create jobs when its corporations are moving production for the American consumer mar-ket offshore. When they move the production offshore, they shift US GDP to other countries. The US trade deficit over the past decade has reduced US GDP by $1.5 trillion dollars. That is a lot of jobs.

I have been reporting for years that university graduates have had to take jobs as waitresses and bartenders. As over-indebted consum-ers lose their jobs, they will visit restaurants and bars less frequently. Consequently, those with university degrees will not even have jobs waiting on tables and mixing drinks.

US policymakers have ignored the fact that consumer demand in the 21st century has been driven, not by increases in real income, but by increased consumer indebtedness. This fact makes it pointless to try to stimulate the economy by bailing out banks so that they can lend more to consumers. The American consumers have no more capacity to borrow.

With the decline in the values of their principal assets--their homes--with the destruction of half of their pension assets, and with jobless-ness facing them, Americans cannot and will not spend.

Why bail out GM and Citibank when the firms are moving as many operations offshore as they possibly can?

Much of US infrastructure is in poor shape and needs renewing. However, infrastructure jobs do not produce goods and services that can be sold abroad. The massive commitment to infrastructure does nothing to help the US reduce its huge trade deficit, the financing of which is becoming a major problem. Moreover, when the infrastruc-ture projects are completed, so are the jobs.

At best, assuming Mexican immigrants do not get most of the con-struction jobs, all Obama’s stimulus program can do is to reduce the number of unemployed temporarily.

Unless US corporations can be required to use American labor to produce the goods and services that they sell in American markets, there is no hope for the US economy. No one in the Obama admin-istration has the wits to address this problem. Thus, the economy will continue to implode.

Adding to the brewing disaster, Obama has been deceived by his military and neoconservative advisers into expanding the war in

Afghanistan, a large, mountainous country. Obama intends to use the draw-down of US soldiers in Iraq to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. This would bring the US forces to 60,000 -- 600,000 fewer than US Marine Corps and US Army counterinsur-gency guidelines define as the minimum number of soldiers neces-sary to bring success in Afghanistan--and less than half as many as the army that was unable to occupy Iraq.

The Iranians had to bail out the Bush regime by restraining its Shi’ite allies and encouraging them to use the ballot box to attain power and push out the Americans. In Iraq the US troops only had to fight a small Sunni insurgency drawn from a minority of the population. Even so, the US “prevailed” by putting the insurgents on the US payroll and paying them not to fight. The withdrawal agreement was dictated by the Shi’ites. It was not what the Bush regime wanted.

One would think that the experience with the “cakewalk” in Iraq would make the US hesitant to attempt to occupy Afghanistan, an undertaking that would require the US to occupy parts of Paki-stan. The US was hard pressed to maintain 150,000 troops in Iraq. Where is Obama going to get another half million soldiers to add to the 150,000 to pacify Afghanistan?

One answer is the rapidly growing massive US unemployment. Americans will sign up to go kill abroad rather than be homeless and hungry at home.

But this solves only half of the problem. Where does the money come from to support an army in the field of 650,000, an army 4.3 times larger than US forces in Iraq, a war that has cost us $3 tril-lion in out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs. This money would have to be raised in addition to the $3 trillion US budget deficit that is the result of Bush’s financial sector bailout, Obama’s stimulus package, and the rapidly failing economy. When econo-mies tank, as the American one is doing, tax revenues collapse. The millions of unemployed Americans are not paying Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes. The stores and businesses that are closing are not paying federal and state income taxes. Consumers with no money or credit to spend are not paying sales taxes.

The Washington Morons, and morons they are, have given no thought as to how they are going to finance a fiscal year 2009 bud-get deficit of some two to three trillion dollars.

The practically nonexistent US saving rate cannot finance it.

The trade surpluses of our trading partners, such as China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, cannot finance it.

The US government really has only two possibilities for financing its budget deficit. One is a second collapse in the stock market, which would drive the surviving investors with what they have left into “safe” US Treasury bonds. The other is for the Federal Reserve to monetize the Treasury debt.

Monetizing the debt means that when no one is willing or able to purchase the Treasury’s bonds, the Federal Reserve buys them by creating bank deposits for the Treasury’s account.

Driving Over the CliffbY Paul Craig Roberts

The Obummer Economy

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In other words, the Fed “prints money” with which to buy the Trea-sury’s bonds.

Once this happens, the US dollar will cease to be the reserve cur-rency.

In addition, China, Japan and Saudi Arabia, countries that hold enor-mous quantities of US Treasury debt in addition to other US dollar assets, will sell, hoping to get out before others.

The US dollar will become worthless, the currency of a banana re-public.

The US will not be able to pay for its imports, a serious problem for a country dependent on imports for its energy, manufactured goods, and advanced technology products.

Obama’s Keynesian advisers have learned with a vengeance Milton Friedman’s lesson that the Great Depression resulted from the Federal Reserve permitting a contraction of the supply of money and credit. In the Great Depression good debts were destroyed by monetary contraction. Today bad debts are being preserved by the expansion of money and credit, and the US Treasury is jeopardizing its credit standing and the dollar’s reserve currency status with enor-mous quarterly bond auctions as far as the eye can see.

Meanwhile, the Russians, overflowing with energy and mineral re-sources, and not in debt, have learned that the US government is not to be trusted. Russia has watched Reagan’s successors attempt to turn former constituent parts of the Soviet Union into US puppet states with US military bases. The US is trying to ring Russia with missiles that neutralize Russia’s strategic deterrent.

Putin has caught on to “comrade wolf.” He has succeeded in having the president of Kyrgyzstan, a former part of the Soviet Union, evict the US from its military base. This base is essential to America’s ability to supply its soldiers in Afghanistan.

To stop America’s meddling in Russia’s sphere of influence, the Rus-sian government has created a collective security treaty organization comprised of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan is a partial participant.In other words, Russia has organized central Asia against US pen-etration.

To whose agenda is President Obama being hitched? Writing in the English language version of the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, Ste-phen J. Sniegoski reports that leading figures of the neocon conspir-acy--Richard Perle, Max Boot, David Brooks, and Mona Charen--are ecstatic over Obama’s appointments. They don’t see any difference between Obama and Bush/Cheney.

Not only are Obama’s appointments moving him into an expanded war in Afghanistan, but the powerful Israel Lobby is pushing Obama toward a war with Iran.

The unreality in which he US government operates is beyond belief. A bankrupt government that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the US taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year!

Obama’s war in Afghanistan is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. After seven years of conflict, there is still no defined mission or endgame scenario for US forces in Afghanistan. When asked about the mis-sion, a US military official told NBC News, “Frankly, we don’t have one.” NBC reports: “they’re working on it.”

Speaking to House Democrats on February 5, President Obama admitted that the US government does not know what its mission is in Afghanistan and that to avoid “mission creep without clear param-eters,” the US “needs a clear mission.”

How would you like to be sent to a war, the point of which no one knows, including the commander-in-chief who sent you to kill or be killed? How, fellow taxpayers, do you like paying the enormous cost of sending soldiers on an undefined mission while the economy col-lapses?

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good In-tentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Where is Obama going to get another half million soldiers to add to the 150,000 to pacify Afghanistan?

One answer is the rapidly growing massive US unemployment. Americans will sign up to go kill abroad rather than be homeless and hungry at home.

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HOME FAR AWAYDie Reise ins Glück (Journey Into Bliss)

Once I believed that it was impos-sible for me to live without romance. For a brief moment, I experienced what a flawlessly sweet partnered life might be like, and it churned up my stomach so I threw it up. There’s someone who I’ll change diapers for when he’s old, but in every life we are forbidden to be lov-ers. I don’t believe in who one loves the most, what matters is whether one loves.

11th of May

A and I left in Ugo’s car at midnight. I could

look into my journal for accuracy, but you

see, it’s filled with the details of love’s

pain that conjures up emotions acerbic in

nature. Anyway I put all my stuff in a few

small boxes and the two bags I found on the

street. I brought them to A’s basement, and

we discovered it had just been burglarized.

Anyway I moved out of Berlin.

12th of May

After dropping off a hitchhiker in Nürnberg,

we headed off to a tiny village in Alsace,

where Ugo’s grandmère exhibited exaspera-

tion for me and A (who employed heavily

Germanated French), who didn’t favor foie

gras due to our vegetarianismistic philo-

sophical disability, and I blacked out while

eating string beans. When I recovered con-

sciousness, me and A took a stroll around

to the infinite field adjacent to the houses.

The scenery was reminiscent of our favorite

show Little House on the Prairie, which I

used to run home from school to watch,

and A from university. What I admire highly

about French people is that, even in this

puny corny village, no one stares at us. Even

though we are infamous for having a big red

arrow perpetually pointing at us wherever we

find ourselves on earth.

A few hours later, when the sky was my

favorite color just before black, we shot

through a straight road to Paris where wild

boars commit suicide sometimes. The drive

was memorably filled with the magical air of

contentment, as I looked at the bright star in

the sky and prayed, until a few hours before

arrival we realized we hadn’t arranged a

place to sleep.

13th of May

Several hours after the day turned, we were

briefly putting behind 3 days of traveling in

a big bed nearly avalanched by extravagant

costumes, while the owner slept on the living

room floor. 17 years ago I was supposed to

come study in this city, which was prevented

by a disagreeable-parent sort of situation.

Precisely one year ago, I had planned to

come here, which was canceled out by a

jealous-GF type of circumstance. Paris in

May, anyway it worked out in the end.

Since A had always said that Parisians are

all on Prozac and when one is heartbroken it

is the place to be, I was hoping for enlight-

enment. Paris was just Paris. We lethargi-

cally started looking for a venue to play at

the last minute, gave up instantaneously,

and met up with friends to discuss all night

on the street which club to go to. In spite

of everything, the feature of Paris was when

in the middle of the night A suddenly kissed

me up the arm from behind and serenaded

“Alexandra”, then passed out with all his

weight on me snoring right at my ear.

1�th of May

Good-bye to Montmartre, and we were on

TGB to Marseille. When we got off the train,

I started walking to the general direction

(which turned out to be too general) of the

club L’Embobineuse, where our band is idol-

ized in an extremely regional sort of sense.

I like Marseille. Things that make me feel

comfortable; these side-parked cars that

have been freshly arrayed, those laundered

clothes that are hanging out the window in

eternity regardless of weather; but not the

fact M tries to get by while speaking Span-

ish to les Marseillais. We went to pick up M

from the airport, who came out of the gate

boisterously with a bottle of Basque hard

liquor in his hand.

18th of May

At 5 AM after our concert, A, M and I got

into the bus to Barcelona and immediately

fell asleep, until it was stopped at the border

and all passengers’ passports got confis-

cated. I’m almost at the end of my journey

now, from Madrid I am flying to my only

family who has fallen ill. Everyone was dead

quiet, the bad air and drowsiness made my

eyes heavy despite the terror. 20 minutes

later the border police returned and a male

passenger silently got off our vehicle with a

suitcase. The picture of myself locked up all

alone without being able to understand the

language floated around in my mind. But

what horrified me the most was getting de-

layed to fly to my severely ill family member

and… yea horrifyingly dreadful hideously

unfortunate incidents. 30 minutes later the

passports were returned and the bus driver

called out names one by one. A got it back,

M got it back, everyone got them back. At

the very end, the bus driver turned to me,

smiled and handed out the last red book-

let left in his hand… Lucky to be the one

carrying a passport of a politically weak, yet

rich country that’s way too far for anyone to

bother…

20nd of May

I stole a glimpse of Sagrada Familia from the

window, and we hopped onto another bus

headed toward Madrid. My delirious brain

doesn’t recall much of the final stage of that

draining migration, but after the bus we had

to change the metro a couple of times, drag

the over-stuffed 50s’ wheel-less suitcase

with a sun-faded Dutch ribbon on the handle

up a steep hill, then up 5 flight of stairs and

M merrily led A and I into his tiny room with

a regular-sized mattress without sheets nor

cover, with 2 BMX bikes having sex on it.

All I can say is, it was a quite an adorably

composed joke, only if it wasn’t true that all

3 of us were expected to sleep there for the

coming week.

27th of May

My last days in Europe were spent in this

unseasonably freezing sopping Madrid,

deprived of proper sleep, with only-baguette

diet, and A’s malodorously decayed mood

accompanied by M’s indifferent and/or tact-

less agreeable mood. Oh and the recently-

relocated not-so-old face of Berlin Raving

Mad Carlos From The Third World, a de-

pressed, yet exceedingly pleasant, likewise

bothersome DJ from Argentine who features,

rave. Our last evening, A and myself left

the house, bought some wheels and went

into the city center to meet up with après-

work Carlos and M. At the meeting point

biker squat bar, we realized, at the time just

Photos by D. Bloß

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bY HAi RY FRE EdOM

TOM TRESSER

DIY Politics

As 2008 wound anti-climactically to a close the economy dwindled to lows most have never seen before. But between capitalism’s spastic and palpitating gasps for liquidity an interesting thing happened: while nearly every major economic and financial sector of the economy desperately hung on for profitable life, one area boomed louder than ever before—Politics. Tabulating just the three races for federal office, U.S. Senate, U.S. Representative and President, the political industrial complex raked in nearly $3 billion, according to figures from the Center for Public Integrity. Add in the money raised and spent in the thousands of other races for municipal, county and state offices and that number could balloon bigger than anyone ever thought possible.

Something is definitely askew when everyday Americans, known for their listless concern of electoral politics, start forking over what little money they have to the very same politicians whom they accuse of injudiciously wasting the tax dollars they’ve already been given. So last year, while millions of people were laid off from their jobs and frantically blinked at what little was left of their retirement funds, 401K’s and whatnot, Americans desperately sought refuge in the one system they so frequently and fervently dismissed as unresponsive—politics.

9 hours before the international flight, A

was robbed his passport, driver’s license

and bankcard and the pass code kindly at-

tached onto it–basically everything that had

his personal identification, on the train. I

got my pretty little embroidered coin purse

snatched, with 10 in it. Luckily, A’s bank-

card could only dispense 10 for the robbers.

Unluckily, that had been the very last money

A had in the whole world. With the dire

inclination and capability to sabotage his

life, A went to figure out a way to rescue the

situation, and I buried myself among grease-

covered bikers inside the squat and fixed the

wheels onto my Dutch suitcase.

In the end, the time to catch the last train

to airport arrived. Carlos offered one last

beer in the brightly-lit grubby bar Manu Chao

used to frequent, then we said farewell, got

on the metro, only to find ourselves strand-

ed, for the last connecting train had just

run… A figured with his barely adequate

Spanish, that there is “a bus that goes to

the bearing of the airport”. Yet every person

he asked said different things, even the bus

driver rattled out something incomprehen-

sible and drove off, leaving us piling smoke

buds around us among the frozen hours until

the same bus returned 3 hours later. This

time the driver said “Si” to the same ques-

tion and we loaded ourselves onto it. When

we found ourselves at the very last stop, it

looked nothing like an international airport

but more like what’s commonly called “a

middle of a residential area”. A few girls who

happened to be in a similar situation on the

bus approached and asked in suspiciously

German-like Spanish, to which A was irra-

tionally exasperated, “can’t they !@#$% see

that I’m nothing but German, why would they

speak Spanish to me idiots!?”

All things aside, a miracle taxi appeared and

A could fly home after filing the report at the

airport police. Finally we had a mere 10 min-

utes to calmly sit and smoke on the bench in

the faint morning light. Then I saw him off,

well, watched him be stopped at the metal

detector at the distant gate over and over,

every time turning back to wave at me, each

time taking off an article of clothing…

16th of December

A couple of hours after that, I flew to Tokyo.

I’m still here, without drinking, smoking,

vegetarianism. Everything I initiated in this

country has been met with obstacles since.

Looks like I’m spending my birthday without

friends. Time to return to where I belong.

Too much mental activity is harmful. Let’s be

happy, let’s destroy our bodies and just be

dumb. That’s really what there is in life.

“What gives you shelter if the clouds are

grey?

The lip umbrella for the rainy day”

- Die Reise ins Glück (Journey Into Bliss),

Wenzel Stork

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In the last issue of Lumpen, #110, Brian Holmes’ “Democracy in America” speech outlined a number of new realities about the relationship art and artists have with democracy. Of them was the imperative for artists to begin intervening in the mainstream political process.

For decades artists have been precariously dancing around the rim of political issues seeking to find that perfect balance of concept, idea and aesthetics to spur action, yet most wind up falling short and settling for that simple, albeit noble goal, of “raising awareness”. The trouble with raising awareness of political issues through art, howev-er, is not the usual passivity of the artwork or the issue and informa-tion being conveyed, but that as human beings, or more specifically Americanized Westerners, we’ve shown the propensity time and time again to blissfully ignore the facts and history laid out before us and willfully allow ourselves to be victimized by the same contradictory logic we’ve been taught since we were children.

Now, as global stock markets collapse, jobs evaporate and the na-tion sinks further into debt by propping up the very same inherently counter-productive institutions that led to its vicious demise, we are beginning to witness the cruel and enormous consequences of a politically negligent, socially inept and apathetic democratic republic that refuses to put its “awareness” into action. Despair not, however, deadening pessimism is a tool more apt to quell meaningful action than incite it, and while Americans enter the era of Obama, let us artists take a page from the President-Elect’s book and hope, not for change, but for action, by seeing the onset of this economic crisis as an opportunity to assert our creative will as an advantage over archaic schools of thought and antiquated institutions.

At this point in this pompous verbiage, you may asking what this op-portunity is and how to take advantage; and for that, I give you: Tom Tresser, a creativity champion who is challenging artists and all those creatively inclined to organize and, yes—run for public office.

It may sound like a hokey proposal: turn a few 20-or-30-something, pot smoking, penis drawing, high-brow slackers into a slate of pre-sentable and legitimate candidates for office, and it is, but listen to Tresser passionately describe creativity and how it manifests itself into the gears of society and the idea will slowly gain reasonable traction.

“When you lay it out, running for office is not unlike opening a show,” says Tresser, who has a background and history in Chicago theater production. “It’s a labor intensive project that has an opening night, like an exhibit. There are a lot of parallels to running for office.”

Tresser traces his story back to the 1980’s when he moved to Chi-cago and began working in the theater business. After toiling in the Chicago theater scene for years he started to wonder why it seemed so difficult to make a sustainable art career in America. His curiosity drew him to the National Endowment for the Arts, the governmental umbrella organization that purports itself to be from and for the artist. At the time, republican conservatives and the Christian right were aligning themselves against free and creative expression. The nota-ble controversy at the time surrounded the NEA 4, a group of artists

whose fellowships were arbitrarily rejected by then-NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer because of the artists’ questionable content and subject matter. One work made famous by the controversy was Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” photograph, which featured Jesus on a crucifix submerged in a glass container of Serrano’s urine. The controversy eventually led Tresser to begin thinking of creative ex-pression as a political form, which had influences and impacts span-ning both the federal and local bureaucracies. Looking at creativity through the scope of politics, Tresser began noticing that where there were artistically vibrant communities, there were conversely economically vibrant communities as well.

“If you’re going to expect to grow up, live and work in the creative community, you can’t expect that no one is going to mess with you,” Says Tresser. “The 1st amendment is merely a piece of paper and it doesn’t enforce itself. What is the responsibility of the creative person toward the first amendment in the larger political sphere that we’re in?”

During the last two decades, Tresser has begun organizing art or-ganizations of all kinds to come together and be scene as a viable, significant and voting constituency. He’s written a book, “America Needs You! Why You Should Become a Creativity Champion”, de-veloped and taught classes in creative politics at Roosevelt, DePaul and Loyola Universities and now wants to begin training and organiz-ing the artists himself with a artistic activism workshop.

“I’m not asking everyone to drop everything and go run for office or go lick stamps for some schmo congressmen, but you do have an obligation to aware of the politics of creativity and the issues sur-rounding it,” Says Tresser. “You don’t necessarily need to have it reflected in your work, but you should be conscious of the situation around you.”

Tresser has been met with various degrees of success throughout his struggle to elevate creativity to a national priority, but feels the mix of economic, political and social indicators is ripe for the taking.

“My job as I’ve accepted it is not to run myself, but to be an agitator, a provocateur, someone who helps create a political infrastructure that will last beyond me.”

If artists and those creatively inclined can realize the impending mag-nitude of this situation and capitalize on this opportunity instead of cynically standing on the sidelines with a stoic and horrifying look of indifference, perhaps then we can transform society into the type of place we’ve always wished it to be.

FREd SHEd bY AndY bURkHOLdER

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There is a secret, rotten world beneath us.

As surface dwellers, we see the tops of the roads, the bridges, the electrical outlets and the hole leading into our sink’s garbage grinder—but what the hell is really going on down there? Miles and miles of tunnels, junctions, wild dogs, drains, mole people, vaults, gears, rats, roads and rails and monstrous pipes lay under our feet. They call it infrastructure and most of us ignore it because the word “infrastructure” sounds like a ride through humdrum dullsville.

But at a million gallons a minute, why is infrastructure considered by most of us to be such an awfully boring word? Perhaps “under-pinnings” is a more enticing word to describe the grimy, collaps-ing world beneath us—a world precariously pinned together under civilization’s girdles of cement by various bolts and screws. We may carry a sinking knowledge that things are rotten down in the underworld—perhaps catching dark glimpses out the window of crews working on in a subway train tunnel; however, we only really think about the ugly and convoluted things down there, when all hell breaks loose.

On a late November night in 2005, the underpinnings of my personal hell erupted in a place known as Hubbard’s Cave. This ‘cave’ is a treacherously devised, manmade construct named after Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard—an early settler of Chicago and a fur trader. In 1818, Hubbard—unfortunately for him but fortunately for the animals—gave up the fur trade, moved to the city of Chicago and be-came an insurance salesman He lost his shirt in the great Chicago fire.

Not only was Hubbard’s life a bit of a disaster, so is the cave that is named after him. Out of the rubble, he tried to pay off the claims and help the city piece itself back together. Some cement walls here, a road under there, some train tracks and more water pipes. Hubbard’s ten-lane tunnel is best known as a potential rush hour bottleneck where multiple expressways dip under a tunnel made of surface streets, as they whiz by Chicago’s Sears Tower. Or not.

I hit the brakes as I approached Hubbard’s Cave. Overwhelmed with

that sinking feeling that a pile of jammed up tail-lights causes when it hits you out of nowhere—with no way out. Too late to exit. Trapped. Semi-trucks in front of me; cars lined up behind me. Having once been a professional driver in Chicago, I should have known better. Hubbard’s cave is a star player during Chicago’s downtown rush hours—spoken of frequently, in a dreaded tone, on radio traffic up-dates. The smart driver exits at the first hint of the red brake lights.

It struck me as odd, this traffic jam, particularly because it was 2:30 am; however, I thought there was just some little problem—a flat tire or a fender bender. I sat patiently in my car, listening to raucously loud music. The speakers were so sweet and loud I almost thought I was floating. I’d lucked out when I bought this car. It was a clas-sic. A Barbie dream-car. A two-door, silver convertible with a black top and a type of magic to it—a smooth ride in leather bucket seats; good on gas; easy to fly around. However, even the finest dream-car can get stuck. Often, it’s matter of a few seconds—time and chance.

If luck is with you, it takes 20 seconds to drive through Hubbard’s Cave. The full length of the tunnel is only a third of a mile. The ten lane expressway (I-90/94) dips under Hubbard Street to the north, runs under a number of train tracks and parking lots, pokes its head out just before Kinzie Street and finally emerges. Bordered on either side by fifty-foot high cement walls, the ten narrow lanes of Hub-bard’s Cave can be tricky to maneuver. The minute the tunnel-traffic slows down, it frequently screeches to a complete stop.

I had been stopped in the tunnel for about ten minutes. As I glanced around at the bright lights, the cement walls, the disgusted drivers around me and the down at the road surface, I noticed a tiny trickle of water running down between the cars. This struck me as odd because it was a clear night—brisk but no precipitation. Suddenly, the trickle turned into a puddle—then more puddles. The puddles rose higher. Then, the water began trickling into the floor of my car. Puddles formed around my feet. I started to panic and leaned out of the window, in an attempt to get a better view of the activities ahead.

Within minutes the water level was moving up around the sides of my car. Little puddles formed on the floor of the car. I felt water creeping up into my shoes. The water level crawled up around my legs—faster and faster. Suddenly, it occurred to me that I could drown. Panic set in. I winced hard and felt a punch in my heart.

Life Review

Explosions Of The Hydra Blue bY Renay Kerkman

There is a secret, rotten world beneath us. Along with 20 or so other drivers, I jumped out of the window and began wading out of the cave. The water was several degrees above freezing. The ice-cold water was up to my waist. I felt my shoes squish with an icy-blue gunk. What was that in my shoe?

While running in water may be hard on the legs—running in water that is close to becoming ice is like banging against steel. Dragging my numb feet, I waded by people sitting in horror in their cars. Pass-ing three, four rows of cars and trucks, I could see a river pouring in ahead. Then suddenly, I saw it. The blue hydra was a roaring dragon, a multi-headed beast shooting out and up toward the sky.

Blaring searchlights. Firemen were helping people up the ce-ment embankment wall to the street above. Firemen, well versed in self-preservation, were not entering the tunnel to help people out because they knew the water was blasting out at a million gallons a minute. At this rate, the tunnel could be completely submerged in minutes. As the emergency lights hit the erupting water, an ice-blue sheen glistened over the ferocious roar of water. IDOT trucks blocked off the expressway lanes—as a giant geyser of water burst up toward the sky, out onto the highway and down the embankment of dirt and oily road scum.

Filth mingled with the waters and the waters mingled with filth. As I glanced behind me, fierce eyes stared back from the marooned audi-ence of motorists. I caught a glimpse of one very worried man with a carload of African drums. He was nervously shifting his cargo around in his back-seat—but he was determined to stick with his car. Young families sat trapped in their cars and pick-up trucks—as if they were hoping that their cars might at any moment magically become boats. Perhaps, they were betting that the water would, somehow, miraculously go away.

Just before I crawled up the cement wall, I looked back into the swirl-ing cave. The bright brown eyes of one brave child, sitting on her mother’s lap in the front seat of a red pick-up truck, caught my eye. It was as if the child had just then—at that very moment in time—discov-ered the monsters that modernity has locked up below us. A seemingly mild-mannered concrete wall had been holding inside of itself a giant, bubbling geyser. It was a childlike moment of repulsive fear mixed with a quirky attraction to a newly revealed, dangerous mystery.

This odd reverence for geysers and cement was soon replaced with scraped blood and mud. I was pulled up the hill and stuffed into an ambulance “warming center.” Inside, a group of prissy old women that were not the slightest bit wet or dirty, huddled in two lines crying. I felt like a filthy human fugdsicle, while they sat there whining and crying—for no apparent reason at all. The women had all the blankets, although they were not in the least bit wet. Where had these hysterical women come from? Were they even part of this whole hydra-blue-eruption scenario?

Suddenly, it hit me. These women had been on the front lines. They had been plunged from a serene, everyday drive next to an ordi-nary cement wall to the hydra-blue monster jolting out at them from plumbing hell. A loudmouth woman wearing a loud yellow hat yelled at me to move to the other side. I bluntly told her, “No.” I was met with cold stares from the group of frenzied survivors—all in shock from one glance at the hydra-blue hell. On second thought, I decided that moving was a really good idea—and I jumped up and ran out of the hysterical “warming center.”

Looking down the hill at Hubbard’s Cave, it seemed that the water level had gone down. A very short and very gruff man reported to some boss on a radio. “Yeah… thirty-six inch water main… “ As it turns out, Hercules had been sent to kill the Hydra. Unlike in the original hero of this ancient myth, the modern Hercules was an army of short, gruff men—carrying giant crescent wrenches. This Blue Hydra’s multi-headed roar also sprouted two heads for every one head the Hercules army tried to cut off.

Finally, the Hydra heads were successfully decapitated. The monster receded. The water stopped. The swirling, man-made river began to turn back into puddles. As I stood at the top of the hill, looking down at the disaster scene, I was shaking with chills. Something snapped in my head and all I could think of was that I just wanted to get back into my car and drive home.

What happened next, well, I cannot really explain except to say that I was in shock. People do odd things when they are under stress, traumatized, hysterical; I am certainly no exception to this. Suddenly, I ran down the muddy hill. I jumped down the cement wall, waded back through the water and headed back into the tunnel. The cars that had been blocking my car from behind were backing up and

I had been stopped in the tunnel for about ten minutes. As I glanced around at the bright lights, the cement walls, the disgusted drivers around me and the down at the road surface, I noticed a tiny trickle of water running down between the cars. This struck me as odd because it was a clear night—brisk but no precipitation. Suddenly, the trickle turned into a puddle—then more puddles. The puddles rose higher. Then, the water began trickling into the floor of my car. Puddles formed around my feet. I started to panic and leaned out of the window, in an attempt to get a better view of the activities ahead.

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driving out—and that’s what I wanted to do. Just drive home. I ran. The cars I passed were a blur. I climbed into my car through the win-dow, sitting down on an icy puddle in the bucket seat.

I thought that I could get my car started if I gunned it. Just thrust enough gas through the system to blow all the water out—but I knew I only had, at best, one shot. So, I took the shot—turned the key, blasted the gas petal down and revved up the engine like a rocket. I threw it in reverse and spun around through the water—magically turning my dream-car into a boat. A group of firemen cheered as I bolted out of the tunnel—driving the wrong way down the express-way and up the freeway ramp.

Flash and sputter. The dashboard started blinking like Christmas tree lights and the engine went cold. Shaking like a leaf, I was stuck in the middle of the street. With my adrenalin sinking down, hypo-thermia was finally setting in. My car was facing the wrong way on a one-way street and electrical shorts popped all over. I began shak-ing with chills. Not a soul was in sight. On the floor and seat of the car, puddles of water were freezing around me. Although I was just a few blocks from downtown and a few miles from my studio, no cabs or buses or anyone was around.

I tried pushing my car, but when I began to shake uncontrollably, I quickly jumped back inside. A police car pulled up and the cop asked me what on earth I thought I was doing. I told him that I was… “Baking a cake for my Grandma’s birthday. What the hell does it look like I’m doing, Officer?” He laughed at me. I was so cold that as I jumped out of my car—waving my arms—and then, I cracked in two.

I called the cop every filthy word that I know. I screamed at him to please arrest me so that I could get to the back of his nice warm squad car. He refused to arrest me and laughed, but did allow me to sit in his backseat. Eventually, a lovely man from The Chicago Water Department named Angel gave me a ride home. I soaked for hours in a bubbly-hot tub of water.Although the Hydra Blue monster had been temporarily subdued, in the weeks after this incident I met an equally rotten monster—the Chicago legal system. After contacting several lawyers, who dis-missed me as a crackpot, I went it alone or pro se to file a complaint

with the Chicago City Clerks office—only to find there was no City Clerk at that time. The City Clerk, Mr. James Laski, had just been arrested in “The Hired Trucks” corruption scandal. I did not have the money to file the lawsuit, so I filed an “Order to Sue or Defend as an Indigent Person, form # CCG N689 C-30M-6/27/0.” In forma pauperis. In a matter of a few short days, I was not only left without a car but was considered, legally, a pro se crackpot, a pauper and without an official person with whom to file the paperwork.

In my effort to gather facts for my lawsuit against the City of Chi-cago, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Chicago Water Department. This request inquired into the specifics of the infrastructure, the rotten underpinnings, which had gone so terribly wrong on that disastrous night. I called office after office at the Wa-ter Department, trying to find out with whom I should file the Free-dom of Information request. The Water Department people acted strangely unhelpful. When I caught a glance of the evening news, I realized why.

“Federal prosecutors announced Wednesday that an investigation shows that Colombian drug lords were operating in the Chicago Water Department.” The mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, was shown on TV responding to this arrest by saying, “Heroin is all over. People sell heroin all over. People ... it doesn’t matter, could be a public employee, a private employee. People are selling heroin right now out on the streets.” TV reporters asked Daley if he was embar-rassed by the arrest. “No,” he replied, “I didn’t sell it.”

OK, so the mayor of Chicago was not selling heroin. Surrounded by scandals, I was more than apprehensive. As my day in court ap-proached, I began to realize that I was dealing with much more than just a bunch of bureaucratic plumbers. I was not, however, quite prepared for the City of Chicago attorney that was assigned to my case.As I sat patiently in the courtroom waiting for the hearing, a spunky woman ran up and sat down right next to me. “You don’t need a car,” she mumbled in my left ear. I turned toward the woman with a blank stare. “We know where you live,” she continued to mumble into my shoulder blade and lean up against my face. “What?” I looked down at her stack of paperwork and back up to her face. She was not looking me in the eye. “We know where you live and you don’t need

a car,” she shuffled her papers and didn’t bat an eye. “Who are you?’ I asked, quickly scooting away from her. I looked her over, thinking maybe she was some kind of courtroom lunatic. She identified herself as the lawyer for the City of Chicago and leaned in closer to me. “We know where you live,” she repeated. I glanced over at my friend that had accompanied me to court. He had heard her and his eyes were bulging in disbelief. I snapped, “Who are you, again? Al Capone’s niece?” “You don’t need a car,” she repeated herself, again. “Really? You don’t need shoes. And you don’t need to sit next to me!” I started yelling and moved down the pew, away from her.

This city lawyer lady just would not stop. She had a limited script and was stuck. “We know where you live.” At this point, I had had it. Really. I thought about what my ex-landlord, a Chicago-Bridgeport native that grew up around city workers might say to this sneaky type of warning. I raised my voice, “OK, you know where I live. When ya comin’ over? Do you like coffee? Should I put some coffee on for when you come over?” She stood up and sat on the other side of the aisle.

When we stood in front of the judge, the city lawyer suddenly became very spiritual, connected to the earth, Mother Nature and the forces of Gods. The Hydra Blue Explosion of Hubbard’s Cave incident had occurred several weeks after Hurricane Katrina, and natural disaster was fresh on everyone’s mind. However, on the cat-astrophic night in question it was not raining near Hubbard’s Cave, it was not windy, there were no tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes or snowstorms. There had been a drop in temperature, but this is au-tumn in Chicago—a place where temperatures drop severely at this time every year. It’s called winter. “Your Honor,” the spunky city lawyer began her spiel, “We would ask this case be dismissed because it was obviously just an Act of God.” “God? An Act of God?” I was horrified, “Your Honor, I’m not familiar with all the world’s religions and all the world’s Gods, but I do not think there is a God of Plumbing. There is no God of the Water Pipes and, quite frankly, I don’t think that we should start such a reli-gion now.” The judge laughed. My case was legally lumped together with the other people who had been involved in the incident.The city settled. We met outside the courtroom to fill out the final paperwork that I needed to get my money. I was not alone—the

man was there from the tunnel that had been struggling to save his African drums. The city attorney gave a parting speech to us, “You know, if this case had gone to trial you would have lost. We won a another case like this up north by proving the Chicago water system is a miracle of modern engineering—” I jumped on top of her words, “Could we just go back down to the Hubbard’s Cave, because there are no miracles of modern engineering down there. Only a modern nightmare.”

Pointing into this modern cave is a major water main carrying mil-lions of gallons of water to millions of people in the city of Chicago. These convoluted underpinnings are a precariously layered maize with slabs of cement, drains, pumps, and elbow joints poking above the freeze line, which need to cross a ten-lane interstate at precisely the point that the expressway dips under a major rail system. In a nutshell, it is a badly made world. As the attorney handed me the paperwork, our eyes finally met. She knew where I lived—Chica-go—a city strattled atop a 120-year-old, rotten water monster. It lies beneath us, waiting to explode.

“Federal prosecutors announced Wednesday that an investigation shows that Colombian drug lords were operating in the Chicago Water Department.” The mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, was shown on TV responding to this arrest by saying, “Heroin is all over. People sell heroin all over. People ... it doesn’t matter, could be a public employee, a private employee. People are selling heroin right now out on the streets.” TV reporters asked Daley if he was embarrassed by the arrest. “No,” he replied, “I didn’t sell it.”

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THE OLigARCH

S’ ESCApE pLA

n

bY Michael Hudson

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the economy for which national economic policy is being formu-

lated these days.

The Obama-Geithner plan to restart the Bubble Economy’s debt

growth so as to inflate asset prices by enough to pay off the debt

overhang out of new “capital gains” cannot possibly work. But that

is the only trick these ponies know. We have entered an era of as-

set-price deflation, not inflation. Economic data charts throughout

the world have hit a wall and every trend has been plunging verti-

cally downward since last autumn. U.S. consumer prices experi-

enced their fastest plunge since the Great Depression of the 1930s,

along with consumer “confidence,” international shipping, real es-

tate and stock market prices, oil and the exchange rate for British

sterling. The global economy is falling into depression, and cannot

recover until debts are written down.

Instead of doing this, the government is doing just the opposite.

It is proposing to take bad debts onto the public-sector balance

sheet, printing new Treasury bonds give the banks – bonds whose

interest charges will have to be paid by taxing labor and industry.

The OlIgARChy’S plAnS FOR A bAIlOuT (AT leAST OF ITS OWn FInAnCIAl pOSITIOn)

In periods of looming collapse, wealthy elites protect their funds.

In times past they bought gold when currencies started to weaken.

(Patriotism never has been a characteristic of cosmopolitan finance

capital.) Since the 1950s the International Monetary Fund has

made loans to support Third World exchange rates long enough to

subsidize capital flight. In the United States over the past half-year,

bankers and Wall Street investors have tapped the Treasury and

Federal Reserve to support prices of their bad loans and finan-

cial gambles, buying out or guaranteeing $12 trillion of these junk

debts. Protection for the U.S. financial elite thus takes the form of

domestic public debt, not foreign currency.

It is all in vain as far as the real economy is concerned. When the

Treasury gives banks newly printed government bonds in “cash for

trash” swaps, it leaves today’s unpayably high private-sector debt

in place. All that happens is that this debt is now owed to (or guar-

anteed by) the government, which will have to impose taxes to pay

the interest charges.

The new twist is a variant on the IMF “stabilization” plans that

lend money to central banks to support their currencies – for long

enough to enable local oligarchs and foreign investors to move

their savings and investments offshore at a good exchange rate.

The currency then is permitted to collapse, enabling currency

speculators to rake in enough gains to empty out the central bank’s

reserves. Speculators view these central bank holdings as a target

to be raided – the larger the better. The IMF will lend a central

bank, say, $10 billion to “support the currency.” Domestic holders

will flee the currency at a high exchange rate. Then, when the loan

proceeds are depleted, the currency plunges. Wages are squeezed

in the usual IMF austerity program, and the economy is forced to

earn enough foreign exchange to pay back the IMF.

Mr. Obama’s “recovery” plan, based on infrastructure spending, will make real estate fortunes for well-situated properties along the new public transport routes, but there is no sign of cities levying a windfall property tax to save their finances. Their mayors would rather keep the cities broke than to tax real estate and finance. The aim is to re-inflate property markets to enable owners to pay the banks, not to help the public sector break even. So state and local pension plans will remain underfunded while more corporate pension plans go broke.

The financial “wealth creation” game is over. econo-mies emerged from World War II relatively free of debt, but the 60-year global run-up has run its course. Finance capitalism is in a state of collapse, and mar-ginal palliatives cannot revive it. The u.S. economy cannot “inflate its way out of debt,” because this would collapse the dollar and end its dreams of global empire by forcing foreign countries to go their own way. There is too little manufacturing to make the economy more “competitive,” given its high housing costs, transportation, debt and tax overhead. A quar-ter to a third of u.S. real estate has fallen into nega-tive equity, so no banks will lend to them. The econ-omy has hit a debt wall and is falling into negative equity, where it may remain for as far as the eye can see until there is a debt write-down.

Mr. Obama’s “recovery” plan, based on infrastructure spending,

will make real estate fortunes for well-situated properties along

the new public transport routes, but there is no sign of cities levy-

ing a windfall property tax to save their finances. Their mayors

would rather keep the cities broke than to tax real estate and

finance. The aim is to re-inflate property markets to enable owners

to pay the banks, not to help the public sector break even. So state

and local pension plans will remain underfunded while more corpo-

rate pension plans go broke.

One would think that politicians would be willing to do the math

and realize that debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. But the debts

are being kept on the books, continuing to extract interest to pay

the creditors that have made the bad loans. The resulting debt

deflation threatens to keep the economy in depression until a radi-

cal shift in policy occurs – a shift to save the “real” economy, not

just the financial sector and the wealthiest 10 per cent of American

families.

There is no sign that Mr. Obama’s economic advisors, Treasury

officials and heads of the relevant Congressional committees rec-

ognize the need for a write-down. After all, they have been placed

in their positions precisely because they do not understand that

debt leveraging is a form of economic overhead, not real “wealth

creation.” But their tunnel vision is what makes them “reliable” to

Wall Street, which doesn’t like surprises. And the entire charac-

ter of today’s financial crisis continues to be labeled “surprising”

and “unexpected” by the press as each new surprisingly pessi-

mistic statistic hits the news. It’s safe to be surprised; suspicious

to have expected bad news and being a “premature doomsayer.”

One must have faith in the system above all. And the system was

the Greenspan Bubble. That is why “Ayn Rand Alan” was put in

charge in the first place, after all.

So the government tries to recover the happy Bubble Economy

years by getting debt growing again, hoping to re-inflate real

estate and stock market prices. That was, after all, the Golden

Age of finance capital’s world of using debt leverage to bid up the

book-price of fictitious capital assets. Everyone loved it as long as

it lasted. Voters thought they had a chance to become millionaires,

and approved happily. And at least it made Wall Street richer than

ever before – while almost doubling the share of wealth held by

the wealthiest 1 per cent of America’s families. For Washington

policy makers, they are synonymous with “the economy” – at least

Introduction

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As a condition for getting this kind of IMF “support,” governments

are told to run a budget surplus, cut back social spending, lower

wages and raise taxes on labor so as to squeeze out enough ex-

ports to repay the IMF loans. But inasmuch as this kind “stabiliza-

tion plan” cripples their domestic economy, they are obliged to sell

off public infrastructure at distress prices – to foreign buyers who

themselves borrow the money. The effect is to make such countries

even more dependent on less “neoliberalized” economies.

Latvia is a poster child for this kind of disaster. Its recent agree-

ment with Europe is a case in point. To help the Swedish banks

withdraw their funds from the sinking ship, EU support is con-

ditional on Latvia’s government agreeing to cut salaries in the

private sector – and not to raise property taxes (currently almost

zero).

The problem is that Latvia, like other post-Soviet economies, has

scant domestic output to export. Industry throughout the former

Soviet Union was torn up and scrapped in the 1990s. (Welcome to

victorious finance capitalism, Western-style.) What they had was

real estate and public infrastructure free of debt – and hence, avail-

able to be pledged as collateral for loans to finance their imports.

Ever since its independence from Russia in 1991, Latvia has paid

for its imported consumer goods and other purchases by borrowing

mortgage credit in foreign currency from Scandinavian and other

banks. The effect has been one of the world’s biggest property

bubbles – in an economy with no means of breaking even except

by loading down its real estate with more and more debt. In prac-

tice the loans took the form of mortgage borrowing from foreign

banks to finance a real estate bubble – and their import dependen-

cy on foreign suppliers.

So instead of helping it and other post-Soviet nations develop self-

reliant economies, the West has viewed them as economic oysters

to be broken up to indebt them in order to extract interest charges

and capital gains, leaving them empty shells. This policy crested

on January 26, 2009, when Joaquin Almunia of the European Com-

mission wrote a letter to Latvia’s Prime Minister spelling out the

terms on which Europe will bail out the Swedish and other foreign

banks operating in Latvia – at Latvia’s own expense:

“Extended assistance is to be used to avoid a balance of payments

crisis, which requires … restoring confidence in the banking sector

[now entirely foreign owned], and bolstering the foreign reserves of

the Bank of Latvia. This implies financing … outstanding govern-

ment debt repayments (domestic and external). And if the bank-

ing sector were to experience adverse events, part of the assistance

would be used for targeted capital infusions or appropriate short-

term liquidity support. However, financial assistance is not meant to

be used to originate new loans to businesses and households. …

… it is important not to raise ungrounded expectations among the

general public and the social partners, and, equally, to counter mis-

understandings that may arise in this respect. Worryingly, we have

witnessed some recent evidence in Latvian public debate of calls

for part of the financial assistance to be used inter alia for promot-

ing export industries or to stimulate the economy through increased

spending at large. It is important actively to stem these mispercep-

tions.”

Riots broke out in February, and protesters stormed the Latvian

Treasury. Hardly surprising! There is no attempt to help Latvia de-

velop the export capacity to cover its imports. After the domestic

kleptocrats, foreign banks and investors have removed their funds

from the economy, the Latvian lat will be permitted to depreciate.

Foreign buyers then can come in and pick up local assets on the

cheap once again.

The practice of European banks riding the crest of the post-Soviet

real estate bubble is backfiring to wreck the European economies

that have engaged in this predatory lending to neighboring econo-

mies as well. As one reporter has summarized:

“In Poland 60 percent of mortgages are in Swiss francs. The zloty

has just halved against the franc. Hungary, the Balkans, the Baltics,

and Ukraine are all suffering variants of this story. As an act of

collective folly – by lenders and borrowers – it matches America’s

sub-prime debacle. There is a crucial difference, however. European

banks are on the hook for both. US banks are not. Almost all East

bloc debts are owed to West Europe, especially Austrian, Swedish,

Greek, Italian, and Belgian banks.”

This was the West’s alternative to Stalinism. It did not help these

countries emulate how Britain and America got rich by protection-

ist policies and publicly nurtured industrialization and infrastruc-

ture spending. Rather, the financial rape and industrial dismantling

of the former Soviet economies was the most recent exercise in

Western colonialism. At least U.S. investors were smart enough to

stand clear and merely ride the stock market run-up before jump-

ing ship.

But now, the government’s plan to “save” the economy is to “save

the banks,” along similar lines to the West trying to save its banks

from their adventure in the post-Soviet economies. This is the basic

neoliberal economic plan, after all. The U.S. economy is about to be

“post-Sovietized.”

The u.S. gIveAWAy TO bAnkS, MASqueRADIng AS “help FOR TROubleD hOMeOWneRS”

The Obama bank bailout is arranged much like an IMF loan to sup-

port the exchange rate of foreign currency, but with the Treasury

supporting financial asset prices for U.S. banks and other financial

institutions. Instead of banks and oligarchs abandoning the dol-

lar, the aim is to enable them to dump their bad mortgages and

CDOs and get domestic Treasury bonds. Private-sector debt will be

moved onto the U.S. Government balance sheet, where “taxpay-

ers” will bear losses – mainly labor not Wall Street, inasmuch as

the financial sector has been freed of income-tax liability by the

“small print” in last fall’s Paulson-Bush bailout package. But at

least the U.S. Government is handling the situation entirely in do-

mestic dollars.

As in Third World austerity programs, the effect of keeping the

debts in place at the “real” economy’s expense will be to shrink

the domestic U.S. market – while providing opportunities for hedge

funds to pick up depreciated assets cheaply as the federal govern-

ment, states and cities sell them off. This is called letting the banks

“earn their way out of debt.” It’s strangling the “real” economy,

because not a dollar of the government’s response has been de-

voted to reducing the overall debt volume.

Take the much-vaunted [$75] billion program designed to renegoti-

ate mortgages downward for “troubled homeowners.” Upon closer

examination it turns out that the real beneficiaries are the giant

leading banks such as Citibank and Bank of America that have

made the bad loans. The Treasury will take on the bad debt that

banks are stuck with, and will permit mortgagees to renegotiate

their monthly payment down to 38 per cent of their income. But

rather than the banks taking the loss as they should do for over-

lending, the Treasury itself will make up the difference – and pay

it to the banks so that they will be able to get what they hoped to

get. The hapless mortgage-burdened family stuck in their nega-

tive-equity home turns out to be merely a passive vehicle for the

Treasury to pass debt relief on to the commercial banks.

Few news stories have made this clear, but the Financial Times

spelled the details buried in small print. It added that the Treasury

has not yet decided whether to write down the debt principal for

the estimated 15 million families with negative equity (and perhaps

30 million by this time next year as property prices continue to

plunge). No doubt a similar deal will be made: For every $100,000

of write-down in debt owed by over-mortgaged homeowners, the

bank will receive $100,000 from the Treasury. Government debt

will rise by $100,000, and the process will continue until the Trea-

sury has transferred [$75,000,000] to the banks that made the reck-

less loans.

There is enough for just 500,000 of these renegotiations of $100,000

each. It may seem like a big amount, but it’s only about 1/30th of

the properties underwater. Hardly enough to make much of a dent,

but the principle has been put in place for many further bailouts.

It will take almost an infinity of them, as long as the Treasury tries

to support the fiction that “the miracle of compound interest” can

be sustained for long. The economy may be dead by the time saner

economic understanding penetrates the public consciousness.

In the mean time, bad private-sector debt will be shifted onto the

government’s balance sheet. Interest and amortization currently

owed to the banks will be replaced by obligations to the U.S. Trea-

sury. Taxes will be levied to make up the bad debts with which

the government is stuck. The “real” economy will pay Wall Street

– and will be paying for decades!

Calling the $12 trillion giveaway to bankers a “subprime crisis”

makes it appear that bleeding-heart liberals got Fannie Mae and

Freddie Mac into trouble by insisting that these public-private

institutions make irresponsible loans to the poor. The party line

is, “Blame the victim.” But we know this is false. The bulk of bad

loans are concentrated in the largest banks. It was Countrywide

and other banksters that led the irresponsible lending and brought

heavy-handed pressure on Fannie Mae. Most of the nation’s small-

er, local banks didn’t make such reckless loans. The big mortgage

Calling the $12 trillion giveaway to bankers a “subprime crisis” makes it appear that bleeding-heart liberals got Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into trouble by insisting that these public-private institutions make irresponsible loans to the poor. The party line is, “Blame the victim.” But we know this is false. The bulk of bad loans are concentrated in the largest banks. It was Countrywide and other banksters that led the irresponsible lending and brought heavy-handed pressure on Fannie Mae. Most of the nation’s smaller, local banks didn’t make such reckless loans. The big mortgage shops didn’t care about loan quality, because they were run by salesmen. The Treasury is paying off the gamblers and billionaires by supporting the value of bank loans, investments and derivative gambles, leaving the Treasury in debt.

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shops didn’t care about loan quality, because they were run by

salesmen. The Treasury is paying off the gamblers and billionaires

by supporting the value of bank loans, investments and derivative

gambles, leaving the Treasury in debt.

U.S./POST-SOVIET CONVERGENCE?

It may be time to look once again at what Larry Summers and

his Rubinomics gang did in Russia in the mid-1990s and to Third

World countries during his tenure as World Bank economist to see

what kind of future is being planned for the U.S. economy over the

next few years. Throughout the Soviet Union the neoliberal model

established “equilibrium” in a way that involved demographic col-

lapse: shortening life spans, lower birth rates, alcoholism and drug

abuse, psychological depression, suicides, bad health, unemploy-

ment and homelessness for the elderly (the neoliberal mode of

Social Security reform).

Back in the 1970s, people speculated whether the US and Soviet

economies were converging. Throughout the 20th century, of

course, everyone expected government regulation, infrastructure

investment and planning to increase. It looked like the spread of

democratically elected governments would go hand in hand with

people voting in their own economic interest to raise living stan-

dards, thereby closing the inequality gap.

This is not the kind of convergence that has occurred since 1991.

Government power is being dismantled, living standards have

stagnated and wealth is concentrating at the top of the economic

pyramid. Economic planning and resource allocation has passed

into the hands of Wall Street, whose alternative to Hayek’s “road

to serfdom” is debt peonage for the economy at large. There does

need to be a strong state, to be sure, to keep the financial and real

estate rentier power in place. But the West’s alternative to the old

Soviet bureaucracy is a financial planning. In place of a political

overhead, we have a financial and real estate overhead.

Stalinist Russia and Maoist China achieved high technology with-

out land-rent, monopoly rent and interest overhead. This purg-

ing of rentier income was the historical task of classical political

economy, and it became that of socialism. The aim was to create a

Clean Slate financially, bringing prices in line with technologically

necessary costs of production. The aim was to provide everyone

with the fruits of their labor rather than letting banks and landlords

siphon off the economic surplus.

Ideas of economic efficiency and “wealth creation” today are an

utterly different kind of liberalism and “free markets.” Commercial

banks lend money not to increase production but to inflate asset

prices. Some 70 per cent of bank loans are mortgage loans for real

estate, and most of the rest is for corporate takeovers and raids, to

finance stock buy-backs or simply to pay dividends. Asset-price in-

flation obliges people to go deeper into debt than ever before to ob-

tain access to housing, education and medical care. The economy

is being “financialized,” not industrialized. This has been the plan

as much for the post-Soviet states as for North America, Western

Europe and the Third World.

But we are far from having reached the end of the line. Celebrations that our present financialized economy represents the “end of history” are laughingly premature. Today’s policies look more like a dead end. But that does not mean that, like the Roman Empire, they won’t lead us down toward a new Dark Age. That’s what tends to happen when oligarchies do the planning.

But we are far from having reached the end of the line. Celebra-

tions that our present financialized economy represents the “end

of history” are laughingly premature. Today’s policies look more

like a dead end. But that does not mean that, like the Roman Em-

pire, they won’t lead us down toward a new Dark Age. That’s what

tends to happen when oligarchies do the planning.

IS AMeRICA A FAIleD eCOnOMy?

It may be time to ask whether neoliberal pro-rentier economics has

turned America and the West into a Failed Economy. Is there really

no alternative? Have the neoliberals made the shift of planning

from governments to the financial oligarchy irreversible?

Let’s first dispose of the “foundation myth” of the idea still guiding

the United States and Europe. Free-market economists pretend

that prices can be brought into line most efficiently with tech-

nologically necessary costs of production under capitalism, and

indeed, under finance capitalism. The banks and stock market are

supposed to allocate resources most efficiency. That at least is

the dream of self-regulating markets. But today it looks like only

a myth, public relations patter talk to get a generation of increas-

ingly indebted voters not to act in their own self-interest.

Industrial capitalism always has been a hybrid, a symbiosis with its

feudal legacy of absentee property ownership, oligarchic finance

and public debts rather than the government acting as net credi-

tor. The essence of feudalism was extractive, not productive. That

is why it created industrial capitalism as state policy in the first

place – if only to increase its war-making powers. But the question

must now be raised as to whether only socialism can complete the

historical task that classical political economy set out for itself – the

ideal that futurists in the 19th and 20th centuries believed that an

unpurified capitalism might still be able bring about without shed-

ding its legacy of commercial banking indebting property and carv-

ing infrastructure out of the public domain.

Today it is easier to see that the Western economies cannot go on

the way they have been. They have reached the point where the

debts exceed the ability to pay. Instead of recognizing this fact and

scaling debts back into line with the ability to pay, the Obama-

Geithner plan is to bail out the big banks and hedge funds, keep-

ing the volume of debt in place and indeed, growing once again

through the “magic of compound interest.” The result can only be

an increasingly extractive economy, until households, real estate

and industrial companies, states and cities, and the national gov-

ernment itself is driven into debt peonage.

The alternative is a century and a half old, and emerged out of the

ideals of the classical economic doctrines of Adam Smith, David

Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and the last great classical economist,

Marx. Their common denominator was to view rent and interest

are extractive, not productive. Classical political economy and its

successor Progressive Era socialism sought to nationalize the land

(or at least to fully tax its rent as the fiscal base). Governments

were to create their own credit, not leave this function to wealthy

elites via a bank monopoly on credit creation. So today’s neoliberal-

ism paints a false picture of what the classical economists envi-

sioned as free markets. They were markets free of economic rent

and interest (and taxes to support an aristocracy or oligarchy).

Socialism was to free economies from these overhead charges.

Today’s Obama-Geithner rescue plan is just the reverse.

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished

Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC),

he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The

Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002)

He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com

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“I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad,” said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.

In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in “pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills” to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering.

Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few visible signs of government work on Baghdad’s infrastructure is a tireless attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later.

Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defense Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet heli-copters too obsolete to fly and armored cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. Iraqi officials were blamed for the theft, but US military officials were largely in control of the Defense Ministry at the time and must have been either highly negligent or participants in the fraud.

American federal investigators are now starting an inquiry into the actions of senior US officers involved in the program to rebuild Iraq, according to The New York Times, which cites interviews with senior government officials and court documents. Court records reveal that, in January, investigators subpoenaed the bank records of Colonel Anthony B Bell, now retired from the US Army, but who was previously responsible for contracting for the reconstruction effort in 2003 and 2004. Two federal officials are cited by the paper as saying that inves-tigators are also looking at the activities of Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald W Hirtle of the US Air Force, who was senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004. It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, who have both said they have nothing to hide.

The end of the Bush administration which launched the war may give fresh impetus to investigations into frauds in which tens of billions of dollars were spent on reconstruction with little being built that could be used. In the early days of the occupation, well-connected Republi-cans were awarded jobs in Iraq, regardless of experience. A 24-year-old from a Republican family was put in charge of the Baghdad stock exchange which had to close down because he allegedly forgot to renew the lease on its building.

In the expanded inquiry by federal agencies, the evidence of a small-time US businessman called Dale C. Stoffel who was murdered after leaving the US base at Taiji north of Baghdad in 2004 is being re-examined. Before he was killed, Mr Stoffel, an arms dealer and contractor, was granted limited immunity from prosecution after he had provided information that a network of bribery – linking companies and US officials awarding contracts – existed within the US-run Green Zone in Baghdad. He said bribes of tens of thousands of dollars were regularly delivered in pizza boxes sent to US contracting officers.

So far, US officers who have been successfully prosecuted or un-masked have mostly been involved in small-scale corruption. Often sums paid out in cash were never recorded. In one case, an American soldier put in charge of reviving Iraqi boxing gambled away all the mon-ey but he could not be prosecuted because, although the money was certainly gone, nobody had recorded if it was $20,000 or $60,000.

Iraqi ministers admit the wholesale corruption of their government. Ali Allawi, the former finance minister, said Iraq was “becoming like Nigeria in the past when all the oil revenues were stolen”. But there has also been a strong suspicion among senior Iraqis that US officials must have been complicit or using Iraqi appointees as front-men in corrupt deals. Several Iraqi officials given important jobs at the urging of the US administration in Baghdad were inexperienced. For instance, the arms procurement chief at the centre of the Defence Ministry scandal, was a Polish-Iraqi, 27 years out of Iraq, who had run a pizza restaurant on the outskirts of Bonn in the 1990s.

In many cases, contractors never started or finished facilities they were supposedly building. As security deteriorated in Iraq from the summer of 2003 it was difficult to check if a contract had been completed. But the failure to provide electricity, water and sewage disposal during the US occupation was crucial in alienating Iraqis from the post-Saddam regime.

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspec-tor General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme.

Remember Iraq?

Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

By Patrick Cockburn

Reprinted from the internet

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Ben Speckmann

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Ben Speckmann

Over the last several years, I’ve found myself increasingly

fascinated the public’s views on health and fitness. As we

become more aware of the health risks from fast food and

unhealthy eating, do we simply choose not to eat it as of-

ten, if at all? As I’ve wandered through our lovely city over

the last five years, I’ve only noticed more fast food chains

opening up at every corner. As the consumers, we must

ask ourselves two very important questions. Why do we

need to have so many of these restaurants in such a close

proximity? When is enough, enough?

My work is a study of the convenience and excessive

amount of fast food within our grasp in Chicago. I chose

one fast food chain and examined how many I could

reach on foot from sunrise until sunset. At each location

I reached, I would eat or drink one item from their menu

and then take a (color) photograph. I was able to walk to

twenty-three locations in total, three of which were closed

since it was Sunday.

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JUAN GONZALEZ: President-elect Barack Obama nominated Shaun

Donovan to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

One of Donovan’s main challenges will be dealing with the foreclosure

crisis. An estimated 2.5 million homes have been foreclosed this year.

One of the hardest-hit states has been Florida. Over 40,000 homes

have been foreclosed in Miami-Dade County alone.

One grassroots group in Miami called Take Back the Land has

launched a campaign to help some of the victims of the foreclosure cri-

sis. The group, led by activist Max Rameau, has been helping homeless

families illegally move into vacant homes that have been foreclosed.

Two years ago, Rameau helped build the Umoja Village Shantytown

that housed hundreds of homeless men and women. He is the author

of the book Take Back the Land: Land Gentrification and the Umoja

Village Shantytown.

AMY GOODMAN: Max Rameau joins us now from Miami. We wel-

come you to Democracy Now! Max, tell us exactly what you’re doing

right now to deal with the foreclosure crisis.

MAX RAMEAU: Well, there are a lot of vacant homes in Miami, and so

this is creating all kinds of problems in our community. But the worst

thing is that there’s all these vacant homes while there are people liter-

ally across the street sometimes sleeping in parks and in empty lots.

So, Take Back the Land is identifying vacant government-owned and

foreclosed homes. We’re going into them, we’re cleaning them up, and

we’re moving homeless families into those homes so that they have a

place to stay.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Max, back in the 1970s, there was a similar prob-

lem with a lot of federally owned houses after the big FHA mortgage

crisis. And there were squatters’ movements around the country.

What’s been the reaction of local officials to this movement that you’ve

started?

MAX RAMEAU: Well, we haven’t had a whole lot of reaction. Up until

last week, there was really no reaction at all. And, of course, people

were aware of what we were doing when we started this in October

of 2007. We did so very openly and very publicly, and we had a big

feature in the local newspaper about it, so that it wasn’t like we were

keeping this secret or anything, and our activities were very well

known.

However, last weekend, one of the homes that we moved a family in,

this family identified themselves publicly and has done media and did

not conceal their identity at all. The police chief of the city of Miami did

send over two officers last week to check on the house and to look

around in order to advance his own investigation of what was happen-

ing, and we had to respond to questions about what was going on.

But I will say that I think the crisis is at such a level right now that I

don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot of public appetite for the

police doing a widespread crackdown on this kind of thing, given the

fact that there are a whole lot of people who need homes, there’s a

whole lot of empty homes, and there’s a whole lot of money that’s be-

ing shoveled over to the banks. So the banks have all this money, and

they don’t even have to give up the homes. They get both the money

and the homes. So I think that the police are being used as a tool for

the banks so that the banks can keep these places vacant and cash in

on them a little bit later. I don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot of

public sympathy for that position.

AMY GOODMAN: What has been the response overall? The press?

The authorities? And how many people have you found homes for?

MAX RAMEAU: Well, the authorities, we haven’t had much response

from at all, except for that one incident last week, which, you know,

didn’t amount to anything but a fact-finding mission.

The general public has been very responsive to it. Obviously, we go

and we talk to the neighbors before we move people into these homes,

because we’re not only trying to improve the lives of these individuals,

we also want to improve our communities, the communities that, you

know, I live in and that we live in. So we feel that having the neighbors

a part of the process is a very important part of this campaign. And the

general public, I think, supports it, because they recognize that there is

Take Back the Land

Interview with Max Rameau

bY Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez

Illustration by Chad Kouri

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a real crisis here, and these houses are not doing anything good.

I think what’s happening is we’re having a—approaching a real clash

between two rights, or at least perceived rights. One is the right of

human beings to have housing, and the other is the right of corpora-

tions to make a profit. And there’s a clash going on between these

two rights, or perceived rights, and the society is starting to work out

which one it thinks is the most important right. And we are asserting

that the right of human beings to housing supersedes the right of

corporations to make a profit. And I think people are starting to come

to that same conclusion.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the impact on Miami-Dade of this phenom-

enal increase in foreclosures?

MAX RAMEAU: Well, obviously, there’s a lot of people who are hurt-

ing. There’s a lot of families who are being forced out and becoming

homeless or being forced to move in with other relatives. And so,

what’s happening is you have a two-bedroom house that has a family,

you know, couple and the child, and then suddenly a brother or sister

or another child and their children move into the place. There’s a lot

of overcrowding going on. There’s a lot of deterioration of property,

because there’s too many people living there. There’s a lot of people

in really, really desperate situations. And getting a financial break of a

month, two months, six months, eight months, however the time will

be, where they don’t have to pay rent and they can save up money, I

think is a big help.

But this crisis is absolutely devastating, and I think it’s compounded

by the fact that government on every level—the federal, state and

local—has not only failed to do anything to alleviate the crisis, they’ve

actually played a very active role in exacerbating the crisis. And I think

people understand that and are very upset by that. So this has really

been devastating for a lot, a lot of people.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting to see this model being used in

other places. In Cleveland, advocates are working with the city to al-

low homeless people to legally move into and repair empty dilapidated

houses. In Atlanta, some property owners pay homeless people to

live in abandoned homes as a security measure. I’m looking at an AP

piece. Talk about Marie Nadine Pierre, the woman who was sleeping

in a shelter with her child, and the house you moved her into. And we

only have about a minute to go. Describe that situation.

MAX RAMEAU: Well, first of all, a lot of those things are happening

here also in Miami, where homeless people—we have several people

who are in these homes, you know, somewhat protecting them, I

guess, from squatters, by being allowed to move there. Of course,

their status there is still very shaky.

With the shelter system here, once you’re in the homeless assistance

center in Miami for thirty days, the shelter kicks you out for thirty more

days. So, in other words, you go in there for thirty days, they kick you

out, and they say, “You can come back again after you spend thirty

days on the street, if you have nowhere else to go.” And that is exactly

what happened to Marie Nadine Pierre. She got kicked out, and she

contacted us right before she did. And so, the day she got kicked out,

she was moved into a place where she was able to stay herself. So

she would have spent thirty more days on the street, with her and her

children. And luckily, she was able to avoid doing that. Now she’s stay-

ing in a home that otherwise would have been completely and totally

vacant and not doing [inaudible].

AMY GOODMAN: And that house, you know the house well?

MAX RAMEAU: Yes, I do know the house well. In fact, my friends

rented the house out, and the landlord, of course, you know, took out

one of these bogus mortgages, where they, you know, winked at the

mortgage broker and the mortgage broker winked right back. And he

said, “You know, I’m willing to take this mortgage that I know I can’t

afford, if the bank is willing to give me the money.” And, of course, the

bank was more than willing to give them the money.

And so, I’ve been to that house many times visiting friends, and each

one of the residents of that house have volunteered at one point or

another for Take Back the Land. And they were very happy to make

that place available for a family, rather than stay empty so that a bank

can cash in. Lehman Brothers, in fact, owns the house, the Lehman

Brothers corporation, so we’ve been very happy a family got to use it.

/////

Reprinted from Democracy Now

http://www.democracynow.org

Take Back The Land

http://takebacktheland.blogspot.com

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Parsley Flakes is a Chicago-based po-

litical synth-punk band that released

its first 7” Dead Living with Hewhocor-

rupts, Inc. in early 2008. The band

started almost three years ago as stu-

dents at Kent State University in Ohio,

where they developed unique ideas

about community, anarchy, and social

ethics. More precisely, it was then the

three-piece decided they were living in

a racist, sexist, homophobic, wasteful,

violent, painful world that really pissed

them off. Influenced by Crass, Devo

and The Phantom Limbs, Parsley Flakes

plays pop music with radical under-

tones.

LUMPEN: During performances you often wear masks to hide your

faces. What is the significance of anonymity, or re-characterizing your-

selves for the sake of this project?

Maria: At first we wore the masks and gave ourselves fake names

because it was more fun than just being ourselves. We weren’t very

concerned about the music at the beginning; we were more into

being a spectacle. It has sort of reversed now. We are concentrating

more on the music and don’t mind just being ourselves. Originally the

concept had a tie in with revolutionary actions and demonstrations in

which identity is hidden with masks or bandanas.

LUMPEN: What does being a political band entail for you?

Jeff: Flag burning (laughs). Coming from Kent State we got a pretty

tight knit community, an activist community at college. Starting there,

we were in Anti-Racist Action so we would go to political stuff and

break up Nazi rallies. So we started the band and we’d play benefit

shows for ARA so there would be all these political people around

and it was communal. Way more communal than Chicago is for us.

It’s pretty weird, the adjustment to playing shows. It used to be like

we would play because our friends were coming, or it was a benefit,

but now it’s more about the band being the band, and the music we

do, and this is the bill we’re on, or whatever. There was an adjustment

moving here.

LUMPEN: Do you think Chicago is apolitical and too focused on the

fun of the scene?

Jeff: Historically Chicago isn’t apolitical. Labor, anarchy, the demo-

cratic convention, Fred Hampton was murdered here and all that stuff,

so there’s a vast political history. But as far as young people, or people

now… (sighs).

LUMPEN: Hewhocorrupts, Inc. act in a political way. They have the

fake corporation…

Jeff: They definitely have a satire on the corporation. It’s making a

spectacle out of what is true.

LUMPEN: You said when you first started playing it was about the

spectacle, not the music.

Jeff: Yeah, we liked making music, but I used to always wear the ski

mask over my face. It was more about the weird look. We did way

more yelping. I growled. It was more primitive. Now we try to write

some semi halfway decent songs.

LUMPEN: Do the songs have more structure now?

Jeff: They always did but we just take more time to write them. That is

the thing about having a drum machine; you always have a structure.

You can’t just look back at the drummer and say “Hey, let’s feel the

music out!” There’s only so much you can do. We’ve always been ac-

customed to structure.

LUMPEN: Dead Living only has two songs, and you guys only play

about 10 songs total. What are you trying to cover musically?

Jeff: I play pretty classic punk guitar and Maria is pretty versatile on

the keys but her synth is a dirty, pretty distorted sound, but she does

all kinds of melodies. We used to have a basic drum machine and then

Josh came in and does really wild stuff. He is really great at what he

does with the drums. So we stick to those three things and then make

pop songs.

LUMPEN: So when you’re making these pop songs that damn the

system, how do you reconcile participating in it?

Jeff: There is no “outside” to the system. As in, not yet. Even for the

people who are train hoppers or homeless by choice, kids living off

excess, they haven’t created a thing where they own their own land.

Even people who own land still pay taxes. There’s a lot of work. That’s

a major thing for Parsley Flakes. There’s a lot of grey area but you try

to do the best you can. You try and be good. You try to hold to your

ideals.

LUMPEN: How does working with Hewhocorrupts, Inc. help you hold

to these ideals?

Jeff: It’s also a good opportunity for us to try something new. Usually

we destroy corporations from the outside in, via a brick through the

window or something of that nature. Now we get a shot at completely

dismantling a well-run, profitable business from the inside out.

Unmasked

Interview with Parsley Flakes

bY Steve Greco

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3307 S Archer Ave773-927-4301

thevideostrip.com

deliver and pick upbest video rental prices in town

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Kaplan’s Liquors& Lounge960 West 31st Street

found and scanned by aron gent

Artists are welcome to create any type of presentation: floats, movable sculpture, costumes, performances, dioramas, displays, sounds, transportable installations, protests, etc. For more inspiration, take a look at the Chicagoartparade.com