On land, America has surrounded Iran by having troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. At sea, she has dozens of ships, with a permanent naval base in Bahrain. Assassinations linked to Israel and America have happened inside Iran, and American drones have flown over the country, with one shot down. On the economic front, America is leading an oil sanction. So with all this intimidation and threat of violence, this is what our Peace Laureate President has to say, in his recent State of the Union, “We will stand against violence and intimidation.” Here, Obama was referring to Syria, who is yet another victim of our intimidation if not, soon enough, violence.

Without a doubt, America is the world leader in violence and intimidation, and the US, UK and Israel alliance is the true axis of evil, for these countries have been behind so much violence and turmoil for several decades now. They instigate, spearhead, package and sell violence as a normal, day to day business. First in war and looting, they are a much graver threat to world peace than Iran, Syria and North Korea ever were, or could be. Most lives worldwide are untouched and cannot be molested by what’s decided in Tehran, Damascus and Pyongyang, but a mere sneeze in DC, London or Tel Aviv can send scores to the emergency room.

When this empire is over, and it cannot end soon enough, I doubt that it will be remembered for its artistic achievements, for Americans themselves are completely indifferent to all of their artists. Even the highly educated among us would have a very hard time naming a single living American painter, sculptor, composer or poet. Practitioners of meditative forms, they cannot compete with the hyper kinetic seduction of pop music, pop dancing and sports. Americans cannot think about the arts because their minds are crammed with hundreds of athletes.

In his State of the Union, Obama started out by thanking the troops. He praised their teamwork and urged us all to emulate them. This teamwork ethos is inculcated most effectively in sports, for both participants and spectators, but also at the workplace. Now, unity and sacrifice are certainly laudable, but only when they serve honorable goals, which are clearly absent if you happen to be in the US military, occupying a Goldman Sachs cubicle or drawing a paycheck from the Carlyle Group, etc. Soldiers speak often of fighting primarily for each other, and this makes perfect sense once you’re already on the battlefield, but if they would only step back and reflect, a near impossibility in the herd culture of the military, where the highest virtue is abject obedience, they might discover that they are just dumb, stupid animals being used, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger. Hell, they might realize that they are even less than dumb, stupid animals, for an animal’s strongest instinct is safety. Beside a contemporary American GI, I can’t imagine any primate that would volunteer to be shot at just so another SUV could be sold, not even a mouse lemur with a brain weighting just two grams.

As America moves its war pieces into place, the folks back home can watch helmeted pseudo-warriors crash into each other with each play. In our culture, repeated collisions are a primary excitement. The players’ immediate aim is to gain yards, which are carefully tabulated, with the climax happening in an end zone, a goal which, unlike other sports, cannot be crossed by the ball alone, but must be accompanied by one’s own body. This hard fought, much resisted entry is called a touchdown, as if one has been airborne and homeless all this time. In the end time, the blessed among us will be allowed into that final, celestial end zone, where we can whoop it up with a real Touchdown Jesus, Vince Lombardi and Joe Pa. The Cowgirls will shake their pompoms and more, and Billy White Shoes Johnson will do his funky chicken dance.

Meanwhile, on this depleted uranium, corexit, cesium, agent orange and corn syrup mess of an earth, we can look forward to this game on Sunday, where military jets will roar overhead and there will be a huge flag the size of the field itself, with soldiers standing at attention. During the broadcast, troops stationed overseas will be shown so we can all thank them in our hearts for allowing us to watch these simulated wars at home, and when an actual war starts, we can watch that too. Between real and fake wars, car commercials. It’s so exciting, all these wars all the time.

If they get in the way of civilization’s quest for petroleum, lumber, tin, zinc, copper, whatever, they must be killed wholesale, or one by one, as was accomplished by Chris Kyle, currently touring bookstores to promote his American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. Kyle killed 255 “savages,” his term, and can stand before God with a clear conscience, he told Bill O’Reilly, because he was saving American lives. FOX being FOX, the question of why Kyle was in Iraq in the first place was not probed.

With his tunnel vision specialty, teamwork ethics and preoccupation with numbers, Kyle is the quintessential tool in civilization’s machinery. Tasked with long-distance, targeted killing, he performed outstandingly, and is proud of his feats, all carefully quantified. His 160 Pentagon-confirmed kills wipe out the previous American record of 109, held by Delbert F. Waldron, not to mention the relatively puny 93 of Carlos Hathcock. Kyle’s longest shot was 2,100 yards. Though impressively long, yes, very long, it’s dwarfed by the 2,700 yards recorded by one Horse Craig Harrison, a Brit.

Empire is civilization’s greatest efflorescence and final aim. With empire comes the tallest, biggest and longest of everything. Citizens of empire, down to the lowest cog, bathe themselves daily with numbers as a kind of self-congratulation. Counting themselves hoarse to prove that they are, in fact, content, they measure their achievement and happiness with Dow and Nasdaq indexes, inches on flat-screen TVs, cars sold, runs and touchdowns scored by sport heroes, and savages killed by even more heroes. A large number denoting anything, even debt, cheers up denizens of an empire since it is proof of their gigantism. Empires compete to see who can piss the longest and furthest, over the most continents.

What a contrast this is to a primitive nomad, who sees properties as a burden, and thus does not care to count hardly anything. The most extreme example of this is another Amazon tribe, the Pirahã, whose language includes no cardinal numbers at all. They simply can’t count, and have no interest in doing so. American scholar Daniel Everett spent an hour each night for eight months trying to teach them numbers in Portuguese, with zero success, “It was just a fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board.”

Though living on a finite planet, the subjects of empire are indoctrinated into the religion of infinite growth, with anything short of that seen as a major disaster. With their gross appetites, they cannot conceive of a no-growth existence, though that was the economy of man for thousands of years. During the age of fossil fuels, now winding down, this infinite growth formula can appear sane and sustainable, but as oil and gas go scarce, its murderous and suicidal nature will become ever starker, like an innocent girl being burnt at the stake.

Most of the planet must slave and starve, so the anointed few can consume, yet even these lucky buyers must themselves slave, commute long hours and pop  uppers or downers nonstop to afford that Ipod, Ipad and Xbox. Speaking of which, here’s a still relevant insight from Ben Franklin:

Having few artificial wants, they have abundance of leisure for improvement by conversation. Our laborious manner of life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the learning, on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless.

— from his Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America

With social networking, who needs face-to-face conversations? Slaves to bogus needs and virtual thrills, we have become estranged from the real, with our savage instincts, suppressed, flaring up as conceits or pathologies. Often they explode overseas, as the T-shirt says: TRAVEL TO EXOTIC LANDS, MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE THEN KILL THEM.

In an advanced civilization, a nomadic existence, with its hunting pack, can only be approximated in a war, but instead of hunting animals for subsistence, our boys are gunning down people who are merely trying to prevent us from exploiting and humiliating them. With such a dubious reason to kill or be killed, it’s not surprising that many of these soldiers come back home only to kill themselves.

As I write this, the US is encircling, harassing and sabotaging Iran, yet few Americans seem alarmed that for the sake of oil, again, and that increasingly elusive economic growth, their leaders may kill millions and wreck this earth even further, but as their empire convulses and collapses, most Americans will find themselves reduced to the level of those they’ve been annihilating. They will discover that they, too, are just collateral savages.

Our national army is being trained by American forces, American troops, and wherever we have deployed them the Afghan people have welcomed them. We have initiated the fight against narcotics to save our children, to save your children and children across the world from the evil of addiction to drugs.

It’s amazing the Capitol was still standing after these one liners. Need I remind you that Karzai spent much of his adult life on the payroll of the CIA, the world’s biggest drug gang? And that his brother, since assassinated, was a notorious drug dealer? As for the Afghan people’s love for Karzai’s army, it now depends on four times the number of American troops to keep it from disintegrating or being overrun. The night’s biggest howler, however, came when Karzai related this tale about two American soldiers in Kandahar:

Somebody, a terrorist, threw a grenade at them. The grenade landed in their vehicle. They took the grenade. Instead of throwing it into the street where there were people around them, civilians, these heroic men stuck the grenade under their seat. The grenade exploded. Fortunately, they survived. But they were badly injured. To us, this was also an example of heroism and care for humanity, and we are proud of these two American soldiers. These stories tell a tale of partnership, tell a tale of joint struggle, tell a tale of care and courage and care for humanity.

I’m sorry for being skeptical, but in the long an(n)als of propaganda or warfare, I don’t think anyone has ever claimed that a soldier placed a live grenade under his butts (and jewels). It just doesn’t happen, OK? Even if his mother was standing in that crowded street, I doubt he would shove it right there.

As an American puppet, Karzai had to mouth such absurdities, but these jokes wouldn’t go over too well at home, especially as American atrocities avalanched. When even the New York Times had to report that Afghan children were being blown up just for fun by American chopper crews, Karzai had to protest. He couldn’t follow his supposed outrage to its conclusion, however, by demanding that America quit Afghanistan, because if there were no more American troops in Afghanistan, there would also be no more Karzai… in Afghanistan.

Even Karzai’s own vice-president accused him of being a puppet, so as an American stooge, he had to appear as an uber-Afghan. Thus, the lambskin hat, the bright robe, the tunic. No ordinary suit and tie, Allah forbid, as found on the Syrian President, enemy of the West, or just a discount, JC Penney jacket, as draped on the Iranian leader.

Now, a political puppet can certainly outgrow his role. No longer useful, he can be shoved aside or even killed. Conversely, if he feels that he no longer needs his patron, that he has used this support long enough to consolidate his own power, he can also ditch the patron to stand on his own two feet. This, Karzai hasn’t come close to achieve. Quite the reverse. As recent events have proven, Karzai has become even more superfluous.

Karzai’s only justification for being was that he was an alternative to the Taliban, so when the US started to negotiate with these same Taliban, he went berserk, especially as neither sides bothered to bring him into their discussions. Karzai’s indignation changed nothing, however, so now he’s endorsing this rapprochement between his Yankee masters and his political enemy.

To prove that he’s his own puppet, after all, and a nationalist and humanist, to boot, Karzai’s now demanding that the US returns Bagram Prison to Afghanistan. Citing its atrocious human rights abuses, Karzai considers this complex a violation of Afghan sovereignty. Of course, he’s right, but then everything America does in Afghanistan is a violation of Afghan sovereignty, because America shouldn’t be there at all. America’s installation of Hamid Karzai is a violation of Afghan sovereignty.

Since the American invasion, thousands of Afghans have had to suffer indefinite detention without access to a lawyer, often after having been yanked from their home in the middle of the night. Many have been tortured, with some killed in custody. At present, there are over 1,700 prisoners in Bagram. With the National Defense Authorization Act, Americans can now look forward to the same sadistic, inhuman treatment, but who, and how many?

Since there will be no legal presentation or due process, with everything done in secret, you will never know, will you, unless it’s you yourself who are suddenly stripped naked, hung from the ceiling and beaten, forced to endure unbearable cold and to curl up naked on the floor in an empty cell day after day, without any evidence presented whatsoever, with no basis at all for your open-ended suffering but the whims of an empire gone mad.

Somalia, but who’s thinking about Somalia? Yesterday, Americans were burdened with football and a hangover, and in Philadelphia, there was the Mummers Parade, a glorious display of blue collar creativity where plumbers and roofers cross-dressed, played saxophones or banjos, and strutted down Broad Street towards City Hall, the site of Occupy Philly until not that long ago.

Truth be told, the Mummers Parade has gone downhill for a while, ever since its finale was moved into the Convention Center. What was a street carnival became a perfunctory parade, then an indoors performance for a ticketed audience and designed for television. Yesterday’s version was particularly listless, with the crowd thin, mirthless, and many floats recycled from years past. Everyone’s budget’s tight. In October, a Mummers Brigade was even busted for renting its clubhouse to a pimp. During the sting operation, undercover cops found nude women walking around, and sex acts performed in the open. Hey, when you’re broke and no longer making stuff, you have to make money with what’s intrinsic… to your person.

Back to Mohamed Osman Mohamud. Just over a year ago, he was lured and entrapped by the FBI, then accused of plotting to bomb a downtown Christmas celebration in Portland. His FBI handler had recorded their conversations, but during the supposedly incriminating one, where he actually stated his desire to bomb and kill fellow Americans, the recording device conveniently malfunctioned. Remember that during the Bin Laden raid, the helmet-mounted video camera also malfunctioned, which explains, supposedly, why there is not even a single image of that most wanted man during the exciting operation, although a much ballyhooed photo, an “instant classic” according to Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, was produced of Obama, Clinton and other big shots sitting in the White House Situation Room to watch the assassination in real time. I know it doesn’t add up. It never does. The next time an audio or visual recorder goes AWOL, perhaps the CIA or FBI can blame it on the Chinese, since it’s a given that everything is made in China these days, even if, like Apple or Dell, it carries an American label. Here’s a ready to use, cut and paste headline, “Commies Sabotage Evidence Incriminating Muslim Terrorist.”

The key photo or evidence is never available, but the staged, massaged, doctored or clumsily-spun proofs overflow, not that Americans are paying close attention to anything beside Tim Tebow’s statistics and throwing motion. Seeing our government going through so much trouble to frame a young Somali-American fool, I had to conclude that it was part of the buildup to invade Somalia, and so it is happening, with American drones zapping Somalis from above, and Kenyan, Ethiopian, Ugandan and Burundian troops killing Somalis on the ground.

With Libya out of the way and Iraq temporarily pacified, our military-banking complex is turning its attention to Somalia, but why? As usual, it is spun as a fight against terrorists, as if Somalis are eager to butt heads with a ruthless empire. Attacked, they will fight back, of course, as happened in 1992 during “Operation Restore Hope,” now immortalized and cheesified in the film, Black Hawk Down. But what about missionaries, don’t Somalis also kill missionaries just for the hell of it?

Let’s scrutinize one incident. Last February, it was reported that Somali “pirates” hijacked an American yacht and killed four American missionaries, but even US AFRICA ONLINE, “THE AUTHORITATIVE LINK,” admitted that there was a US Navy war ship “shadowing” this yacht as it headed into Somali waters. This war ship was close enough to hear gunshots coming from Quest, the Christian boat, so it promptly killed 14 of these “pirates.” So, yes, Somali Muslims are so crazy, they will shoot at Americans approaching on a warship, even with four Christians stuck to the prow as figureheads. I don’t know about you but, personally, I prefer mermaids.

Washington can brand anyone a terrorist now, as it regularly does with Muslims it wants to attack. Targeting Somalia, the US is again evoking al-Qaeda, terrorism and even a desire to help ordinary Somalis, but the reason, as always, is money, which these days usually means access to oil and natural gas. Did you think it was anything else?

Before the overthrow of Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, he signed over nearly two thirds of Somalia to four US oil companies, Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips, so the world’s biggest and baddest pirate, America, has been trying to reclaim this bounty ever since.

Future observers will be aghast to discover that, as our economy collapses and the country slides into Fascism, our mostly numb and passive population is left to ponder the true identities of cartoon characters and who Jim Carrey is sleeping with. When it comes to putting a population to sleep, North Korea could take a few lessons from the US, and, in fact, many Communist states already have. Don’t ban anything, just suffocate people with nonsense, bombard each brain cell relentlessly with so much tedious “entertainment” that it can no longer think straight.

All governments lie, but empires lie even more voluminously because they have a grander fiction to maintain, as well as a larger and more complex audience to pacify, stroke and sucker. The list of facts and events, recent and historical, that have been airbrushed from American history would occupy thousands of Howard Zinns for thousands of years. In their places, the official, unending bullshit. Wonders of wonders, tallest buildings collapsing at free fall speed, one without being hit by anything, its demise announced before the fact even. Or a murder without corpse of a most wanted target, with the “heroic” hit team conveniently packed into a helicopter, then killed. Nothing is ever explained, because nothing needs to be explained to a well-opiated audience.

I have contended that a hidden agenda of the Occupy Movement’s tent cities, now mostly gone, is to remove oneself from a normal, domesticated environment, with its attendant, non-stop media brainwashing via television, computer and other electronic gadgets. Freed from these insidious and poisonous mediators, one could discover other human beings, one’s neighbors, and oneself, at last. It wasn’t just a sacrifice to endure the elements and poor sanitation to feel solidarity and community. It was also an attraction, an atavistic yearning to see, hear and feel directly, and to jettison all of the soft yet stubborn, plugged-in shackles. As a sign at Zuccotti Park said so well, “FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, I FEEL AT HOME.”

Many inhabitants of these encampments had no other homes, however, so when these tents were cleared out, they had to scramble. In Philadelphia, a group relocated to an out of the way, vacant lot in a distressed neighborhood, then issued this plea to be left alone, “We are not here protesting or to make a statement, we’re homeless. We are sick of being forced to exist alone, sick of being told that shelters, which are not tolerable living facilities for sober people, are an adequate alternative to being “allowed”, by the government, to work, live and share together to create for ourselves […] ”

Forced by necessity or motivated by activism and desire, these tent dwellers will only multiply in the years ahead. Becoming a tribe unto themselves, they will reclaim entire swaths of America. Squatting on land, they will also get a chance to occupy their own minds. There, they will discover that the tucked away answers are already many degrees wiser and saner than the drivel being pumped out daily by their masters of murderous greed and war.

So far, our overlords have not been overly alarmed by our budding awakening and rebellion. Time magazine even gave the movement a pat on the head, with a chuckling reminder that it took the Civil Rights Movement a decade to achieve tangible results, but we don’t have ten years to chip and dally away. The bankers are more entrenched than ever, with the next POTUS, their loyal servant, no different than the last, and don’t bet on Ron Paul being allowed to occupy that ceremonial seat.

The Pentagon’s core budget, as submitted by Peace Laureate Obama, is the biggest ever, though hefty cuts have been applied to Overseas Contingency Operations. Whenever another war starts, however, and who knows how many more we’ll see in 2012, the cash spigot will spill as madly as the blood. Trust me.

It’s another year coming, but I doubt that most Americans feel any sense of renewal. In spite of reassuring or silly headlines, pervasive dread is in the air. The election year will give the Occupy Movement energy and focus, but unless it can sharpen its message and allow exceptional individuals already in its midst to emerge as spokesmen and leaders, it will continue to accomplish merely minor, symbolic victories, as their opponents continue to kill, loot and, yes, laugh in their faces.

The you are a leader, I am a leader mantra is patently nonsense, because it takes a highly intelligent, charismatic and forceful figure to galvanize and inspire. A leader must earn his status, and when he has, lesser voices will naturally defer, and if he turns out to be a fraud, he should be chucked aside. Faced with a monomaniacal, brutal and well organized enemy, we cannot just offer them a horizontal position, because they will gladly accommodate this inclination.

Military Contractor Gear, $499.95. For that aspiring mercenary in your family, now he can get off his couch and terrorize terrorists, without leaving his parents’ home even. Armed with a knife, grenades, M9 pistol and the latest Kalashnikov, the world’s most reliable infantry rifle, not that toy gun, M-16 piece of crap, your hired soldier can foray into his backyard and blast nasty holes into his dog, cat and lawn furniture. Emboldened, he can venture into adjacent properties and kick down his neighbors’ doors in the middle of the night and splatter them if they resist, or even if they submit. There’s no need for your deranged warrior to be bummed out over the end of the Iraq War, since he can bring all of that exciting carnage home. Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out later! Bored with nightly mayhem, your military contractor can even step on an improvised explosive device (at $79.95 extra, with only one needed, trust us) and feel the thrills of having his lower half, at least, shredded. Real life hired-guns don’t get Purple Heart, but we’ll ship you an authentic looking one, at $4.99 extra.

Big Sis Sex Doll, $65.99, with $9.99 for handcuffs and $29.99 for TSA uniform. Tired of Janet Napolitano rummaging in your pants? Now you can get into hers. This is no generic, almost life-size dummy with the usual, traditional orifices in more or less the right places, or even that rarified, glasses-wearing and Emily Dickinson-quoting vinyl girlfriend. No, Siree! This is the Secretary of Homeland Security in face and person, her unique body shape extraordinarily rendered by a world-renown, Chinese artisan, a classmate and rival, no less, to the sculptor of that hulking and fug ugly MLK statue on the Washington Mall. Spiffy in your TSA outfit, you can intone on your very first date, “This is merely procedural, ma’am,” as you legally insert your creepy claws inside Janet’s business pants and fondle her pubis, buttocks and more, with no foreplay whatsoever. Why waste time? Like any sane person, she will squirm, grimace or even curse in a realistic, battery operated shriek, AA cells not included, but should Janet resist your patriotic, post 9-11 molestation, you can harden your voice and growl, “I’ll send you to Guantanamo, bitch!” before you handcuff her and get really funky. Fun over, you can waterboard Janet’s face and gently wash her body with warm water and soap. Deflated, she is compact enough to store in a back pocket until the next airport patdown and/or enhanced interrogation technique session.

Home Slot Machine, $199.99. With offshoring, American factories are crumbling. Once the makers of high-quality merchandise, Americans now merely service or hustle each other, whether in investing banking, at street corner shell games or in casinos. Forty-one states now boast glittery gambling emporia, with these springing up even in an old church or a disused steel plant. It’s not farfetched to imagine a day when there are poker, blackjack, roulette and mahjong tables near each home. They’ll have to be within walking distance, of course, since Americans will be too broke to afford car or gasoline. Hell, it is probable that there will be a slot machine installed outside each dwelling, even of tarp or cardboard, where the mailbox used to be. The government won’t deliver your letters, since the postal service has long gone out of business, but it will stop by regularly to collect coins from your personal gambling contraption. Why not leap into the future, my friend, by having a slot machine right now in your living room? If you still have a living room, that is. Day or night, you can compulsively stuff your dwindling income into this cartoon-decorated steel box, then crank its handle without consequence. As in a real casino, your money will be magically transferred to unseen persons elsewhere. This mindless toy is tough enough to endure repeated kicks, bangs or even an atomic bomb, without showing any of your disappeared moolah. With each $200 spent, however, it will spit out a 25-cent coupon, to be spent at the supermarket of your choice.

Let’s try to clear up this fogged up situation by examining who’s killing whom, and why. The US has been butchering Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistani border, and the Pashtuns are fighting back because that’s their homeland. The Pashtuns have been living between the Hindu Kush and the Indus River since at least the 3rd Century, so one can reasonably say that they belong there, at least much more so than some guy from Intercourse, PA, or Walla Walla, Washington.

Go to most borders worldwide and, surprise, surprise, you’ll find more or less the same people living on both sides, often speaking the same language. This is also true in the US. In 2006, I drove 100 miles on route Farm to Market 170 in Texas, hugging the Rio Grande, and I didn’t see a single Anglo face in three hours. (Granted, there weren’t that many faces to be seen.) At Candelaria, population 75, I crossed a brief foot bridge into Mexico, then returned. Everybody else was doing it. Here, Rio Bravo was barely a trickle, so people on either side saw each other as neighbors, with the border an irrelevant fiction. To a Pashtun, then, the Durand Line, named after a British Foreign Secretary, is even more absurd.

Of course, I’m not advocating the abolishment of international borders, since large and subtle differences between populations require that they organize their societies differently, with demarcations between them, but it is ironic that the United States is chafing at the Pashtuns for crossing an arbitrary line, when America is the world’s most persistent and violent violator of international borders. As in many other cases, the only one who doesn’t belong on the map is you, Uncle Sam! Uncle Sam doesn’t know how to spell or pronounce sovereignty, at least when not talking about Israel. Sovranty. Sofarenty. Sufferenty.

Any Pashtun killed by American bombs or drones is a Pashtun wrongly murdered, be him a “militant,” as the Pentagon consistently charge, or more likely just a farmer or even a child. Imagine drones hovering over your hometown and zapping people at will, with the murdered victims being branded “insurgents.” If a Pashtun fights back, it’s because he has too. Wouldn’t you? If he dies fighting, at least he dies with honor, fighting for a just cause. The same cannot be said for American soldiers in Afghanistan. Pat Tillman realized this, but one of his own wasted him before he could tell the world about his awakening.

As a client state of America, Pakistan is being asked to kill its own citizens, Pashtuns and others, as a contribution to the petroleum fueled, natural gaseous, opium hazy and totally fogged up War on Terror. Doing Washington’s bidding, Pakistan has lost nearly 4,000 soldiers, but these needless deaths aren’t enough to appease the Washington masters of war. For brownnosing, Pakistan gets no pat on the head, but is being demonized as an “ally from hell,” to quote from the Atlantic.

With the notable exceptions of Israel and England, American allies are often betrayed. Pakistan’s being blamed for America’s ongoing troubles in Afghanistan, and for harboring Bin Laden until that much ballyhooed yet substanceless assassination, but all of the acrimonies and needless deaths could have been avoided had America never planted its XXXL rump on that corner of the world.

Using Bin Laden as a pretext, America invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and a decade later, it is still there, though its bogeyman is long gone. America never runs out of enemies, however, for it can always generate them anew, with either its bombs and guns, or through its jingoistic media. Along with Iran and Syria, Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has become a target.

Washington will always find new wars to fight and more people to kill, since that is the only task it is good at anymore. It does not know how to do anything else. Peace is not in its vocabulary, since war is how Washington and Wall Street make their money.

My first Thanksgiving, I had just turned twelve and had been in the US all of six months. I was living in Tacoma with my father, kid brother and a woman who would morph into my stepmother. Even then, we hated each other. For $150 a month, we had a one bedroom apartment not far from my school, McKinley Elementary. My brother and I slept in sleeping bags on the living room floor, with our treasure a tiny black and white TV, a tutor in American culture and English.

Each afternoon, the magic box would usher in Bugs Bunny, then Shirley Temple or the Three Stooges, to be followed by Jimmy Snuka. No more dismal or heroic singing, as on Vietnamese television. No more body counts or political speeches. This is America, boys and girls, where everything is goofy and fun!

Though they hardly knew us, the people next door generously invited us to Thanksgiving dinner. It wasn’t a family but two young couples, with the men bearded. We ate on the floor. I had just learned, “May I,” so I tried out, “May I have the corn, please.” This linguistic feeler elicited a compliment from one of our sweet hosts, which flattered me. In Vietnam, I had studied French from kindergarten onward, but since I had no need to speak it, I never owned any French, not even a mouthful, yet here I was, already careening forward with a new, reckless tongue that I wagged about like some lashing weapon.

For whatever it’s worth, it’s true that Americans do say “thank you” and “sorry” quite readily, at least much more often than Vietnamese, and I’m only talking about ordinary people, of course, not any official. The American government should apologize constantly, but never does. Better yet, it should cease and desist from all the looting, carnage and destruction that require that it gets on its knees and begs forgiveness from man, gods and gaia.

So what am I suggesting? I’m saying that Americans are for most part kind and generous, unlike its murderous government. I’m claiming that our 99% are mostly fair and decent, unlike the 1% that rule and represent us. Working against humanity and country, this 1% bring shame and dishonor to our name.

In 1976, my father decided that we should join my aunt in Houston, so he drove us 2,400 miles in his Chevette, the cheapest on the market. In the middle of the Sonoran desert, this crappy car died, so strangers had to come to our aid. This was before the cell phone, so a passing motorist had to use a payphone to call for a tow truck, and, even more incredibly, a mechanic at this garage invited us into his home for the night, since we couldn’t afford a motel. My brother and I played with his two boys, and his wife made burgers for us all. My father did give them some money, maybe $20, as a token thank you, but their kindness and graciousness were truly marvelous, though at the time, as a kid, I didn’t fully appreciate it.

In 1983, during my second year in art school, I had another memorable Thanksgiving dinner, this time at the home of a professor, Boris Putterman. I had started out calling Boris “Mr. Putterman,” but he insisted on “Boris,” which is the informal, American way. Boris liked my progress as a young painter, and also my confidence, which later he would discover, to his dismay if not disgust, to be an unwarranted cockiness. Stoked by a combustion of social, intellectual, alcoholic, dope, speed and sexual awakenings, I even declared to Boris, “You should never say sorry!” His response, “Where did you get that?! You should always say you’re sorry.” Life would kick my ass good upon leaving school, however, so I got my comeuppance in ample dosage. Whether in an individual or nation, hubris is a distortion that demands correction, for sooner or later the proper perspective and proportion will reassert themselves.

It’s strange but from all the conversations of that night at Boris’, the only bit that’s stuck in my mind was uttered by his mother, “I don’t see how people can eat chicken wings. There’s no meat on them!” Instead of fading, this will only mean more and more in the years ahead, and not just to me but nearly all Americans, so be thankful for what’s left, but unless some are made to feel sorry very soon, the rest of us will be kicked in the ass.

• A shorter version of this appears in the Guardian.

I’m not supposed to know anything about foreign policy.

— GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain

Not everything, mind you, but anything, which would put him on par with the dumbest American living under the heaviest and mossiest rock. Hell, he’s running neck to neck with that boulder. Though Cain knows nothing, he has enough political sense to bluster, “If you mess with Israel you’re messing with the United States of America.”

That’s been the mantra in Washington, Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Iran knows this as well, and that’s why it is, in all likelihood, trying to develop the nuclear bomb, not to strike New York or Washington, but Tel Aviv. It only makes sense, since that’s the only deterrence it has against an American invasion.

Clueless Cain thinks the Iranians have warships off our shore, but it’s America who has Iran surrounded, with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US Fifth Fleet also operates from Bahrain, a mere 120 miles from the Iranian coast. Washington has been itching for a fight with Iran ever since it had the (Muslim) balls to depose the CIA-installed Shah and kept 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Iran is also the largest Islamic country to openly defy the United States. By the way, it also has a lot of oil and natural gas.

Threatened for three decades by the biggest empire on earth, what can Iran do but strive to aim a nuclear warhead at Israel? You mess with us, we’ll kill your daddy!

A few days ago, I was a guest on Iran’s Press TV to talk about the anti-Wall Street protest. On the same show was Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. A year after his book came out, Kovel was fired from Bard College. Seeing a causal effect, Kovel issued a statement charging that he was terminated because of “differences between [himself] and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism.” At that time, I was teaching creative writing at Bard, so I tried to drag this controversy onto its listserv, but no one, absolutely no one, responded, to my astonishment. Hey, a college teaching job isn’t easy to come by, so why rock the boat? President Botstein will kick your ass. A few months earlier, the same listserv was orgasmic with cheering for Obama, but then again, nearly all of the American Left were. Ah, how idyllic and delightful it is to be a tenured liberal in the waning days of empire!

2011, at another supposedly radical bastion, Berkeley, cops wacked students with the chancellor’s approval. Protesting outrageous tuition hikes, these students correctly blamed banks for their university’s and state’s budget crises, but banks and universities have been in cahoots for a long time now. Schools jack up rates, knowing they can send students to banks for loans, but no matter what one’s major these days, the jobs are simply not there, but one’s debts are, for life!

Is it a surprise, then, that so many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are recent college graduates? Spat out by the system, they know that they’ve been had. Like investment banks, American colleges are also purveyors of ponzi schemes. Beaten to the ground, flattened, these protesters are suspicious of all hierarchies, of all pyramids, and that’s why they’ve refused to elevate leaders or even to prioritize key issues, but these reluctances must be overcome, I think, for this movement to move forward.

Its success, so far, can be attributed to two crucial decisions, to have an open-ended occupation, not a one-day march, and to target Wall Street. This movement, then, is about the looting and corruption of the money manipulators, so it’s important that the public be educated and constantly reminded about the abuses of the Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and the rest of the banking cartel.

As Americans endure actual or symbolic homelessness across this land, their government is hankering for yet another war. To distract attention from problems at home, the US wants to attack Iran and/or Syria. This is madness, certainly, but not to the war profiteers. Having bought off all of our politicians, these money masters own the Pentagon and its obscene budget that eats up half of our tax money.

When Michael Avery of Suffolk University pointed out, in a leaked email, that it was irrational to support troops sent overseas by a war-prone country to kill, he was met with considerable abuse and hostility. Unsurprisingly, his school’s president quickly distanced himself from Avery’s lucid remarks by saying that he himself was sending a care package to the troops. So, yes, if you don’t die by the time this box arrives, have a bar of chocolate on me!

How can anyone in his right mind not be against corruption, since corruption is just stealing public money, but unfortunately, many of the 99% are still misled into supporting our military. They cannot see that the Pentagon, like the banks, is also a nexus of corruption, that its main task is not to defend our republic but to funnel money from the 99% to the 1%.

Do not lose sight that our main battle is against the corrupt banking cartel and equally corrupt Pentagon. Much of our financial, political, social and ecological ills can be traced to these monsters. Winter is coming. Time is running out.

In a country of walls and locked doors, where even infants have private domains, there are no barriers here. With everyone exposed, and no TV to distract, conversation comes more readily. Here, no canned music slops over each dialogue or interior monologue. Here, all crazy, percussive rhythms and melodies must be generated by living muscles and breaths. Here, all faces are real all the time, with none beamed from uptown or across the land mass.

Though we’ve been together all these decades, I don’t think I ever saw you good before this goddamn protest. Beatific apes, winged baboons or renaissance orangutans, why are we so gorgeous? Sweetie, it’s been so long since I had a leisurely gaze at your magnificence, fixated as I was by the holograms.

Yes, there are laptops, cell phones and cameras here, but machines don’t dictate. Most folks here have no ready access to electricity. During 21st century America, and in Lower Manhattan no less, this qualifies as primitive, and it’s not just something to endure, a nuisance, but a primary if hidden aim of this pow-wow.

In a society where proximity is the biggest sin, where another skin is best avoided, where virtual coitus has become a national pastime, these weirdos, misfits and outcasts have converged into one writhing body, and I don’t list these categories derisively, as I am one also. I’m all of the above. In any sick culture, it should be a badge of honor to not fit in. In my teens, I was inspired by Franz Kline’s, “A bohemian is one who can survive where an animal would die,” and by Alfred Jarry having to write on his belly because his one room apartment has been divided, vertically and horizontally, into four quarters by an enterprising slum lord. To supplement his piss poor diet, Jarry also fished from the Seine, but water was still water then.

As always, it’s OK to drop out, train hop, squat in a warehouse, dumpster dive or stand in a trash can to take a shower, but one does not do these out of masochism, but to survive or save oneself from the deformations imposed by a system that sanctions endless war, torture and the humiliation of countless victims. Just this week, America gloated over the capture, sodomizing then shooting of a trumped up enemy, then stood by as our disneyfied allies barbarically displayed his near-naked corpse in public.

Suffering is endurable if our integrity and essential values have not been compromised, and sacrifice is worth it if it may lead to a better order. In this rat race hot house of calculating schmoozers who cheerfully suck up to keep their health insurance, gain promotion, bonus or tenure, not to mention a chance to screw down, there are still many who will eschew comfort and moolah to serve the common good. An Occupy Wall Street snapshot from 10/14/11: A young woman cleaning an unknown stranger’s vomit because, well, someone had to, not that she liked it, “Ah, this is just perfect! Just what I want to do, to clean someone’s vomit in the middle of the night. It’s just like Christmas, I tell you.”

They come to the center from lesser boroughs, cities and towns. Exiled to post-industrial, post-First World waste lands or strip mall and chain-burger-shack developments, they invade this privileged polis, where they must deal with the crooked policy of the pole lease and dicks. Lying on the ground, they can finally dwell in a proper and propaganda America, since, normally, few can afford to rent or buy within five miles of this tourist magnet, post card-ready hunk of real estate. This occupation, then, has aspects of a refugee camp. Here gather victims of an economic war, the homeless, unemployed, underemployed and those who may be fired tomorrow, but it is also a rebel camp, where these previously faceless, dispersed and downtrodden lumpens discover common cause and recover their strength for a counterattack.

In any community, renewals are essential. For health to be regained, mistakes must be acknowledged, structural defects corrected and character flaws identified, shamed then purged, but, in this society, all normal channels for healing have been corrupted. Once again, we are presented with an animated election pageantry that promises much, but will solve nothing. The American patient will be kept prostrate and exposed, so that it can be picked over by the military/banking complex vultures. (Yes, it’s time to update that term, since we hardly have any industry left in America.) If we want renewal, then, we must do it ourselves, from outside in and from the ground up, but before we can achieve anything, we need to sharpen our vision of what victory may look like.

Besieged by heaven-puncturing towers of double speak and obscuranto, an all inclusive tribe has gathered. Lapped by an invisible ocean, we teem in this common embryo, but mother is exhausted and may not survive this. Will light come?

Will unemployment be 40 or 50%? Will we be fighting a dozen wars, or, defeated everywhere, maybe even none? Will the occupy encampments become “enduring” tent cities? Will Chicago protesters plant vegetables and raise chickens in Grant Park? For a preview of what’s to come, look no further than Philadelphia itself.

Unlike elsewhere, Mayor Nutter has been sympathetic towards these protesters. He visited them on the very first night, showing up at 1:15AM to say, “The things you’re talking about are the things I talk about every day.” He instructed his police chief to have the First Amendment, about freedom of assembly, to be read at roll call each morning, at each police district. Most importantly, he allowed protesters to pitch tents right next to City Hall.

Two weeks into Occupy Philly, there are about 350 tents right in the heart of Philadelphia, as well as makeshift dwellings of pallets, tarps, cardboard and plywood. One has a two-foot-high platform, so it can endure the cold and rain better than most. These people are planning to stay, in short. This plaza has long been a magnet for Philly’s homeless, with about 50 folks curled up on benches each night. Now they’re joined by hundreds who are only symbolically homeless.

Some of the long-time homeless have picked up donated tents, and three times a day, they also line up at the Occupy Philly chow tent. Though they tend to be more scruffy and older, it’s not always easy to distinguish between a regular homeless person and a protester, but, if you think about it, each homeless individual is already a protester.

All-too-visible and rapidly increasing in each city and town, the homeless are an accusation that our system is truly messed up. In the “greatest country on earth,” the top 10% own 71% of the wealth, while the bottom 40% must scrape by on less than 1% and, this year, at least 3.5 million Americans, or more than 1%, will experience homelessness at some point.

The brainwashed will sneer that the poor deserve to be broke because they’re so damn lazy and, well, not enterprising enough, but, in any society, no one works harder than those at the very bottom, where it takes a superhuman effort just to survive from day to day, and it wasn’t poor Americans who conned the entire world, then looted our treasury to reward themselves eight-figure bonuses. In this upside down nation, it’s the bottom 90% who must sacrifice everything to succor the top 10%. We must eat less and even sleep outside so they can indulge their vicious, insatiable greed and endless war. Our biggest companies rake in trillions from organized carnage and swindling, yet Citigroup, Bank of America, GE, Chevron, Boeing, Conoco, Exxon Mobil and other big boys pay no taxes. Instead, they get rebates from the IRS. Money buys influence, and all the rules are rigged against us, and unless we revolt, we must endure increasingly savage destitution. Not satisfied with our sweating and bleeding bodies, these ogres want to devour generations to come. No wonder the kids are rebelling.

Martin Luther King’s last project was to organize Resurrection City, where poor Americans could be made visible to the Washington elite, the rest of America and even foreign tourists. Living in makeshift dwellings, they were a protest against America’s misplaced priorities, but King was shot before Resurrection City was even erected, and Bobby Kennedy, its brainchild, was murdered just afterwards.

In Philadelphia, a new Resurrection City has arisen, however, and across the street from this rapidly expanding community, there’s Philly’s swankiest address, the 48-story Residences at The Ritz-Carlton, where a one-bedroom bachelor’s pad can be had for half a million bucks, and the penthouse, $12 million. Backlit by warm, yellow lights, Ritz-Carlton residents can be seen each night looking down at the mess of tents below. Some peer through binoculars, others snap photos, but they didn’t pay through their cosmetically enhanced noses to put up with this stinking Third-World vista. It is quaint and lively, yes, but also squalid and somewhat menacing. Tonguing a prosciutto roll, they frown and imagine the day, soon, too soon, when these tents will surround them completely.

Critics have slandered these protesters as idle and frivolous, as muddled crybabies who would flee from any job application, not that anyone’s hiring, by the way. This rally, then, is just a noisy blight on America’s crooked economic engine. With a first dusting of snow, these anarchists, hippies, art students, bums and trust fund kids would all go home to mommy. Third-term billionaire mayor Bloomberg—who says money can’t prolong life?—even moaned that this protest was targeting people just “struggling to make ends meet,” and he was sorta right, of course, because there’s no way Wall Street’s end can meet any of our ends.

When noticed at all, the protesters’ frequent meetings have often been dismissed as pointless and confused. Surely nothing will come of their callow and cumbersome deliberations. Their decisions can’t and won’t matter. America’s life and death matters are decided by cynical, rich old guys in suits, not bongo stroking freaks, so debate all you want, but there’s no way your jejune ideas can inflect, however slightly, this monster bank-dominated, Federal Reserve-run, two war party system.

With the just released The99%Declaration, our ruling class has been issued an ultimatum, however. The anti-Wall Street protesters will convene a National General Assembly in Philadelphia from July 4th, 2012 until October of 2012, resulting in a “PETITION OF GRIEVANCES to be submitted to all members of Congress, The Supreme Court and President and each of the political candidates running in the nationwide Congressional and Presidential election in November 2012.” If these grievances are not redressed within one year, the 99% “will organize a third independent political party to run candidates in the 2014 mid-term elections.”

This is the best news I’ve heard in a while. Finally, some much needed oxygen in this suffocating political dungeon. These mostly young protesters have stayed clear of any current politician. Showing more maturity than many of their elders, they trust neither Democrats nor Republicans. They are not suckered by Obama nor distracted by Clinton’s Usher and Lady Gaga circus. It’s incredible, isn’t it, that the man who enacted NAFTA and repealed the Glass-Steagall act can now go on television to lament that “the American Dream has been under assault”?

With their rejection of this walled up and dead end system, the protesters can bring to mind Bartleby, with his “I’d prefer not to,” but this movement is not just a refusal to be co-opted into a murderous and life-sapping existence. Last week, America entered yet another war, but who’s keeping track any longer? A Yahoo! headline, “Mysteries of Clinton’s Big Concert Solved,” and the Cardinals are amazing, aren’t they?

A third, viable political party is long overdue. Though the moneyed interest will surely bare its fangs before it gives up even a sturgeon egg from its privileged table, it is high time we break apart this mad vehicle before it hurls us all into the abyss.

“They’re all guarding the bull’s asshole,” I said to this middle aged black woman standing across the street.

“Yeah, they’re all guarding the bullshit!” She laughed.

It was nearly 10PM. At Wall Street and Broadway, I met a young protester from Austin. Twenty five years old, he’d been sleeping at Liberty Park since September 24th.

“What do you guys do when it rains?”

“We just have to deal with it. We sleep under tarps.”

“Man, that must really suck. You probably can’t sleep too well.”

“Yeah, sometimes I get up and my body aches all over, but we just have to deal with it. We’re not leaving.”

“And it’s fucked up they won’t let you guys use tents.”

“Yeah, it’s fucked up, so we’ll have to set up tents at some point. It’s getting colder, and we can’t just sleep like that if it snows.”

“You think the cops will come in and get rid of the tents?”

“I don’t know. Who knows.”

“You know in California and other places, cops have slashed tents of the homeless.”

“Yeah, I know, but the whole world is watching us now, so if they do that, the whole world will see it.”

I asked him about demands, about how everyone is demanding that these protesters make demands, but so far, nothing.

“We did put out a Declaration.”

“Yeah, but that’s a long list of grievances, without concrete demands.”

“Well, we don’t want to narrow it down to a few demands, because each community has issues that it wants to address. This protest is spreading, and a list of demands from here can’t address all the problems.”

“But what about educating the public? If you can highlight a few key issues, then the public will have a clearer idea of what is wrong?”

“I hear you, but there are already people doing that. Writers. They may not be in our group but they are sympathetic to us. The explanations are out there. There are already people explaining what is wrong.”

Naomi Klein was scheduled to speak at Liberty Park the next day, as a matter of fact, so he was right. All the explanations are out there, if only people would pay attention. I then asked about them having no leaders or spokesmen.

“We don’t want to designate a spokesman or a leader, because we don’t want all the pressure to be on him. We don’t want him to be harassed by the FBI, for the FBI to tap his phone. Look at all the protest leaders from the past. Look at how they killed Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. If they want to tap the phone, they’ll have to tap all of our phones.”

“Yeah, but some people are better at speaking than others, so these will emerge naturally, right?”

“You’re right, and they already have, but we can all talk. We all know what to say. We’ve taught each other what to say.”

He believed the country was solidly behind this protest, and support will only grow, “People love us, man. They send us all kinds of stuff. They send us money. People love us.”

Speaking of solidarity, I wouldn’t have been able to observe the protest if a dozen readers of my blog hadn’t sent me hundreds of dollars this past month alone. Part of this cash was used to fix my broken camera. With a poisoned media, untrained citizens must anoint themselves journalists.

Though protesters have released no official demands, many of the signs at Liberty Park are clear enough, “END THE WARS,” “END THE FED” and “TAX THE RICH.” These demands are also shouted out by protesters on their marches.

And the marches are getting larger and more representative. Everyone is here, basically, from tiny children to senior citizens, egg heads to hard hats, pacifists to war veterans. Black, white, yellow or brown, they are all here shouting in unison, “Wall street got bailed out. We got sold out,” “Tax the rich! End the wars!” and, “This is what real democracy looks like!”

About the only types who aren’t marching are Wall Street suits and, well, cops. It is sad to see so many policemen protecting the very people who have also ripped them off. At a Starbucks near the New York Stock Exchange, some cops have even become bouncers.

Running around trying to find a place to charge my camera batteries, I saw a Starbucks, but its entrance was blocked by a police-manned barricade spanning the street. I approached, “Can I go in?”

“I need to see an ID,” a cop said.

In the new America, one needs to show an ID just to enter a Starbucks? I pulled out my long expired Virginia driver’s license.

“So you’re not from New York?” The cop interrogated.

“No, I live in Philadelphia.”

“What are you doing in New York?”

“Just visiting.”

“Why did you come up?”

“Just to hang out in the city. No reason.”

This cop gave me a long hard look. I had neither tattoos nor piercings, and my hair and clothes were more or less neutral. I mean, I don’t dress to make a statement, and I don’t like to wear slogans on my person. He gave me a long, hard look, and I could tell that he didn’t quite believe I wasn’t a trouble maker of some kind, or maybe even a terrorist ready to plant a robust pipe bomb inside Ben Bernanke’s lying quiche hole, but goddamn it, this was only a stupid Starbucks, though it happened to be within sight of the New York Stock Exchange.

Had the cops moved their barrier five feet back, the public could enter this business unmolested, but they couldn’t do that, you see, because that would inconvenience the Wall Street denizens arriving from the other direction.

So there you have it. While 99% of us are losing our present and future, as we’re harassed and groped and sleep in the rain, in protest or for good, as some of us are sent overseas to get our nuts blown off, a banker must never be made uncomfortable, even when his errand, or, rather, even when his secretary’s errand is nothing more than to grab her (and the cops’) boss a frappucino.

So that’s established. So there’s nothing wrong with the fact that greed hardens me, but what makes me different from you is my method. I’m more clever than you, a whole lot more clever. (I didn’t want to say “smart” outright, since that would offend your sissy sensibility.) Part of it is education, yes. I did learn a few tricks in college, but it has to be the right one. While you sculpted sandwiches for Subway and/or went into suicidal debt, thanks to me, to attend Butt Fuck U, I chain smoked Havanas at the Skull & Bones before segueing into Haaaaaavard. Bet you don’t even know where that is, you dumbfuck. In any case, you went to school to get indoctrinated. I went to network.

At Harvard I joined a gang, so to speak, an Anglo-American gang, and our method is so clever yet so simple, and since you’re so stupid, I’ll only use the teeny tiniest words and speak as slowly as possible. If I had a set of crayons handy, I’d draw stick figures to help you to understand this. OK, so our entire method, trumpet blast then drum roll please, comes down to this: We make money out of nothing, then we lend it to you, you and you, for profit.

Is that it, you ask, and I’m sorry to be so anticlimactic, but if it works, why complicate it? This laughably simple method has enriched us and impoverished you, you and you for nearly a century, since 1913, to be exact.

I can see that you’re not quite satisfied. You want more. OK, OK, I’ll give you a cartoon slide show: Let’s say you are a developer, and you want to build a bunch of houses. Since you can’t just pull cash out of your ass, like me, you must come to my business for financing. The customers, likewise, can’t just fart Federal Reserve notes either, so they too must trudge to mi casa to secure loans. Thanks to the wizardry of fractional reserve banking and other neat tricks, I’m lending to y’all money I don’t even have, but though these interests are making me so damn fat—figuratively speaking, of course, not like you—I will go a step further. I will bundle a gazillion of these crappy mortgages together, chop them up real fine, then sell stinking shares to investors all over the world. Like Taco Bell, I’ll stuff my products with all sorts of impurities, but unlike them, I won’t even list the disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate or potassium chloride, etc., in my investment scrapple. Selling dog shit, I’ll even charge a commission.

But how can I get away with this? Where are the regulators? What are you, a Huffington Post intern? A college professor with an Obama button surgically attached to your forehead? Here, look into my laundry basket. The regulators are dozing among the lint and skid marks. Don’t disturb them.

So everything is going great, with houses being sold left and right, on mountain tops and in the middle of the desert even, until it seems that every Wal-Mart greeter and busboy is a proud owner of a McMansion, but, of course, they won’t be able to keep up payments, especially when interest rates jack up.

Though their mortgages have been turned into confetti and scattered all over the universe, I’ll still repossess their houses. Some I’ll sell, but since there are so few buyers these days, especially as I’ve tightened lending standards—who says I’m not upright?—many of these homes are left to rot. Some I’ll even tear down.

Looking out the window, I now see a mob down below. Night after night they sleep in the cold or rain without even a tent over them. They have a long list of grievances but no demands, not that they’ll get any concessions anyway. Though they’ve pointed accusatory fingers in my direction, I have nothing to worry about since they’ve refused to call me by name. Perhaps they don’t even know. Do you?

Should this carnival get rowdy, these hippies, punks, eco loonies, union goons and other assorted misfits will only get themselves hurt and, at most, a few of my foot soldiers annoyed. I’ve been talking to you real friendly, fuckheads, but in spite of my bonhomie and $10,000 Fioravanti suit, I can be nastier than Quentin Tarrantino’s worst nightmare. I’ve brought entire countries to their knees, so I won’t hesitate to squash a few more tattooed and nose ringed cockroaches.  Cornell West or Michael Moore groupies ain’t ish. (I picked up that lingo from my “rebellious” son.) Now, would you like a drink? I’ll buy the first round.

The violence of September 24th, the 8th day of the anti-Wall Street Protest, appears to not have caused severe or permanent injuries, though it was brutal enough, and some outrage has even flared in the mainstream media. Anthony Bologna, a 28-year-veteran of the New York Police Department, has emerged as a clear cut villain. Without provocation, he pepper sprayed two young women in the faces, and for this he should certainly be fired, then locked up, but this commotion has overshadowed, at least momentarily, the real target and meaning of this protest. Though police brutality is never to be taken lightly, Occupy Wall Street is aiming to expose and hold to account goons much more vicious than any garden variety Anthony Bologna. Though they maim and cripple countless households, even entire countries, these bigger thugs are rarely condemned and never indicted. In fact, some are given plush jobs in the US Treasury, if not a Cabinet appointment.

Who am I talking about, exactly? Here is where it gets murky, and all by intention. (Theirs, not mine.) When people say Wall Street, as in Wall Street has ruined this country, and it certainly has, what do they mean, exactly? Though there are those who object to financial speculation of any kind, most people have in mind the biggest banks when they rail against Wall Street. They’re really talking about Citibank, for example, that gargantuan money-laundering house, or Goldman Sachs, the world’s leading swindling outfit. Their criminality is well documented, though hard to untangle, since most of us are fairly clueless about the intricacies of the dismal science, and since financial, white collar crimes aren’t as vivid as, say, a middle-aged cop pepper spraying the eyes of two defenseless young women, then calmly walking away as they collapse and scream.

But consider this: there are those who are defending Bologna even now and think that these “hippie chicks” got what they deserved, just as there were those who saw nothing wrong with cops whacking Rodney King with a baton 56 times, kicking him 6 times, then bragging and joking about it afterwards, and even the sadism of Abu Ghraib was cheered by many Americans, so it often comes down to where you’re coming from, but what kind of bias can blind anyone to the fact that it’s criminal for Stephen Friedman, Chairman of the New York Fed and a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, to give 10 billion dollars of our money to Goldman Sachs? Bad publicity over conflict of interest forced Friedman to resign, but if you really think about it, there was no conflict. The Fed can give money to these monster banks because the Fed is owned by these monster banks. If you grant private banks the monopoly to create money, of course they will shower themselves with cash, year in and year out, and use this unlimited power to buy up all of our politicians.

So protest police brutality, media whoredom or governmental corruption all you want, but if you’re willing to overlook the fact that our money supply is controlled by an elite group of criminal bankers, nothing will change. And don’t hold your breath waiting for “our” Attorney General, Eric Holder, to prosecute any of these banksters. Where is Eric Holder, by the way? Has anyone, in any time zone, seen him lately? In any case, the last thing Holder would want to do is to inconvenience, in any way, his true bosses.

Considering the violent police reaction to protesters marching from Liberty Plaza to Union Square, what would have happened had they gone to the Goldman Sachs Headquarters instead? Surely the foot soldiers of empire would not allow the unruly riff raff to desecrate this tall, dignified temple to computerized and three-piece-suited mugging. Kitty-corner from the site of the pulverized Twin Towers, it’s also a Ground Zero. Live, in real time, this is the epicenter of the destruction of the American economy.

Remember that Smith Barney commercial where a sonorous, no-nonsense elderly gentleman intoned, “We make money the old fashioned way. We earn it”? Yeah, right, as in generating money out of nothing, then lending it at interest? As in laundering bloody cash for pushers of heroin or weapons of mass destruction? Smith Barney was owned by Citigroup, a main player in the Federal Reserve. You can’t say these boffo mofos don’t have a fine, sick sense of humor.

Though the mainstream media have stayed clear of this topic, the truths about the Fed are leaking out all over the web, so Big Brother has a solution. The New York Fed is seeking a vendor to help it monitor online conversations about the Federal Reserve. It wants “an alerting mechanism that automatically sends out reports or notifications based [on] predefined trigger[s].” This cyber spook will “provide sentiment analysis (positive, negative or neutral) around key conversational topics” and “identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers.” With the Fed all eyes and ears, even this trifling article may appear on its radar, so I will take this opportunity to send out an unequivocal greeting to all of our fine banksters:

Gentlemen, for enslaving hard working people, taking food from children, stealing money from senior citizens and degrading countless communities, may all of you be locked up as soon as possible, then rot in hell into eternity.

Wall Street got drunk […] It got drunk and now it’s got a hangover.

— George W. Bush

As usual, Bush got it wrong. Wall Street soberly and cynically got the rest of us drunk on dreams of homeownership, a robust stock portfolio and a cozy retirement. This slurry bacchanal was fueled by the housing bubble and, when that exploded in our faces, bailouts saved Wall Street from any hangover, so it’s us who will suffer through a torturous, decades-long headache of a ruined economy.

But who are us, exactly? Us are the poor and the middle class, unions, retirement funds and governments at all levels, federal, state and city. Us are 99%, according to the mostly young protesters at Liberty Park in NYC. Nearly everyone got ripped off, including the cops guarding these protesters. As a protest sign sweetly and innocently demands: “Say Sorry! To All of Us!”

After eight days of protest, over a hundred people have already been arrested. Several have been roughed up, with cops being caught on still and video cameras pepper spraying or yanking the hair of young women, or slamming people to the ground. Sadly, these cops are fighting against their own interest. Bankrupted by Wall Street, cities all over America are laying off policemen left and right. Why defend the crooks of Wall Street, cops, when they have directly caused many of your colleagues to be thrown onto the streets? When you yourself may end up on a park bench in the near future?

The conflict between cops and protesters can be partly attributed to a clash of styles, to the eternal jocks vs. freaks dichotomy, but dear policemen, these young people are actually on your side. In spite of their colorful or eccentric clothing, odd haircuts, tattoos or piercings, they are fighting for you too. To their credit, the protesters have made overtures to these cops by offering them coffee and water, but the cops, keen to maintain separation, have declined.

During the massive protest at Tiananmen Square, there was initially much fraternization between protesters and soldiers. They conversed, established common cause and did not wish to harm each other, so the government had to truck in troops from distant provinces, many of them not even Han Chinese, to commit the massacre. Also, in that famous photo of the protester who stopped a line of tanks, recall the restraint of that tank driver. Though trained and brought in to kill, this soldier couldn’t do it, at least in that instance.

With these Wall Street skirmishes, and many more battles to come, one has to hope for that solidarity and fraternization. Though the belligerent will always gravitate towards jobs that allow them access to weapons, incorrigible psychotics are relatively few, for even in a gung ho uniform, most men aren’t overeager to inflict pains on another. In fact, before the Vietnam War, most soldiers did not even fire their rifles during battles, though improved reflexive trainings have “corrected” this natural reluctance to kill. United we must stand, Americans, clean cut cops and tattooed protesters alike, against that destroyer of America, Wall Street.

Last wednesday, there was a NYC protest against cuts to the public schools. It took place at Tweed Courthouse, only half a mile from the Occupy Wall Street rally, but unlike the anti-Wall Street activists, these protesters were mostly above 35-years-old, with many of them Black or Hispanic. It would have been wonderful had these public school teachers marched over to the Wall Street protest, for it is precisely Wall Street that has bankrupted their state and city, putting their jobs in jeopardy. Dear teachers, do join these brave young protesters, because Wall Street is also your enemy. Dearest everybody, Wall Street is the vampire who’s draining blood from all of our bodies.

Several commentators have pointed out the lack of clarity of the anti-Wall Street rally. What reforms are they after, exactly? Among the many signs at the site, there are those that attack the Federal Reserve, bank bailouts and Corporate Personhood, and for the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, but these key demands are either diluted or enlivened, depending on your temperament, I suppose, by signs that are merely whimsical, vaguely philosophical or even antithetical to this protest. Though I smiled at “OPPOSITION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP,” I had to cringe at “FREE IRAN! MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD IS NOT MY PRESIDENT!”

Whether Iran needs to be liberated or not, it’s not for me to say, but it is surely genocidal to appeal to Americans to “free” yet another Islamic country, and one that has been in Uncle Sam’s crosshair ever since it had the temerity to oust that CIA favorite, the Shah.

In addition to the many, many signs, there are also teach ins and book discussions, so a primary aim of this protest is to educate the public about the flaws of our system, and to articulate possible remedies. It’s crucial, then, that the most important messages not be drowned out by irrelevancies and contradictions. There must be a way to keep the main points front and center at all times, so that even the most casual tourist will know what it is he is witnessing.

For an empire, then, whose crimes are myriad, for it takes so much violence to maintain worldwide dominion, this assault against the mind is relentless, a blanket of nonsense that suffocates night and day, a miasma of photo ops and jive that poisons the conscience.

Thus, a chirpy CNN reporter talked about “terrorists” attacking the US Embassy in Afghanistan. She didn’t even called them “insurgents,” but simply and unequivocally “terrorists,” “terrorists,” “terrorists,” like a mantra, as she excitedly recounted how they had disguised themselves as women before overwhelming Afghan cops guarding a unfinished high-rise, killing them. Their aim was to gain a vantage point to rain rockets onto the US Embassy.

Of course, the CNN reporter could not point out that these men were classic nationalists, for a nationalist is one willing to defend his homeland against a foreign invader. Also, this paid-for mouth piece could not admit that these men were courageous and bold, as well as noble and selfless, for they had no escape plan. They were trapped inside that building. They knew that as they attacked, they would be surrounded by American soldiers, yet to do what was just and laudable to their own people, these brave individuals were willing to be killed by their hated enemy. They chose death and honor before subjugation and humiliation. Patrick Henry should be proud of them.

After this incident, US officials accused Pakistan of being the mastermind. Besides justifying continued drone and missile strikes against Pakistan itself, this charge also discredited the attackers as foreign agents and mercenaries, but let’s think about this for a second. A mercenary fights for money. He doesn’t choose certain death. Any Afghan willing to die battling foreign invaders, be they Americans or Soviets, is a nationalist — period.

Similarly, a Libyan is a nationalist if he’s fighting the vast American-led coalition, this oil-soaked crusade of mostly white, Christian countries that’s been attacking Libya for over six months now, but, no, the American media is calling him a “Gaddafi loyalist.”

Such deformation of facts also affects American victims of empire. When Pat Tillman was shot at close range by an American soldier, he was presented as a hero killed in action, a victim of the Taliban. A death loses its meaning and dignity when it’s perverted to serve someone else’s interest, and when a corpse is used to glorify the murderer, you have one of the worst of possible crimes, something akin to necrophilia. The empire will kill you, then screw you. It will derive pleasure from your cadaver.

Likewise, though it has been proven in court that the US government was behind the killing of Martin Luther King, he now has a huge statue on the National Mall, the very Mall where he organized Resurrection City, a poor people’s protest which hastened his assassination. With typical cynicism, our government is celebrating and appropriating a man it exterminated in cold blood.

Likewise, 9/11. It was nauseating for me to watch the ten-year commemoration of that tragedy without any airtime given to those who desperately wanted to probe deeper into exactly what happened. The many architects, engineers, pilots, first responders and relatives of victims who doubted the official version of 9/11 were shunted aside so a self-justifying and congratulatory narrative from this criminal government could proceed without interruptions. This was the moment for sinister butchers like Bush and Obama to appear caring and statesmanlike, as father figures consoling us in our moment of grief, when they are, in fact, the authors of so much past and ongoing grief.

The truths about many key events in this nation’s history, Pearl Harbor attack, Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Martin Luther King’s, John’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, etc., have never fully come out, or only came out decades after the fact, so Americans should have learnt to suspect, by now, routine duplicity from Washington, yet many of us continue to believe. Such is the power of brainwashing. As they kill and lie in our names, we keep nodding and nodding.

We are not expected to ask questions, but merely to swallow whole the spoon-fed kitsch and bullshit. Recently, Americans were shown a photo of a dog that refused to leave the coffin of his master, a dead SEAL member, one of those “heroes” who supposedly killed Bin Laden. Though there was no physical proof whatsoever, no corpse, film or photo, we were told that a successful raid had occurred, and though an American helicopter tail was left behind, no American had died, incredibly, then we were told, three months later, that 22 of the SEALs involved, i.e., potential witnesses who could contradict the official narrative, were conveniently killed in an unprecedented attack by the Taliban.

These fairy tales are so bizarre but, before you can pause to parse one, if you’re so inclined, and most of us are no longer inclined or capable, another one comes down the chute, then another, then another. When one commits as many killings, lootings and rapes as this government does, one must lie constantly.

Inflation is your dollars deflating. It’s your money going down, down, down, depreciating as the Federal Reserve injects more bucks into our banking system. And since the biggest banks own the Federal Reserve, the Fed is the banking system. Each time these banks give cash to themselves to be lent to you at interest, your dollars becomes a bit more worthless.

Though perceived by most Americans as a governmental agency, even the Federal Reserve admits that it is “an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects.” As “an independent entity,” the Fed does not suffer from Presidential control or Congressional oversight. Though its Board of Governors is appointed by the President of the United States, each of its seven members serves for 14 years [!], with only one member replaced every two years. Out of the limelight, these shady gentlemen are more enduring than all of our Presidents, Senators and Congressmen, and certainly more powerful, since they represent banks that bankroll all of our politicians, who are their abject servants. The Fed can also inflate, deflate, strangle, rape or bleed dry the global economy. With such leverage, it does not care that a 2011 Congressional audit, the first ever, managed to discover that in less than three years the Fed lent $16.1 trillion to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, as well as banks in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium. This astronomical sum is greater than our national debt or even the GDP, so where in hell or Foggy Bottom did it come from? Nowhere. From thin air. With Godlike power, the Fed can just conjure up cash, and thus just about everything else, into being. Here a mansion, there a yacht, and now, with a few keyboard strokes, a brand new slave, or many, many slaves!

Subconsciously thinking, Daddy, send us money, the infantile sees each gross increase in the money supply as dollars sloshing through the system, benefiting everyone, but if quantitative easing were a magic bullet, Weimar and Zimbabwe would be success stories. If we could just monetize our way out of trouble, then why not pay all of our debts right now with newly minted cash, and bypass the painful interest payments? Why not revive this economy by sending each citizen a huge check? Not 600 piddly bucks, like Bush did, but a billion dollars for each man, woman, child and dog? It can’t be done because our creditors aren’t dummies. As Vladimir Putin said about us, “They are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar.” So Russia, China, Japan, Brazil and our many other creditors are neither reassured nor amused when Allan Greenspan explained that “the U.S. can pay any debt that it has because we can always print money to do that.”

The Federal Reserve used to tell us how many dollars were in circulation, but in March of 2006, it stopped. A sane man would deduce that it wanted to hide how much inflation it was generating, but, no, this sudden opacity was merely a cost cutting measure, so explained the Fed, the profligate, money pumping Fed.

To grasp immediately how much your dollar has depreciated, look no further than the price of gold. In 1982, an ounce was less than $500. Now it has breached $1,800. Surging gold price also indicates that people are losing faith in their economic, political and social system, and that they fear the immediate future. When gold shoots up, this house is coming down. Wander into any Vietnamese or Cambodian neighborhood, you’ll see an inordinate number of jewelry stores selling gold. People who have been traumatized by war and dictatorship don’t trust in banks or even money, but only gold to help them survive any societal upheaval.

So if the dollar is sinking, why accumulate it? First of, foreign governments must have dollars to buy oil, since no country can sell petroleum for anything but the dollar. The only renegades to this rule are Iran and Venzuela. Accepting Chinese yuans for oil, they have constantly been threatened by Washington. If euros, yens, yuans or rubles were generally accepted for oil, the United States would quickly become irrelevant and no one would have to send us real products for our increasingly worthless paper.

This petro dollar arrangement is enforced by the U.S. military. As Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi have found out, America will rain bombs on your people’s heads if you try to escape from this racket. Gaddafi wanted to nationalize Libya’s oil fields. He also proposed a common currency for Africa. In their trade with each other, African countries could then be free from the tyranny of the dollar, but such insolence could not go unpunished. America will hold a gun to your head to make sure you go on biting its bucks.

Making money on interest, banks generate debt for you and me, and for the government itself. This system is buoyed up from us drowning, and to keep us spending beyond our means, it must make us delirious with wants. Hence, this nonstop seduction everywhere you look. Don’t think or reflect. Lust. In 1982, there was only one television in McGlinchey’s. Now, there are four. As music blares, the unceasing come-ons flicker above our heads. Buy this, buy that, screw me, or rather, make love to my mirage.

Traditional virtues such as prudence and self control have been jettisoned, to be replaced by an insatiable appetite that breeds frustration, boredom, numbness and violence. In 2009, five blocks from here, a flash mob attacked a 56-year-old man riding home from work. They beat him unconscious and stole his credit cards. One of the perpetrators then bought over $5,000 of Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani and other high-end merchandises. He had the loot delivered to his front door, and that’s how twenty-one-year-old Stephen Lyde was caught. Though poor and obviously inexperienced with a credit card, Lyde was lusting after all the finer things possessed by those at the very top, and just like many of them, he was willing to commit violence. Unlike white collar crooks, however, Lyde pounced on his victim directly. If America were to start yet another war, how many stockholders would rejoice?

Our banking system makes money out of nothing, lends us cash that it doesn’t even have, and with Washington as its protector and enforcer, ensures that what we own is worth less and less, while we must work more and more to make payment after unending payment, with compounding interest, penalties, fees and whatever else it feels like tagging on at the end. The Federal Reserve, then, is not an institution with “public purposes and private aspects,” but exactly the opposite. Like our federal government itself, it is a cartel with ruthless, private objectives hidden behind a public façade.

The Fed has private purposes and public aspects, and as long as this parasite controls our wallets and government, you can count on more wars, bankruptcies, foreclosures, increasingly severe inflation and looting frenzies of every kind.

During this never ending public spectacle, they’ve introduced us to a cast of rather outlandish characters: a stuttering Texas idiot; a fist bumping, long range shooting and Harvard educated Muslim Commie; a blow job-loving burger clown. Splitting into opposing camps, they’ve climbed into a ring to perform for the whole world. In the front row, a mob of rightish and leftish pundits. These ad-peddling charlatans have parsed each choke slamming and brain busting move as if it was real. Thus, Obama tapped out on canvas. Thus, Obama steam rolled by Republicans. Thus, Obama’s bad bargain. Obama caved in. He no criminal, he weak. Thus, Obama surrendered.

Those who don’t swallow entirely these farcical blow by blows are branded nutcases and conspiracy theorists. Whether it’s about 9/11, Bin Laden, Iraq, Afghanistan, War on Terror, Iran, Underwear Bomber, BP oil spill, Corexit, Libya, death of Bin Laden, on and on and on, the official narrative is always, and I mean always, nonsense, yet repeated often enough, from all angles, left, right and center, these clumsy fairy tales will coalesce in the brainpans of the inattentive or stupid as uncontestable truths and history.

In spite of all the recent bombast about fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice, the wasteful wars continue, though few Americans can tell you why or even where we’re unleashing horror, hatred and sorrow. America must kill because wars are so lucrative. No other country has been fighting so continuously, for so long. Anham, a Northern Virginia company, has just been busted for charging the Pentagon $900 for a $7 control switch, $3,000 for a $100 circuit breaker, and $80 for a $1.41 piece of plumbing equipment. Blah, blah, blah. Tell me something new, why don’t you? And Lockheed Martin has just been given a $72 million contract to install those universally despised, irradiating scanners at 300 U.S. airports.

Meanwhile, one in six Americans is on food stamps, and more and more Americans are losing jobs, including teachers, firemen and cops, as unemployed and deranged teens run wild in “flash mobs” to beat up random strangers. It has happened repeatedly in Philadelphia, my neck of the woods, as well as Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Boston, Brooklyn, South Orange and Greensboro. There are racial and class components to this phenomenon, as these wilding youngsters are invariably poor blacks converging on white shopping districts. In the latest episode, an 11-year-old Philly kid was arrested for assaulting a stranger.

With these mobs, all the pathologies of a post-industrial, post productive society, with its dead-end jobs, bad schools and a nonstop, stupefying media, are on full display. Another factor not often cited is the phenomenon of children being raised almost exclusively by strangers, practically right after birth, and the poorer the kids, the crappier the quality of daycare and subsequent schooling. How many times have you seen black women push strollers with well dressed white children, so the rich kids are pampered by their parents and nannies, while the poor ones are left alone in nightmarish neighborhoods. Also, when your government is so openly corrupt, anger is inevitable, although punching a stranger in the face is certainly not a solution. The biggest criminals are out of sight, leaving us bottom feeders to inflict pain on each other.

In any struggle, it’s important to know the nature of your enemy. Is he a klutz, prone to a goofy mistake now and then, or does he have murder on his mind? Again, we are being lorded over by a gang of criminals. War criminals.

For two years, there was a military entertainment complex inside a Philadelphia area shopping mall. At the Army Experience Center, young teens could play shoot them up, blood splattering video games for free, while those over 18 could climb into a realistic mockup of a tank or chopper to massacre bad guys in desert settings, also for free. An advertisement: SHOP FOR SOCKS. GRAB A BITE. PILOT AN AH-64 ATTACK HELICOPTER. After receiving 40,000 visitors and enlisting 236 recruits, the Army decided to shut down this 13-million dollar facility on July of 2010, “It’s been a great success. Basically it’s mission accomplished.”

Though it had planned on opening more of these centers, the Army soon realized there was no longer a need. Thanks to the Mother of All Depressions and rapidly increasing unemployment, desperate Americans are flocking to recruitment stations even without the promise of a free video game. It’s a win, win situation for our military industrial complex: destroy the economy, and Americans will enlist. They will beg to be blown up.

Until 2010, Social Security had always been a net gain, meaning that money contributed by workers had always exceeded the amount sent to retirees. This surplus means that Social Security, as is, should be sustainable until 1936, but that’s assuming the economy won’t seriously unravel, but even if it will, Social Security should be the very last program to be tampered with. Waste is needless wars and bank bailouts, not money spent on the old and the disabled.

In a traditional society, one must take care of one’s aging parents, and let’s not sugarcoat this. There is a Vietnamese proverb, “One mom can feed ten children, but ten children can’t feed one mom.” In Saigon, an old lady also confided to me, “My daughter pinched my inner thigh out of spite the last time she gave me a bath, so I said to her, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and kill me already?’”

In the Republic of Goldman Sachs, NASCAR, and Lady Gaga, however, most kids won’t be around to pinch our inner thighs as we fade into senility. Also, more American women won’t have any children. In 1970, it was only one in ten. Today, it’s one in five. Fewer of us are also getting married. What you have, then, is a huge aging population without any income beyond the Social Security check that arrives each month.

Substituting for the missing children, three workers now support each retiree, but this is only fair, since for decades, these old people were the de facto filial sons and daughters of other senior citizens.

As working citizens, we have no choice but to participate in Social Security, but this has never been a problem, since the vast majority of us has always recognized its necessity. Who’d want to be old and curled up under a bridge?

At $1,177, your average social security check will pay for a one bedroom apartment in a semi-slum neighborhood, plus enough leftover for discount groceries, bought with several fistfuls of coupons. It’s not much, but it’s survival, and not something to be messed with, unless, of course, you belong to the very rich.

The wealthy hate Social Security because they don’t need it. Even the concept of surviving on a grand a month boggles their minds. That is so pitiful! Such chump change won’t even get them three bottles of Pinot Noir at Bistro Bis, a favorite of belt-tightening advocate, Paul Ryan. Never been there, but if I go, I’ll order a Spam musubi. Can I have an extra plate, please? Me and the wife will share.

For the wealthy, for people whose earnings derive mostly from investments and dividends, and not grunting work, it is somehow scandalous that we should get a thousand a month after a lifetime of honest labor. They can steal from us to finance their endless war and banking shenanigans, but it’s not OK for us tapped out lumpens to have a minimum income in old age? Instead of gutting Social Security, we should wipe out the superfluous Department of Homeland Security.

This vicious campaign against Social Security is nothing but class warfare, pure and simple. Unless we do something about it, and soon, the ruling class will continue to rip us off as we sweat, and starve us when we’re no longer useful. They and their enablers, Bush, Obama and Boehner, et al., are not of us or among us. Never on the streets except when hustling votes, they never see the senior citizens already sprawling on our sidewalks.

Old people of limited means are a drag, really, since they can’t be sent to war, and you may have to clean up after them, instead of the other way around, as is customary with the poor. What good is a poor person who won’t clean your toilet, give you a sensual massage or kill and die for the empire?

According to Japanese legends, Ubasuteyama is a mountain where old people are abandoned to die. With each cut to Social Security, we will be erecting our own Ubasuteyama.