Sometimes, folks are proud of the wrong thing.

“Those people wish they were the one percent!” said Mike Polski, 53, a sign maker from Joliet. “The one percent are billionaires.”

Seeing the Occupy Chicago protest every day for nearly two weeks, traders on break from working in the pit have had some time to reflect on the demostrations.[sic] “It’s a free country, and everyone has a right to an opinion,” said George Garza, a courier for RJ O’Brien at the CBOT, donning a kelly green trading jacket. “I don’t think the economy is as simple as 99 percent to one percent, though.”

When I informed Paul Richardson, who spent his morning in the pit for Vision Financial, about the WE ARE THE 1% signage, he chuckled. “It’s just trying to get the protesters stirred up," he said. "They’re getting a little annoying, you know what I mean? Blocking streets, sidewalks. I know they’re just trying to be heard, but I think they’re uninformed. They’re inexperienced on being educated on the economy, so they don’t have a leg to stand on in terms of their platform.”

Democracy can be so annoying. Yesterday, NPR carried a report from the BBC in which two bankers were talking about confidence in the Euro before the G20 Summit. It has not occurred to bankers that the rest of us are aware that bankers have become enough of a problem that we might have to fix it, and by extension, them. Keep your eye on Europe.

After Steve Gilliard died in 2007, a bunch of his friends got together and decided to continue the kind of work he did over at the Group News Blog. For a while, GNB did Gilliard proud, putting out some of the best work in Blogtopia (™ Skippy). I don't know what happened to the GNBers; gone to Twitter and Facebook probably, like so many others who have abandoned the long-form blog format. But as I watch the wingnuts suddenly turning on Herman Cain, who actually thought that his presence on a debate stage meant he was being allowed into the club, for recognizing that there's a serious problem with a white candidate whose family hunting club had a big rock outside with "N----rhead" painted on it since the 1980's, I once again find myself wondering what Steve Gilliard would make of all this. And today I was reminded of a post that Group News Blog's Lower Manhattanite did back in September 2007, in which he recounted an experience he had in North Carolina as a child and then said:

Understand something. It is the year 2007. Where we joke about, “Where is my flying car? My monorail? The 3.5 jet-packs per family we were promised?”, mocking the progress we were supposed to have made, based on futurists predictions.

It is the year 2007. And as much as we may try to think otherwise, we live in a country where White teenagers will still fight over who can, and who can not sit under a fucking tree during recess at school, based on the color of their skin. For all the crowing about the “browning of America”, and how the kids are un-learning the racism inculcated in the American fabric, this incident should give every one of us pause.

Pause because it speaks to the reality of what we're actually confronting here.

If these kids...these supposedly, rapidly blind-to-color kids will fight over a scraggly patch of grass, don't stand here and try to tell me that their fathers and mothers—the generation presently in control of this country—aren't actively fighting Black folks' inclusion in the more important arenas of participation in the American mosaic.

Do not look me in the face from my TV, and tell me from your visit to New Orleans Mr. President, that Kanye West—crazy as he is—was wrong. The carnival that is American Idol, where “Ohmigosh! Look at all those talented Black people doing so well—aren't they doing so well?” isn't enough of an anesthetic to numb me to the constant, pounding ache that is the reality of not being Black in America—but rather, what dealing with the perceptions from others about one's being Black in America does to you.

Jena brings it all sickeningly home. Teens. Kids. Decades at least, removed from the last picnic/lynching to take place in their neck of the woods, by so-called decent people, somehow knew, in their stupid little turf battle, just what mega-trope, what ultimate nullifier to go to to let those wandering n*ggers know that they meant business about keeping one's place. And then, when those Black kids defiantly said “Better check your calendar, motherfuckers. It is the year 2007!”, those Black teens saw the second wave, the real shock troops—those silly, turf-crazed White kids' parents, jump up with the old-school, authority smackdown all too familiar Post -Reconstruction, to uppity/not-having-it Black folks.

We can sing “kum-ba-ya” til our throats sound like Miles Davis after a bender of Sloe Drano Fizzes, but at the sick core of America, racism still infirms this country's aspiration to greatness.

I use the word “infirms”, loosely. Because the pat analogies about America's racial “sickness” are so very, very flawed. Racism in America isn't a wound,—as so many describe it. No. Wounds heal. And it isn't a cancer—because you can remove a cancer, should you catch it early enough, or if not—at least bomb it with enough countering toxicity where you can seriously impede its progress.

Racism in America is neither of these things—a wound, or a cancer.

It is quite simply...akin to a living, festering parasite that feasts on the very soul of the country, and what makes it work. It's a vicious tapeworm. Picked up long ago, and living there, deep in the American belly...it's very guts, in fact. Not killing, mind you...but in there nonetheless, all slimy and sickening, so intwined with what makes this place simply exist, that it's supremely difficult to remove.

And the host knows it's there. Knows it slows and sickens it with every step forward. But in the end...does nothing about it...because the effort to remove the parasite is “just too great”.

Too costly.

“Time will take care of it.”

And besides...the “host” figures, “How bad can it be? I'm alive.”

The host can “get by”. Never mind how his guts are fouled and slowly failing. As long as he can get up, and go about his business reasonably well, fuck it—it's a price he's willing to live with.

The willingness to pooh-pooh racism, and shuck off dealing with it pro-actively is like that walking around, going about your business, with that insidious parasite inside of you—sapping your strength, leeching off your nutrients, benignly weakening you from within. You can go about for quite a while with a tapeworm in you. Years, in fact.

But a side effect of having that kind of parasite in you, is that it is a thing unto itself. And it grows. And grows. And grows, until it sometimes spreads past the digestive tract, laying its eggs (for it does reproduce) in muscle, bone, and yes...the central nervous system.

I miss Lower Manhattanite. I have no idea where he disappeared to, but I wish he was still writing, just as I wish Steve Gilliard were still here to write about how two years after a black man became President, people can defend yet another dimwitted Texas governor, this one with a demonstrable history of, if not outright racism, certainly a tin ear and a tin heart for what that fraught word means. I'm just a middle-aged white Jewish woman from Jersey. I can empathize what it must be like to be black and accomplished and yet know that somewhere in Texas, there may STILL be a rock that has "N----rhead" painted on it that belongs to a man who still possibly could succeed that black man we elected just three short years ago. But it would be presumptuous for me to say I KNOW. And so I won't. But if Lower Manhattanite is still out there, I hope he starts writing again, because we need his voice.

Labels: bloggers, racism

The collusion between publishers and literary agencies goes back at least a generation and continues. As the hoary old story goes, and I've told this one myself countless times, about 25-30 years ago, publishers were drowning in unsolicited submissions and the slush piles were getting unmanageable. So publishers gradually made literary agencies a deal, one that became a firmly-enforced standard: "Become our unpaid weeding out process, take on our slush piles and we'll make sure no one gets past the front door unless they have one of you repping them." Agencies, not knowing what they were in for, agreed because this elevated their status from an optional service to a mandated one.

Since then, the business model of getting an agent before a publisher has proved to be, euphemistically speaking, an untenable one. As I'd just mentioned, literary agencies that had been far fewer in number during the 80's finally got an eye-opening idea of just how many wannabes there were out there. Even now, with over 450-500 literary agencies across the landscape, agencies typically get 300 or more submissions a week, mostly by wannabes who make the likes of Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell look like Virginia Woolf.

Now, with epublishing grabbing a bigger and bigger share of book sales at a time when traditional publishing is losing over a billion per year, the business model set forth in a collusion between publishers and literary agencies a generation ago had only created a unique set of problems virtually unheard of in the early-mid 80's. E. g. Literary agencies have become so wealthy and influential that they no longer feel the need to seek out new talent and their doors are closed to unpublished novelists and other writers who are still told by the publishing zeitgeist that they need an agent to get through the front door.

This Catch-22 situation is the one that frustrates and infuriates a lot of otherwise talented writers who have yet to discover what the password is to the Kool Kids Klubhouse. The conundrum of not being able to find an agent without a publisher that insists on one having an agent is perhaps the single-biggest reason why the current business model is simply untenable and non-sustainable. Epublishing, especially POD (publish on demand), for a brief, shining moment, looked as if it was the answer to many "prepublished writers' (a euphemism for those who have yet to find that all-important password) biggest problem- Getting around mandatory and exclusionary representation that largely fails them even with representation. For the first time in the modern age, writers could bypass both publishers and literary agencies and get to keep their royalties to themselves. A few agencies began waking up to the fact that more and more writers were cutting out what was once again an optional middleman and they were determined to do something about it.

Nowadays, we're seeing a newer, more technologically savvy collusion between publishers and literary agents who still demand on getting a slice of the pie. The Perseus Book Group is offering, on its face, a deal for beginning and midlist authors that seems infinitely better than the one offered by Amazon's Kindle and Create Space: a 70% royalty and fairly aggressive marketing and distribution. The catch is, Perseus' new epublishing venture, called Argo Navis Author Services, is open only for those authors who are represented by the Janklow and Nesbit literary agency. Curtis Brown, Ltd., another large and influential literary agency both here and in the UK, is close to finalizing a similarly exclusionary deal and Perseus is currently negotiating with about a dozen other literary agencies.

This is not good news for authors who thought they'd found a way out of the Minotaur's lair and Joseph Heller's paradox. Essentially, the technology has radically changed in just the last five years and publishers and agencies have no choice but to both acknowledge and embrace it. But the old cronyistic business model that's primarily predicated on greed and excluding presumably bad writers has remained intact and we're now back to where we started. Publishers have, for the second successive generation, found a sleazy way to keep solipsistic and clueless literary agencies on the playing field in spite of their dismal track record.

The trick to making this work, of course, is not in making the new technology available to consumers but to offer such ereaders at a reader-friendly price. The most common ereader, by far, is the multi-platform Amazon Kindle. But recently, avaricious Amazon tycoon and Steve Jobs wannabe Jeff Bezos, who decided that being worth just under $20 billion wasn't quite good enough, unveiled the Kindle Fire, which for a limited time will go for $99, about $40 less than the standard Kindle. Despite its new bells and whistles and exciting-sounding name, the catch is that the new Kindle will soon go up to over $200 after applicable sales tax. Why Bezos thought this would catch "Fire" in the worst economy we've seen in a generation is anyone's guess but a $200 ereader is still a $200 ereader and it'll still be viewed as a luxury as long as dead tree publishing thrives.

Or, and I'd discovered this quickly after publishing my first two novels on Kindle, people will pay whatever Amazon thinks they should get for the Kindle but consumers will be so cash-strapped they'll lowball impertinent and greedy independent authors who may want to make a buck and charge more than the .99¢ that is the buyer's self-imposed threshold. It's a classic case of buying a leather wallet or purse that costs so much they no longer have any money to put into it.

In fact, the seedy underbelly of the so-called free market is no better delineated than on Amazon.com, which has banned who knows how many hundreds of authors for committing the unpardonable sin of trying to sell their Kindle titles on Amazon's book-selling site. Kindle publishes only and does not get involved in marketing. If you ask their tech support people who, if not you, will help your work stand out among 800,000 Kindle titles, all you'll get is some idiotic robo email thanking you for using Amazon.

Another problem with Amazon's quasi-fascist setup is that, while authors can bypass the usual publisher-agent obstruction and name their own price and royalty rate, ultimately the price is controlled by tight-fisted Kindle owners feeling some unvoiced buyer's remorse for buying a $140-$200 ereader and insist on purchasing only books that cost no more than .99¢. Some will lowball an author even more and refuse to even look at it unless it's offered for free. This means, since the transaction rate is paid for out of the author's royalties, authors are increasingly finding themselves in the absurd position of actually paying their fickle readers to read their books! And this prejudicial attitude is predicated on the simple-minded belief that, if you can't get a legitimate book contract, then you're not worth the $8.99 or $9.99 that "real" publishers would be allowed to charge. There's no haggling at the bookstore. But in the free market at Amazon, haggling is done through a cruel process of attrition.

Barnes & Noble's Nook reader is generally considered technologically comparable but the drawback to the Nook is that it is made and marketed by the deeply troubled Barnes & Noble, which will almost surely meet the same fate as Borders, Inc. Compounding its sluggish sales is that it's considered a great bargain at $250. Judith Curr, Vice President and co-founder of Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, has in the last couple of years pioneered an interactive reader called the Vook. This platform does something even the latest Kindle doesn't: Play videos that supplement the text. The problem with this bit of genius on Curr's part is that there's no hardware or even software to download and the process and technology isn't that well articulated until you commit to purchasing titles (through iTunes for your iPod or iPad). Essentially, Vook offers original movies (One stars noted actor Blair Underwood) only with massive amounts of subtitles.

A cursory look at this Broomhildan digital landscape shows that, where corporations have set their still-smaller but spreading footprint, it is hostile to authors, especially those trying to get just a toe in the shrinking pool, and friendly to corporations and literary agencies. Essentially, they're already ruining a new market and excluding from writers a still highly Protean technology. The old rules of exclusion still apply and, while the NY Times article doesn't specify payment to agencies, I would imagine the same standard 15% commission still applies for those lucky few within Janklow and Nesbit & Assoc. who might want to dip their well-shod toes into this pool.

Obviously, unlike Amazon Kindle, some editorial gatekeeping would be required. Under this new arrangement, agents from participating agencies will submit mss to ANAS, who then get to decide whether it passes their subjective muster. If agents are just as clueless as they've always been, this will also result in the usual 90-95% mortality rate for the adult fiction they choose to represent, a steady casualty rate that apparently doesn't bother those in the publishing business as it would alarm those in other industries and professions.

Either way one looks at it, if you're a writer, you'll note the existing system and the one emerging from the bones of its decaying carcass have one thing in common: It's set up to make the independent and unrepresented author fail while The Powers That Be are already dividing the pie. The 70% royalty rate offered by ANAS compares with Kindle's but, unlike Kindle, the new business model is the same as the old one, only much, much more exclusive, and will exclude all but a handful of America's published and non-published authors.

Perhaps because of this reason, not only does Perseus not have a title on the virtual bookshelf, no such titles exist because there's no catalog. And this is because not one author has signed on under their present exclusive agreement with that one agency.

You don't have to be a genius to realize this:

The U.S. economy is limping along with the help of modest business investment in new equipment, some exports to parts of the world that are growing and the last few dollars from the government's 2009 stimulus spending program.

For the time being, it looks like American consumers are AWOL. And until they come back, don't expect to see any real recovery in economic growth and the job market. Consumer spending typically accounts for roughly 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

Fresh data from the government Friday confirmed that American consumers are tapped out. Consumer spending in dollar terms rose 0.2 percent in August. But those extra dollars went to cover higher prices for food and gasoline; when adjusted for inflation, spending was flat.

Wages, meanwhile, slipped 0.1 percent -- the first decline in nearly two years. To make up the difference, American households had to dip into savings: the savings rate in August fell to its lowest level since late 2009.

"What you're basically getting is a scene where consumers are losing momentum, they're losing momentum on income and as a result of that they're slowing down on spending," said Steven Ricchiuto, U.S. chief economist at Mizuho Securities in New York.
That spending slowdown has rippled through the economy, creating one of the biggest drags on an already weak recovery.

The part that the greedy didn't realize in their plans to take ALL of the wealth in this country, is that not even the most conspicuous consumers can keep an economy of this size going. They may be trying to push the middle class down into poverty and the poor into living on the streets, but if only 1% of the population has any money to spend, they're going to find that what they have isn't worth all that much.

Labels: economic death watch, greed, unabashed consumerism

This, and only this:

We Are The 99 Percent.

(If you, like me, were born between June 22 and July 21, and your first answer to "How can I help" is always "Feed them!", Liberatos Pizza (yes, by sheer coincidence, that's the place's real name, and the owner's name is really Telly Liberatos) has an online ordering system that you can use to order pizzas to donate to feed the protesters. Just tell them to deliver to anyone at Zucotti Park. They know what to do.)

Labels: Blogroll Amnesty Day, Occupy Wall Street

Step right up and see what the intellectual flea circus of the right wing has for us today.

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El Rushbo is attacking the First Lady again, this time for buying Lysol at a Target. Sure, it's suspicious that an AP photographer would just happen to be there at the same time as the First Lady but "coincidental" photo ops is part of politics. You know, sort of like when Laura Bush commandeered a Red Cross aid station that was trying to update its website to tell Katrina victims where to go for help, an aid station that Bush's Secret Service goons took over for a full eight hours so that the First Zombie could hand out one fucking loaf of bread.

You know, Rush, for a white racist, you sure are spending a lot of time thinking and talking about "Mooch-elle". I think someone's in lo-ooove!

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Obama essentially assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki without due process certainly deserves to be condemned but why is it up to, of all people, Dick Cheney to stick up for American principles and due process of law? Cheney's doing a great impression of the pot calling the kettle black because authorizing the torture of people who hadn't received due legal process is certainly on a higher moral plane.

Dick, put aside your moral relativism, go count your book royalties then kindly go fuck yourself in a quiet, dark corner, you deflated twat.

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Half the NYPD recently arrested, along with 700 other people in the Occupy Wall Street movement, what appears to be a 13 year-old girl on the Brooklyn Bridge, although it's impossible to see why the child was being arrested (Gee, guys, maybe you should call in some backup from Jersey). Maybe it was because the youth was on the walkway of the bridge where the NYPD had herded people only to arrest them for walking on it.

At this arrest rate, all the jail and prison space will be exhausted, meaning that by Halloween, Escape From New York could become a reality series. And here's a thought: People in Egypt sent pizzas to protesters in Madison last winter: How come we don't send pizzas to the Wall Street Occupiers? Just a thought...

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Herman Cain's laser focus is on the most pressing issues of the day, such as "freshening up 'Hail to the Chief'", to which he would include some gospel beats. Cain's reasoning is that companies update their marketing from time to time to keep from getting stale. It would be easy to assume that Cain in his addled mind has downgraded the entrance of the President to a mere marketing gimmick.

It would also be just as easy to suggest that, rather than additional gospel beats, "when" Cain gets elected "Hail to the Chief" should be played on kazoos and a calliope.

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Why do we still listen to racist video editor Andrew Breitbart?

Last night, Breitbart put in an appearance at TeaCon and told the 15 or 20 in attendance that Nancy Pelosi was "a bitch", Janeane Garofalo was a "sympathy fuck" and, oh, "Fuck you" to unions. Naturally, the dozen or two in attendance uproariously cheered over this crude simulacrum of humor and wit without realizing that about three years ago, Ted Nugent achieved notoriety for saying essentially the same thing about Nancy Pelosi and others.

So, not only was Breitbart's rant needlessly vicious, sloppy and career-tarnishing, it wasn't even original. Way to go, Tubby, keep it classy.

I'm sorry, but when my good friend DCap chooses his 10 Greatest Instrumentals and doesn't include Green Onions by Booker T. and the MGs, I shall have to ask him to step outside!



Or, if you prefer to travel forward in time from then:



Or the late, great, criminally underrated Roy Buchanan:

Labels: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, music

First we have a police officer spraying pepper spray at female protesters. Now it seems that in Brooklyn, they're stopping women in the street and telling them to cover up:

In response to a string of at least 10 unsolved sexual assaults in Brooklyn, New York police are reportedly stopping women on the street who are wearing clothing they say is revealing and advising them to cover up if they don’t want to be raped. The Wall Street Journal reports on the disturbing message police officers are allegedly spreading:

Lauren, a South Slope resident, was walking home three blocks from the gym on Monday when she was stopped. The 25-year-old, who did not want her last name to be used, was wearing shorts and a T-shirt when she claims a police officer asked if she would stop and talk to him. He also stopped two other women wearing dresses. [...]

“He pointed at my outfit and said, ‘Don’t you think your shorts are a little short?‘” she recalled. “He pointed at their dresses and said they were showing a lot of skin.”

He said that such clothing could make the suspect think he had “easy access,” said Lauren. She said the officer explained that “you’re exactly the kind of girl this guy is targeting.”

Aside from the sense I have that this is more about the police officers' view of women than it is about keeping them safe, it also shows a profound ignorance of what rape is. It's an act of aggression that takes the form of a sexual attack. It is not an act of uncontrollable lust. If it were, we wouldn't hear about 80-year-old women getting raped in their apartments.

How can any woman who is assaulted in South Slope have any hope of being treated in good faith by the police, when the law acts like mullahs on the streets of Saudi Arabia?

Labels: just another outrage, rape, sexism