Author: Chuck Young

Mike Whitney wrote a great column recently titled “Is It Immoral to Vote for Obama?” Based on Obama’s predilection to kill large numbers of people around the Middle East in pursuit of foreign policy objectives, Whitney argued, it would indeed be immoral to vote for him. He isn’t the lesser of two evils. He is worse than Bush, which makes him evil, period.

I would argue that it is immoral to vote for Obama because he is guilty of the negligent homicide of 70,000 American citizens every year.

Consider what negligent homicide is. Legally it means that somebody died, and that the defendant should reasonably have been aware of the risk and instead of doing something to stop it, he “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly” acted in such a way that the death occurred.

Ethically, it means that you could have prevented a death at little or no risk to yourself, and you chose not to. It means that if you see a child crawl into a refrigerator and shut the door, and you don’t let him out, you bear responsibility for his death.

Now consider what Obama did on September 2. It was Friday before Labor Day, an infamous date almost every year because politicians use it to announce things that make them look bad. Most voters are traveling for the long weekend and aren’t paying attention. So just the choice of date proves he was aware that his decision was rotten, just as flight indicates consciousness of guilt.

He announced that day that he would not implement new regulations recommended by his own Environmental Protection Agency that would have cut the amount of smog we all inhale with every breath.
Obama cut the rules that limit air pollution by utilities and other major polluters

Liberated Autonomous Manhattan — In a century, community organizers will still be debating what to call Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza/Liberty Square. The surrounding skyscrapers will be covered with luxuriant tomato vines hanging from rooftop organic gardens. Electricity will be generated by solar panels and fermenting compost. Inside, the skyscrapers will be humming with intense conversation at the Occupy Education Graduate School of Revolutionary Studies, open to anyone willing to teach everyone wanting to learn.

Visitors to the park will meander through meticulously maintained sidewalks that wind in fractals through authentic tarps and wet sleeping bags from the early 21st century. Scent generators will alternately waft herbal cigarettes, sandalwood incense and mildew into the breeze.

In the center of the park will stand a 100-foot statue, cast from the bronze of the long forgotten Wall Street bull that was melted down in 2014 and recast as a 5’1” woman in a windbreaker, waving a big red flag. On the marble pedestal, it shall be carved: THE UNKNOWN ORGANIZER. And below it there shall be some beautiful words, maybe a sonnet, written about October 15, 2011, when The Unknown Organizer, who looked at a distance to be in her 30s, led a contingent of 500 brave revolutionaries from the 10,000 massed in Washington Square Park to defend 20-odd people who were being arrested for the crime of withdrawing their own money and closing their accounts at Citibank, one of the most corrupt, heartless and stupid institutions in all of corrupt, heartless and stupid Wall Street.

The unknown organizer in a movement that has no leaders

It will be written that the 500 volunteers followed The Unknown Organizer from the center of Washington Square Park to the sidewalk at the southern entrance where she waved her red flag in a “Halt!” gesture and asked, “Hey, does anyone know where LaGuardia Place is?”

Somebody did know, and we marched for a few minutes east and south to a Citibank branch where a couple dozen cops, decked out in their body armor and black uniforms and riot helmets, were standing in the middle of LaGuardia Place nervously tapping their extra-long batons.

Liberty Park — For most of the night, the air hovered at the midpoint between high humidity and fog. For the rest of the night, rain poured down in silver sheets, reducing Occupy Wall Street to the Park of Many-Colored Lumps, each lump consisting of: one green/yellow/red/blue plastic tarp glistening under lightning bolts and the relentless glare of police car headlights, and 1-4 huddled recent graduates with $120,000 in debt, no employment prospects, the reading skills to write a dissertation on 12th century French troubadour poetry, and an overwhelming distrust of capitalism.

When it wasn’t actually raining, the Lumps emerged from their tarps and fell into two warring camps: Those Who Cleaned, and Those Who Complained Bitterly.

It had been decided by the previous General Assembly that Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza should be cleaned, as a way of pre-empting the cleaners hired by Mayor Bloomberg as an obvious ruse for ridding himself of Occupy Wall Street, which has struck fear into the heart of the American ruling class unlike anything since…what? The Minneapolis General Strike of 1934? Hard to figure the analogy, but Those Who Cleaned really wanted to keep it going, whatever it was, by cleaning every flat stone slab in a park that was almost all flat stone slabs. There were about two platoons of Those Who Cleaned vigorously with stiff-bristled brooms.

There were about the same number of Those Who Complained Bitterly. What they complained about was Those Who Cleaned.

“Why are you cleaning the same stone slab that someone else just scrubbed three minutes ago?”

“Because we’re the Sanitation Working Group and the General Assembly voted we should clean.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense. It’s been raining for an hour.”

“Mayor Bloomberg will say the park is dirty if we don’t clean it.”

“But it’s already clean, and he’s going to say it’s dirty whatever we do.”

“Why don’t you grab a broom and help us?”

Liberty Park filled with thousands of people in the pre-dawn hours as people responded to the call to defend the Occupation

Mayor Bloomberg has announced that Occupy Wall Street must leave Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday, October 14, allegedly so the city can clean it.

Almost verbatim notices have been served on other occupations around the United States and the world. Invariably, they have turned out to be a ploy to clear the space and not let demonstrators back in. Mayor Bloomberg has a long history of lying and police state tactics of crowd control.

As I write, Occupy Wall Street is cleaning all of Zuccotti Park, even spending $3000 of its own funds to hire professionals with steam cleaners as well as gardeners who are replacing trampled flowers. The park had become somewhat messy with all the wet sleeping bags and tarps, but it was never filthy. Uniquely among New York’s urban public spaces, it is completely free of pigeons, who cannot find a meal, despite enormous the amounts of free food being served daily. The demonstrators have been cleaning up after themselves from the beginning.

The OWS General Assembly has voted not to leave the park voluntarily. It has issued an urgent call for all supporters to come to Zuccotti Park by 6 a.m. tomorrow (Friday, October 14) and defend the occupation.

Occupy Wall Street has been steadfastly non-violent from its start on September 17. The police are another matter–especially the supervisory goons in white shirts and the “Paid Detail Unit,” which is composed of active-duty city cops directly employed by the banks and the New York Stock Exchange. But if thousands of people show up, link arms and refuse to leave, the police can’t arrest everyone and Zuccotti Park, or Liberty Plaza as it has been called lately, will remain liberated space.

Occupy Wall Street and the countless other occupations across the country it has inspired is the most important and effective demonstration the left has organized in at least 40 years. The New York action has garnered $150,000 in donations. It has support from the most important unions and community groups in New York. It has inspired millions around the world to fight back against greed and corruption with their own occupations. It must be defended.

We call on all our readers to go to Zuccotti Park now. At the latest, get there by 6 a.m. Preferably spend the night, because Mayor Bloomberg should not be trusted about when the “cleaning” will start. He is, after all, a billionaire.

Please forward this alert to everyone and anyone you know who lives within driving range of New York City!

Hey Mayor Mike! Show us the #%&*!# dirt in Zuccotti Park!

New York — I took the subway down to Zuccotti Park on Saturday morning to go on the Slut Walk. Since it was on the official schedule of Occupy Wall Street, and since I had heard it promoted by various members of the Ad Hoc Caucus of Non-Male Identified Individuals, I figured that the Slut Walk was an official Occupy Wall Street event. I envisioned a few dozen Non-Male Identified Individuals raising a ruckus and making a spectacle and wreaking havoc in and around Zuccotti Park.

Instead I found the park to be stuffed with an unusually large proportion of Male Bodied Individuals of unknown identification who were preoccupied with revolutionary pursuits other than the Slut Walk, which was nowhere in evidence. I asked several Male Bodied Individuals where I might find the Slut Walk, and none of them knew.

This presented an unanticipated problem. It was almost noon, and I was in danger of missing the Slut Walk entirely, wherever it was. Yet my mother raised me in such a way that I would never ask a Non-Male Identified Individual, “Hey, where’s the Slut Walk?”

So I perambulated the park a couple times searching for a Non-Male Identified Individual who would not think I was making untoward assumptions with my ever more urgent query. “I will know her when I see her,” I thought. And I did. I knew her because she was wearing blue jeans and a negligee and she had “SLUT” written in foot-high black letters from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.

“Excuse me,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the Slut Walk is, would you?”

“Union Square,” she said. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to get there, would you?”

Thus it transpired that I accompanied Mariah Bracken and her recently acquired friends Dana and Brianna to the No. 4 Train. All of them were 22 years old. Mariah and Dana were dressed like…um, ya know…and Brianna was dressed normally. Nobody on the subway seemed to notice.

“Because there’s a serial rapist loose in Brooklyn right now and the police are saying, ‘If girls stopped dressing like sluts, then they wouldn’t be raped’—that’s why I’m going to the Slut Walk,” said Mariah, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. “We are trying to reclaim the word ‘slut.’”
Arrested on the bridge by devious NYPD officers, this Wall Street occupier lets everyone know, he's still occupying The Street (Lindorff photo)

1) I had brunch on Sunday in Chinatown with a friend who works in local television news. He complained that the Occupy Wall Street people had sent over video that they said showed demonstrators getting maced. It didn’t show any such thing, my friend insisted. After brunch I walked over to occupied Zuccotti Park (two blocks north of Wall Street) and told somebody at the Media table that they had to be careful about claiming more for their video than it actually showed. Then I went home and looked at the video, and it clearly showed several young women, who presented no physical threat, getting wrapped up by police in a plastic net and pepper sprayed in the face.
Officer Anthony Bologna is being sued for gratuitously pepper-spraying women at the Wall St. occupation

2) My friend’s other complaint about Occupy Wall Street was that they didn’t have a list of demands. Nobody knows what they want, said my friend. It is true that they don’t have a policy statement yet, nothing to spoonfeed the corporate press. But they are trying. On Saturday night, I sat through their General Assembly meeting in the park and heard the report of the One Demand Working Group. Basically, they wanted to demand that other autonomous groups in other cities join them. Most of the General Assembly pointed their hands down and wiggled their fingers, meaning disapproval (in a supportive way). Several people said that you can’t demand solidarity from an autonomous group, you can only encourage it. And everyone seemed to think the language wasn’t “provocative” or “funny,” which meant it had way too much Process jargon and not enough Anglo Saxon monosyllables. It was suggested (not decided) that the One Demand Working Group try another draft and perhaps combine their efforts with the Principles of Solidarity Working Group.

3) The Process is how stuff gets worked out when you don’t have leaders, only Facilitators who facilitate group decisions. There are lots of Facilitators, so the police can’t nail anyone as a leader, not that anyone would want a leader anyway.

4) The Ad Hoc Caucus of Non-Male Identified Individuals wanted help writing a letter to Stephen Colbert, who had done a report that focused on a Non-Male Identified Individual who was in a state of disrobe while protesting Wall Street on the sidewalk. The report featured only interviews with Male Identified Individuals commenting on the naked Non-Male Identified Individual. The Ad Hoc Caucus of Non-Male Identified Individuals wanted Colbert to rectify this imbalance. Male Bodied Individuals, who were not wholly Male Identified, were welcome at the meeting of the Ad Hoc Caucus of Non-Male Identified Individuals.

5) I think that the corporate press has a difficult time understanding Occupy Wall Street because, like 99% of Americans, they have no experience with democracy. They spend most of their time enslaved by large totalitarian collectives known as “corporations” and have never once decided anything for themselves as a group of equal workers. Instead they follow orders and write about elections, which are big puppet shows financed and scripted by Wall Street.

6) Most journalists wouldn’t know democracy if it bit them on the ass.

Free Wall Street, NY – For God’s sake, all you liberal, progressive, anarchist, socialist, communist, hippie, hip hop, yippie, punk whatevers of all aligned and unaligned varieties no matter what your age! There’s a little spark of something down in Zuccotti Park in the heart of darkest darkness near Wall Street! Many hundreds of people have gathered there without permit, declared it their own and are refusing to leave until Wall Street reforms its evil ways!

Now is not the time to stay home and read blogs about how horrible everything is!

Now is not the time to overeat, drink, shoot up, watch television, look at internet porn or whatever else you use as an antidote to despair!

Now is the time to go to Zucotti Park and overthrow capitalism!
Where's the support? A group of activists has occupied a piece of Wall Street since Saturday

News judgment being what it is these days, the corporate media gave more publicity to the Casey Anthony trial than they did to “The High Costs of Wrongful Incarceration,” a report by the Better Government Association and the Center on Wrongful Convictions about the practice of locking up innocent people in Illinois.

Perhaps journalism schools are teaching their students that wrongful convictions are inherently less interesting than wrongful exonerations. Perhaps law schools are teaching their students that wrongful convictions aren’t all that wrong, because their students will want a lot of convictions on their resume when they run for governor or audition for a talk show on cable news.

I can only speculate. But why would the Better Government Association even bother to write such a report if journalists and lawyers in Illinois thought that wrongful convictions should be avoided because they are wrong? The point of their report is that wrongful convictions should be avoided because they cost a lot of money.

Which is undeniable. The BGA did the math on 85 wrongful convictions in Illinois between 1985 and 2010, and found that it cost the state $214 million to incarcerate and compensate the exonerated, while it cost the exonerated 926 years in prison. Meanwhile the actual criminals were on the street committing 14 more murders, 11 more sexual assaults, 10 more kidnappings and 62 other felonies, plus at least 35 murders, 11 rapes and two murder-rapes that remain unsolved.

Another interesting statistic is that of the 85 false convictions, 81 involved “government error or misconduct by police, prosecutors and forensic officials.” Error and misconduct apparently means inducing false confessions from terrorized or mentally ill suspects, encouraging false eyewitness identification, cooked forensics, and “incentivizing witnesses,” which means making deals with prisoners for desired testimony in exchange for reduced sentences.

Shortly before the BGA report was issued in the middle of June, the Supreme Court ruled in Connick v. Thompson that the district attorney of New Orleans had no obligation to “train” his prosecutors not to hide exculpatory evidence, thus overturning a jury award of $14 million for an innocent man who spent 18 years in prison, most of them on death row. So it would be fair to say that the Supreme Court thinks the remedy for the high cost of incarcerating the innocent is disincentivizing defense attorneys, who won’t get paid for years of legal work proving prosecutors wrong.

“With this ruling,” said the New York Times in an editorial, “the court made it even more likely that innocent people will be railroaded by untrained prosecutors–with the terrible prospect of their being put to death for crimes they did not commit.”

Indeed, training. Lets mandate a lecture on ethics at some point in law school and remind everyone that God didn’t leave a lot of wiggle room in the ninth commandment. Bearing false witness against your neighbor is wrong, and that’s all there is to it, even for prosecutors. Then maybe put a question on the bar exam. “True or false: If lying makes me look good, it’s okay that somebody who hasn’t done anything is put to death by the state.”

The "exercise" yard at the California Adjustment Center for solitary-confinement prisoners

“Project Nim” is a twisted mirror image of “Grizzly Man.” The former is about a guy who thinks he can make a wild animal human by raising it in civilization. The latter is about about a guy who thinks he can make himself a wild animal by living in the woods. The former gets tenure. The latter gets eaten. Both want to be famous.

“Grizzly Man”, a 2005 documentary by Werner Herzog, concerns one Timothy Treadwell, a suicidal misfit who goes to live among grizzly bears in Alaska every summer for 13 years. He videos his encounters with grizzlies and concludes that because he hasn’t been eaten yet, he is one of them. He also sees himself as their protector, even though they are already protected in a national park. And then the bears decide to eat Treadwell and his girlfriend.

Moral: Bears will be bears.

The tragic hero of “Project Nim,” a 2011 documentary by James Marsh, is Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who is raised by humans who think they can teach him to communicate using sign language (chimps don’t have the throat structure to talk). The alpha scientist of the project is Herbert Terrace, a Columbia psychology professor who acquires Nim at the age of two weeks in 1973. Nim is violently separated from his distraught mother at the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma and shipped to New York. It is clear in the movie that Terrace hadn’t given the experiment or his chimp much thought. If he had, he probably wouldn’t have given Nim to a family of rich, vaguely bohemian intellectuals with seven children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They seem like nice people, but nobody knows anything about chimps or sign language. This is also true of the press, who do a lot of soft features on the project.

For 18 months, Nim wrecks the home and marriage of his surrogate parents, and becomes dangerous as he gets larger and stronger. No “science” is getting done, so Terrace moves Nim to a country estate north of the city, from which Nim commutes to a classroom at Columbia. Various student assistants try to teach Nim sign language and are lucky to escape with their lives. Fearful of getting sued, Terrace decides that he’s got enough data in 1977 and sends Nim back to his birthplace in Oklahoma. He sees Nim a year later to have his picture taken for an anecdotal memoir bragging about all the sign language Nim learned. In 1979, he changes his mind and publishes an article in Science saying that Nim had learned nothing, that chimps can’t learn language.

After the trauma of adjusting to life in a cage with other chimps, Nim gets lucky for a while. One of his keepers is a hippie Deadhead named Bob Ingersoll who appreciates Nim for his essential ape-ness. They play a lot in the woods and smoke dope together. The reserve closes because of financial problems, and Nim is sold to an NYU lab where vaccines for hepatitis are being tested on primates. It is also a medieval torture chamber. Ingersoll lobbies to get him purchased and moved, and Nim ends up in Cleveland Amory’s private animal prerserve, where he has a few happy years and finally dies of a heart attack at the age of 26 (about half of his expected lifespan) in 2000. Since Nim’s favorite foods in New York were ice cream and pizza, one wonders if his handlers ended up killing him with arteriosclerosis.

Moral: Chimps will be chimps.

A large gap in “Project Nim” is that the origin of the name Nim Chimpsky is not explained, which means Terrace’s motives—other than to be the first man to talk to an ape— are not explained. The viewer leaves the theater wondering, “Why did he want to tweak Noam Chomsky?”
Nim Chimpsky incarcerated for failure to speak

I have three comedians on my iPod: Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Bill Hicks. All of them evolved as much into prophets as comedians, and all of them died younger than they should have from maladies that probably had something to do with the stress of being a live performer on the road in corporate America.

Hicks died the youngest, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32 in 1994. Perhaps his pancreas had had enough of his drinking, which started later than usual at the age of 21 but got excessive quickly. Or maybe it was road food from all that driving to comedy clubs around the country. He looked puffy by his mid-20s. If Hicks came back from the dead, he could do a good routine about government agents slipping some carcinogen (white sugar?) into his food because his routines had come too close to the truth.

That was one of his best joke constructions, taking some dark conspiracy theory lurking in the collective unconscious and validating not so much the theory as the paranoia that got the imagination fired up in the first place. In a routine called “The Elite” on his album Rant in E-Minor, Hicks speculates on what happens to a new president. “When you win, you go in this smokey room with the 12 industrialist/capitalist scumfucks who got you [elected]…And this screen comes down—whrrrrrrr—and this big guy says, ‘Roll the film.’ It’s a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before. [Big laugh.] And it looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll. And the screen comes up and they go to the new president and say, ‘Any questions?’”

Hicks did believe the Warren Commission was a lie, but you can have any theory you want about the Kennedy assassination and get the joke there. He’s describing a fictional situation, and in literal reality, it doesn’t happen like that. Long before anyone is elected president, they are vetted for obedience. Nobody has to tell politicians to obey, or what the consequences of disobeying would be. New presidents want to obey, and that’s why they got the nomination. What Hicks is getting at is not so much conspiracy but the deeper truth that inspires so many grassroots conspiracy theories. It really is a tiny number of industrialist/capitalist scumfucks who control everything. They will tell any lie and commit any crime to keep their power. Hicks not only understood that, he could make phenomenal jokes about it.

I saw the recent documentary about Hicks, American: The Bill Hicks Story. As a coming of age story about a teenager who figures out that he’s funny, becomes fascinated by the mechanics of humor, and is performing in nightclubs before he can drive, it’s compelling and even triumphant. Growing up talented in the Deep South always has its element of heroism. The story is not so much about finding himself, which he did by his late teens, but finding a place to display what he found of himself. That was a struggle until the end.
Bill Hicks