Iceland survived Cleburne’s Chilicahcah Twot long before bank failures and today’s social media

Scene from Reykjvik, Iceland.

By Dan Bodine

Center against Social Minimalism


Iceland’s President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson told CNN last week that not only did social media wizardry allow his country to survive potentially catastrophic bank failures a few years back now facing Europe and the United States, but also that same social media is the model for the Occupy Wall Street protests sweeping the world now.

Hee, hee. I always loved Iceland. Sitting in the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream, the worst thing about the island nation always has been its name. Some corrupt form of Iss-land pronunciation. But even the Prez apparently doesn’t know the real story about the nefarious red-faced scribe from the U.S. Navy who first planted seeds of modern-day social media protest in that country in the late ‘60s.

A little history lesson thus is in order. This guy did it while stationed at Site H-2, a remote site in the north, located atop a mountain less than 10 miles from the Arctic Circle, and all its magical Northern Lights. A critical communications site it was. Radar snooping. Big stir, he caused once. Yes sirreee!

A third-class electronics technician petty officer from Cleburne, TX,  he touched off a firestorm manhunt once by writing letters of protest in the local base newsletter publication condemning the commanding officer for his loosey-goosey attitudes about religion.

The writer chose anonymity; I won’t mention the name here either. But each letter was signed, The Chilicahcah Twot. And he got the name from me. I often talked fondly about a secret boys club we had in my hometown--whose members wore white shirts to school stitched boldly with the large red letters CCC Club on the back. Hot, baby! Obviously it impressed him.

Any of you readers who grew up in Cleburne in the late 50s remember the old, secretive CCC Club? Hee, hee. Yeah, I’m spilling the beans on that, too; time somebody did. Letters stood for the three Cs in Chilicahcah.

We didn’t know what the word meant; thought we did. Jon Whites--who later became a minister, I understand [boy, did he do some backsliding!] is the one who suggested the name. (My smart-aleck Littl’ Sis, Kay Laboda, a Republican no less in San Diego, told me years later we had a whacko concoction of something that wadn’t very nice! Whoo!)

But anyone who was at the ol’ H-2 Site at the time will remember the Triple C-T (his fond nickname) as the biggest “social media“ event of the year then. Long before Facebook or Tweetie-Pie

Dared to pose as a collective cosmic conscience, he did, lambasting the commanding officer, a Lt. Jones--beginning with the way he first announced the visit of a Navy chaplain to the site to minister to some of our spiritual needs. (The word 'Twot' is a further abortive slang--this one of celestial spiritual origin. Natch! In truth the guy just didn‘t know how to spell.)

“Get Your Religion from the Man in the Know,” or something like that, the headline screamed in The Word. That was Jones’ newspaper. He put out his word in The Word. Get it!? (doo-dah, doo-dah!) Installed a “Letters to the Editor” wooden box in the galley, and encouraged letter writing. (Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Never open a Letters box up to a hotdog!)

Thus when the ol’ Twot responded with a sneaky twot-letter, the whole base knew that Commanding Officer Jones had been waylaid by the cosmic spirit in retaliation for his offensive religious jest. The Twot had twotted him.

Angered him, yes. The commanding officer. He even put up a reward one time. “Free Weekend in Akureyri,” shouted the headline in The Word, “to the person who can identify the Triple C-T!”

You know where Akureyri was? Nearest town to us of any size amongst all those rocks up there, southwest of our mountain, I think. Maybe 90 miles; I’ve forgotten. But had girls there. Lots of ‘em. And you bet, I was in the pack, too. Looking for the ‘ol Twot. Wow! Whole weekend. Free. In Akureyri!

But he was somewhat clever, this Triple C-T guy was. Must’ve gotten up all hours of the night to type his letters. By flashlight! Drew on the spiritual wisdom of Nikos Kazantzakis in his weird ’63 classic, The Rock Garden

“Your skull is a pit of blood around which your ancestors gather to drink and be revived. Do no die so they do not die,” one of the passages more or less said. Hee, hee. Everyone had it more or less figured the ol’ Twot was from the Southwest somewhere, probably from down near Mexico way.

Never was spotted though; nor were any of the letters ever traced. Apparently he sneaked in different offices to use different brand typewriters, for the letters had different key marks on ‘em. Some investigation, it turned out to be. Ejoli! Jones and his cadres were turning over everything in everyone’s rooms and offices over it!

Never caught the guy. Hee, hee. In fact, Lt. Jones’ self-importance drivel he put into The Word had become a sideshow all in itself. Just as Grimsson now says what social media has more or less made his government and all of its many functions and activities--a sideshow.

“I know it’s a strong statement…” he told CNN, interviewed at the PopTech conference he was attending in Camden, MA. “But the power of the social media is, in my opinion, transforming the political process in such a way that I can’t see any chance for the traditional, formal institutions of our democratic systems to keep up.”

People in Iceland--due to the ancient boat invasions that established the country--are roughly a mixture of 70 percent Scandinavian and 30 percent Irish. It’s no secret some of the most beautiful women in the world live there. They were wearing the micromini’s long before they became faddish in the 60s in the United States. And the people read there probably more so than anywhere else on earth. It’s a great mixture.

Life in Iceland has always been a sideshow. And the people love it that way.



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Harsh Immigration laws both immoral and harshly counterproductive

Typical scene in Presidio, TX--Deportations of immigrants across the International Bridge at Presidio are pretty routine for the U.S. Border Patrol. What's causing controversy, however, are the large numbers being sent back in ports all along the U. S. borders coupled with harsh anti-immigration measures passed by some states. (Texas Tribune photo)

By Dan Bodine

Center against Social Minimalism

EL PASO--One of the major news coming out this week was a report Tuesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported almost 400,000 people from the country last year, including 216,700 people convicted of felonies and misdemeanors. The Texas Tribune has one of the many stories on it here.

Illegal immigration is a hot political issue and the Obama administration isn’t ducking any responsibilities toward it, to be sure. But up and down the border here most folks, reacting to the news I dare say, said, Entonces. (…And so. Then?) You wanna medal? What!?

Which is to say, the immorality of harsh immigration laws isn’t debated too much here. It’s more like, the laws and the radical-right attitudes that spun them out are all part of those sad, acceptable facts most people know about that are wrong with the country now. Ejoli! And like drought and a bad economy, they’re hoping like the dickens it’ll end soon.

The figure is nothing to sneeze at, don’t get me wrong. Especially since 55 percent of those deported had criminal records. And even if most of that was for multiple deportation violations, which it probably was, it’s past time to get a message across that even free rides can’t go on forever: Start looking at getting a sponsor, whoever you are. Clean up your act, apply for an immigrant visa, and await your turn. Like millions and millions of others. As painful and time-consuming as it is. Or at least make some efforts! But let’s stop chewing on this rag so much!

“The (deportation) figures are in line with the Obama administration’s increased enforcement since 2009, which has resulted in more deportations and prosecutions in three years than President George W. Bush's administration accomplished in two terms,” the Tribune reported.

And amidst all the political clamor nationally against illegal immigration, especially by Republicans and the Tea Party (and 2012 being a presidential election year, too), I’m sure the timing of the news release was politically expedient. So we can pass over that. They’re grumblings on both sides, yes, but not here.

So give me a break, some of you hardwingers. You want to salivate? Foam up around the mouth in anger over it? Even over there not being more deported? Why? If America is a land of immigrants, who are we to suddenly get ugly with them? Which is what we’re doing with some of these states’ harsh immigration laws. Too, you have any idea how much this is hurting us already economically? Huh? Not only is that cruel but a little dumb, too, it seems, Jethro. No?

The high figures are politically driven, yes. Stepped-up enforcement and prosecution, it is. Of the 396,906 deported in 2010, 55 percent had felony or misdemeanor convictions, we‘re told. So? I imagine most folks of moral, upright standards want to ask then. What does that mean? Hee, hee. Not much, according to at least one professor who could easily be described as a political analyst.

Mike Alllison, an associate political science professor at Pennsylvania’s University of Scranton and a member of the university’s Latin American and Women’s Studies Dept., writing Wednesday in the Christian Science Monitor, argued for the most part the figures show non-violent offenders whose crime was merely wanting a job bad enough to risk entry even at the peril of being classified as a multiple offender.

Is that shocking to you, Jethro? Life could be so bad for you somewhere else--seeing everybody either dead or dying it seems and you’re next?--that you’d risk the plague of being declared a multiple deportation offender, if it meant there was even the slightest chance you could find work and thus “a living” somewhere? Huh?

Wanna read something about alleged immigrant treatment in a South Texas prison that’s sickening, Jethro? So bad at Raymondville, immigrants willing to admit anything--Yeah, I did it! Whatever it is! Hell, just go ahead and deport me!--if it means they get another crack at “coming across” somewhere.

Ain’t saying it’s the gospel truth; simply there’s enough in it to make it sound believable; and that it’s sickening to think we would ever even dare think about doing this to other human beings. Because that puts us on the cusp of losing our humanity, it does

Wanna read it? To glimpse at one reason why the bogus deportation figures may be so high? It’s a website Democracy Now: The War and Peace Report’s story entitled Lost in Detention.

Read down halfway or so to comments on maggots in the food by a respectable reporter, Maria Hinojosa; about other reported conditions there; and then tell me you’re not bothered some even though “they’ve got it coming to them!” Huh, Jethro? You want to meet God someday with that attitude? Jeesh!

Alright, alright! I’ll slack off that tack. What about cold economic facts then? Effects of harsh, new anti-immigration laws? Understand that better? Gotta carry this paper; gotta carry that paper. Or git arrested!

About how towns, schools and farms in the South already are shriveling--and crops left to ruin (billions in economic losses)--simply because the Latino farm workers (legal or illegal) don’t want to risk arrest, imprisonment and deportation.

Here’s one first-hand account published by the prestigious The Nation entitled The High Cost of Anti-Immigrant Laws, which describes millions of pounds of watermelons left rotting in fields in Georgia this past summer--along with peaches, blackberries and cucumbers--as usually reliable farm harvesters steered clear for other, more friendlier states.

The El Paso Times today, in an Associated Press front-page story entitled Few Americans willing to work immigrants’ jobs, reported that even though barring immigrants was supposed to open up more jobs for Americans, it’s not working out that way, no, indeed.

“I’ve had people calling me wanting to work (and) I haven’t turned any of them down,” said one Alabama potato farmer, “but they’re not any good. It’s hard work; they just don’t work like the Hispanics with experience.”

An estimated $300 million loss in watermelon crops in Georgia alone, adding to a hit on that state’s total ag sector for the season of possibly $1 billion. Just in one state. With few workers in sight for future crops?  Everywhere.

Ooops! Didn’t mean to shoot yourself in the foot with all that harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric you’ve been mouthing off for the past few years or so, did ‘ya, Jethro?! Huh?

Nothing personal; I ain’t picking on your ilk, want ‘ya to understand. Just explaining why along the border here we’re not too impressed with those deportation figures you’ve been crowing about this week.

They’re a lot of bad stories in ‘em. Don’t stir the embers.

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This is Presidio, TX, not New York! It’s damn hot!

By Dan Bodine

Center against Social Minimalism

PRESIDIO, TX–Not exactly sure when this rental property case came up, 7-8 years ago at least. Long before I retired as JP down in Presidio, a small Far West Texas border town downriver from El Paso several hours, nestled deep in the Big Bend area’s Chihuahuan Desert mountains.


The head of the University of Texas Energy Institute coming out in news this week against the Republican Texas governor, Rick Perry, for his opposition to climate change, is what reminded me of it.


Real strange what protecting economic self-interest–which is what this climate change debate to Republicans mostly is, I believe–can do to one’s senses. Can change daylight to darkness; burning hot to just piddling warm. Indeed, with heated theatrics a new political reality–both climate deniers and protestors–one often wonders just where as a collective body did we lose our common sense?


Perry repeatedly cast doubts on what almost anyone with a wet finger in the air can tell you about our climate. That we’re getting hotter and dryer. Hell, even the polar bears in the northern Arctic and the carpenter ants beefing up on lawn water in my backyard can sense that! But maybe it’s time to cool the rhetoric and face the economic realities, too.


Wednesday’s Texas Tribune quotes UT’s Raymond Orbach, in a research paper in the forthcoming issue of the British journal, Reports on Progress in Physics, as having mounted scientific evidence that not only has man caused climate change but also argues an 80 percent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions is needed by 2050 to stabilize global temperatures, and cut damages currently being done. (Readers who want to see results of climate change can look here at either these National Geographic shots or these lovely livescience.com photos.)


Anyway, it all reminded me of Carolina, a good friend in Presidio, who because of her family background, its stubbornness, and its strong economic interest there, too, I’d always suspected was a closet Republican, like some of her more “open” cousins. (Business and politics both make it difficult to be openly Republican in Presidio. Call the town old-fashion! Hee, hee.)


Carolina (The Spanish-pronounced i like an ee) was willing to sidestep the issue of it being hotter than blazes one summer when she came into our little justice court with an ex-renter, seeking an informal injunction against the person from “taking away my property.” It being hot didn’t have anything to do with the facts in the case, she felt.


The former tenant was attempting to remove her evaporative air-conditioner–and 15-20 ft. of metal, overhead ductwork she’d constructed–all from where it was attached to a small, backroom window in a small building she’d leased from Carolina for a novelty store business of some kind.


On the main drag in downtown Presidio, it was. Within walking distance for hundreds of weekly shoppers from over the international bridge in Ojinaga, MX. You got rental property in a location like that, you fight to protect it, right? Well, sometimes you just need to step aside from the personal insult of the moment and think rationally.


Physical improvements done by a tenant to improve property–yes, as Carolina had argued– generally “stay with the property,” property codes of most states say. Especially in New York City, for instance, which is notorious for entrenched family landlords of sizable estate holdings, who year after year, generation after generation, do little to make their living but squeeze more rent income out of tenants and their enhancement projects.


But this was Presidio, the former tenant had argued. The nation’s hot spot. The rent amount certainly wasn’t at a discount rate for it. And an air-conditioning system, which by decency should’ve been standard equipment for any business rental building in Presidio, wasn’t there either.


What was she to do? You can’t ask customers to come into your store and stand around in the sweltering heat! Not in Presidio! So she installed her own air-conditioning system. And she felt it was hers to keep!


After making sure she wasn’t damaging any property to remove it, I agreed with her, too. Against the injunction request. Call it bad logic or a bad hair day. Whatever you will. That’s the way I felt. Carolina wasn’t happy.


“This is Presidio,” I reminded her, feeling a little embarrassed for even having to do so in the first place. What actually is a pleasant climate 7-8 months out of the year, here it’ll soar up 115-120 in late spring-summer heat. Folks bonding together socially against not only the heat but the region’s isolated location long has been the established norm for treating each other in places like this. Talk before you fight. Generations have done it.


Which brings us back to the overall climate picture. Lord knows I’m not smart enough to figure out any solutions to climate change. But it’s obvious, to me, that “in a pinch” one must do what it takes to survive. Our planet’s air conditioning system is badly out of kilter. So we wait ‘til it’s too late to fix, to do anything? And risk the unspeakable? What are we to do?


For one, it’s refreshing to see some Texas honesty coming forward, at least. UT’s Professor Orbach, too, believes the stakes of Perry’s and Republican highroller’s economic self-interest (what they stand to lose in the debate) are the largest obstacle to getting an agreement on the problem.


And he's unashamedly simple about it. Stop using politics as a whipping post and recognize the obvious: It’s the economy, stupid! is his message to blood-sniffin’ critics. Find a political solution!


Orbach said that a major issue, indeed, is that it seems simply too expensive to fix. The current remedies, he said, “are economically not viable, and as a consequence I think people are reluctant to try to go through the processes that are so expensive and so deleterious to the economy in order to respond to climate change. …


“Countries are not going to destroy their economy” to prevent climate change, in short, he said.


He laid out an example of what he argues is a potential solution, involving carbon sequestration in saline aquifers under the Gulf and geothermal technologies — though he acknowledges more studies must be done to prove its feasibility. But on such paths we must press on, too. That also is a reality. A must reality.


Right now, Orbach says, “People are not going to spend 30 percent more on their energy just to capture the carbon dioxide” from a coal plant, so they can store it underground and out of the atmosphere. Maybe framing the economic debate like this amidst economic challenges is what our New Realism needs to be defined as.


Asked about the climate consequences particularly to Texas, Orbach said: “It’s not Texas. It’s the globe. We are part of, as [Buckminster] Fuller said, Spaceship Earth. … If the sea level rises, the people in Corpus Christi are going to get awfully wet. There are consequences everywhere.”


Wall Street protestors, it might be a good time before ratcheting up heat on this topic further, to back off and make sure we’re not asking someone to “cut off their (economic) nose to spite their (public) face.” See a spade as a spade.


Is it possible to have a national conversation about something like this without going into screaming hysterics? Is there an idea person amongst us? If so, please stand up.


The clock is ticking.

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El Paso’s city recall election a tad strange for morality play

Fr. Michael Rodriguez, formerly of El Paso, is seen outside the door to Sta. Teresa Catholic Church in Presidio where he recently has been transferred. The controversial priest got involved in a local political contest publically criticizing gay and homosexual lifestyles in El Paso. (Photo courtesy of The International Presidio Paper)

By A. Daniel Bodine

Center against Social Minimalism

EL PASO, TX--Calling it a bit queer as a standup for morality is no play on words, folks. For the events in a religious group’s recall election petition drive here (involving an extension of city employee health benefits to “domestic spouses,” a drive hell-bent to oust this city’s popular mayor and two other representatives from office for their support of it), indeed, is more than a little strange.

Mayor John Cook has tangled the web with a suit seeking an injunction against the group, claiming the corporate-owned church’s leader who organized the drive both bullied from his pulpit and used his ministry’s website to help gather petition signatures. That’s a state felony crime in violation of a tax-exempt separation status.

                                                            

Cook, losing both in  lower and in appellant courts, wants to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary to challenge corporate-church political financing exemptions. Whoo! Hello, Personhood Revisited maybe?

Too, already as early fallout, a Catholic priest who got involved supporting the drive with a series of ¼ -page newspaper ads, has been transferred to the remotest parish in the diocese, reportedly as the bishop’s way of advising him to keep his mouth shut in contentious political issues. How much plainer can that message be?

So, is this a morality play of biblical proportions? Or a simple turning of the ol’ political progress screw against the concept of old, entrenched sinning in the South, a concept noted historically for its backwardness? My guess is, it’s both. So let’s strike up the band and celebrate our differences! Maybe in good cheer we can find cause to merge a few thoughts along with a few beers together, per the way of President Obama our civil leader.

The conservative religious group El Pasoans for Traditional Family Values--led by members of the Word of Life Church and organized by feisty Pastor Tom Brown, who even performs exocists--brought a ballot initiative in 2010 against a city council decision effective at the start of that year granting health benefits to unwed but legal “domestic spouses.” Only 19 of 6,200 employees chose to claim the benefit. (Here’s link to the El Paso Times’ excellent coverage.)

Voters generally yawned at the special election measure when it appeared on last November’s ballots (only 15 percent of the eligible voters voted in it), and sure enough with strong church participation supporters against the benefits won by a 55-45 percent margin. Case closed, supposedly.

A ballot initiative, to be clear, is a process allowing local registered voters to propose legislation for a binding election of the general populace, targeting specific local laws or a law of a political entity; and to enact or reject the law(s) at the polls, independent of the lawmaking power of that duly elected governing body. Some call it populism squared, as of the exponent two. It’s a core Constitutional part of democracy’s checks and balances system, however.

But then Cook played another card in the Spring of this year. Claiming that voters would be more supportive once they were more cognizant of the background, he ordered a reworded version of the benefits law be presented to the council again for approval.

The church group’s ballot initiative, unintentionally, it turned out, also cut off health benefits to some of the city’s retired families, too. There’d been anger expressed.

Too, although I can’t find any background research to clarify it, I remember distinctly at this controversial June meeting one of the speakers identified himself as “the one who brought you into court” earlier, while urging council to pass the new revision. (Perhaps one of the readers can help with background on this.) He made the remark in the tone implying “and I’ll do it again, too,” if this new law reinstating the “domestic spouses” benefits wasn’t approved. Thus, the meeting was tense with inglorious diatribes, yes.

At one point Brown even led a hallway prayer group just outside the council chambers beseeching God in his infinite wisdom to intervene against a permissive vote. But that wouldn’t be the case. Council members split 4-4 and Cook cast the decisive vote to approve it. Brown said I’ll be back, and sure enough his group was--this time with the recall petition. And over 9,500 signatures.

Meanwhile, Father Michael Rodriguez has settled comfortably into the old parish in Presidio, and commented to the media in a press release about his reassignment thusly: “Obedience to my bishop is essential to the priesthood,” according to the website Big Bend Now. “My bishop has transferred me to another assignment, and I intend to be obedient. The priesthood is my greatest joy. In the present circumstances, I intend to try even harder to be a good, holy priest.”

Presidio is a couple hundred miles downstream from El Paso on the Rio Grande, at the confluence of the Rio Conchos flowing northward from the eastern slopes of Mexico’s Sierra Madres--La Junta de los Rios, the historic crossing called by Indians thousands of years ago. Tucked deep in the Big Bend, its remoteness has been both a blessing and a curse over the years. But Fr. Rodriguez says he comfortable in his profession. And his new location.

The unspoken message in all the stories arising from the recall issue, however, may be the greatest--the historical one. One of the most noteworthy researchers on the South’s religious belligerence arising in the aftermath of the Civil War, toward anything smacking of sin, is Charles Reagan Wilson, history professor at ’Ol Miss and director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is the author of Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause.

One reviewer of the book--noting how all things sinful along with such institutions as the Klu Klux Klan, etc.--could become such symbols for the southern states, said Wilson sought “to explain historically (in the book) why ideas such as these came to be in the first place.

“His answer is that the ‘Religion of the Lost Cause‘--all of the myths, rituals, holy days and the homogeneous conservative Civil Religion of the American South after the Civil War--was an attempt by the defeated southerners to deal with their loss and to assert their distinctive religious identity against the looming North.”-- E.g., to cope, when swamped with seemingly overwhelming uncertainty, one leans hard on a crutch, real or imagined.

So, is this moral outrage in El Paso against extending employee health benefits to “domestic (gay or homosexual) spouses” all a lot to do about nothing? Just El Paso folks eking out progress “as the world turns?” Or is it out with the current regime in favor of a more strident drum beat?

The voters will decide, possibly in an election as early as May 2012.

Expect a larger than 15 percent turnout.

-- 30 --

‘Well, shut my mouth, Jethro! American people still have kick left?’ Wall Street protestors to steal Teapartiers’ Christmas!

Protestors masked as economic zombies participate in the 'Occupy Wall Street' protest in New York. (AFP/Getty Images)

“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose…’

     -- Kriss Kristoffenson, ‘Me and Bobby Mcgee’

By Dan Bodine

Center against Social Minimalism

Unusual, it is. The turn of events. All during the Arab Spring uprisings, beat-up friends kept nudging me, Think something could happen here in the U.S. like that? / Naw, I said. The Republicans and Corporate Right have got us locked down, screwed and tattooed; no way!

Hee, hee. But maybe not. Sunday I was shocked to read on CNN that over 700 “Occupy Wall Street” protestors had been arrested for blocking the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Who are these yaahoos? was my first thought? Tweeters, I soon learned.

Inspired by the Arab Spring protests, CNN reported, “Crowds have taken up residence in the park in New York’s financial district (too), calling for 20,000 people to flood the area for a ‘few months.’” And nationwide protests are spreading to other cities.

A ‘few months?!!’ I thought. Hell’s bells, that’ll strip the hollies from tea partiers’ Christmas cash registers!

Indeed, Santa Claus could’ve done come and gone by then and nary a gift left for any of ‘em! And maybe millions more good folks cheated of Christmas, too, if this thing really spreads. Including collateral-damaged Tea Party minions! Maybe even kick the Dallas Cowboys off holiday-season TV! Sheesh!! These idiots know what they’re doing!?!

Hee, hee. Maybe so. Could social minimalism, radical capitalism‘s fiendish bastard brat, possibly choke on its own tainted Christmas eggnog this year?

“The protest campaign…began in July with the launch of a simple campaign website calling for a march and a sit-in at the New York Stock Exchange,” CNN reported. “Over the past two weeks, demonstrations have addressed various issues, including police brutality, union busting and the economy.”

Further headlines and statistics further point to the cause of the unrest:

** The economiccollapse.com blog reports another huge wave of store closings and layoffs s coming. The parent company of Payless stores has announced that it will be permanently closing 475 stores. Borders is in the process of closing every single one of its 399 stores. Also, Bank of America has just announced that it will be closing about 600 branches, and that could result in the loss of about 30,000 good jobs.

** With Wall Street CEOs tipsy with earnings and the nation’s banks sorely linked to what appears to be an oncoming domino default in the European market, is there any big-time reason to fear another 2008 collapse? Yes!

** Barring a Christmas Miracle and a large percentage of the current unemployed finding meaningful work before the end of the year, come January another 6.2 million Americans will come to the end of their unemployment rope benefits. Big-time cutoffs already coming!

Following this string further, this morning comes news via Saving the Dream--OurFuture.org, that over a thousand activists will gather in Washington this week as part of a skull session to plans the protest’s next stage: A national day of action on November 17 calling for jobs, not budget cuts (especially Social Security), from Congress.

And if that doesn’t work, there ain’t logically but one thing left, Jethro: Shut down Christmas! Let’s all have a merry, merry…

“The American dream was built on a broad middle class, grounded on the promise that with hard work, you could build a family, have a good job that would afford health care, retirement security, a home, a better education for your kids,” wrote Robert Borosage in OurFuture.org. “The great challenge was to open the door to that dream to those who had been locked out – minorities under segregation, women suffering from discrimination, new immigrants.

“Now that dream is disappearing (along) with the middle class. Americans have been demanding change. In 2008, as the economy cratered, we elected a president with a mandate for change, Democratic majorities in both houses, and the most progressive Speaker of the House in our history. Yet the president’s reforms – pre-compromised for the most part – were diluted, delayed, and disemboweled. The entrenched corporate interests, spending billions to array legions of lobbyists, protected their privileges and subsidies.

“Voters responded by punishing Democrats. Yet the Tea Party Republicans who were defenders of Medicare and scourges of Wall Street on the campaign trail sought to gut Medicare and reopen Wall Street’s casino once in office.”

And this, then, is the result. A mean, yaahoo dog with its back to the wall. No where else to go for help; nothing else to lose. Who’s to say, sic ‘em, Fido?!

Oh, Lord, Jethro! Tell me it ain’t so! Po-Leeze tell me it ain’t so!

Hum along, ya’ll…Christmas bells, fairy tales…

-- 30 --