This is only one of the smaller, most minor examples of how the recent unparalleled theft of Americans’ wealth, under the guise of the Global Financial Crisis, is tearing away at the fabric and the traditions of the American people. It should be no big deal for such an event to be cancelled, when towns and states don’t have the resources to pay for it, but it still sounds just so terribly, terribly sad :
As the economic crisis has dragged on, city leaders around the country say fireworks are a luxury they can no longer afford. Big and small, urban and rural, the skies will remain dark over at least four dozen communities nationwide come July 4.
“It came down to this: Did we want to spend $150,000 on something that would be over in a few hours?” Cervenik said. “Or did we want to use that money to keep city workers employed?”
The news has sparked outrage and protests among residents who long to preserve an American tradition that dates to 1777. They say that fireworks displays are more than a nod to nostalgia: They allow communities to come together, set aside their woes and build up town pride — even if only for a few hours.
“Good times, bad times, there’s always been fireworks,” said Robert Baker, who heads the Fourth of July festival committee in Abington, Mass.
Not this year. Some cities are cancelling the July 4 fireworks so have a bit more money to give to the food banks and charities feeding the rapidly rising ranks of the unemployed :
Some cities would rather feed their residents than entertain them. In the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello, where unemployment hovers at 12%, the City Council unanimously voted to use its $39,000 fireworks budget on donations to local food banks.
“The last food bank line I saw had more than 1,000 people in it,” said Mayor Rosemarie Vasquez. “We figured that, instead of burning the money in the air, why not give it to people who need it.”
Christmas decorations and town square Christmas trees will join July 4 fireworks for dozens of cities and towns across the United States this year.
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Michael Jackson before and after he became heavily addicted to pharmaceutical painkillers, and assorted mindfreakers
By Darryl Mason
It seems likely a murder, or at least involuntary manslaughter, investigation into the death of Michael Jackson will be announced within the next few weeks, once toxicology reports are finished. The massive insurance policies connected to Michael Jackson, his business interests and the 50 London concerts he was never going to perform, will demand it.
The pharmaceutical industry that allows one person to run up $100,000 in local drug store debt to pay for even more pills would be my first suspect.
But others may have been involved. Besides being only 58 kilos, and ravaged by two decades of addiction to prescription drugs, Jackson’s body apparently bore wounds around the knees and shins and cuts across his back.
Liza Minnelli - “all hell’s going to break loose when the autopsy results come in”.Reverend Jesse Jackson : “It’s abnormal. We don’t know what happened. Was he injected and with what? All reasonable doubt should be addressed.”
Lisa Marie Presley : “Years ago Michael and I were having a deep conversation about life in general…he may have been questioning me about the circumstances of my father’s death. At some point he paused, he stared at me very intensely and he stated with an almost calm certainty, ‘I am afraid that I am going to end up like him, the way he did’.”
“Michael was dead before he left the house. I’m suspecting foul play somewhere. He was waving to everybody and telling them he loves them and all the fans at the gate. A few minutes after Michael was out there, he was dead.”
What will Americans think, or do, if it turns out the King of Pop was murdered?
Michael Jackson in make-up and costume as a fat, gray, balding man from his 1997 movie Ghosts. Funny, and astounding, with the best moonwalk you will ever see :
Michael Jackson was about 38 years old when he performed that dance routine.
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Michael Jackson guest-starred in the ‘Stark Raving Dad’ episode of The Simpsons, playing a psychiatric patient who claimed to be Michael Jackson but clearly was not, being tall and white and bald :
Jackson pitched several story ideas for the episode, including Bart telling everyone in town that Michael Jackson was coming to his house.
He also requested several script changes, including that he wanted to have a scene in which he and Bart wrote a song.
Jackson especially liked Bart and wanted to give him a number one single, so he wrote much of the song “Do the Bartman” although he did not receive credit for it.
Jackson also wrote the song “Happy Birthday Lisa” for the episode….
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Michael Jackson recently passed a four hour physical in Los Angeles to comply with insurers demands for his 50 date, $100 million sold out run of shows in London. The biggest of all comebacks from the biggest pop star in history.
How much was Jackson insured for to complete those concerts? $100 million? $200 million?
Michael Jackson was notorious for breaking very expensive business deals, leaving a trail of extremely pissed off and slightly less wealthy entertainment industry players in his wake.
He had some very big debts indeed, and his most prized possessions and collection of strange but valuable antiques were recently auctioned off.
The London concerts for Michael Jackson were not just his Big Comeback. He needed that money to pay off tens of millions in heavy debts, and to fight to keep control of his remaining assets, like the royalties he got every time a Beatles song was played or performed, thanks to the massive music publishing catalogue he co-owned with Sony Music.
As his fortune ebbs away, Michael Jackson is relaunching his pop career with a 50-date residency at London’s 02 arena. Thanks to record ticket sales, he could be moonwalking to fiscal salvation. But can the middle-aged comeback kid survive this musical marathon? By Robert Sandall
“….(there is) the sincere belief of some of Jackson’s former business associates that he will bottle it.
Even before the reports that Jackson may be suffering from the early stages of skin cancer and the news that the first four dates of the tour are to be postponed, scepticism was rife.
One top British manager who spent time in 2007 attending meetings called by Jackson, then cancelled at the last minute, says: “Let’s see how many concerts he turns up for.”
“He’s a serial betrayer of business deals. He’ll probably play a couple of shows, then get a doctor’s sick note. Jackson’s not a well man. To do 50 concerts you need real strength, mentally and physically. He couldn’t even read the teleprompter at the press conference.”
The story goes on to speculate that Michael Jackson could have used a lookalike at the press conference to announce the London shows, and that he was rehearsing lookalikes to fill in for him during the more rigorous dance routines.
Here’s concert promoter CEO, Randy Phillips on Michael Jackson and the London gigs :
“Michael is a magnet for weird stories like that! He’s in fine shape. Very sharp, asks succinct questions. When we first started talking he was a little thin maybe. Today he feels much healthier.”
“It isn’t about the money, it’s all about the money!”
The insurance worries :
But there have been dark mutterings in the business pages about the difficulty of insuring the O2 concerts with a notorious no-show like Jackson. Marcel Avram, a German concert promoter, won a multi-million-dollar judgment against the singer at a 2005 civil trial in California for damages arising out of Jackson’s no-show for some millennium concerts. As usual, Phillips is sanguine. “Michael is totally focused now, and the insurance wasn’t a problem, it was just expensive.”
He reveals a phased three-year touring plan that will take Jackson to Europe, then the Far East, winding up in the Americas in 2011. He estimates that Jackson will make $50m-$100m from the London dates, and that this could rise to $500m if the world tour materialises.
A half billion dollar tour just went up in smoke.
Jackson was on the brink of losing the rights to his treasured collection of Beatles songs, and about 400,000 other songs. Sony owned half of the Beatles catalogue with Jackson, and were on the brink of seizing it all from Jackson, riddled as he was with small nation sized bad debts.
But here was Michael Jackson, a very astute business man, back in 1993 :
He had recently signed a new contract with his label Sony that was reputedly worth $100m, making it the richest record deal in history. He had outbid Paul McCartney for the publishing rights to the Beatles songs — which meant every time one of their tunes was played or performed in public, he received half the royalty. He had acquired a 2,700-acre ranch with a funfair and zoo attached, which was later valued at $100m and which he named Neverland after the fictional nirvana of Peter Pan.
Jackson’s Dangerous tour of 1993 grossed $200 million, and by then he’d already sold more than 100 million albums and singles.
Jackson was an extremely big spender :
One source who had access to Jackson’s accounts reckons that over the previous 20 years he had burnt through $1 billion: $650m in earnings and the rest borrowed.
“When I asked him why he was doing this tour now, he said it was because his kids are old enough to appreciate it and he still felt young enough to do it. He’s told me that whatever profit he makes from these shows will go into a trust fund for his children.”
Profits, however, are still some way off. AEG expects to see no return on its investment of at least £20m until Jackson has played one-third of the O2 shows. The start-up costs for This Is It have been huge, covering the biggest stage set built for an indoor arena show and a number of what Phillips calls “grand illusions”.
His hope, along with that of the 800,000-odd fans who have bought tickets, must be that their trust in pop’s most charismatic but accident-prone Peter Pan doesn’t turn out to be the grandest illusion of all.
There will be many grande illusions quickly stitched up in the media about just how fit and ready Michael Jackson was for the London shows, and the inevitable world tour that would have followed. Jackson had to keep performing live to get the money to hang onto all those Beatles songs, a catalogue which will be worth at least a couple of billion dollars in the next few years as digital exploitation of those rights continues.
Kurt Cobain earned more than a billion dollars after he killed himself.
Elvis Presley earned dozens of times more after death than alive.
Michael Jackson, now he has Dead Legend Status, will likewise become an extremely profitable enterprise now for the music industry.
Now Jackson cannot destroy that heavily promoted Legend by failing to perform those 50 London shows, or by simply failing to perform anymore.
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If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.The plot is incomprehensible.
The dialogue….is meaningless word flap.
(The Transformers) appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock.
The battle scenes are bewildering.
….an incomprehensible confusion.
….dumber than a box of staples.
Modern technology allows Ebert to immediately compare his review to some of those in the British online media :
“Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!” (Bradshaw, Guardian)
“Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!” (Tookey, Daily Mail);
“A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!” (Edwards, Daily Mirror).
The kids will love it. Transformers 2 will make a solid billion around the world before it hits the discount DVD bin.
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The Flying Killer Robot body count must be getting close to 1000 dead civilians, including dozens if not hundreds of children in some of the poorest regions on the planet. And this is before the flying killer robots become truly autonomous, when there is no longer 22 year old working what is basically computer game controls in a military base back in Nevada, when real robots are flying and killing and nobody will ever be held responsible for all the men, women and children they kill. Another 60 Slaughtered By Flying Killer Robots
“Three missiles were fired by drones as people were dispersing after offering funeral prayers for Niaz Wali,” one intelligence official said, referring to a Taliban commander who was one of six militants killed in an earlier drone attack.
The army had no information on the attack on the funeral in the remote area under the control of Baitullah Mehsud, the country’s enemy number one, a military official said.
One local security official, who could not be identified as he was not authorised to speak to media, said that more than 60 had died of whom “half are civilians”. Funerals of Taliban are attended by local villagers, not just militants.
The most modern methods of killing come from the skies and rain slaughter in Waziristan, where some of the most ancient methods of killing remain popular.
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The women arrested did not resist, they were choked, assaulted and restrained and then jailed for three days before charges against them were dropped.
This is not Iran, this is the UK, supposedly one of the countries that the uprising youth of Iran are hoping their country will one day emulate. A lot may have to change in Iran before it becomes a beacon of myth-soaked Western Democracy, but the police in both countries are already use plenty of the same techniques and violence to break the spirit of those who will not submit, and be intimidated.
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The Nation’s William Grieder takes President Obama apart over his justifications for the financial reforms that will make the Federal Reserve more powerful than ever before :
The most disturbing thing about Barack Obama’s call for financial reform was the way in which the president falsified our predicament. He tried to make it sound as though everyone was implicated in the financial breakdown and therefore no one was really to blame. “A culture of irresponsibility took root from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street,” Obama explained. “And a regulatory system basically crafted in the wake of a 20th century economic crisis–the Great Depression–was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st century global economy.”
is not what happened, to put it charitably. Unlike some other presidents, Obama is much too intelligent not to know this. The regulatory system was not overwhelmed by historic forces. It was systematically gutted and dismantled by the government in Washington at the behest of the banking interests.
And so far, at least, the ‘banking interests’ have won.
Photography of our world 100 years ago is just about all black and white. And while there are many, many beautiful century old photographs, the fact that they were B & W, or sepia-tone, puts us at a vast distance, not only in time, from the reality captured in those images.
Either Rueters fucked up the quote, or the context, or the Iraqi PM just declared “victory” over the United States as an occupying force in his country, and it didn’t even make the headline, or opening paragraphs of this story :
“I, and you, are sure that many don’t want us to succeed and celebrate this victory,” he said. “They are getting themselves ready to move in the dark to destabilize the situation, but we will be ready for them, God willing.”
Naturally, these were the last two paragraphs of a story about a truck bombing in Iraq, killing dozens. Burying the lead, indeed.
The War On Iraq really is over….well, kind of :
Almost all U.S. soldiers will leave urban centers by June 30 under a security pact signed by Baghdad and Washington last year, and the whole force that invaded the country in 2003 must be gone by 2012.
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Will it last? That seems to be the biggest question of all right now. How long can the many millions filling the streets of Iran over the past few days maintain their rolling protests against what they believe to be a stolen election?
Iran might have been expecting attacks from Israel, they’ve certainly been planning for it for years, but it seems obvious the ruling religious leader did not expect anything like the dissent and scenes of anarchy that now fill the streets of Iran’s capital.
In many ways, what is now happening in Iran is even worse than an all-out aerial assault by Israel. That would have only lasted 48 hours or less, and united most of Iran behind its leaders.
But what is happening in Iran now could last for weeks, months, could end up hauling the brutal theocracy into the 21st century whether they like it or not.
You just don’t see these kinds of scenes on the streets of Iran’s capital city.
Pepe Escobar, one of the finest, most honest journalists writing about the Middle East today (which is why he’s not published in your city’s newspapers) explains why, in dealing with what they perceive to be a stolen election, Iranians are not like Americans (excerpts) :
It is 1979 in Tehran all over again. From Saturday to Sunday, the deafening sound deep in the night across Tehran’s rooftops was a roaring, ubiquitous “Allah-u Akbar” (God is great). Then, in 1979, to hail the Islamic revolution; now, in 2009, to signify what appears to be the hijacking of the Islamic revolution. Then, the revolution was not televised; it was via (Ruhollah Khomeini) radio. Now, it is being broadcast all across the world.
Let’s cut to the chase: what Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi qualified as “this dangerous charade” and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “the sweetness of the election”, or better yet, a “divine assessment”, has all the non-divine markings of intervention by the Iranian Republican Guards Corps (IRGC). This follows President Mahmud Ahmadinejad officially gaining 64% of the vote in defeating Mousavi in what in parts of working-class south Tehran, but not even “divine assessment” could be expected to give him more than 30% in the capital.
Ahmadinejad blamed the whole Iranian turmoil on foreign media - which not by accident are now being virtually persecuted by the security apparatus. The crackdown is assuming ultra-hardcore proportions. Yet the revolution continues to be broadcast to the whole world in English and Farsi, although the indispensable Tehran Bureau website was been taken down by the thought police. Riot police have fought students inside the dorms of the University of Tehran.
This has nothing to do with the US-supported color-coded revolutions in Eurasia. This is about Iran. An election was stolen in the United States in 2000 and Americans didn’t do a thing about it. Iranians are willing to die to have their votes counted. There is now an opening for a true Iranian people-power movement not specifically to the benefit of Mousavi, but with Mousavi as the catalyst in a wider struggle for real democratic legitimacy. The die is cast; now it’s people power against “divine assessment”.
Change always comes to those who fight it the hardest, and even if the protests die away, or the rulers military forces kill thousands once the foreign media is expelled, real change in Iran has been set in motion.
Those who have feasted on the exhilarating joy of true defiance in these past few days, as the centre of Iran has filled with hundreds of thousands of people, and nine kilometre long protest marches, will not forget that feeling of being a part of something historic. Revolutionary.
At the same time, it will not be impossible for outsiders to now seed the scenes for something close to a civil war. The city-dwelling middle classes versus Ahmadinejad’s rural poor.
That kind of horrific reality will be immediately preceded by the ever reliable car bombs and urban terror attacks that no-one ever seems to claim responsibility for. They just seem to happen, don’t they?
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The short section where George W. Bush is laughing it up with his elite pals over the WMD lies, with the photos that show the tragic realities of those lies for Americans, is still one of the most powerful and shocking pieces of video I’ve seen in all these long, strange years of the 2000s.
If you feel fucking outraged watching that clip, all those lies, imagine how it feels to be an American soldier who signed up when the NeoCon cheerleading for War On Iraq was at its loudest, who did their two or three tours, saw friends die, came home to see more friends die in drunken car accidents and suicide-by-cops, who came home to see so many families shattered by loss, the ruins and ongoing aftershocks of all those terrible fucking lies, small communities forever scarred, imagine how it must feel to watch the above video now, to hear Bush laughing like that, while their colleagues and friends were being blown to pieces.
If you claim to Support The Troops, then you now have no excuse not to support the many hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and miliary family members who want BushCo. to be held to account for their lies and deceptions before and during the War On Iraq, and the War On Afghanistan.
You know why these people keep making these wars in our reality? Why they keep sending so many Americans to die for little more than the sake of maintaining and expanding their war industries and presidencies and energy empires? You know why they do it generation after generation?
Because while American teenagers die miserable deaths screaming for their mothers in a foreign land, they get to laugh it up back home with their pals about how, once again, they got away with it.
How they always get away with it.
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Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled today
In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of a blog called NightJack.
The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name.
In April Mr Horton was awarded an Orwell Prize for political writing, but the judges were not aware that he was revealing confidential details about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions.
His blog, which gave a behind-the-scenes insight into frontline policing, included strong views on social and political issues, including matters of “public controversy,” the judge said.
Think about it. A Rupert Murdoch newspaper helped shut down a blogger who was reporting the kind of news and opinion that they cannot. And he was pulling the kind of readership that many Murdoch online newspapers would kill half a dozen sub-editors to get.
It wasn’t the police who put this anonymous blogger out of business, and forced this wildly popular blog to be removed from the internet, it was a Rupert Murdoch newspaper.
This is called Killing The Competition With Your Lawyers.
Rupert Murdoch journalists in Australia are trying to do the very same thing with anonymous blogs who ritually smash the credibility of some of Murdoch’s highest paid Australian journalists and opinion writers. It has been made very clear indeed to a small circle of anoymous bloggers in Australia that Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers want to have their true identities exposed in court. And not because they are revealing police or even government secrets, but because they are too criticial of the Murdoch media in Australia.
Around the world, there are plenty of hardcore political blogs published under writers’ real names that will carry on as usual, but there are also tens of thousands of other blogs, on subjects as vast and varied as sex, finance, police brutality, anarchy, the questioning of history, tech, the movie industry, the music industry (what’s left of it) that will now either disappear, or will tone themselves down in fear of the day the writers real indentities are exposed in a court.
We will see a steady, concerted push by politicians, media companies and authorities across Western nations to make it mandatory for blogs to be published under the writers’ real names, and then similar laws will be pushed to do away with anonymous commenting completely.
No doubt, plans are already being discussed to create mandatory online IDs for all internet users, be they readers or writers, creators, publishers or just commenters, game players too. This will of course cost a fee, per year. If you don’t pay for your online ID renewal, you will eventually find it more difficult to get online. These new laws might not get pushed through yet, or in the next few years, but they are most definitely in the pipeline.
That yearly online ID subscription fee for a billion internet users around the world is simply too much money not being collected to never become reality.
When all bloggers must post under their real names, and all commenters must log in with their mandatory online ID numbers, the wild and crazy and absurd and shocking and jaw-dropingly funny and controversial and information-soaked online realities will become far more subdued, restricted, monotone, and sad indeed it is to say, a whole lot less exciting.
Of course there will be plenty of mainstream media companies who will be damned happy to know that bloggers will soon no longer be able to get away with doing what their journalists can never do, so very, very unrestrained - writing brutally honest reality-changing opinion and ‘Truth’ detonating news, and not giving a fuck for the consequences.
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These kinds of compilations always miss a few personal favourites, but this collection of 100 Classic Movie Lines In 200 Seconds is fantastically comprehensive, and tight as a drum :
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I thought I was a total space-nerd during the late 1970s and early 1980s, but I seemed to have missed the part where Russians sent probes and landers to Venus and took extraordinary images of the surface. Like this one, :
Here’s a screen capture of those distant hills :
The Russian ‘Venera’ missions reached the surface of Venus at least 10 times, before 1985.
For someone who stared for a few hundreds of hours at the colour front page of a newspaper showing the surface of Mars, stuck to my bedroom wall, I’m stunned I knew so little about the Russians on Venus.
Obviously I was reading the wrong books. Back then.
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You’d think the busting of an international smuggling and probable counterfeiting operation involving more than $134 billion in US bonds would be big news.
You’d be wrong, at least according to thousands of mainstream news services you can search through Google News :
That’s a search from today, at 11pm Saturday night, almost four days after the story first appeared on the front pages of Italian newspapers.
Only 36 related articles, and that includes the financial media. The independent online media and bloggers have given this story far more attention than the mainstream media.
Italy’s financial police (GuardiaitalianadiFinanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland. They include 249 US Federal Reserve bonds worth US$ 500 million each, plus ten Kennedy bonds and other US government securities worth a billion dollar each. Italian authorities have not yet determined whether they are real or fake, but if they are real the attempt to take them into Switzerland would be the largest financial smuggling operation in history; if they are fake, the matter would be even more mind-boggling because the quality of the counterfeit work is such that the fake bonds are undistinguishable from the real ones.
What caught the policemen’s attention were the billion dollar securities. Such a large denomination is not available in regular financial and banking markets. Only states handle such amounts of money.
The question now is who could or would counterfeit or smuggle these non-negotiable bonds.
In order to stop money laundering Italian law sets a ceiling of 10,000 euros per person for importing or exporting money without declaring it. The penalty for violating the law is 40 per cent of the money seized.
If the certificates were real, for Italy it would be like hitting the jackpot. The fine alone would amount to US$ 38 billion, five times the estimated cost of rebuilding quake-devastated Abruzzi region. It would help Italy’s eliminate its public deficit.
As soon as the seizure was made the US Embassy in Rome was informed. Italian and US secret services were called in to assist the Italian financial police.
As this story points out, the international media, the Western media, is all but silent.
This is either going to be the biggest financial smuggling bust in history, or the biggest counterfeiting bust in history.
Or both.
But you can probably tick this story for a very quick disappearance from the handful of mainstream media outfits that have bothered to cover it so far.
Apparently there is already a fair bit of talk in the Germany and Italian financial media about American “funny money” being detected in circulation.
This massive bust and those rumours are not going to help the standing of the broken American dollar in world markets, and China will be increasingly nervy about the true value of the trillion plus in US bonds they’ve found themselves stuck with.
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