South Park Parody of Jonas Brothers All Too Real

After I watched the South Park parody of purity rings and the Jonas Brothers, I felt a little dirty. Had I really laughed that hard at those terrible images? How shocking. I tried to tell a friend about it, but couldn’t give my full endorsement. The over-sexualized caricatures used by Matt and Trey to make their points about the absurdity of promoting  abstinence-only programs through boy-band popularity went too far. After all, these are, on some level, still elementary-school characters. Then I saw this on reddit.com:

Wow! The Jonas Brothers really do spray white foam all over pre-adolescent girls in the audience! I though it was just an exaggerated  symbol of the way bands like the Jonas Brothers sell sexuality to kids while calling it chastity. Too absurd to be real, right? Teen-age boys spraying a white, foamy substance into the faces of their screaming, frantic, enraptured fans? To promote abstinence? How could a  such a crazy and crude South Park gimmick actually be accurate?  And yet it is. Pretty fucking brilliant.

Don’t Eat the Food

In bill H. R. 875 Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, Congresswoman Rosa Delauro introduces a possible threat to any attempt to subsist independently of the agribusiness giants who have made it their business to feed us. This video also explains H. R. 875′s threat to organic farming and Delauro’s connection (through her husband) to agribusiness giant Monsanto:

Monsanto, as reported in here in Vanity Fair, has waged a war against small farmers that would be bolstered by H.R. 875′s potential criminalization of small, independent farmers. Below an excerpt of the much longer article explaining Monsantos’s hostility toward farmers and the threat the pesticide-giant poses to organic farming, seed storage and our ability to avoid GMF:

“Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.”

Donald Barlett and James Steele go on to say later in their excellent artilce Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear?:

“For centuries—millennia—farmers have saved seeds from season to season: they planted in the spring, harvested in the fall, then reclaimed and cleaned the seeds over the winter for re-planting the next spring. Monsanto has turned this ancient practice on its head.

Monsanto developed G.M. seeds that would resist its own herbicide, Roundup, offering farmers a convenient way to spray fields with weed killer without affecting crops. Monsanto then patented the seeds. For nearly all of its history the United States Patent and Trademark Office had refused to grant patents on seeds, viewing them as life-forms with too many variables to be patented. “It’s not like describing a widget,” says Joseph Mendelson III, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, which has tracked Monsanto’s activities in rural America for years.

Indeed not. But in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, turned seeds into widgets, laying the groundwork for a handful of corporations to begin taking control of the world’s food supply. In its decision, the court extended patent law to cover “a live human-made microorganism.” In this case, the organism wasn’t even a seed. Rather, it was a Pseudomonas bacterium developed by a General Electric scientist to clean up oil spills. But the precedent was set, and Monsanto took advantage of it. Since the 1980s, Monsanto has become the world leader in genetic modification of seeds and has won 674 biotechnology patents, more than any other company, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Farmers who buy Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready seeds are required to sign an agreement promising not to save the seed produced after each harvest for re-planting, or to sell the seed to other farmers. This means that farmers must buy new seed every year. Those increased sales, coupled with ballooning sales of its Roundup weed killer, have been a bonanza for Monsanto.

This radical departure from age-old practice has created turmoil in farm country. Some farmers don’t fully understand that they aren’t supposed to save Monsanto’s seeds for next year’s planting. Others do, but ignore the stipulation rather than throw away a perfectly usable product. Still others say that they don’t use Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds, but seeds have been blown into their fields by wind or deposited by birds. It’s certainly easy for G.M. seeds to get mixed in with traditional varieties when seeds are cleaned by commercial dealers for re-planting. The seeds look identical; only a laboratory analysis can show the difference. Even if a farmer doesn’t buy G.M. seeds and doesn’t want them on his land, it’s a safe bet he’ll get a visit from Monsanto’s seed police if crops grown from G.M. seeds are discovered in his fields.

Most Americans know Monsanto because of what it sells to put on our lawns— the ubiquitous weed killer Roundup. What they may not know is that the company now profoundly influences—and one day may virtually control—what we put on our tables. For most of its history Monsanto was a chemical giant, producing some of the most toxic substances ever created, residues from which have left us with some of the most polluted sites on earth. Yet in a little more than a decade, the company has sought to shed its polluted past and morph into something much different and more far-reaching—an “agricultural company” dedicated to making the world “a better place for future generations.””

Jellyfishing, Jellyfishing, Jellyfishing!

Their environmentally devastating potential for reproduction (whatever is more than exponential) alluded to in this  article from January in the telegraph.uk.com sounds like a job for Spongebob and Patrick.

“The Turritopsis Nutricula is able to revert back to a juvenile form once it mates after becoming sexually mature.

Marine biologists say the jellyfish numbers are rocketing because they need not die.

Dr Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute said: “We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion.”

The jellyfish are originally from the Caribbean but have spread all over the world.

Turritopsis Nutricula is technically known as a hydrozoan and is the only known animal that is capable of reverting completely to its younger self.

It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation.

Scientists believe the cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it potentially immortal.

While most members of the jellyfish family usually die after propagating, the Turritopsis nutricula has developed the unique ability to return to a polyp state.

Having stumbled upon the font of eternal youth, this tiny creature which is just 5mm long is the focus of many intricate studies by marine biologists and geneticists to see exactly how it manages to literally reverse its aging process.”

Wow, is this evolution right before ours eyes? And if so, who am I to call one species’ great leap forward environmental devastation?

Governors Gone Wild or Political Assassinations?

When I first heard of the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, my only context for this information was the proposed boycott of Bank of America that Blagojevich promoted. In the days before his arrest, the Governor had made headlines for supporting former employees of Republic Windows and Doors.

Bank of America was refusing to  fund the factory through January in order to allow the factory to give its employees adequate notice of closure and to pay final wages and severance packages.  Former employees were in the midst of a 9 day sit-in, and Blagojevich had publicly  stated:  “We, the state of Illinois, will suspend doing any business with the Bank of America.”

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the Governor, “flanked by union leaders, more than a dozen aldermen demanded that City Hall divest itself of funds deposited by Bank of America—and stop approving zoning changes sought by the bank and its subsidiaries.”

I had seen clips of the protesting factory workers, and enjoyed their solidarity.  I looked forward to seeing more of the protesting laborers, and the threat they posed to the status quo. B of A’s refusal to renegotiate Republic Windows and Doors debt in a way that allowed the factory to honor its obligations to hard-working employees right before Christmas seemed to exemplify the consequences of this global economic crisis and  the immorality and culpability of the financial sector.

Perhaps, I thought, the people will fill the streets, and alliances between labor and sympathetic executives like Blagojevich will allow for a public confrontation of a system that demands that the blue collar  people who are losing their homes and jobs have to bankroll a “bailout” of the banks that are foreclosing on their homes and shuttering their factories.

Instead, the day after Blagojevich called for a Boycott of Bank of America and threatened to oppose the bank’s zoning requests, the Governor was arrested for attempting to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. Stories about the factory workers fighting for their wages were relegated to the dust-bin, and Blagojevich’s “crime spree” became the hot news  item. His dirty mouth, flamboyant hair, and careless arrogance inspired ire from everyone from Neil Cavuto to Rachel Maddow. Many lefties, myself included, were distracted by the possibility that Blagojevich’s graft might taint our beloved President-Elect.

Over the course of the month that has passed, Blagojevich’s antics cheapened his support of the former factory employees. Blagojevich’s efforts to name Obama’s Senatorial replacement seem alternatively tone-deaf, ego maniacal, and embarrassing. Democrats in the Senate have refused to welcome Roland Burris, not because they find Burris an unacceptable replacement for Obama (although his pursuit of the death penalty against an obviously railroaded and innocent man shoud disqualify him), but to garner public approval. The noise created by this prolonged scandal drowns out lingering questions over Bank of America’s unethical behavior, and the potential fate of Americans working for companies that are devastated by falling demand and lack of credit.

After hearing news-goddess (and moral barometer) Rachel Maddow repeatedly condemn Blagojevich, I doubted my original response to his arrest. Now that the dust has settled, I again question the timing and legitimacy  of Blagovich’s arrest, and the marked similarity of the Blago debacle to Eliot Spitzer’s fall from grace last year:

1.) Both men were taking on huge financial institutions and exposing the graft necessary to keep them afloat.(Before Spitzer was Ashly Dupre’s trick, he was known as a crusader  who took on AIG, investigated Wall Street, and demanded better regulation of the financial sector.)

2.) Both men appear to be completely guilty, yet while the crimes they committed are personally and politically devastating, they are ridiculous small-potatoes compared to the crimes committed by the billionaire grifters that  they confronted and sought to expose.

3.) Both men were effectively neutralized due to the embarrassing nature of their crimes, while the perpetrators of large-scale economic crimes against all American citizens go unpunished.

Spitzer and Blagojevich are both deeply flawed public figures, but the scandals surrounding each of them do not distinguish them from their peers. Hubris, greed, and lust are native denizens of the waters in which both men swim. What made them different, and perhaps intolerable, was the threat they posed to the corrupt and precarious financial systems that were further enriching the Wall Street elite. Sure, they were guilty of dirty, shameful, things and that made their respective political assassinations that much easier.

Trooper Revenge is Super Sweet in Wasilla

Once celebrated for her conservative values, like helicopter-hunting, book-banning and charging rape victems for their own rape investigation kits, Sarah Palin finds herself the object of less Alaskan adoration these days. The Wasilla church she once attended was targetted by arsonists, but whether or not the fire was linked to governor is uncertain. Palin is also not linked to the arrest of her daughter’s partner’s mother, Sherry Johnston, for the alleged sale of controlled substances. There is absolutely NO indication that the Palin family was involved in the six felony counts with which Johnston has been charged.

There is  no evidence at all in the article here in the Telegraph UK that the Alaska State Troopers enjoyed the undercover investigation of the drug-dealing activities of a woman with such obvious yet personal connections to the Palin family. But true irony speaks for itself. Here are awesome excerpts:

“The swoop by Alaska state troopers on Sherry Johnston threatened to mar the birth of Mrs Palin’s first grandchild, due this weekend. Mrs Johnston, 42, is mother of Levi Johnston, the self-confessed “redneck” who is the father of Bristol’s child and is due to marry her next summer… Mrs Johnston was taken into custody on Thursday at her home in Wasilla, Alaska, where Mrs Palin used to be mayor and still lives, and was charged with six counts of misconduct involving a controlled substance. Officials in Alaska said that the arrest was connected with the strong prescription painkiller OxyContin. In addition to possession charges, Mrs Johnston faces a felony charge usually related to selling or manufacturing the drugs.”

Okay, so I too immediately thought of meth. I mean how much more poetic could the universe get? And I often root for poetry, especially when it coincides with humor. However, Johnston apparently bucked the Wasilla trend to bring variety to the lives of her neighbors in the form of OxyContin. Soma, not Go.

I love imagining the day-to-day investigation, which may or may not have been ongoing during the Palin campaign:

“The arrest followed an undercover narcotics investigation, but law enforcement officials refused to say whether it was underway when Mrs Palin burst onto the national political scene in August after Republican presidential candidate John McCain selected her as his running mate.”

Really? Troopers could have been (probably were, if TV has taught me anything) undercover-investigating this hillbilly drug ring while Levi was nestled in the bosom of the RNC campaign? Oh the wicked (awesome) anticipation must have been thick and delicious. I bet the secret promise of vengeance made the lives of everyone around the investigating Troopers as sexy as the movies!

Here is a video that demonstrates the relationship between Palin and the Alaskan Troopers, if anyone needs a reminder from election season:

So I can’t wait to find out how having my unmarried, pregnant daughter’s boyfriend’s mother get arrested for drug-dealing in my hometown makes me the ideal political representative to legislate morality, criminalize dissent and restrict personal liberty.

Philanthropists and Profiteers – U2 Opts for Cash

Honored with a  Nobel Man of Peace Prize, Bono is poised to make millions of dollars at the expense of the music promotion company Live Nation.  In this article, Ethan Smith at the Wall Street Journal reported that: “The Irish rock band U2 hasn’t toured since 2006, but it stands to make $25 million in a sweetheart stock deal, according to SEC filings Wednesday and people familiar with the matter . From the same WSJ article: “In March, the band struck a 12-year deal with Live Nation Inc., that called for the concert promotion giant to pay U2 partly with stock. Live Nation promised to pay tens of millions of dollars to high-profile artists in exchange for several years’ worth of revenue from a broad range of their work, including concerts, online fan clubs and t-shirt sales. The idea was pitched as a novel way to make money in the ailing music business.”

Now, however, in the changed business climate, U2 is cashing in their stock for the promised (long-term) figure of 25 million: “Live Nation had guaranteed that U2 would receive $25 million for 1.6 million shares. But the current market value was just $6.1 million at the close of trading Wednesday. That leaves Live Nation on the hook for the balance, which the company said Wednesday in a SEC filing it would pay with cash on hand or borrowed money”. Well, just so Bono makes more millions, no matter the terms of the deal. Live Nation, of course, is involved in numerous charitable events. But, no matter.

Okay, so maybe the inclination to vomit that I felt back in 2005 when I found out Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates had been named Time Persons of the Year, and the tendency to talk about the burning feeling in my esophagus with U2 fans wasn’t proper or popular. But alas, although I truly want to save lives in Africa, I detest the type of charity work he and the Gates were engaged in. It just seemed like a self-perpetuating cycle of  money and ego.  A couple days after the Time cover, writer Paul Theroux wrote a poingnant critique of the Rock Star’s Burden. Better than anything I could come up with, I encourage everyone to read his analysis. In a nutshell, the big-ticket charity acts made entrenched problems in Africa worse not better.

And then there is the troubling report a couple years later in 2007, stating that Bono sought to hide money in tax shelters in the Netherlands. Call me a socialist, but paying your fair share in the social contract is important, and becomes more so as wealth increases. To each according to his need, from each according to his ability…or whatever. What Bono, you run around trying to save the world, but you can’t step up and pay your fair share in taxes? Shouldn’t the first, best answer be personal responsibility? And what is up with that other Gates? Really? Bono is planning global policy? I really liked the Joshua Tree, and Sunday, Bloody Sunday is a truly treat song, but maybe Matt and Trey were right again.

Also last year, Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon wrote “Dark Cloud over good works os Gates Foundation” for the LA Times. The article begins by introducing Justice Eta from Ebocha, Nigeria. Justice Eta was a 14 year old boy who had recently received a Polio vaccination from the Gates Foundation, but was plagued by respiratory ailments common to his village.   “In Ebocha, where Justice lives, Dr. Elekwachi Okey, a local physician, says hundreds of flares at oil plants in the Niger Delta have caused an epidemic of bronchitis in adults, and asthma and blurred vision in children. No definitive studies have documented the health effects, but many of the 250 toxic chemicals in the fumes and soot have long been linked to respiratory disease and cancer…The oil plants in the region surrounding Ebocha find it cheaper to burn nearly 1 billion cubic feet of gas each day and contribute to global warming than to sell it.”
The problematic relationship between charity and profit, or even a financial system based on making money off causing the diseases you work to eradicate, is illustrated by the Gates’ own interests in the poison-emitting oil companies in Justice Eta’s Nigerian neighborhood:
“The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France — the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.” As Chris Rock said, “the money isn’t in the cure, it’s in the treatment.” Well, I guess the real money happens when you have both vertical and horizontal integration in the business of human tragedy.

So what if U2 sabotages the promoter that give them credibility as philanthropists, or if  Bono, Who Preaches Charity, Profits From Buyouts, Tax Breaks, or that the Gates build their empire on causing and treating but never curing the problems they confront? What kind of solution do I offer? How can I distinguish this post from a useless complaint?

Well, I have an idea. We (Americans, agents of an exploitative economy and hegemonic culture) should stop fucking everything up. As uncomfortable as it is to accept, many modern-era problems are reactions to Western ( particularly US)  imperialism. Sure there would be other problems, different kinds of exploitation and oppression, just not American style. Okay. Fine. That is no reason to keep on messing everything up when we should just stop. Some times the best way to help is to do no harm, and often the only way to do no harm is to go away and quit making problems worse.

People can work toward social equilibrium, justice, and health without the “help”of the USA, world cop/criminal. A timely example: in a recent movement in India, called the Pink Gang, women dressed in pink robes engage in vigilante social justice, protecting one another and their communities form the abuses of men. They refuse the help of outside agencies that attempt to co-opt their movement: “The pink women of the Banda shun politicla parties and NGOs because, in the words of their feisty leader, Smapat Pal Devi, “they are always looking for kickbacks when they offer to fund us” The organization in place to provide aid and protection are rightly viewed as part of the problem, and a fundamental part of the oppressive social and economic systems that reify the patriarchy they are contesting.

Recently I was at a lecture given by an indigenous South American historian. A man in the audience asked what the US could do to help the Mapuche people in the face of the Chilian state’s repression, neo-liberalism and land misappropriation. He answered by quoting an old Mapuche woman: “I don’t need you to give me a hand, I need you to get your hand off of me.”

I Too Throw My Shoe

Muntather al Zaidi reminded us here in Christendom of the cultural meaning attached to shoes in the ancient city of Baghdad and the wider Muslim world. They are  vehicles for contempt and, awesomely, highly efficient projectiles . For his efforts at contesting the impunity of Bush and the tolerance of the broken bodies, ecosystems and economies left in the wake of his evil administration, al Zaidi will undoubtedly be beaten up some more and imprisoned for years and years.

And what of us? We sit here and do nothing. As if it would be too much trouble, and kind of tacky, to investigate and punish the crimes committed by our government these last eight years. Even if we set aside Iraq and the War on Islam (and all the Orwellian implications of this terrible and absurd modern crusade) and just focus on domestic issues, a terrible, shoe-throwing anger should burn inside the belly of this citizenry.

Take for example this global economic crisis.  Well, it’s a crisis now.  Before the bottom fell out of this elaborate Ponzi scheme, all of the men and women (so many of them Bushies) who now claim to be able to rescue us were heedlessly joining the obscenely profitable orgy of deregulation and speculation.

The Madoff crime spree is a sad, but almost poetic consequence of our collective refusal to live sustainably. Charities, investors and even entire towns are wiped out by flagrant lies and corruption by a high-profile businessman and philanthropist. Bernard Madoff ran a huge outfit, under the noses of financial regulators, and he himself was the former chairman of the board of directors of the NASDAQ. This costly episode should elicit more than curiosity — Madoff’s arrest should indicate to all the criminal nature of the people we let take control of our financial systems.

Or we could hold the Bush administration accountable for the rampant environmental degradation that has poisoned our bodies and the land. After eight years of letting corporations poison our food and water, rape our mountains and disrupt our climate, Bush is working overtime now to ensure the incoming Obama administration will find it difficult or impossible to correct his damaging policies.

Finally, I will end this litany with a shout out to civil liberties. It was three years ago today that the New York Times broke the warrentless wiretapping story. This video of Rachel Maddow interviewing Thomas Tamm is a wonderful reminder of the abuse we the people put up with for the last eight years. It is now time to stop being such whinely little bitches and strip this man and his administration of the impunity and affluence that protect them from the just consequences of so many murderous acts.