I love Maine and hate elitist dinks from away who run crap magazines

Open letter in response to this, from my friend Rob Korobkin:

Dear Person Flipping Through Vex Magazine,

The conflict over the future of Congress Square is NOT - as the noxious know-it-all New York elitist fuck-head Mort Todd would have you believe - a battle between people living on the street and the "good" citizens of Portland. It's a battle between greedy investment bankers from Ohio who want to buy up the big open public space at the center of our fair city and sell it off to a multinational hotel conglomerate who would kick us ALL off of it and throw up an ass-ugly building so rich yuppies from away can drink $15 martinis, eat Sysco pigs-in-blankets and listen to shitty commercial pop music - and those of us who actually live here and would prefer not to lose our park.

Yeah, we know Congress Square is a concrete hole in the ground with few benches and even fewer trees - but, god damn it, it's OUR concrete hole in the ground! We're not saying we think it's perfect as it is - we're saying we'd rather keep it this way, for now, than lose it altogether. Even in its current form, it's still a wonderful place for outdoor punk shows, juggling, steel drummers, art sales and taking little kids to ride tricycles. We want to see it improve and become a fun place where everybody in Portland and beyond is welcome to hang out and enjoy being downtown. And, yeah, by everybody, we mean kids on skateboards, immigrants, families, travelers, seniors, people who don't always have a roof over their heads, you know, everybody! That's what it means to have a community.

This is Maine - we aren't pretentious twerps - our state was built by loggers and mill workers who didn't need sensitivity trainings in political correctness to know that communities like ours only get a say in the decisions that affect us when we stick together. As long as we're squabbling with our neighbors, saying nasty things about people down on their luck and staying buried in our own little rabbit holes - nobody in Power will give a shit about us.

If, on the other hand, we want to live in the kind of world that we can feel good about bringing children into, we need to start coming together and saying things like, hey, there's a fairly large, centrally located piece of land at the center of our city that has the potential to be a really nice public space. If we worked together and used some of those municipal dollars coming out of our rent checks, parking tickets and property tax payments, we could do something awesome! The city budget is about 160 MILLION dollars a year - that's our money, and we have every right to spend at least a little bit of it on making our city as pleasant as possible for us to live in. Whatever happens to the square, it should be a decision that we make together as Portlanders - not one that gets made for us by fat cat business interests looking to make money off the hospitality industrial complex. We have zero obligation to be "hospitable" to anybody who doesn't respect us and our city.

Or we could just be assholes. We could print condescending comics that depict how funny it would be if we all ganged up on Portland's street population - many of whom are veterans suffering with trauma and mental illness the likes of which most of us can't even imagine. We could turn our neighborhoods against each other, devolving our entire public discourse into a pathetic mishmash of chest-thumping and bleating, completely ignoring the very real threat that global institutions of private capital pose to our independence and basic liberties as a free city of hard-working, open-minded Mainers. The choice is yours.

Save Congress Square!

Poor America - BBC

Sometimes when you're in denial, a friend has to show you exactly how fucked up you are...

CPAC has thoughts on #OWS; but #OWS has thoughts on CPAC

So the Conservative Political Action Committee had a panel in which they discussed the Occupy Movement vs the Tea Party.

It's on C-SPAN, and is currently not available for embedded playing. So here's a link: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/304376-8

I would say, "Enjoy!" but I think you're going to have a REALLY hard time doing so. It's extremely cringeworthy.

Thankfully:

The Occupy Movement Shared Their Thoughts about CPAC

via Teamster Nation

The annual corporate greedfest known as CPAC was turned upside down today by thousands upon thousands of union members, community activists, unemployed workers and our good friend the giant Fat Cat. Dozens of reporters trained cameras on the sprited Washington, D.C. scene. Union banners waved as throngs of marchers surged into the street and up the hill to the hotel entrance. Protesters chanted, sang, drummed and danced while grandmothers sat down in the street to protest attacks on Medicare.


Police gave up trying to keep the huge crowd on the sidewalks. They blocked off the street as the peaceful protesters vented their thoughts about greed, tax dodging, unemployment and the war waged on working families.


Teamsters with "Stop the War on Worker" signs joined autoworkers, sheetmetal workers, firefighters, elevator constructors, UFCW, SEIU, AFSCME, UNITE. Community groups from as far away as Baltimore showed up by the busload.

Some of the entitled jerks attending CPAC had gleefully predicted violence, the way they always do, then did their best to provoke it. With expensive suits and camera equipment, they waded into the crowd hurling belligerent questions at the protesters. A security official -- was it a Secret Service agent -- took one entitled jerk away from the group he was badgering and gave him a talking-to.

The rally got off to a slow start around noon, as steelworkers, UAW members and Teamsters formed a picket line around the Fat Cat chanting, "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Union busting's got to go." But at 12:30 someone shouted "Oh my God, thousands of marchers!" Led by drummers they filled the street, waving signs and banners as cars honked and police officers tried to herd them onto the sidewalks. "Our DC" and "We Are The 99%" signs joined "Recall Walker" and "Greed is Good--Romney-Gekko."

Soon the huge crowd surged up the hill, past the police and security, bellowing, "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!" Then they peacefully marched down again and regrouped in the street. Two women sat down on the pavement, soon to be joined by many more. Some gave speeches, some chanted and some sang along with pro-movement songs made up on the spot.

The CPAC one percenters had some charming things to say: @BossyMother called them "mutant scum." The delightful @stephenww tweeted, "I think we all can agree that the #OccupyCPAC crowd should get free contraception." @JimForbes_Pasco refers to the peaceful protesters as "OccupyCPAC goons."

[infographic]7 Facts about our Veterans that will Shock You

via MoveOn.org (yeah, I know)

Capitalism: Abandoned Homes and Gardens Rot While the Homeless Starve

I love capitalism. The homeless starve without a roof over their head, while abandoned homes (that belong to the banks) grow bountiful gardens that go to waste.

That is until this liberal bleeding heart interloper decides to start stealing food from the banks! That's the bank's property lady! We're supposed to be teaching the poor how much it sucks to be poor! We can't do that if you feed them! Hunger is a positive motivator to work for subminimum wages! You're screwing the whole thing up!

From the New York Times:

ATLANTA — As she does every evening, Kelly Callahan walked her dogs through her East Atlanta neighborhood. As in many communities in a city with the 16th-highest foreclosure rate in the nation, there were plenty of empty, bank-owned properties for sale.

She noticed something else. Those forlorn yards were peppered with overgrown gardens and big fruit trees, all bulging with the kind of bounty that comes from the high heat and afternoon thunderstorms that have defined Atlanta’s summer.

So she began picking. First, there was a load of figs, which she intends to make into jam for a cafe that feeds homeless people. Then, for herself, she got five pounds of tomatoes, two kinds of squash and — the real prize — a Sugar Baby watermelon.

THAT IS THEFT! You're stealing from the banks! They were going to let that food sit there and rot to teach poor people a lesson, but then you had to go an steal it! You're messing the whole thing up! Capitalism can only work if there's scarcity! If we suddenly find that things are plentiful, why... the banks wouldn't be able to control all the capital... and then... yada yada yada, we'd be eating babies and so on!

“I don’t think of it as stealing,” she said. “These things were planted by a person who was going to harvest them. That person no longer has the ability to. It’s not like the bank people who sit in their offices are going to come out here and pick figs.”

Of course, a police officer who catches her might not agree with Ms. Callahan’s legal assessment. And it would be a rare bank official who would sign off.

And they shouldn't either! How else are we going to teach the poor how much it sucks to be poor? It's bad enough we have charities and a hole-ridden social safety net for crying out loud...

Over the last few years, in cities from Oakland, Calif., to Clemson, S.C., well-intentioned foraging enthusiasts have mapped public fruit trees and organized picking parties. Volunteers descend on generous homeowners who are happy to share their bounty, sometimes getting a few jars of preserves in return.

There are government efforts to turn abandoned land into food, too. In Multnomah County, Ore., officials offer property that has been seized for back taxes to community and governmental organizations for gardens.

They are advocating for COMMUNISM! We can't let the Rooskis win the cold war! That's exactly what they are doing! Unless we have starving homeless, the terrorists, er, the communists have won!

But with more and more properties in foreclosure and large stretches of vacant lots available in some cities, a new, guerrilla-style harvest is taking shape.

Robby Astrove works with Concrete Jungle, a fruit-foraging organization in Atlanta that in 2009 began building a database of untended fruit and nut trees on commercial and public land. The group donates most of the food to agencies that feed the hungry.

[...] “It’s a beautiful idea,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a neighbor’s tree or a vacant lot or a foreclosure or whatever. It’s you and that fruit tree right at that precise moment when the fruit is ready and you need to make something happen.”

Yeah, it's totally okay to tresspass on bank property and steal from them. This "whatever it takes" attitude is exactly the kind of attitude these communist socialists have. Whatever it takes, no matter who they have to steal from! And quit stealing perfectly good food out of the dumpsters at the grocery store too! Sure, that food technically is still perfectly fine to eat, contained in hermetically sealed packages, and still has a week until it expires... but without artificially created scarcity capital markets cannot function! Do you want to destroy capitalism or something? I'll remind you that Capitalism is the greatest best freest system of economics since feudalism!

The point, she and other urban fruit foragers say, is to keep food from going to waste. Ms. Callahan, who works for the Carter Center and lived in Africa for eight years, has seen true hunger and cannot bear to watch food rot.

“If food is going bad on the vine,” she said, that says something about us as a society. “It doesn’t matter if the bank owns it. We should be more communal than that.”

COMMUNAL?! Sounds like COMMUNISM TO ME!

Although urban foragers see no harm in picking the produce, one would be hard-pressed to find a real estate agent or a banker who would officially encourage the practice.

Still, a ripe fig is a ripe fig.

Typical liberal namby pamby, wishy washy leftist tripe from the New York Times. We're in a class war against the poor here! Pick a side!

Merry Christmas from the Punk Patriot!

Insurance Companies Pass Landmark Bill Part 2

Sorry that this took so long to upload. YouTube was refusing to allow me to upload it, so I uploaded it over at Blip.TV