As a college graduate, I see the city I love differently than a decade ago. Winter has been brutal, and our chances keep getting worse. Our generation's debt has been downgraded almost as much as our city's. The west side is 2.5 times as dangerous as Afghanistan. We voted Hope/Change and got Drones/TPP. Why? Senator Alan Grayson, (D) said:
"Well they(TTP) take a bad situation and make it far worse. These are deals that would extend free trade status which we now have with Mexico and Canada to roughly fifty other countries and what we've seen over and over again with these deals is that they weaken our economy and gut the middle class. Let's take NAFTA for instance. Before NAFTA went in to effect, the United States never had a trade deficit of a hundred and thirty five billion dollars in any time in its history."
Every single year since NAFTA went in to effect we've had a trade deficit of a hundred and thirty five billions dollars or more. In the last thirteen years we've won thirteen state trade deficits that are higher than any country that's ever run in the history of the entire world. There's no country that's ever had a two hundred billion dollar trade deficit other than the United States.
Even if the Affordable Care Act is starting to work, the Koch's are still allowed to bankroll any attack against private citizens they choose to. Because, their company is privately held, and that somehow magically makes them above the law. Some of us now thankfully have Medicaid, our generation still struggles with the emotional burden of war, minimum wage jobs, a college education, all amounting to thousands of dollars of debt. What Happened to " support the troops "? Even if we manage to force a fifteen dollar minimum wage, we still have to figure out how we are to feed a millions of people without food. Yet, Republicans want the poor to die. Once think we know is, that if they succeed, the majority of Americans could then not buy the necessary things they need to live, on. Milk is 6 dollars a gallon, and republicans are still looking for welfare queens. Shame they don't own mirrors.
We can continue to grumble about Republicans. They are bought and paid for by Koch Industries, what about the Democrats? Do you know about pensions in Chicago? Are Koch politicians planning on leveraging public works on salaries? What money are Union Workers going to retire on? They will be forced on the state. Our pensions are underfunded just like Detroit. Our mayor has no plan to address the lack of funds, in he is selling off transportation and what ever is left. It costs about five dollars an hour to park on much of the city streets. When you make a hundred and eighty dollars on unemployment, your ability to even go and look for a job is impoverished. And Boner is still attacking unemployment. I want my unemployment. I paid into it. How do we make this right? I think we should sue him for violating our rights Is it time for bipartisanship on his removal?
For our purposes we may say that there are two justifications of punishment. What we may call the retributive view is that punishment is justified on the grounds that wrongdoing merits punishment. It is morally fitting that a person who does wrong should suffer in proportion to his wrongdoing. That a criminal should be punished follows from his guilt, and the severity of the appropriate punishment depends on the depravity of his act. The state of affairs where a wrongdoer suffers punishment is morally better than the state of affairs where he does not, and it is better irrespective of any of the consequences of punishing him. - John Rawls
The Chicago machine is gearing up for a new year. Our trains are fifty years out of date. Our electricity is dependent on nuclear, Koch, and coal. Disasters in any of these industries would decimate our water supply. As the EPA has been not only de-fanged, but neutered, drawn, quartered, and then finally brought to the taxidermist by oil industries, food corporations, wall street and anyone with a buck to shove in it's Teflon G-String. We have to protest for a living wage. We have to protest to get enough money to feed our families and pay our rent.
Perhaps the next Occupy should consider finding property for farms. This fight is not going away. As each local chapter of Occupy asks themselves questions, one of the first should be, how do we eat? What are our Rules for Realistic Radicals? There are many properties that can be of benefit of the community and transitioned into to community gardens. Besides
protesting, how can we take back our community?
What jobs are going into the west side other than drug trafficking? Can we propose an alternative future? Are there
free market solutions? Why can't public and private help provide resources for community gardens that can feed the community? Public space and public transportation for Public works. Chicago was built on rail roads, and ours are depressing dated and dilapidated. Our trains are flying off the rails.
Koch chemicals threaten Chicago's poor with neuro-toxic exposure. If you want to change behaviors you change children's diets, and remove hardship and toxins and toil from the basic activities of survival so we can
smile. Why aren't there opportunities in one of the biggest economies in the country to utilizing empty buildings and factories to grow peppers, and lettuce and food for and put at risk
children in the garden to play in dirt and not dodge bullets and
institutional racism?
"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the 'law of causality' the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind." - Ayn Rand
If someone really wishes to 'focus on the family', you can focus on feeding the family. If you want to reduce drug dependence why not provide community greenhouses? If you nurture a child you feed it's soul. We need a food network to force Monsanto and other chemical companies out of the market of feeding children and growing crops. We know now that GMO crops are horrible for human development. Locally, we can write city and ordinances banning their GMO's and Koch Industries. Both have only grown hardship, cancer and super-bugs.
"In the normal mode of discovery, even resistance to change has a use that will be explored more fully in the next section. By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core. The very fact that a significant scientific novelty so often emerges simultaneously from several laboratories is an index both to the strongly traditional nature of normal science and to the completeness with which that traditional pursuit prepare the completeness with which that traditional pursuit prepares the away for its own change." - (Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Pg. 65)
We know the results of GMO on children. We can link sugar with cancer, and corn syrup with cancer, lets stop giving children cancer. Only sounds fair, no? We need new ways to fight against those who are cancerous to the freedom of a society.
Nobility in man is worth as much as it is in horses asses or rams. But the meanest blooded puppy
in the world, if he gets a little money is as good as a man as the best of them. Yet birth and wealth
together have prevailed over virtue and talent in all ages. - John Adams
Koch Industries has been highly effective in disrupting the political process of our neighbors to the North. As the wolves get more ravenous, who stands to lose in Chicago? Shouldn't we do more than collect bribes? If that Bast is indeed working with ALEC, should we be concerned? Fighting the Koch associates in an educational war, It's obvious that Koch and friends have continued their war on academia with adapted tactics and a new campaign on Cato, who they once courted. Is Koch the Hydra of the new millennium? Since Joe Bast decided to have his guy, Thomas K Lindsey, and his friend Patrick Parker sue administrators of Shimer College for train fair, to continue on with organized racism that has been, and continues to be expelled upon the city of Chicago by the right, and it's hate-mongers. Their main objection was Postmodernism, such as Black Female Author, "Toni Morrison and the titles of several of her books are promoted on page 1095. (of Common Core) One of her books listed is called The Bluest Eye. It’s recommended reading for 11th graders." and according to some conservative sources are considered pornographic. As the Right's attack on the articulation of speach amongst their detractors and intellectual superiors continues. This is considered pornography:
Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know", she says. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands."
Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.
For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.
So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. - Toni Morrison
If we no longer produce goods in such structures, is there a plan in place to surrender the buildings to the community to do good things with, to provide community public space with the profit for the community? Or is that Socialism and therefore evil and dirty? I think not. Our civilization requires change for the survival of the species. Can we trust Congress to pass through legislature that would be signed into law for collective use of abandoned buildings? Can we trust them to vote on anything but to renew their pensions? The only economic reform we can expect out of Obama will be undercut by TPP.
Why not eminent domain to retake dangerous buildings? Lets start a new free market economy, where the community can freely market food to children and anyone in need. Fuck the banks. Feed the People. Why not? Why can't we local source? Everyone deserves to eat. We can utilize these buildings as after school locations where students can study safely, and feed themselves without the threat of gun violence. In one small thing, we can make Change. Lets learn how to feed ourselves. We have the space, we have the will, the knowledge, all we need is for people to know, âIf you build it, change will come.â To quote Jefferson:
"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth."
If that is true, perhaps the pope can provide funding from his own personal massive bank. Someone has to take care of the souls of the next generation. Our government can't even address the potholes. And NASA says Industrial Society as we know it is Doomed. So, What is the future? Is it as shaky as a City Pension? Can divine providence save a tortured city's soul, and put it's money where it's mouth is? Can we make this right? Can we promise every child in Chicago a garden to play in? Better schools? Can Libertarianism be saved from the words of racists as their de-facto speakers? Time will tell.
How should a blunder at a table be treated?
If a blunder of any sort is made... remember the amount of mistake is in proportion to the amount of trouble and inconvenience it causes others, and do not be unhappy unless the offense really calls for unhappiness...
Apologies should be sincerely made and frankly expressed.
- Vogue's Book of Etiquette - 1924 edition, Pg 210
I apologize if I hit on anyone's triggers on race. I mean no ill, merely to speak for those without a voice.
It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience. - Toni Morrison