Custom-fitted dresses for Greece.  Everybody wants one!  They’ll be all the rage in Milan, Lisbon, Dublin, Madrid and gay Paris.  Anyone for a haircut?

However, according to Frau Merkel, “the rules [now] state that only “those companies mentioned on the list drawn up each year by a commission domiciled at the Ministry for Credit Default Swaps are entitled to avail themselves of the label haute couture.”

I think she meant, “Prevention is better than a cure.”  But what cure?  Paint your ass baboon pink and call it fashion?  

The more things change…the more the country still beats, shoots, gasses and kills its own citizens (veterans EVUHN!) after the bankers crash the economy.  Good times.  Under 30 min total.

But first, a message from Oakland via Bluegal:

“My part of Oakland is full of poor people. There’s at least one murder a week. Old creeps pimp out teenaged girls in broad daylight. You can buy crack or heroin 30 feet from my door, and two of my neighbors have been held up at gun point this summer. And the City of Oakland says they don’t have the police to stop any of that. But a bunch of people protesting the fact that rich people got a bail out and everyone else got nothing? The city shuts them down tight. Bang. Done. Riot act. Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? I do. Every day.”

Enjoy the show below.

Hustlers control the flow,

They lost their bets and now you owe

The deepest hole that they bestow,

A parting gift, the final blow.

Making off with all that dough,

Their stocks have hit a high plateau.

40 something years ago

The middle class was on the go,

Now what you “own” is what you owe,

The underwater big chateau

How far is down, how low is low?

Don’t look up, watch out below!

Hopey Changey’s status quo

Is emptier than a Home Depot

In jobless ranks he’s called “no-show.”

Of course, he’ll ask you to forgo

Retirement, the afterglow.

While bettors bet the food yo-yo,

And savings earn a fat zero.

Whose woods these are I think I know:

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

The game’s been rigged to steal the show.

Angry protests grow and grow,

The cops responding with a blow

To the Charter’s final throe.

Tectonic plates begin to glow,

The sulphurous pyroclastic flow

Three times around the world will go.

Whatever happened to my recording of Four Boys and a Guitar by the Mills Brothers, I dunno, but it’s a classic from the true Kings of Harmony.  

The first vid has poor sound quality, but illustrates that, except for the guitar, they did everything, bass, harmonies, and “hand trumpets” using their voices.

Nagasaki:

Hillary the Tittering Medusa:

William Black already has a teaching job, but what he really needs is an occupation at Justice where he can kick some fraudulent ass.  Here’s vid from Democracy Now with Amy Goodman that I doubt gets front-paged at any high-traffic liberal blogs:

disclaimer: these working demands came through “a” working group, and is not necessarily definitive, at all.  The link came from HuffPo.

I see five major themes to the working demands of OWS.

Democracy/anti-plutocracy (items 1-5, 19):

(1) Public financing of federal elections, (2) nullify Citizen’s United, (3) 5-year ban on revolving door, (4) lifetime ban on gifts, (5) tax code reform, (19) additional campaign finance reform

Health Care (item 6):

(6) Health: single payer, Medicare for all

Environment (item 7):

(7)  empower EPA enforcement, carbon caps, transition to renewables

Economy (items 8-18):

(8) sustainable debt/GDP ratio by 2020; (9) jobs program; (10) student loan debt relief; (11) immigration reform; (12)  close non-essential military bases; (13) education with emphasis on tech and green, fair teacher pay; (14) rebuild manufacturing; (15) currency wars (?); (16) re-instate Glass-Steagall, investigate & prosecute market collapse; (17) end mortgage crisis; (18) one-year moratorium on foreclosures.

War (items 12 & 20):

(12) close non-essential bases, Congressional approval of war; (20) withdraw from Iraq & Afghanistan.

Another three-ton object hurtles from its decaying orbit towards Earth, so today must be another day ending in “y”.  Dying in the brimstone of space junk, however, is not our most pressing matter by a long shot.  Not that space junk crashing into other space junk is a minor concern, given our dependence on global communications that the fragile “junk-o-sphere” makes possible.  A critical mass of fragment-generating collisions could be a real game changer, and is yet just another reminder of our seemingly infinite human ability to err on the side heedlessness.

OOXX,

CF