For some otherworldly reason, following President Sparkle Pony’s mealy-mouthed announcement, the mainstream media — along with, of course, vast swaths of Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans/Whatever America — practically crapped its pants with excitement. This was especially great news for the media, who had a ready-made excuse to spend the next week avoiding all discussion of the economy, the war in Afghanistan, the indefinite detention provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, the health care debacle, and a host of other more important issues. This was also good news in the context of the current Presidential Freak Circus, as it finally gives the Romney and Obama campaigns something to disagree on.

So, I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my heartiest congratulations to GLBTW America, for so cleverly diverting the attention of the People, the ruling class and the media away from far more important issues to your goddamn’ lame-assed hot-button bullshit culture-war pissfight.

Next week: flag burning!

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Sorry about the cursing, and… actually, on second thought, no — I’m not sorry about the cursing. If you can’t handle it, tough. –mf

DC has no May Day

Or, why the Institute for Policy Studies can eat shit.

I’ve often groused about how the activist millieu in DC is domesticated, low key and dead. Every event inevitably follows this formula: BORING SPEECH followed by THREE WORD CHANT, with ANNOYINGLY SERPENTINE MARCH that passes by OUTSIDE BORING OFFICE BUILDING, OUTSIDE BORING OFFICE BUILDING, OUTSIDE BORING OFFICE BUILDING, OUTSIDE BORING OFFICE BUILDING, winding up OUTSIDE BORING OFFICE BUILDING, with BORING SPEECH, THREE WORD CHANT, THREE WORD CHANT and BORING SPEECH. Sometimes, BORING SPEECH is interspersed with BORING FOLK MUSIC.

It’s almost as if all of these events are planned by the same central committee. We’ve long been frustrated and irritated by the presence of 501c(3) non-profit groups— they latch on to every movement and suck the life out of it. Suddenly, every event —no matter how grass-roots its origins— is handled like a goddamned rock concert, with backstage passes and VERY BUSY STAFFERS who are VERY IMPORTANT AND CANT TALK WITH YOU RIGHT NOW WOULD YOU KINDLY STEP AWAY FROM THE SPEAKERS. You have to butter these little shits up, too, or else they’ll do everything in their power to keep you from taking pictures or interviewing people.

Politics.

So it comes to pass that every activist event ends up following the same fucking script, with people on the street becoming so accustomed to the routine that they block it all out. The people of DC have acquired ninja-like prowess in dodging and brushing off bright, shiny-faced youth with pamphlets, and shitty, squawking bullhorns just blend into the white noise of the city. I know, you’re getting less than minimum wage to hand out fliers for an hour or two and it looks good on your curriculum vitae when you apply to another 501(c)3, but the people who told you to do this have no connection with the worker you’re slowing down who needs to catch the subway or else she’ll lose her minimum wage job.

This is why no one who lives in DC gives two shits about activism anymore, and why no one bothers to start anything. You’d think DC would be alive with political discourse on every corner, but it’s not. Everything has been domesticated. Tamed. Broken. Every movement, no matter what it is, will inevitably be co-opted by a large, well-funded nonprofit who will then move its own people into leadership positions in the original, grass-roots group. Or— as with the case of Occupy DC, where there is no leadership position— the nonprofits will create leadership positions with their own people already in the position; namely, the Institute for Policy Studies’ involvement with Occupy DC. We were looking up info about tomorrow’s May Day event at Malcolm X park, and saw this press release. That’s odd, Occupy is just supposed to DO THINGS, not have press agents and people who live in very expensive apartments in Alexandria.

“Who ARE these people?” “Hmm… they work for something… Institute for Policy Studies?” “INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES?! A FUCKING NON-PROF?!” “Yeah, fuck that shit, I’m not wasting my time on that crap.”

What DOES MayDay DC have planned, anyway? A carnival? A family friendly outing of happy, puffy, safe pablum that completely undercuts the serious nature of the entire goddamned 99% message? The right wing and corporatists are waging a very literal waron working people, dissidents and anyone who doesn’t fit into their narrow “God-Money-Empire” worldview, and the best way to demonstrate this is by having nonprofit staffers dress up in CLOWN COSTUMES for a goddamned PARADE?

The common line of apologist bullshit from non-profits is that without the power of a nonprofit, they wouldn’t be able to pull in notable speakers or professional sound systems— which is probably they’ve had their sights set on Occupy since it first appeared. Think about it— a legitimately grass-roots movement that doesn’t want or need your fucking Genelec monitors that you can’t mix properly, and where speakers like Slavoj Zizek spent their own money to travel to and attend. Hell, DC may actually by a perfect example where right wing media may have had its baseless propaganda finally hit a mark: a rich, well-funded group of flatulent, old “establishment leftists” really have taken over the activist scene in DC.

The major difference between what Institute for Policy Studies does and what Americans for Prosperity does is AFP has the backing of the Koch brothers’ billions, and IPS only has donations from a few well-off people from left-of-center. Either way, both of these abominations are the very definition of astro-turf political movements. Nothing of any journalistic importance will happen at Malcolm X park tomorrow, and I’m certainly not going to risk my brand new camera and lenses to cover a fucking astro-turf event that’s already being photographed by talentless hacks working for a fucking non-profit. Fuck that shit.

‘Free Mumia Abu-Jamal’, Wash DC 04.24.12 from Mike Flugennock on Vimeo.

Photographed and edited by Mike Flugennock, 05:48

The birthday of dissident journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, imprisoned on Pennsylvania’s Death Row for 30 years, was marked today by a demonstration in solidiarity with Mumia and with political prisoners all over the United States, and in the US gulag of “black sites” all over the world.

Featured among the four hours’ worth of speakers before the march were noted rappers Chuck D (of Public Enemy) and M1 (of Dead Prez); however, I happily blew off their footage in favor of a live phone call to the rally by Abu-Jamal himself, from prison. Mumia sent greetings of solidarity and delivered a short statement, which is included in its entirety in this newsreel.

So, here we are two years after the massive oil spill from BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore rig which devestated ecosystems, fisheries and tourism along the US Gulf Coast. Our Exalted Boy Emperor and Nobel Laureate, Barack Drone Strike Obama, responded by sitting around saying nothing for a couple of weeks before giving a speech so empty and loaded with blue-sky platitudes about our wonderful energy future that he should’ve been wearing a cardigan.

Meanwhile, large numbers of eyeless shrimp and mutated fish are being caught by Gulf Coast fishing boats, Gulf fisheries are in deep decline, and not a single BP executive has served so much as a day of prison time for this crime.

Happy anniversary, everybody! Have some cake.

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…and for those of you with long-term memory issues — or, “looking forward”, as your average Democrat would say  — here’s a quick recap of the Gulf Coast oil disaster:

“Spill, Baby, Spill!” 04.30.10
“Climate Change?” 05.12.10
“Plugged, At Last!” 05.29.10
“Nerobama no. 2″ 06.17.10

Well, folks, it looks like MoveOn and the Democratic Party are at it again. These two have had a long and dirty history of co-opting, subverting and destroying popular democratic movements in this country, and their latest campaign to infiltrate the Occupy Movement, “The 99% Spring”, continues in that sordid traditon.

Here’s Charles M. Young, writing in Counterpunch last week:

…The meeting was a few blocks from where I live. The spam said it was “inspired by Occupy Wall Street.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I was vaguely hoping that whatever The 99% Spring was, it would start a chapter of Occupy Wall Street on the Upper West Side, conveniently near my abode, and agitate for the Democrats and MoveOn to move left.

The first clue that my evening might go otherwise was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale and one sign-up sheet for the oddly named Community Free Democrats (are they free of community?), which is the local Democratic clubhouse. That killed the “inspired by Occupy Wall Street” vibe right there. No piles of literature from a zillion different groups, as there had been in Zuccotti Park. No animated arguments among Marxists, anarchists, progressives, punks, engaged Buddhists, anti-war libertarians and what have you. Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling…

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Remember back during the ‘08 Presidential Freak Circus, when everybody was talking about how Obama was a “blank slate” where his acolytes could project any ideas they had about who they thought Obama was (regardless of what he actually was)? What do you mean, “no, me neither”? C’mon, gang…

Well, aaaaanyway… I’d almost forgotten about that “Obama is a blank slate” business myself, until a couple of weeks or so ago, when one of “Mittens” Romney’s key campaign advisors mentioned that the Romney campaign and his conservative principles were like an Etch-A-Sketch, and that you “…can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

So, yeah… Obama’s a blank slate you can put anything on that you want and then erase it, and Romney’s like an Etch-A-Sketch that you can… well, put anything on that you want and then erase it.

Jeezus, I just love the spectacle of American Democracy.

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Well, I’ve decided to make it official – at least inasmuch as anything on this blog is “official” – and replace the link to my YouTube channel with a link to my Vimeo site. I’ve been contemplating this for the better part of a year, after the YouTube Music Nazis gave me a ration of shit about using The Bangles’ “Walk Like An Egyptian” in my Egyptian Embassy solidarity demo piece in January of last year, and they stripped the audio track out of it, leaving my video silent, as if I was engaged in some nefarious scheme to mass-produce DVDs of that protest video and sell them out of the back of a friend’s van without paying royalties to The Bangles’ record label. So, the very day YouTube pulled that bullshit on me, I set up my Vimeo account, and posted the Egyptian Embassy piece there unmolested.

As many of you who follow my video work might have noticed, I’ve been using obscure mid ’60s garage-rock instrumentals for background music in a lot of my work lately – partially because I’ve kind of gotten into mid ’60s garage these days, but mostly because almost all those tracks are long forgotten, released by long-forgotten bands on long-forgotten regional labels, available only on old 45s, never reissued on CD, and so damned obscure and under-the-radar that I can avoid being jerked around by the YouTube Music Nazis.

Still, on general principle, I’ve switched my main video link to Vimeo, not only because they don’t have Music Nazis harassing people left and right, but also because you can find some pretty good quality work there without having to fight through all the footage of cats falling off tabletops, people throwing slabs of dry ice into swimming pools, and plane-crash porn. In fact, I’ve accelerated the process of re-posting a lot of my old work on Vimeo as lately I’ve been pestered a lot by YouTube about music I used in pieces I posted as much as five or six years ago with no problems (at least at the time).

I’m still leaving my YouTube channel active – for those of you linking/embedding my stuff from YouTube – and I’ll still be posting pieces there as well, but from here on in, Vimeo will get first priority. Between their cluttered new interface that pushes “featured” and “promoted” videos and other bullshit I’m not interested in, and their Amazon pop-up ads for the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls under my NYC 9/11 Anniversary piece which used “Shattered” (without giving me a share of the ad revenue), and their pestering me about music I used in a piece I posted six years ago, my attitude is pretty much “screw YouTube”.

“By spending as if we were at full employment, we will help to bring about full employment”

Now, mind you, I’ve never been a Nixon revisionist, and I wasn’t one of those bonehead Liberals who spent the entirety of the Dubya Administration wishing they had Nixon back, but, still… full-employment budget? Then, I started thinking back some more… EPA? Detente with the Soviets? Healthcare program compromise with Ted Kennedy? Christalmighty, I thought, was Nixon, on balance, more progressive than Barack Obama?

Yeah, sure, Nixon dragged out a pointless war that hardly anybody wanted, bombed civilians at the drop of a hat, surveilled and harassed dissident activists, and sponsored coups and assassinations all over the world, but hasn’t Obama also done these?

Jeeeeeezus… full-employment budget.

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It’s no surprise that the Liberal punditocracy has grabbed hold of the story of Mitt Romney making his dog ride on the roof of his car and jumped on it like… well, like a big dog. Likewise, it’s also no surprise that the same big-shot Liberal pundits have softpedaled the reports of the Obama campaign allowing the formation of a big-money SuperPAC on its behalf — basically condoning the same kind of corporate election-buying that it condemned during the ‘08 campaign.

Granted, Mitt Romney making his dog ride on the roof of his car while the rest of the family rode comfortably inside is a crassly insensitive act — but it’s even more crass and insensitive that the allegedly “progressive” Barack Obama continues to give the cushy ride to bankers and corporate interests while The 99% are forced to ride on the metaphorical roof of Obama’s metaphorical car.

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CPAC does little to hide the fact that it is a product of and for the elite rich, with a full pass to the conferences costing 200 dollars, a one day pass at 75 dollars and media passes only awarded to a select few that have passed a rigorous background check that would make the FBI jealous…

OCCUPY CPAC! from Wespennest on Vimeo.

…and here’s our coverage of the scene, shot by the Town Hell Posse (including yours truly).