June 10, 2022

Roaming Charges: The Politics of Limbo

by Jeffrey St. Clair

Morada, Abiquiu, New Mexico. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

“There is not one single police officer in America that I am not afraid of and not one that I would trust to tell the truth or obey the laws they are sworn to uphold. I do not believe they protect me in any way.”

– Henry Rollins

+ America’s shooters–sports and mass–can thank the Mad Bomber himself General Curtis LeMay for the current popularity of the AR-15. In the early 1960s, when the US was scrambling to develop a combat weapon to counter the lethality and reliability of the Soviet-made AK-47, LeMay began talking up a rifle manufactured by his buddies at Colt: the AR-15. The Pentagon brass weren’t convinced, but LeMay plunged forward on his own, ordering 8,5000 guns for the Air Force to use in Vietnam. The purchase increased the press on the US Army to make a decision. Ballistic testing was ordered. The US Army  wanted to find out how fast the gun fired and how much damage a bullet fired from the gun would do. First they used the gun to shoot 176 live goats tethered to a cart on a moving track, from distances of 25 to 500 meters. They measured the entrance and exit wounds. The bullets punched gaping holes in the thick-pelted animals. But the testers really wanted to find out what the gun would do to human heads. Thinking it would be impolitic to use American skulls for target practice, they secured 27 human heads from India and filled the desiccated brainpans with gelatin. Heads were shot from multiple distances by both weapons. The testers compared the explosive power of the AR-15 to that of the Soviet-designed AK-47. After mapping the blood splatter patterns, the Pentagon determined that the AR-15 was the more powerful weapon, since it shattered the heads into more fragments than the AK-47.  Later the Pentagon also did “field testing” of the destructive power of the weapons in Vietnam. A survey of enemy Killed in Action reports showed that many PLAF fighters were decapitated when hit in the head by bullets fired from M16s (AR-15). (See C.J. Chivers’ book on the development and rivalry between the AK-47 and the M-16, The Gun).

+ Though the exploding head tests were enough to convince Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to rush the rifle into mass production, the results were almost certainly cooked. The AR-15/M-16 was never a match for the AK-47. In the humid and wet conditions of Vietnam, the M-16 tended to corrode and rust. It routinely jammed and misfired. Many grunts in that war started using AK-47 taken from captured or killed Vietnamese soldiers.  “We called it the Mattel 16 because it was made of plastic. At that time it was a piece of garbage,” according to former Marine Jim Wodecki.  (See: Misfire: the Tragic Failure of the M16 in Vietnam by Bob Orkund and Lymon Dureya.)

+ Dr. Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician who treated the victims at the emergency room of Uvalde’s hospital, testifying before Congress on what he saw: “Two children, whose bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them, over and over again, decapitated, whose flesh had been so ripped apart, that the only clue to their  identities was their blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them, clinging for life and finding none.”

+ Democratic politics is a game of limbo. Set the bar low and see how much lower you can go…Senator Chris Murphy says the Senate won’t compromise Second Amendment rights: “Listen, we’re not going to do everything I want. We’re not going to put a piece of legislation on the table that will ban assault weapons or pass comprehensive background checks.”

+ Uvalde teacher Arnulfo Reyes, who was shot three times while trying to protect his students, on the police response: “After everything, I get more and more angry. One of the students from the next-door classroom was saying, ‘Officer, we’re in here. We’re in here.’ But they had already left…You had a bulletproof vest. I had nothing. They’re cowards. They sit there and did nothing for our community. They took a long time to go in. There is no excuse for their actions. I will never forgive them.”

+ Miah Cerrillo, 11-year-old survivor of Uvalde mass shooting: “He shot my friend that was next to me and I thought he would come back to the room so I got blood and put it all over me.”

+ Will smearing yourself with the blood of your classmate become a part of active shooter survival drills?

+ Christopher Hooks on the governor and lieutenant governor of Texas:

Taken at their word, Abbott and Patrick believe they are governing a Texas where a growing proportion of the population is dealing with pervasive mental illness, some of whom are possibly demonically touched, who are farther than ever from God, and more and more capable of committing evil and violent acts. They also believe that everyone in this population should have nearly unregulated access to military-grade weapons.

+ The problem Texas is having is that every previous response to a mass shooting in the state has been to liberalize gun laws to the point where you can open carry your AK-15 everywhere except at an NRA convention. They’ve reached the point of maximum ballistic liberalization.  Now they’ll have to start forcing people to carry guns in schools.

+ I’m more convinced than ever that it’s not the NRA that paralyzes the Congress on even basic gun control measures, but the very palpable fear that they might get shot if they do anything to defang the beast they’ve created…

+ There are more guns in private hands in the US than in the other 26 top gun-owning countries…combined.

+ The average daily gun deaths of children in the United States have nearly doubled since 2019…

+ Sen. John Thune on AR-15s: “The challenge you have on that is there’s 20 million of them in the country already. They are a sporting rifle. And it’s something that a lot of people for purposes of going out target shooting — in my state they use them to shoot prairie dogs.”

+ Nationally, 2% of homicide cases are ruled “justifiable” by the police or prosecutors. When it comes to non-Hispanic white men who kill black men that figure rises to 17%.

+ Blowing the heads off of prairie dogs while sitting in a chair with your AR-15 is, apparently, a thing in Montana and the Dakotas.

+ Rounds per minute of AR-15: 45

Rounds per minute of muskets owned by authors of 2nd Amendment: 5

+ For the sake of argument, let’s assume Louis Gohmert’s right about mass shootings being a (much delayed) reaction to the Supreme Court having banned prayer in public schools 37 years before Columbine. How then does he explain mass shootings in churches, many of them–including the bloodiest–in Texas? This phenomenon prompts one to inquire: Just what is the Supreme Deity’s beef with the churches of Texas? Why are Texas’ churches targeted so frequently by avengers with assault rifles? When worshippers say their prayers down there are they reading from a blasphemous edition of the Holy text, like the woke Revised New Standard instead of the King James?

+ Mitch McConnell called on Democrats to pass the “Supreme Court security bill” after a California man (described as a “Democratic hit man” by Sen. Tom Cotton) was arrested outside Brett Kavanaugh’s home: “House Democrats must pass this bill and they need to do it today. No more fiddling around with this, they need to pass it today …before the sun sets.”

+ Does the bill include a provision to limit the number of doors in the houses of Supreme Court justices?

+ Isn’t someone angrily pacing in front of a Supreme Court justice’s house with an AR-15, pissed off about a life-or-death decision made by an unelected body, exactly the “last resort against tyranny” justification many gun advocates–including some prominent members of Congress and the federal judiciary–repeatedly invoke to sanctify their peculiar reading of the 2nd Amendment?

+ The Uvalde School Superintendent said on Thursday that the district would hiring “more police.” They’re going to need a bigger lounge…

+ On the morning of the Parkland High School mass shooting  the school’s deputy Scot Peterson allegedly conducted an unlawful search of the backpacks of more than 10 students. He claimed he was looking for drugs. Peterson seized $200 from a Parkland student who had saved the cash for a Valentine’s Day dinner. When the student protested, the deputy told the kid that was “not manly enough to own up to what he did.” But the student had no drugs, just a few unsigned late passes. Peterson’s intrusive search went on for a couple of hours that morning. Then the shooting started and the deputy stood outside for 48 minutes as the massacre unfolded.

+ How much did the DNC spend coming up with their “We’re Powerless” theme for the 2022 elections?

+ My expectations for Biden were about as low as you could get. But he’s managed to surprise me by not even rising to meet those.

+ Last month three police officers watched a homeless black man drown in Tempe, Arizona. When Sean Bickings begged for their help, one officer told him to “swim to a pylon.” Bickings said he was drowning and couldn’t swim. The cop responded: “Okay, I’m not jumping in after you.” A few seconds later Bickings is heard to say: “I can’t touch. Oh God. Please help me. Help me.” Then he went under for the last time. The three cops have been placed on leave. Paid leave.

+ Andre Hernandez, Jr. was 13 when a San Antonio, Texas cop shot him last Friday. It took the police department five days to tell Hernandez’s mother they’d killed her son.

+ The Supreme Court’s carving away of habeas corpus is bad enough, but check out this statement from the Democratic Mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot, arguing that bail should be denied to people arrest for “serious crimes” because they wouldn’t have been arrested if they weren’t guilty: “We shouldn’t be locking up nonviolent individuals just because they can’t afford to pay bail. But, given the exacting standards that the state’s attorney has for charging a case, which is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, when those charges are brought, these people are guilty.”

+ A new study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics finds that ending welfare benefits for young adults led to an increase in the number of criminal charges by 20% and the annual likelihood of incarceration by 60%: “We find that SSI removal increases the number of criminal charges by a statistically significant 20% over the next two decades. The increase in charges is concentrated in offenses for which income generation is a primary motivation (60% increase).” In other words, expanding welfare benefits reduces crime.

+ Before NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ criminalization of the homeless policy, the NYPD participated in roughly 30% of homeless sweeps. Now the city’s cops are at just about nearly ever raid, targeting the same population of shelterless people time and time again. According to data compiled by the Gothamist, the cops have throw out belongings of 415 people so far.

+ In the last five years, there’s been a four-fold increase in acute global hunger; in the last five months, 10 million people have been pushed to the “edge of famine” and 400 million force into “food insecurity,” which is roughly the number of people China has pulled out of poverty over the last few decades.

+ The Washington Post is all upset about China building a very small (.3 square mile) naval base in a country the US tried to destroy (illegally by its own laws). Meanwhile, the US operates 750 military bases in around 80 countries & colonies. China would have 9, including a Djibouti and those built on uninhabited islands in the South China Sea….

+ For the past few months, law enforcement agencies in south Texas have been working with the Patriots for America militia, routinely allowing militia members to question detained migrants.

+ From Keri Blakenger’s new memoir Corrections in Ink: “I have problems: I am out of clean clothes, I cannot find my glasses, my English paper is late, and my pockets are not big enough for all the heroin I have.”

+ Gabbard’s playing to her new Fox audience, but I’d think the Biden White House would be relieved to be compared to Jimmy Carter. I’m not a big fan of Carter’s presidency, but there’s no question Carter, as inept as he was, would have won that election if not for Reagan’s illegal backchannel negotiations with the Iranians, pledging they’d get a better deal with him if they held back releasing the hostages.

+ The best part of the J6 hearings was limiting the speechifying to the committee co-chairs. The worst part of the hearing was the speechifying by the committee co-chairs. An hour of Liz Cheney’s voice is enough to make anyone want to storm the Capitol to unplug her mic.

+ When asked how the White House reconciled not inviting Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to the Summit of the Americas because “we don’t believe dictators should be invited,” while simultaneously planning a trip for President Biden to Saudi Arabia, which he vowed to make “a pariah,” new press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s proclaimed: “The president is focused on getting things done for the American people. If he determines that it’s in the interest of the United States to engage with a foreign leader, and that such an engagement can deliver results, then he’ll do so.”

+ How petty. Not that those three countries are missing anything. Who wants to be hectored by the likes of Biden and Blinken? And let’s face it, as a getaway LA ain’t the place it used to be.

+ AMLO on why he’s boycotting Biden’s Summit of the Americas: “There cannot be a Summit of the Americas if all of the countries of the American continent do not participate. We consider that to be the old policy of interventionism, of a lack of respect for nations & their peoples.”

+ Somebody seriously misunderstands who Vladimir Putin is…

+ The war in Ukraine seems to be going badly for all involved, except the oil companies and the arms merchants.

+ Putin’s pal Vladimir Solovyov, a popular commentator on Russian TV, warned this week that if NATO keeps supporting Ukraine, there will be a “massive nuclear strike” which only “mutants” will survive.

+ Mutants can’t be any worse than the genetic specimens now running the planet…

+ Jon Schwarz: “It’s important to understand that Israel is a closer US ally than Saudi Arabia. Israel is allowed to assassinate American journalists, while the Saudis are only allowed to assassinate journalists who are permanent US residents.”

+ Another atrocious Supreme Court decision this week. In Egbert v. Boule,  the court, in yet another opinion written by Clarence Thomas, ruled Border Patrol agents may unconstitutionally enter a person’s home without a warrant, assault the resident and then block the abused party from filing a lawsuit to seek compensation for excessive-force or retaliation claims. The ruling pretty much gives federal law enforcement officers near-absolute immunity from civil liability if (when) they violate someone’s constitutional rights. The ruling guts the Court’s long-standing holding in the Bivens case (1970), where, as Constitutional law scholar Steve Vladek pointed out, Justice Harlan argued: there would be little point in “having constitutional rights” (which exist to limit the political branches) if  the ability to “enforce” those rights is left solely to the “political branches.”

+ Sotomayor has taken the gloves off in her dissents, assailing the radical rightwing judicial philosophy of the “a restless and newly constituted court”.

+ Newly released memos and emails show that Trump administration officials became enraged that parents were being prosecuted so quickly they were taken back to the Border Patrol before their kids had been sent to U.S. Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)—so Trump officials ordered border officials to stop parents from reunifying. “This obviously undermines the entire effort and the Dept is going to look completely ridiculous if we go through the effort of prosecuting only to send them to a FRC (family residential center) and out the door,” wrote Matthew Albence, a Trump appointee at ICE.

+ Our Black Sites don’t discriminate. We’ll waterboard anyone, regardless of gender identity or sexual preferences…

+ At the White House event feting Nancy Reagan, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy praised Reagan “as an important part of one of the most pivotal presidencies of the 20th century.” Pivotal, as in a pivot against the poor, the gay, the sick, and the black…

+ DeJoy is hardly an outlier these days. Check out this from Pelosi: “It might come as a surprise to some of you that the president I quote most often is President Reagan. The good humor of our president was really a tonic for the nation … the gentleman that he was.”

+ An example of that good old Reagan humor: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

+ During the BLM protests in 2020, the US Postal Service seized masks that read ‘Stop killing Black people’ and ‘Defund police’ that were meant to protect protesters from Covid. Now they’re being sued.

+ Not only does God teach that all gays must be “shot.” But that they must be “shot in the back of the head.” Out on Highway 61, no doubt…

+ Louisiana became the 18th state to bar transgender women and girls from playing on female school sports teams after the state’s Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, decided not to veto the bill. A party with a spine would kick Edwards out…

+ Alyssa Rosenberg on the Ohio gender verification bill: “In plain language: Verifying someone’s gender through an examination of ‘the participant’s internal and external reproductive anatomy’ means a doctor must look at a young athlete’s genitals. And a standard pelvic exam involves a physician putting their fingers inside a patient’s vagina while pushing on the pelvis with their other hand. Asking a student to choose between an unnecessary medical exam and a desire to keep playing sports is vicious; morally, if not legally, it’s a kind of medical rape.”

+ The new model for right to life groups bans abortion for any city resident “regardless of where the abortion is or will be performed.” The fights between states are going to intensify in the post-Dobbs era.

+ Coming soon to a state near you: Poland having banned nearly all abortions is now setting up registry of pregnancies to track women all the way to birth.

+ American society is actually much more tolerant than the people running it, so tolerant that they tolerate people who should have their asses kicked (out of office, at least)… From new Wall Street Journal poll:

-65% of Americans say being transgender should be accepted by society

-27% of Americans think their local schools focus too much on racism (40% too little)

+ US has 11.7 psychiatric hospital beds per 100k pop while the EU countries the average is 68.

+ According to an analysis by Redfin, Seattle home-buyers need to earn 34.2% more than they did a year ago to afford the region’s median-value home. The amount is closer to 40% in Vegas, Phoenix and Tampa.

+ Trader Joe’s is beginning to feel the heat from the unionization drive. The company’s managers have been making workers remove their union pins or go home without pay.

+ The wait times to get an appointment to get a visa to visit the US are long and getting longer. To get an appointment for a Visitor Visa in New Delhi, for example, takes 291 days. In Mexico City the wait time is 581 days. In Nairobi, Kenya it takes 664 days.

+ According to a new study in JAMA 0n the racial and ethnic disparities in COVID mortality rates in the US: “If all racial and ethnic populations had experienced the same mortality rates as college-educated non-Hispanic White populations, 71% fewer deaths among racial and ethnic minority populations would have occurred.”

+ The percentage of physicians who were Black men in 1940 was 2.6%. The percentage of physicians who were Black men in 2018 was … 2.6%.

+ When a loaded Martha Mitchell, irate that her husband John had left her, invited Woodward and Bernstein over to rummage through his private files: “Have at it, boys. Please nail him. I hope you get the bastard.”

+ Dr Oz, a joint production between Oprah and Trump, finally won the Pennsylvania senate primary. It turns out that the doctor is registered to vote in New Jersey, not Pennsylvania, and has been registered there since the 1980s.

+ Thrown but not yet overthrown…

+ Where’s the hologram of Jean Baudrillard doing the commentary on this trip into hyper-reality?

+++

+ Why are gas prices so high? This might explain at least part of the problem…

2022 Q1 profits:

ExxonMobil – $5,480,000,000 (a 100% increase compared to 2021 Q1)
BP – $6,200,000,000 (highest quarterly profit in a decade)
Chevron – $6,260,000,000 (a 400% increase compared to 2021 Q1)

+ On the other hand, gas prices really aren’t so high in the US, relatively speaking. There are 104 countries with higher gas prices than the US (ave: $4.79 per gallon), including Hong Kong ($11.20), Norway ($10.61), Denmark ($10.01), Greece ($9.19), Germany ($8.79), Israel ($8.24), UK ($8.16), Spain ($8.12), France ($8.06), Ireland ($7.91), New Zealand ($7.87), Italy ($7.77), Ukraine ($6.50), Canada ($6.49), South Korea ($5.82), Brazil ($5.77), and China ($5.49). Meanwhile, the price of gas in Venezuela, Libya and Iran is below $1 per gallon.

+ Europe has now become by far the largest destination for U.S. Liquid National Gas (LNG) exports… 74% of all U.S. LNG shipments went to Europe in the first four months of this 2022, up from 34%  in 2021.

+ In May, the Mauna Loa Observatory measured a CO2 concentration of 421 parts per million, a record for the planet and  a level 50% higher than the pre-industrial age.

+ 6 trillion tons: the amount of ice Greenland has lost since 1970.

+ Facing power surges and shortages from unrelenting extreme heat, India has reversed an earlier policy to cut coal imports and instead asked states to step up imports for the next three years–a disastrous move for the climate and one which help ensure that the heat waves which Modi used to justify it will continue unabated.

+ Hywind Tampen, the world’s largest offshore floating wind farm off the western coast of Norway, is being built to power production from nearby … oil and gas fields.

+ In the US, however, new research from Energy Policy suggests that wind turbines have increased local incomes by around 5% and house values by 2.6% in parts of the US.

+ 619: the number of people who died when last summer’s “heat dome” descended over British Columbia, according to a new review by a BC Coroner’s Office.

+ What’s the key indicator species for the Anthropocene Epoch? The leading candidate is the broiler chicken, which now has a standing population of 22.7 billion, the largest of any bird species in the Earth’s history.

+ A fire that burned 170 acres in Joshua Tree National Park at the end of April likely wouldn’t have spread more than a quarter-acre before 1965.

+ A new report from the University of Washington warns that even if all carbon emissions were halted immediately, there would remain a two-in-five (42%) chance the Earth is already destined for 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

+ The Great Salt Lake has now lost two-thirds of its surface area and continues to shrink, creating a scenario that’s been compared to a “nuclear bomb.”  The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic (much of it deposited by the Kennecott Copper smelter) and as more of it becomes exposed, windstorms carry that the toxin into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population.

+ “There are more than a trillion litres of toxic oilsands waste stored in tailings ponds near Alberta’s Athabasca River — and they’re leaking.”

+ More than half of U.S. adults alive today were exposed toxic levels of lead as children, largely from the burning of leaded gasoline, according to a new study from Duke University. The study estimates that lead contamination lowered the average IQ scores of Americans by more than two points.

+ Big oil’s gobbling up of “biogas credits” is serving to spur the expansion of factory farming in New York…

+ Polar bears and grizzlies are mating more frequently, which is probably that last real shot for preserving polar bear genes…

+ If you’re looking for a little ray of hope in these dark times…water shortages are now threatening development across the West.

+++

+ Sorry, Al Gore, Deadheads invented the Internet…

+ Tipper had more of a claim to inventing the internet than Al. As Cockburn and I reported in our biography of Gore: “Tipper (despite her role as self-appointed music censor, who wanted music that glorified drug use stamped out) fancied herself one of the Dead’s most devoted fans, “a true Deadhead,” as she boasted in ’96. In ’93, Tipper invited the entire band to her DC office and took her staff to seem them perform at RFK stadium. A couple of years later, Jerry Garcia was dead, his body pickled in heroin and alcohol.”

Lauren Bacall in Dark Passage.

+ I’ll say this for Delmer Daves’ experimental use of the subjective camera in Dark Passage: it works very well when Bogart’s character is intently focusing on Lauren Bacall. According to Bacall, it was during the shooting of Dark Passage that Bogart’s hair began to fall out in clumps, a consequence of his developing alopecia areata. By the end of the film, Bogart was wearing a full wig. I’ll bet Bacall’s slap would have floored Bob Hope had he made a crack about that during the 1946 Academy Awards…

+ Billy Wilder on meeting Erich von Stroheim (who he would later cast in Five Graves From Cairo and Sunset Blvd.) for the first time: “I’ve always admired you, sir. Your work is 10 years ahead of its time.”

Von Stroheim: “Twenty.”

+ Robbie Robertson: “From a very early age I remember a phrase being quietly passed around among our relatives at Six Nations: ‘Be proud you are an Indian, but be careful who you tell.’”

+ In the 60s, Al-Bara’em became Palestine’s first rock band to perform original songs in Arabic.

+ Jean Piaget instructing his new assistant: “Don’t move a thing!”

+ Nehru objecting to the Customs Office of Bombay’s decision in 1959 to seize copies of Nabokov’s Lolita on the grounds that it was obscene:

Reading this book Lolita, I felt that it was a serious book and in its own line rather outstanding. It is hardly a book which can give light reading to anyone. The language is often difficult. It is true that some parts in it rather shocked me. The shock was more due to the description of certain conditions than to the writing itself. The book is certainly not pornographic in the normal sense of the word. It is, as I have said, a serious book, seriously written. If there had been no fuss about it, no question need have arisen at all of banning it or preventing its entry. It is this fuss that sometimes makes a difference because people are attracted specially to reading books which are talked about in this way.

+ From Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume On: “On the way back to the house I passed the local movie theater on Prytania Street, where The Mighty Quinn was showing. Years earlier, I had written a song called ‘The Mighty Quinn’ which was a hit in England, and I wondered what the movie was about. Eventually, I’d sneak off and go there to see it. It was a mystery, suspense, Jamaican thriller with Denzel Washington as the Mighty Xavier Quinn a detective who solves crimes. Funny, that’s just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song ‘The Mighty Quinn,’ Denzel Washington.”

+ Lester Bangs on Bruce Springsteen: “He sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck.”

+ The mother of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, was the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s quintessential Bond girl, Pussy Galore.

+ In 1949, Downbeat magazine held a contest offering a $1,000 prize to anyone who could come up with a new name for “jazz”, a term the editors considered “outdated.” Ted Gioia surveys the results.

+ Ronnie Hawkins: “I spent ninety percent of my money on wine, women and song and just wasted the other ten percent.”

I Feel Like It’s Time for Us to Move On…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Positive Vibrations: Politics, Politricks and the Story of Reggae
Stuart Bothrick
(Reaktion)

Scorpion’s Dance: the President, the Spymaster and Watergate
Jefferson Morley
(St Martin’s)

Charged: How the Police Try to Suppress Protests
Matt Foot and Morag Livingstone
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

White Jesus Black Problems
Fantastic Negrito
(Storefront)

No Wow
The Kills
(Domino)

Welcome 2 Club VIII
Drive-By Truckers
(ATO)

Fuck You, I’m Fucked…

“Punk was just a single, venomous one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger—which was necessary to reignite rock & roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than fuck you. Someone was going to want to say, I’m fucked.”

– Greil Marcus, History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.