A year has passed sing last this blog was updated.

Here is a collection of thoughts on recent events.

Looking back at these observations I must remind myself and others it's always darkest before the dawn.

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Day 46 of the 45th administration.

A massive dump of information by Wikileaks includes much information about activities performed by the CIA during the 44th administration. Amid protests of 45 we are reminded that "our" government does not serve the people, they spy on the people.

The fever dreams of every tinfoil hat wearing paranoid seems credible as the code used by the CIA to turn TV's into recording devices monitoring the population is revealed.

While the hacking world begins to dig into this code, both white hats looking for ways to stop such intrusions and black hats seeking to use them for their own purposes, the majority of the populations keeps looking for the specter of the cold war, just as their media has told them too, rather than caring about the actual proof that the CIA interfered with the 2012 election in France.

Our collective decent into madness mines deeper and deeper realms to delve into.

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 40th day of the 45th administration

The air smells as it did in France the spring of 1789. Senators lock their doors and hide from their constituents. This would be promising if the warm spring breeze did not carry this to us in winter.

While Senator Ron Johnson hides in a darkened office as his staff delivers a cease and desist note to his constituents gathered to talk with him the permafrost in large swaths of the arctic including Alaska and Canada is no longer frost, nor perma.

Recent news is that over 52,000 square miles of permafrost has been lost just this winter. Record temperatures have spiked all over the world and total we are looking at setting a new all time high. Alongside humans wearing shorts in February we can add less die off of wood boar beetles due to the lack of freeze. The forests continue to thin at an accelerated pace.

The Democrats continue to pretend to represent the people even as they vote to not add a ban on corporate money. Meanwhile they are silent as the military has moved in with assault rifles and forcibly remove natives from their land and role as protectors of our water.

When corporate bottom line is more important then continued planetary stability then no one is allowed to call themselves conservative.

I hope your seat belt is fully fastened because things are just starting to speed up.


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As I Awaken on this the 33rd day of the 45th administration I find that the sword of Damocles is hanging over the heads of our collective future.

Despite being only a fraction of a percentage (0.000062%) of the budget the giant banhammer of doom has targeted the National Endowment for the Arts.

That's right, in a 2.5 Trillion dollar budget that is planed to include increases to Military spending and a giant fucking wall to replace the medium fucking wall we already have that does nothing to keep immigrants out 45 thinks that getting rid of the 145 million dollars that funds public radio and TV is going to fix things.

In an age when schools are increasingly inept at teaching, when parents are unable to afford preschool, this is not the time to be gutting our limited free programing of all educational programs yet that is what has been targeted.

I'm not sure if I am furious or happy as 45 seems hell bent on accelerating our decent into oblivion.
Will the world be a better place when the US is no longer a world leader? Will we all be better off when the United States has turned into the largest 3rd world nation filled with those who underwent the DeVos corporate education system? Will the children who grow up without PBS realize what they are missing?

Or will our increase in military spending bring about mutually assured destruction before they even come of age?

As the seconds keep ticking off on the doomsday clock I ponder these things as I begin gathering the needed documents to get a passport...

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24th day of the 45th administration.

#Resistance continues in North Dakota. As judges push forward with the corporate agenda, drill baby drill, veterans gather in anticipation of what comes next.

While the Los Angeles Times tells us how quickly 45's poll numbers have fallen since he took office they also try to push people away from radicalism by publishing a hit piece on "the Black Bloc"

California continues to lay under a haze of legal smoke that blankets the entire west coast as yet unworried that the change in administrations may bring a change to enforcement.

The winter continues on as one of the warmest of record. While full data is not yet available and the current winter storms on the northeast may change things up until today it has been the warmest winter ever on record in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

As we continue our rollercoaster ride into oblivion I urge all to remember to live their life as morally and nobly as they can they can while succumbing to every hedonistic wish they can get away with without harming others.

Fight the Establishment

So this is the were I bitch about corruption and such right? Well let me tell you all about a little something that I've been standing up against for years now.

I'll start with a quick mention of Tammany Hall. Tammany Hall was a political group in new your city. What would be called a good old boys network. They were the establishment of the Democratic party in the mid 1800's and under Boss Tweed they controlled they city with near mobster like precision. When people try to play the Republicans are the bad guys card Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall are the go to counter.

But Tammany Hall lost it's power and their grip over New York politics and were fully kicked out in the 30's by the New Deal you say. Sure they were but that does not mean there have not been other fraudulent democratic parties that have tried to control things since.

This brings me to my time 'Living here in Allentown.' Well the factories have already been all torn down and now they built an arena. An arena built on the backs of the tax payer. I first got involved with fighting the future PPL center hokey arena in Allentown PA near the very start, early 2011. Eminent Domain was being thrown about as a way to scare business owners into selling their property to the city. Meeting were held, citizens were outraged, and the city council did not care. Things are going to move forward they said. You can fight us or give n now either way you will lose.

Just the threat got all but one business to sell to the city right away. That one business that fought got more for their property then anyone else. Never give up the fight, even if you can't win.

Then came occupy. I didn't do it. I was never at a meeting at the beaver street building in New York, I didn't camp on Bloombergs lawn that summer, but I had heard that something was in the works. Our own Arab Spring. (An American Fall if you will) And when it hit I knew what was up. We were going to do what we had been doing for years. Protest income inequality, point to the banks (and the WTO, and the G8's & 20's) This was old hat for me. I had been doing these sorts of events for years. I didn't start with the big one in Seattle in 99but I had followed that and knew the ins and outs. This time however we were going to go to an old method of protest, seizing public land, and since no one understood us we were going to put away our black flags and ideologies. Sure Anarchism is about empowering the workers but so much propaganda against us over the last 150+ years had fooled people into thinking we really were the bomb throwing crazy people we had been framed as since the Haymarket Massacre.

I did not call the first Occupy Allentown protest but I was there the first day. I had read "How to cook a pacific revolution" the handbook created by those behind the Arab Spring. Take a global problem and find a local issue that involves it they said. That's why New York took the monetary issue right to the root, Wall Street. In Allentown someone else already called the first Occupy Allentown protest on the corner where they were taking peoples businesses away from them to build a tax payer funded arena.

Now I know what your saying right now, arenas are usually built by tax payers but Allentowns case is special. They set up a new law, the NIZ (Neighborhood Improvement Zone) that not only lets the arena get funded by tax dollars it also gives private developers that ability to take tax money and use it to pay off loans for new construction. Before the first day of Occupy I was already following the money. As Occupy was going strong I was in the streets with the news paper, often that days edition, running commentary on what was going on. Showing people who two people, J.B.Reilly and Joe Topper, who own 'City Center Development co.' had bought up much of area just before the law was signed by Pat Browne, J.B.'s old school chum. How the Lawyer who had been hired by Browne to draft the law was also J.B.'s personal lawyer. How Reilly and Topper had hired Browne's wife Heather to work as a lobbyist for them. How City Center was given a 20 million dollar tax payer backed loan to buy more property BEFORE THERE WAS A WAY TO APPLY FOR NIZ FUNDS. How when the NIZ area of 120 acres was mapped out if was not a simple rectangle but rather a complex form that jutted out here and there to include only certain buildings here, and odd block there. All properties owned by City Center.

And of course JB and Joe were the top donors to Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski. While Ed was not in charge of creating the NIZ zone he was the one who appointed the people to the comity that did draw up those borders.

For months I camped on the streets telling everyone who walked past about what was going on. I connected all the dots. I pointed out connections to then Montgomery county Democratic Party Chair Marcel Groen (Now Chair of the State party) I warned that the city was miscounting parking spaces (the city has now said there is not enough parking and has increased meter prices from $1 an hour to $2 and hour and extended paid parking hours from 6 to 10pm to encourage carpooling) I pointed to lists of names that had given money to the local Democratic Party only to end up with lucrative contracts. I showed how the Allentown hokey arena cost 3 times as much as any other minor league hokey arena.

When the police came are destroyed our camp, cutting tents open and breaking tent polls in half, claiming the camp was covered in piss and shit and that's why they had to throw our stuff in the dump, I was there leading chants against them. And I did not go away. I spent another year + holding rallies and going to city council meetings. I tried to save the water when they city, after giving away over a billion in tax payer backed loans, needed to make up lost revenue so they sold the public water supply. I fought Marcel Groen when he tried to put in an incinerator downtown that would have burned an experimental mix of feces and garbage. So experimental that it was given special status that would have let it break EPA emission guidelines as a "test"

Total from the time I first heard of the arena plans, through occupy, till I left after we lost the water (but we did stop the incinerator) I spent 3 years fighting city hall in Allentown. Fighting the Democratic party establishment. They say you can't fight city hall, well I did. I fought them long and hard. I had a lot of allies. Old political friends from my anti war days, new people mad as hell who joined occupy, clean water action, the sierra club, fellow union members (IWW 4 life) Some stayed for one or two campaigns, so were there for the long hall. Finally I left. I was to tired. I had watched too many battles get lost. The construction was in full swing, people had re-elected the same assholes I had warned them about. The very people who made fun of citizens when they came to council meetings. The money we were fighting was too much. I was suffering from protester burnout. It happens to us all. When your giving everything you have and your fighting against a system that just takes from those your trying to help to fund the fight against you... nothing is easy.

But then something happened. Something I never would have expected. The FBI had my back. No not with cross hairs (not just with cross hairs) they filed last year a corruption case against the mayors of Allentown and Reading. They raided city hall looking for documents pertaining to many of the people I had been pointing at. They have started charging people and getting guilty pleas, sending politicians to prison. The case is still early but it looks like a full blown RICO trial will happen soon. Right now they are still gathering, getting confessions from the weak links. But Mayor Pawlowski is going down. Once he was prepped to run for Governor, soon he will just be another perp walking up to a federal judge. Allentowns own Tammany Hall is falling.

I like to think the protests I helped organize had something to do with it. (or maybe those multiple calls to the state ethics hotline) but there is one thing I do know. Boss Tweed fell but Tammany Hall continued, albeit smaller and slower. It took the Democratic Socialism of FDR and the New Deal to really clean house. I know the Democratic party today is full of establishment politicians like Pawlowski. While the NIZ is being investigated three new cities in PA have been set up in similar fashion as CRIZ's (Community Revitalization and Improvement Zones) If we want to have a Left in this country, a real Left like the rest of the world has, then we need a new New Deal to clean out the establishment. We need to get rid of centrists like the Democratic Leadership Council (that later merged with the Clinton Foundation.) We need to elect people like Bernie Sanders, people like John Fetterman.

Only if we clean the Democratic party of these Tammany Hall types can we truly go back to having a democracy of the people.

Why I hate Bing and Google.

There is bullshit about. Not the nice kind that makes the flowers grow either.
Go to Bing. Search Bernie Sanders, search Hillary Clinton, search Donald Trump or Mark Rubio, search Iowa caucus. Search just about anything involving the primaries and see what comes up. I'll wait...
I'll attach what you should have seen here.

So last night the Iowa caucus was a dead heat. Clinton won by .3 percent but only because of 6 coin tosses that all came out in her favor. You get rid of those tosses and it ends up with Sanders 834 vs Clinton 833.
But that does not really matter. It was so close that each candidate will have one half the delegates for Iowa. 44 delegates going 22 each to Clinton and Sanders.
That's where things stand right now. 22 delegates each.
But Bing is telling anyone who looks up anything to do with the primaries that the delegate count is like this.
Clinton 384
Sanders 29
O'Malley 2
Why? Because of Super Delegates that have already said who they are going to vote for at the DNC.
You see the Democratic National Convention is very undemocratic. 20% of the final delegate count is made of Super Delegates.
It works like this. I'll use Iowa as an example since they just did their Caucus (a primary of sorts, just a really weird one. That's a story for another post) and we know their results.
As I mentioned above there are 44 delegates in Iowa. These are assigned based on the percentage of votes a candidate gets. Last night it was split down the middle. The almost 200,000 people who voted last night get turned into those 44 delegates. But another 8 people, party insiders like the Democratic party chair for the state, are super delegates. They get to vote however they want. They are not bound to the democratic results of the primaries. So that's 52 delegates for Iowa total.
Many of the super delegates (they count for 20% of the total vote and the DNC) have already said who they will vote for. Bing is adding those undemocratic super delegate pledges to the total numbers to make it look like Clinton is in the lead. None of those Super Delegates have voted yet and they may still change their mind, they did in 2008.
But Bing wants us to think that Sanders has no chance. That Clinton is leading him 384 to 29. They want anyone looking into the primaries to think Sanders has already lost. This is perhaps the most evil underhanded thing any news group has done so far this election. While Bing's owner Microsoft is not in Hillary's top donors the Gates foundation (run by Microsoft founder Bill Gates) is the Clinton foundation's (run by Bill and Hillary) top donor having given them over 26 million dollars. While the Gates foundation did not lobby Clinton when she was Secretary of State Microsoft did. Legally this is okay but it's easy to read between the lines and see that the 26 million donation was sure to effect Clinton's views.
This election is going to be a fight the likes of which has not been seen since 1968. In 68 the Super Delegates used the fact that there were multiple pro peace candidates running to elect a pro war Democrat who had not even run in the primary. This led to fist fights on the floor of the DNC including security sucker punching Dan Rather.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wItUjFU1i4M
We may very well be facing this again. At the very least Bing is trying to use the not yet even voted but only pledged Super Delegates to try and throw the election for Clinton. We are witnessing the perversion of Democracy first hand.

I have now been informed that Google is doing it as well.

Socialist countries are failing you say?

Every time someone on the internet brings up Socialism there has to be at least one person who starts the "Socialism is bad, m'cay" routine.   It's a given.  And it seems like the all got the same mass email of "how to debate Socialism" in their inbox.  Nothing the say is ever backed up with facts.  There are no hard numbers, or in the rare case that there are numbers they are only from one side.  One I always hear is "Look at the Scandinavian Debt clock.  The Nordic countries are failing. They want to get rid of their Socialism and go back to Capitalism.

Well lets start with some Debt clocks then shall we?

http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/denmark

http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/finland

http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/norway
http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/sweden

There are the Nordic block countries and yes their National debt is swelling.  Gosh those clocks keep spinning while I watch them.  How about some of those numbers below the debt.


Denmark  -     Interest per Second - $115    Debt as % of GDP - 46.57%    Debt per Citizen $27,985
Finland  -        Interest per Second - $119    Debt as % of GDP - 59.68%    Debt per Citizen - $28,752 
Norway  -       Interest per Second - $68      Debt as % of GDP - 19.62%    Debt per Citizen - $14,419
Sweden  -       Interest per Second - $127    Debt as % of GDP - 28.09%    Debt per Citizen - $16,536


Boy oh boy those are some scary numbers.  There is no way out of it. The north Of Europe, that vast Socialist with with all their universal healthcare, free college, welfare programs.  It's no wonder they are so deeply in debt.

Of course we here are doing so much better

http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/unitedstates

USA       Interest per Second - $16,692     Debt as % of GDP - 104.50%    Debt per Citizen - $56,797

Or maybe not so much.

If you bring this up the next thing you get to hear is that those Nordic countries have super high tax rates.  They only keep their debt down by having exorbitant taxes.   So how about that?

Finland Tax rates 2011

Taxable earned income (US Dollars)		Rate within brackets
17,332 – 25,776		6.5%
25776 – 41,997		17.5%
41,997 – 75,773		21.5%
75,773 –		30.0%

 United States Tax rates 2011

Taxable earned income		Rate within brackets
8,500		10%
8,500–34,500		15%
34,500–83,600 83,600 83,600		25%
83,600–174,400		28.%

174,400–379,150		33%
379,150–		35%

Again to be fair there are other taxes too.  In Finland municipal taxes are Fixed and vary from 16.5% – 21.5%

Just like we have state taxes the vary from 0% in some states to as high as 13% in California. 

So yes Taxes end up being a little bit higher but not as much as those attacking Socialism would have you believe.  Not when you compare what they get for those taxes.  We get no healthcare and instead subsidize the health insurance marketplace with our taxes.  While a few people are happy with the Affordable Care Act there are plenty who are not for good reason.  High out of pocket costs, large deductible and premiums that are not included in our tax rates and would start to equalize things out a bit.  Then of course there's no tuition paid be the state for college here, limited workplace protections, no mandatory vacation time.  The list goes on. 

What do we pay for with our tax money?  One of the worst performing primary school systems in the developed world, more prisoners per capita then anywhere in the history of the world. Military aid sent out to both sides of conflicts our two largest military aid packages being to Israel and Egypt. And an overall military spending budget that is higher then the next 20 countries on the list combined all of whom we have treaties with.  Even our Veterans Administration in underfunded and those many who fought to keep our country "free" get less service the the average citizen in the Nordic bloc.

But they must have more poor people right?

Well I like to look at the children first so lets quote a study done of the 35 riches countries ranked by percentage of children who live in poverty. Here is info from the Office of Research at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) released in 2012

Children living in relative poverty:

Iceland     4.7
Finland     5.3
Norway    6.1


Denmark  7.3
Sweden    7.3


How about us?
We came in at number 34 out of 35
USA        23.1

In fact only two countries have more than 20% of their children living in relative poverty, Romania and the United States.


Now to be fair none of the Nordic countries are Socialist, they are mixed markets with both Capitalist and Socialist Economics being used.   In my mind this mixture of the two systems is the best way to go and I can only hope this country begins to follow this trend as mixing the two has in the past show to lead to economic growth.

Introduction to a book a have been working off and on since early 2012.

Does anything matter anymore? Tens of thousands gather together to say they are fed up with the treatment of the people by the government and we barely even hear about it except to create disinformation about what is going on. Why should we continue to try and gather for a redress of grievances if "our" government clearly does not want to let that happen? We now know that the FBI worked with DHS and other government agencies and local municipalities to organize a crackdown on local occupy movement groups around the country. Why? The only reason would be that the government knows the occupy movement is correct, that we have attained levels of corruption that surpass the oppressive regime we fought against over 200 years ago. No taxation without representation was the call then and today we again face that same thing. "We the people" were upset with all our taxes being taken away from us and given to the royal family. Today we have new leaders, the 1% as occupy likes to call them, but they rule us today the same as the British royal family ruled us then.

If next to nothing has changed over this time then we need to examine why. The truth is things have changed but then they went back. We must look at both how and why this happened. In 1776 we as a people decided enough was enough. We looked beyond left right divided and realized the truth, that every man woman and child were treated as less then slaves of the royal family. We were no more then cattle to them. Today, despite all the efforts of the founding fathers, we are right back to being cattle. What went wrong? Many things happened starting with making too many deals. The declaration of independence, written in June of 1776 by Thomas Jefferson, paints a very different version of what the founding fathers imagined then the constitution and the bill of rights when they were written from 1787 to 1789. During those years something happened, part of finding out what happened is looking at who signed those two documents, and who didn't. We all look at Jefferson as a founding father yet he never signed the constitution as it went against nearly everything he stood for. While the Declaration of Independence states that "all men are created equal" the constitution counted 5 slaves as 3 people for districting and limited voting rights to only landowners until the 1830's. "Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" the Declaration of Independence. "Inalienable rights" the Declaration. Just about everything we think this country stands for comes from the Declaration of Independence, a Document that has nothing to do with the system of government we now have. So we can see that within those few years we had already lost much of what we think this country was founded on.

Jefferson and many of the other founding fathers wanted a federal government that only oversaw the interactions of the different states. This can be seen in the articles of confederation, the system of government we had in this country from 1774 until 1789. The first true president of this country was Peyton Randolph in 1774. George Washington called the president of the continental congress "the most important office in this country." After Peyton Randolph there were another 14 Presidents of the continental congress until we got rid of the articles of confederation and replaced them with the constitution. So why then do the history books not talk about this early government? Why are they hidden away from us? What do they not want us to know? The most important thing to know is that war is not cheap. Even the guerrilla war waged by the minutemen cost quite a bit and since it was a war against taxes there was no easy way to fund it. Much of the funding came from France who were at odds with the British but still wealthy citizens of the Americas needed to be brought on board so many changes were made to keep them happy. While the Declaration held that there should be a small government of the people based on Jeffersonian Republicanism, the constitution pushed for a larger government based of Alexander Hamilton's federalist papers. A government where we would replace the British crown with a new ruling class, the richest of those who lived in the "new world."

We have to admit that without the funding of these richest early Americans the war might not have gone on very long, but to give up on the system of government set forth in the articles of confederation was to give up on the very thing these revolutionary soldiers were fighting for. Truth, Liberty, and Freedom were to be replaced by Lies, Injustice, and Slavery. Were it not for early Republicans who fought for the Bill of Rights this country would have failed from the start. However much of those rights were assumed to be quite easy to interpret, yet have proved to be open to much changes of intent. Let’s look at the 2nd Amendment. The promise of an armed militia was to keep our own government honest. "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." What is important to see here is the term "free state," that a militia, not an army, is required for freedom. How did the revolutionary militia differ from an army? The militias were true direct democracy in action. Leaders were elected by those who served in them and decisions were put to a vote. There was no requirement to serve, no prison time for deserters, and as such those who fought and died for their country had to feel as if they were a part of the unit, not a servant to their officers. Today's armed forces would fall to pieces if there was no requirement to serve once enlistment papers were signed. Would an openly run, democratic military be facing a suicide every day? Not likely as soldiers would not be forced to do things they do not agree with. Today's armed service men and women are forced into killing innocent civilians and trained to not feel guilty if they do kill someone just because of an itchy trigger finger. If soldiers were able to vote out commanding officers whose orders they disagreed with then most CO's would be gone. Those who joined the militias were made a part of the governing of this countries defense and they were armed with the best technology of the era.

Today gun ownership is relegated to sport weapons. If there was ever an armed revolt it would be put down by the very military that has sworn an oath to protect the rights it would suppress. Say that today, Texas decided to leave the union. That they would no longer be a part of the United States because it had grown in corruption to the point of citizens interests no longer being represented and had formed a new local government that did not recognize U.S. rule. The military would be called in and they would disarm or kill everyone who stood for "no taxation without representation" The very militias the second amendment protects are now listed as terrorist organizations by the FBI. However for a peoples militia to protect the values of this country it would have to have weapons of equal power to the governments military. I'm sure there are few who would argue that we should arm the people with stinger missiles but with bans on assault weapons being proposed we are seeing the one thing the people had left to protect themselves being taken from them.

The loss of the second amendment was gradual, just like the other losses we have suffered. They have swung back and forth many times but eventually we have lost everything this country was founded on. One great example is the civil war. In modern times we look at the civil war as being fought to end slavery but there are two main things to look at. One, was forcing the end of slavery before it naturally was unable to compete and failed on its own the cause of over 100 years of bigotry and racism? And two, did the loss of the States rights to govern themselves hurt us more than freeing the slaves helped? Today we are the leading the global race to lock our population up in a for profit prison system. A disproportionate ratio of the prison population is Black and the leading cause of incarceration is drug related. States efforts to regulate and decriminalize drug use are fought on the federal level and the very loss of States rights that were fought over during the civil war now keeps tens of thousands as slaves of the prison industrial complex.

From the cattle and railroad barons of the old west to the factory owners in the late 1800's things continued to get worse until we had the biggest income divide this country had ever seen. The pendulum finally swung back to the working class and the labor movement was born but from the beginning there was a divide in the labor movement. On one side you had the mainstream trade unions today represented mainly by the AFL-CIO and on the other side you had the radial industrial unions survived in the U.S. by only the IWW but elsewhere in the world many anarcho-syndicalist and socialist unions still thrive. Unfortunately first the tactics used were demonized by the Taft Hartley act then the very activists and organizers who were still active were vilified by McCarthyism until those battles won by the radicals are the few concessions still seen today. The fight for the 8 hour work day directly led to the haymarket massacre and the execution of 7 Anarchist union leaders for nothing beyond political ideology. Today we are seeing the return of many of the tactics used by radical unions in the early 20th century. 500,000 gathered in the Wisconsin capital chanting general strike during 2010 and the first general strike in over 60 years took place in Oakland California in October 2011. The IWW is the strongest it has been in decades and worldwide radical unions old and new are gaining support.

In the following chapters we will look in detail at both what has gone on in the past as well as what is going on now, how we are still fighting the same battles that the founding fathers waged and how we can learn from the mistakes of the past. We will look at the pendulum of the left right political spectrum that has been used to keep us enslaved and why we must break that system now and move beyond this false ideological divide and unite the working class to take back this country. In particular we will look at the two largest populist movements on the century, the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement, how they differ and how they are the same.

I heard a story about Diane Teti, girlfriend of Brew Works owner Rich Fegley, and Ed Pawlowski meeting at some city event during the time that both of the former were opposing the trash incinerator being proposed by the later.
Pawlowski asked Teti what she was doing opposing him after he had helped secure funding for the Brew Works. When she told him that was what a mayor was supposed to do he replied "You know how it works, one hand washes the other."
This sort of attitude from Pawlowski may very well be why a Grand Jury is now sending the FBI to raid city hall. Spokesman for the city Mike Moore has claimed that based on what was taken by the FBI that the city contracting process seems to be the target of their probe however J.B.Reilly, CEO of City Center Investment, has made it clear in the time since the raid that City Center has never had a contract with the city.
While this is true the FBI specifically listed Reilly as one of the targets of their investigation on the search warrant. Due to this one must assume that the investigation is not limited to the cities contracting process.
Back to Pawlowski's hand washing we can see that Reilly washed Pawlowski's hand first by being the largest single donor to Pawlowski's campaign starting in 2005 when he was first running for mayor. The same year the FBI has been searching records back to. Reilly and his partner in City Center Joe Topper even maxed donations to Pawlowski at $10,000 each in non election years.
However the other hand washed right back. Before the NIZ formerly had lines drawn on a map Reilly started buying property downtown. Lots of it. A map published on the front cover of the Morning Call showed these properties nearly a month before the NIZ zone was actually created. When the NIZ zone (or zones as despite the law stating a zone there are three separate zones) was created it was not a simple square. The NIZ does not follow boundaries such as 5th to 10th, Liberty to Walnut. Instead the NIZ is a very complicated area jutting out to include a block here, part of a block there, one building on this street, another on that one. Interestingly enough most of the areas the downtown NIZ juts out at are areas Reilly owns property.
Despite buying all these properties before the NIZ was formerly laid out it was not enough for Reilly nor did Pawlwoski think that drawing the NIZ map to include these properties was enough hand washing. So before there was ANIZDA, before there was any way to apply for NIZ funds, a grant for $20 million was given to City Center so they could buy most of the block across Hamilton from the new arena.
So far the NIZ has given out over 1 billion dollars in loans but none of these loans will be repaid by those that received the money. Instead the taxpayers of Allentown will have to repay these loans and there is no end in site. On the 14th of July Pawlowski's facebook linked to an article about new NIZ backed development on the waterfront and the day before he linked an article about Reilly's City Center building another two towers near the arena. Despite the FBI and Grand Jury investigation the NIZ money grab continues. Pray for your future Allentown because none of your elected officials care about you.

Come down and join the circus...

Nothing like burning the candle at both ends.
Despite nerve damage through my entire right side and herniated disk I refuse to just sit there in pain (well not every day anyway) I am running away with the circus. again.

It will come as no surprise to any who know me and a few have already learned the fact that when I was 13 I ran away with the circus. Well I didn't really run away so much as I just disappeared while they were in town. Two weeks of pounding rebar tent poles into blacktop, shoveling animal excrement, accidentally riding lamas, and ultimately being charged the admittance price from my wage despite working as stagehand made me fall in love with the life (and learn to be wary of carrnies)

While life had other plans for me and I've been unable to join a full touring show  when the option has been placed in front of me I've still picked up a thing or 20 over they years. So now when a new start up circus style stage group asked me to join with them and help them develop their group I was honored to be able to say yes and add a little sideshow to their circus.  I've done my own sideshows here and there. just as I was starting to get some decent gigs was when the accident happened.  Since then I've been unable to really do much.  work is not an option unless it's a loose enough place that I can only work when I'm able, even my ability to perform as a fire breather, a skill that takes me no physical effort or exertion, has been reduced to the point where I can not do a full haunted attraction season. So the circus works out because at this point it's very sporadic. I'll be part of a group, not the main or whole act so I can just jump in and out throughout the short performance, and I can just take a few days of rest after.

One of the two main issues I deal with I'm to workout as often as I can to heal, the other I'm to rest. it's hard to be able to do anything in this double bind but I will continue to deal as I can, pushing myself as hard as I can to improve. It's been three years and to be back in a place where I can, even if only for short stints, to be able to rejoin that world, that feeling of joy and awe that comes with being a part of the show, being a part of the greatest spectacle that this planet has ever known. My life is truly blessed to once again be back.  May the show go on.