It's good to see you. Come on in, leave your shoes in the hallway, we've got fire on the stove preparing lunch for later. In the meantime, browse the bookshelves and plunk down on the sofa with one, or pick out some tunes from the music library or come in to the kitchen to help with the cooking. Our special blend of tea is steeping and will be right up.

Make yourself at home...

(cover illustration by Occupy Wall St activist Molly Crabapple).

There's a passage in Matt Taibbi's "The Divide" that I've referred to in my notes as the "best 6 pages he's written." That's what I told him, when I had the chance to meet him in the reception area of the satellite radio show where a very good friend of mine and he were going to appear. Specifically, I said, it was pages 323-328.

If you haven't read it, the book is a tour de force, a deeply rankling insight into a world of dehumanization at the greased hands of Lady Liberty. He documents various blood-boiling incidents in which the slippery scales of justice lie shattered on the ground. In the wreckage lies a two-tiered system, of impunity for financial elites and murderous cops, and a Dantesque nightmare scenario for the rest of us, especially the poor, especially brown and black folks, and especially women - and it lies heavy upon us all. In this era of the first two decades at the turn of the century in which America has seriously become a banana republic, Taibbi's legendary command, of arcane financial skulduggery and the interconnectedness of the broader issues, becomes more and more important.

These six pages contain, in my view, some of the best summation of a malaise felt on some level by everyone in this country, no matter what you're background is. Doesn't matter if you're an overworked urban medical doctor administering at the behest of insurance companies, or a suburban office employee still tossed about in a maelstrom of ever-rising cost of living bills, or a poor rural family scrambling to find enough for the gas tank while staving off chronic hunger. Everybody is getting royally screwed, but few have the time, or lack the wherewithal, to really begin to understand what's going on.

The chapter in which it appears is called "Little Frauds." In it he juxtaposes the indignity with which poor women on welfare are hounded and violated, with the hands-off approach to white collar white men who conspired to scam working folks out of their pensions and savings, and who then had the sheer audacity to ransack the federal government for a taxpayer bailout.

He begins the chapter by telling the story of a Hispanic woman in Southern California, a victim of domestic abuse, who legally qualified for food stamps. A gruff social worker appears at her door a few days later, practically pushes her aside and begins berating her with ugly accusations of her personal life, while looking around her apartment. In her bedroom he's sifting through her underwear drawer, making threats that if he finds evidence of her estranged boyfriend/father of the child she cares for, living there, he could, and will take her son away.

"They make you feel like a piece of garbage," she tells Taibbi.

That incident happened in the late 80's. It's worse now. In some places, such as San Diego, instead of a social worker it's a law enforcement officer who make these visits now. In 2011 alone, the county made "an astonishing 26,000 home visits."

...while the San Diego district attorneys office spent more than a decade sifting through thousands of dresser drawers and bringing felony cases all the way to court for frauds as small as $400, executives in the same general area of Southern California, at companies like Countrywide and Long Beach Mortgage, were pioneering the brilliant mass fraud scheme that involved the sales of toxic mortgage-backed securities.

These financial companies were part of a global scheme that stole trillions of dollars from people all over the world. Countrywide alone cost the taxpayer $26.6 billion. In the settlement of mortgage fraud abuses, the federal government was able to recover that amount, but from 21 different cases involving players at all levels. Every single one of the companies were permitted to settle without admitting to any wrongdoing. "Not a single individual was charged and any of those cases. Not a single individual had to pay so much is a dime of his own money and damages."

For these obscene crimes that sent the world's economy into a tailspin, not one of these Economic Terrorists' homes were searched. "No banker ever had someone pick up his underwear by a pencil and and wave it in his face."

$26 billion of fraud: no felony cases.

But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars we kick in 26,000 doors, in just one county.

At this point in the chapter, Taibbi begins to try to make sense of the nonsensical. He concludes it's "the logic of our new shadow government," which is more about fucking with people than it is about money, which he attributes to an inability or laziness to govern ourselves. "So we put society on bureaucratic autopilot - and autopilot turns out to be a steel trap for losers and a grease pipeline to money power and impunity for winners."

To understand this insane apparatus requires thinking beyond the "Two Americas" cliche. For the most part, he says, every society has favored the rich and discriminated agains the poor. "The new truth is infinitely darker and more twisted."

He describes a dystopian world we've (beginning the ultimate question, who is we?) created, in which the real issues aren't "justice and injustice, but biology and mortality. We have a giant meat grinding bureaucracy that literally alters the physical makeup of its citizens, systematically grinding down the losers into a smaller, meeker, lower race of animal while aggrandizing the winners, making them bigger than life, impervious, super-people."

What's different now is that these quaint old inequities have become internalized in that "second government" – a vast system of increasingly unmanageable bureaucracies, spanning both the public and private sectors. These inscrutable, irrational structures, crisscrossing back-and-forth between the worlds of debt and banking and law-enforcement, are growing up organically around the pounding twin impulses that drive modern America: burning hatred of all losers and the poor, and breathless, abject worship of the rich, even the talentless and undeserving rich.

This is where I think he gets to the heart of the matter, which is how dehumanizing unbridled capitalism is. We live within a system in which a small cabal of oligarchs are permitted to not only greedily hoard all the world's resources and concentrate its wealth, but to use those gargantuan sums of money to infiltrate the minds of the citizenry at all levels of - inside schools to newspapers to the halls of Congress - through divide and conquer propaganda, and to then do their bidding of keeping the status quo intact.

It's a fully functioning psychotic trap of dog-eat-dog economics stemming from a completely failed and useless government, in which we're caught in the grasp of a Catch-22, which promotes "freedom and liberty and justice for all" propaganda through all levels of society, but distorts the idea of the "pursuit of happiness" or personal fulfillment through the Great Sham, which is that it can ultimately only be attained through the acquisition of more and more cheap disposable goods, which one dutifully accepts while on the way to achieving the purposely elusive American Dream™. Nobody cares about anything else that is happening around them, as long as there's a chance to get rich quick.

All the while this draconian system churns on...

No one is managing these bureaucracies anymore. They are managing us. Just as corporations are brainless machines for making profits, this sweeping the complex system of public – private bureaucracies that constitutes our modern politics is just a giant, brainless machine for creating social inequity.

It mechanically, automatically keeps the poor poor, devours money from the middle class, and sends it upward. Because it's fueled by the irrepressibly rising vapor about darkest hidden values, and attacks people without money, particularly nonwhite people, with a weirdly venomous kind of hatred, treating them like they're already guilty of something, which of course they are – namely, being that which we're all afraid of becoming.

In the Orwellian dystopia the original sin was thoughtcrime, but in our new corporate dystopia the secret in a crime is need, securely financial need. People in America hide financial need like they hide sexual perversions.

Why? Because there's a direct correlation between need and rights. The more you need, the more you all, the fewer rights you have.

It's a sick, upside down, system. So much of life today, from the most menial thing such as getting your drivers license or challenging a parking ticket, or even trying to get someone on the line at your local police precinct to take a report, can be an infuriating exercise in futility.

Conversely, the less you need, the more you have, the more the free citizen you get to be. On the extreme ends of the spectrum it is literally a crime to be poor, while a person with enough money literally cannot be prosecuted for certain kinds of crimes.

What keeps the poor poor and rushes the money upward is the complexity of the bureaucracy. If you have the wrong kind of person and you get caught up in the criminal justice system, we're stuck in the welfare of bureaucracy, or mired in debt, you can't get out without navigating a maze so complex and dispiriting and irrational that it can't possibly even be mapped. It's not brains that you need to get on get through it, but time, energy, strength. You have to stand on line after line, send letter after letter, make call after call.

The reality of our government, and how blatantly it is beholden to big moneyed interests, doesn't leave us with a lot of hope. The justice system is pure farce, manipulated by those who can wage and win wars of attrition.

And if you want to change even the smallest law, and your home state or in Washington, you need an army of thousands of lobbyist to get it done. And even in the rare case that you succeed, you then need to commit to ten years or more furiously boring legal battles and inane bureaucratic rule-writing sessions and fend off tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of dissenting reports and comment letters and policy papers, all developed mechanically by an industry that responds not by human decision, but bureaucratic reflex.

On the other side of the coin, the secret to conquering the financial bureaucracy isn't savvy and business sense, or the ability to spot a good entrepreneurial idea. Instead, it's pure bureaucratic force, the ability to throw 100 lawyers at every problem, to file 1000 motions and never get tired, to file ten thousand, a hundred thousand, one million lawsuits.

In other words, you need to be a bureaucracy and order to survive one. This is the overwhelming narrative of modern American economics, that the individual, particularly the individual without a lot of money, is inherently overmatched. He's a loser. And if he falls into any part of the machine, he goes straight to the bottom.

Everybody experiences this bullshit, and know that the system is rigged on every level.

How then do we get those beaten down by the crushing inertia of it all, to instead of accept it by just mumbling in response, as if it were some kind of profundity, "it is what it is," to understand life doesn't have to be this way. How do we get those who are outraged enough, as were are at C99, to want to have these conversations on a mass scale, to keep some hope alive, so that a moment of clarity shines upon humanity, and all folks realize we're are all the same and would just like the basics in life to be the right of one and all, with no exceptions.

So, what's going on with you?

Back in the kitchen we're listening to:

Thin Lizzy "Black Rose"

Reading/Browsing List:
"Runaway Inequality" Les Leopold
"Griftopia" Matt Taibbi
"The Twentieth Century" Howard Zinn
"The Leaderless Revolution" Carne Ross

Middle Eastern split pea soup with vegan sausage

diced 2 onions, chop 4 carrots and 3 celery sticks. Sauté onions first until they begin to caramelize, then add the rest.
In another pot, boil a 1.5 cups of split peas. Set aside when just soft but not mushy.
In another pan, fry sausage for a few minutes, then add split peas to cook further and make slightly crisp.
Add lots of coriander and some turmeric to sautéed onions/carrots/celery, along with a few cloves of garlic. Cook for a couple of minutes, then add 3 cups of water.
Add half of the split peas. Bring to a boil.
Remove soup from stove and using an emulsifier blender, puree soup.
Return to stove, bring back to slow boil, add sausage and remaining half of split peas. Cook for a few minutes. Turn off fire. Add handful of fresh chopped thyme and squeezed lemon.

Lemongrass Chai Blend

heaping scoop of dried Thai lemongrass
shards of cinnamon bark
a few cardamom pods
a few black peppercorns
A few cloves
fresh chopped ginger