Wade Michael Page, the forty year old ex-soldier named as the perpetrator of the latest massacre, this in Wisconsin, was a member of the Nazi punk band, End Apathy.
Like every other punk band in North America, End Apathy entered Ernie Ball’s Battle of the Bands contest for a slot on the Van’s Warped Tour. The Google entry caught my attention as readers will recall I’d asked them to vote for the DD band’s page a couple months back.
“In a 2010 online interview with End Apathy’s record label Label56, Wade said he had founded the band in 2005 because ‘I realized … that if we could figure out how to end people’s apathetic ways it would be the start towards moving forward,'” reads a Reuters piece.
In the last twenty years there has never been a shortage of Nazi punks, a fact the label’s catalog well illustrates. The page advertises a show of white neo-Nazi punk rock, over the past weekend, in Bratislava and Budapest. It also pushes End Apathy “shirts and vinyl” merchandise, including a women’s ‘babydoll’ T, all since removed.
An expert from the Southern Poverty Law Center told Reuters Wade once attempted to buy “goods” from the National Alliance, the primary neo-Nazi group in the United States. The group was once lead by William Pierce, the author of “The Turner Diaries,” the best-selling premier piece of white extremist hate fiction in the country, a book favored by domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh..
O votes, 22 fans — reads Wade’s Battle of the Bands page. The band also had the page mirrored at a RockStar Energy Drink contest. The profile has since been removed although a cached page at Google can be found.
The vinyl and its art, from End Apathy and like-minded peers at Label56, explicitly telegraphs a philosophy of hate that erupted in Wisconsin with deadly results over the weekend.
The popular neo-Nazi split single format, optimized for atrocities and all grim outlooks.
Today, a brief piece in New York magazine about weird, decadent billionaire Jeff Greene, a man who admits he made his fortune gaming the system.
Now, he’s allegedly trying to persuade his other horrid billionaire pals they’d better stop hogging it all lest they provoke the peasants into burning the place down.
I’m not convinced the 99 percent can take up the pitchforks.
The country lacks something. Like fortitude and iron jaws. It doesn’t have the polity it did in the Sixties. Even then, while social unrest and the Tet offensive in Vietnam caused Lyndon Johnson to not seek re-election, the Democratic Party was effectively destroyed until Richard Nixon did himself in.
And there’s no indication that the current populace has even fractions inclined to repeat the labor riots of the early 1900s.
The country has no group like the Molly Maguires. It does, instead, have the Tea Party, which would call for the FBI to destroy dissent would such a group appear.
We also have a heavily armed and powerful police forces, a private sector national security industry unafraid of lawbreaking and a general populace that is easily propagandized.
Greene does make the valid observation that those who are being impoverished by his type are still voting for the mountebanks who will accelerate the doing of it.
Another casual observation: The guy probably does a lot of of some type of powder. And when he’s in one of the flop sweats from it suffers panic attacks.
It’s strange to imagine someone like Greene, who counts Mike Tyson as a close friend, and who has a streak that caused the L.A. party girls to refer to him as “Mean Jeff Greene,??? feeling vulnerable. It’s hard to think of any superrich person as vulnerable, just as it’s hard to think that a bear with outstretched claws and giant teeth is more afraid than you are. But over the past few months, it’s become clear that rich people are very, very afraid.
“Obama wants to take my money and give it to do-nothing animals,??? one matron blurted at a recent party at the Pierre for Dick Morris’s Screwed!, the latest entry into a growing pile of socioeconomic snuff porn geared toward this audience.
“There are all these people in this country who are just not participating in the American Dream at all,??? he says. This makes him uncomfortable, not least because they might try to take a piece of his. “Right now, for some bizarre reason, a lot of these people are supporting Republicans who want to cut taxes on the wealthy,??? he says.
Greene ran for Senate in Florida a year ago. You can guess the comedy that ensued.
Read the entire thing. I’ll also wager someone is now waving a book contract worth a couple hundred thousand so he can retell his tale of the billionaire with a conscience.
For “District Unknown”, Afghanistan’s first heavy metal band, the answer could be “Two Seconds After the Blast”, from their soon-to-be recorded first album, “A 24-hour life time”…
The thumping, heavy metal rock and aggressive lyrics which reverberate within the sound-proof walls of Kabul’s “Sound Centre” music school allows young Afghans to vent their anger at the violence they have witnessed during years of war before and after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States …
Kabul’s rock music school, housed inside the small “Venue” restaurant in the Afghan capital, also reflects the return, although sometimes tentative, of social and individual freedoms since the end of the Taliban rule … And the shadow of the Taliban looms large ahead of the 2014 transition when most [American] combat troops leave … The Taliban staged a 12-hour siege at a popular lakeside hotel outside Kabul this month.
I’m sure Saigon had at least one rock band in 1973, too. That ended well.
I just finished rereading Phil Caputo’s book on his experience as a Marine in Vietnam, “A Rumor of War.” In 1975, Caputo was back as a reporter to cover the fall of Saigon. The South Vietnamese shot at the evac helicopter as the Americans left town.
Tuesday marked the third anniversary of the last increase in the federal minimum wage. For the last three years, while the prices of gas and milk have risen steadily and the richest 1% have enjoyed huge tax breaks, the federal minimum wage has remained frozen at $7.25 an hour, which amounts to just $15,080 a year — as long as you get paid for any time you take off. That’s more than $7,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of four. As a result, the purchasing power of the minimum wage has slowly eroded — in just three years, its real value has sunk to $6.77 per hour, a nearly 50-cent drop.
The Bush tax cuts, which are simply the perquisite of the moment for the 1%, allow for the richest to prosper at the expense of middle-class and low-income workers. While CEOs make millions and their corporations make billions as part of a so-called economic recovery, the majority of Americans are struggling to make ends meet. This struggle is exacerbated by the low federal minimum wage. As middle-class jobs are increasingly replaced by low-wage work, however, this is the economic reality for a growing number of Americans.
Unless Congress raises the federal minimum wage, economic security for workers in low-wage jobs, the fastest-growing sector, will disappear. It is incumbent on members of Congress to raise the federal minimum wage …
We are watching these corporate forces which are supra-national … reconfigure the global economy into a form of neo-feudalism. We are rapidly becoming an oligarchic state with an incredibly wealthy class of overlords … [it is called] inverted totalitarianism, it’s not classical totalitarianism, it doesn’t find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader but though the anonymity of the corporate state that purports to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, to the iconography and language of American patriotism, but internally has seized all levers of American power … as to render the citizen impotent.
After World War I “American society became enveloped in the psychosis of permanent war where in the name of anti-communism we could effectively banish anyone in the society who questioned power in any serious kind of way.”
From two to twenty-four minutes will give you the full measure. “In theological terms, these are forces of death … I know what happens when wheat prices increase by 100 percent, children starve,” Chris Hedges tells Bill Moyers, on his view of US financialism.
It’s very discouraging. It’s also impossible to pull away.
From the wire, Fender Musical Instruments shelves its IPO:
Fender Musical Instruments announced Friday that it would be withdrawing its planned initial public offering (IPO) based on current market conditions.
“Current market conditions and concerns about economic conditions in Europe do not support completing an initial public offering at what we believe to be an appropriate valuation at this time,” said Larry E. Thomas, Fender’s Chief Executive Officer, in a statement …
After going public, the company was hoping to have roughly 26.4 million shares outstanding. This would have valued Fender at about $395 million, but that all goes out of the window now.
By gross tonnage, most of Fender Musical Instruments’ guitars and amplifiers are made in China and Mexico. Its US manufacturing is essentially an artisan and snob business, priced for the high end for music professionals, people on label contracts and people who perhaps played when they were young, but then went into lawyering or banking and want a piece to impress people.
However, guitar players — young to old — are not, on average, a wealthy bunch. And the lousy economy has hit musicians hard. There aren’t any deep pocketed men on the staff at Guitar Center, walking the showroom floors nationwide.
So the idea that everyone who owns a Fender-branded guitar or amplifier would buy stock to have a piece of the company is laughable. Guitar players aren’t part of the investing class, not even as hobbyists.
Which would largely leave Fender stock to those who buy its artisan custom shop goods. Yet Fender is also very definitely not Harley-Davidson, the iconic US motorcycle manufacturer.
With its off-shored manufacturing hitched to the low and middle ends of the market, those segments where consumers were the most blasted by the economic collapse and subsequent loss of jobs and dollars, Fender Musical Instruments did what it had to.
In over the transom, a suggestion to read a woeful story on the nature of Pasadena’s division of Satan Bank, OneWest.
I’ve walked by OneWest every day at lunch for the past three years. At one point I used to notice signs proclaiming it to be some sort of friendly community bank. This was all so much horse-shit.
This is no longer opinion, just straight statement of fact from the daily news of the past few years.
The site I’m about to direct you to is Bankster Law! It deals with my corporate neighbor, OneWest in Pasadena. The author relates his grinding battle with IndyMac and OneWest in Pasadena over a home construction loan. Yes, they are as bad as you think.
The trouble begins when IndyMac begins to fail — it’s money is all gone — and it starts misleading customers while short-changing them. The author finds IndyMac has reneged on the construction loan, declaring it complete with the house still unfinished.
Want to learn something of the system? Read Bleak House by Charles Dickens. You can download or read it on Gutenberg. Do you want to have your soul (and money) drained by Mr. Vholes? Do you want your mind stolen like poor Flite? Do you want your home to go to rack and ruin like Bleak House?
Deadbeat peasants won’t pay their bills! Let us pretend that the economy has nothing to do with people’s ability to pay. And let us also pretend that the bankster stealing doesn’t have anything to do with the economy! And let’s ignore the deadbeat bankster bailout, that has NOTHING to do with anything!
———-
The peasantry is being programmed by the banker run media to be selfish and jealous of others. So that when one is ripped off, others do not care. Why should you have a free house, they are trained to ask. As if your paying will make their paying more bearable. Wouldn’t it be wiser to ask why the bankers should be able to print free money at everyone’s expense.
And on OneWest:
My trouble with Pasadena began when I was given a loan from the original IndyMac Bank, FSB. Honestly, I liked most of the people I talked to from that bank. Those were the good old days when bankers did not hide their last names. When if you had a problem, a Vice President would give you his cell phone number and tell you to call him at home if necessary. This is when many of the California bankers had sunny Cali-style personalities and were not just churlish brutes. I only remember one lady that sounded like a goon, and I’ll bet you she is still working there at OneWest Bank …
[Later] OneWest Bank takes over. A filthier set of churlish thugs you cannot imagine. It seemed that they liked to call people even before payments were overdue in order to demand money …
Trust is essential to all financial transactions. When trust evaporates – or is smashed to oblivion through reckless and self-serving behavior at megabanks – the consequences can be dire.
The severity of the financial crisis in fall 2008 can be directly attributed to the collapse of trust among financial institutions. Cheating on Libor was not the only cause of this collapse but – if Mr. Bernanke is right and market participants knew what was going on – it must have contributed to it. — today, in the New York Times.
Pointed to in a Krugman piece, another graph showing compensation stagnation for most workers as national productivity grew. The nut sentence: “The divergence of pay and productivity has meant that many workers were not benefiting from productivity growth — the economy could afford higher pay but it was not providing it.”
The conclusion: Stagnation cannot be fixed without the re-establishment of “decent and improved labor standards” and “raising the minimum wage to half the average wage.”
You’ll notice the slope of the line for productivity gain for most of the war on terror years actually increases a bit.
And that for most of the Vietnam War years, despite the social upheaval and cost — which created no deficits in the way the war on terror has despite costing many more American lives — wages mirrored growth in productivity.
Actually, we don’t know just how standard [Mitt Romney’s] behavior was — and won’t until we see his tax returns, which will probably never happen (there has to be something really explosive in there). In any case, however, the fact that we’ve had a Gordon Gekko economy for 30 years doesn’t make it OK.
Total wage stagnation for three decades. It’s awe-inspiring.
If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while. — Tom Lehrer
