Behold, the Giant Chicken of Doom

As promised, here is another one of the giant animals on top of my local supermarket.  I am featuring the giant chicken today in honor of the Democratic party, who have yet again shown themselves to be absolute giant chickens when it comes to corporate personhood. 

As the President was busy trying to prop up that overconfident idiot Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, the Bush-packed Supreme Court was rubbing it’s hands with glee.  It had just ruled allowing corporations – yes, those entities with billions of dollars at their disposal that pollute our environment, manufacture lethal products, and fire their employees thousands at a time to boost their stock prices - to pour unlimited monies into campaigning for political candidates that tow their own corporate line.

In order to create a warm, fuzzy image for corporations to use to convince the generally anesthetized public to go along with their agenda, each corporation will be creating their own cartoon mascot and series of public relations spots.  I have managed to put my hands on the copy that’s going to be used for a very large oil refining concern.  Imagine the following in voice-over:

“Hey, there, folks.  Slick Seagull, here, with an important message for you from Polypropyl Industries.  You know, up here by the coast, we really love kayaking, fishing, and flying our kites on the beach.  But there’s one more thing that folks around here really love, and that’s industry, because without industry, we don’t have jobs.  And without jobs, we don’t have money to buy kites or kayaks or bait for our lines much less the poles to fish with.  Polypropyl industries wants to help our community by building a brand new factory that will employ hundreds and hundreds of people.  And what does Polypropyl do?  They make strategic entry into our landscape, extract ore by the ton nice and easy without harming a single animal or human, and then use completely safe chemicals to blast the ore into itty bitty pieces from which we extract natural gas.  The process is completely safe for the environment, leaves behind a minimum amount of hazardous toxic waste, and doesn’t cause cancer hardly at all!  So if you want to help your community, and help Polypropyl Industries, make sure that you get out to the polls on Tuesday and vote for a really great guy who loves kayaking and fishing and flying kites just like you!  Bill McWhiteguy!  A vote for Bill is a vote for families, jobs, and the ocean.  Caw!  Caw!”

I was listening to Dennis Kucinich last night talking about what can be done to make sure that corporations, which already wield too much power in this country, don’t completely run roughshod over democracy.  Well, actually he didn’t say anything about what could be done – he was just whining that it should be.  Oh, that isn’t the same thing?  Damn.  Democrats are good at whining, the same way Republicans are good at bullying and willful ignorance.  They remind you more of an abusive marriage than a government, really.

Currently, corporations behave like bratty children – they don’t pay for anything (their fair share of taxes), they make huge messes (using their profits to simply pay fines for ruining the environment instead of spending to take precautions and not pollute in the first place) and blame all the bad things they do on their imaginary friend (the stockholders want us to do these things!).  In the Reagan era rush to deregulate industries of all sorts, based on the now debunked theory that markets will just naturally regulate themselves by magic, corporations achieved a personhood – the granting of rights to a corporation normally only given to individuals.

If you want to know more about corporate personhood, and how this country was royally screwed over by it, nevermind continues to be so, check out Thom Hartmann's book "Unequal Protection:  The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights" http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Protection-Corporate-Dominance-Rights/dp/1605095710/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264190492&sr=1-1

So – is anyone going to draft legislation to revoke or even remediate this corporate personhood and protect the individuals who, after all, are supposed to be the ones actually in charge of the government?  Probably not.  Barney Frank, bless his heart, is trying to impose additional rules through the Finance committee that will ameliorate this outstandingly evil decision.  I love Barney Frank, and I hope he's successful in at least helping to curtail this, but nothing I've hoped for in the past 12 months for America has come to pass, and I'm getting pretty exhausted.  Hope and Change.  Yeah, right.  Well, I've lost hope, and my opinions have changed.

Okay, I'm being really glib about this, but it's not fucking funny folks - it's really not.  This is not the United Corporations of America.  This country was never intended to be a collection of corporate fiefdoms ruled over by corporate boards and CEOs as if this is a fucking Shakespeare play and they're the dukes of Gloucester and York and Bedford.  In the past 12 months I have gone from being fantastically relieved that Bush was gone, to cautiously optimistic about President Obama, to completely betrayed by the escalation of wars, the continuing of torture, and the utter lack of spine, to what I feel right now which is righteously bloody furious that the Goldman Sachsians surrounding the President right now have him completely bamboozled.  No mean feat for a guy who ran the Harvard Law Review.  Okay, maybe he's complicit.  Even if he isn't, he's smart enough for everyone to THINK he's complicit.  Either way, it all sucks.

I know I promised you that this blog would have mostly to do with the bizarre stuff up here in my neighborhood, so I thought I'd get a picture of this odd little bit of sculpture.

This artwork is actually plastered up on the wall of the Park View Restaurant on Dyckman Street.  The family that owns the place also owns the Garden Cafe up on Broadway, and they used to own another diner across the street that is now a Bank of America/McDonald's combo.  Instead of the requisite pictures of Greece and puppies enjoying spaghetti dinners, these guys decided to get their Mom - yep, it's their Mom - to put her face in a bucket of alginate and let them create a sculpture of her re-envisioned as a Greek goddess.  I always think of her as the goddess Anhedonia, because she always seems so depressed to me.  It's also odd when their actual Mom is running around in the diner, because she's this little old lady and dresses more like an ex-nun than a Greek goddess.  I have to give both of these restaurants a shoutout, though, because I eat in both of them all the time.  The food is inexpensive, nicely done, and both places are pretty comfortable, although with the Park View forget getting a seat for brunch on the weekends because there's always a huge line.  And, of course, it's also packed whenever "Law and Order" descend on us for location shooting, because the tecchies would rather eat in there and pay than eat the usual boring chow off the catering truck.

Okay, seriously?  I'm still mad about the corporate thing.  I've been mad for days.  I have no idea what to do about it, but I'm mad.  I could write letters to Chuck Schumer I guess.  I wish I could do something other than write letters.  Maybe I'll write to Tom Hartmann - he might have an idea or two.