by Davis Fleetwood
Are you ready for some football???

“For the last six months all we’ve seen is U.S.-England,” said Landon Donovan Wednesday. “And so, if you were a casual sports fan at home, you might think that this was the World Cup final, U.S. vs. England.”

Actually Landon, the casual sport fan in the U.S., after they say, “Landon who?” Is more likely to be saying “Soccer, please God no. Give me badminton, give me curling, give me single A Baseball- gives me the Myrtle Beach Pelicans Vs. the Winston Salem Cancer Sticks. No, you know what, give me avant-garde French cinema. Give me Un Chien andalou and put that scene with the razor blades over they eyeball on repeat for the entire month give me anything but don’t give me soccer- and don’t you dare call it football. Football is for men and steeped in war metaphor with bombs and blitzes and aerial attacks. Football is American. Soccer is for commies!!!

But I am not like most Americans Landon. I have not been so excited for a sporting event since my 9-year-old football travel team, the Sachem Redskins, played for the Suffolk County Championship. Our coaches whipped us into a frenzy by having us sing this song on the bus to the game- imagine a group full of 9 year boys frothing at the mouth and singing:

Blood on the saddle
Blood on the ground
Great big puddles of blood all around
Pity on Wyandanch, isn’t it sad?
Great big Sachem stomped on their heads!
U! U! U! U! U!
UPSIDE THEIR HEADS!
U! U! U! U! U!
UPSIDE THEIR HEADS!

Yeah. American youth football culture is all kinds of fucked up.

Why is the America the lone holdout in the entire world to hold real football in disdain? Cuz we are Cowboys. We are Hypercapitalist war mongering Cowboys.

Listen: It is not only a side effect but also an object of American Football to hurt your players. Embedded in both our pop and youth culture, it prepares us for war. In Soccer- or real football – they trade jerseys after the game.

America celebrates the individual. Soccer- or real football- is about cooperation. No one player can impose their will on the game Kobe Bryant style. It is the ultimate team sport.

Remember, we are Cowboys.

Plus (and here is the real problem)the game never stops, when are we supposed to air commercials? How are we supposed to use this sport to hypnotize our consumers that they should drive to Wal-Mart after the game and rack up credit card debt trying to make our living rooms look like the latest spread in Martha Stewart Living?

And that right there, as any good Any Randian Regressive Tea Bagging American will tell you, is where the problem lies: Soccer- or real football- is a socialist plot to subvert capitalism and take over the world.

For the love of humanity, we can only hope so.

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The former Miss Wassilla 1984 wants Barack Obama to pick up the phone and call her so that she can leverage her extensive executive experience and help the President navigate the increasingly murky waters of the BP OIL disaster.

I kid you not. I’ve got another idea; Obama should be calling in the Gambino family to deal with this mess.

Palin wrote that Obama’s comments amount to “further proof that it bodes well to have some sort of executive experience before occupying the Oval Office,” and added that the president should call experts who lived through the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska – including herself.

“Based on my experience working with oil execs as an oil regulator and then as a Governor, you must verify what the oil companies claim – because their perception of circumstances and situations dealing with public resources and public trust is not necessarily shared by those who own America’s public resources and trust.”

Okay, I will not waste time absolving Obama here. Despite his recent claims that he is going to whoop some ass, delivered in the same polite tone one might use to deliver an elementary school commencement speech- the white house is to intertwined with wall street and big business to do anything meaningful on the ass kicking front.

However, if Palin is going to suggest that any involvement she- or any other executive in Alaska- had a relationship with Exxon that resulted in anything other than a rape – on so many levels- a casebook study in how corporations violate the citizens of this country while our elected officials stand impotently on the sidelines, then a quick review as some basic facts is required:

1. For the liability incurred for the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill that stretched 1,200 miles from the accident site, and covered 3,200 miles of shoreline and an incredible 10,000 square miles overall Exxon was taken to court. 22,000 plaintiffs sued Exxon.

2.  A jury awarded the plaintiffs $5 billion in damages, equal to what was, at the time, a year’s worth of Exxon profits. This was cut by half by a U.S. appeals court, then finally lowered to just over $500 million by the Supreme Court. During the 20 years of court battles, 6,000 of the original plaintiffs have died. ExxonMobil, with its billions in annual profits and armies of lawyers, can tie up the Valdez case in the courts for decades, while the injured commercial fishers slowly die off.

3. While a whole generation of plaintiff’s waits for justice, the first quarter profits for Exxon in 2010 were 6.3 Billion, up 38% from the first quarter in 2009.

4.  Legal teams for Exxon are currently working overtime in an effort to create the legal framework for a corporate takeover, Gordon Gecko style, of BP. Why would any company want to buy BP, given the liability of the cleanup costs and future lawsuits?
Well, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, BP’s liability for economic devastation — above the cost of the cleanup — is capped at $75 million. BP CEO Tony Hayward has publicly declared to go above that cap and pay all legitimate claims. The legitimate comes in very old school blue blood British quotation marks, however. Further more, if Exxon were to buy BP, Tony Hayward would just be another unemployed billionaire whose promises will be just another rubber check delivered to the American people.

So, no Miss Wassilla 1984, Barack Obama should not be calling you, or any other wall street executives to seek guidance on how to handle BP.

My hope, for the American people and for justice, is that Obama consults the Gambino crime family. Because while fishes still do exist, it would be nice to see some of the executives swimming with them.

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While a few out of work gulf fisherman are earning extra cash skimming oil for BP, bankers and lawyers are working overtime as well, drafting bankruptcy papers and takeover deals. Before you cheer the downfall of BP, ask yourself: where will all of the liability go?

According to Andrew Ross Sorkin’s article in the New York Times: “The idea that BP might one day file for bankruptcy, particularly as part of a merger that would enable it to cordon off its liabilities from the spill, is starting to percolate on Wall Street.”

Wall Street. It is not only the street with the highest concentration of grade A asshats in the entire world, a collection of leather soled empty suits without whom the world would be an infinitely better it is also the title of the most misunderstood movie of all time.

“Greed,” Gordon Gecko famously said in Oliver Stone’s- yes Oliver –I’m-pals-with-socialist-Hugo-Chavez” Stone wrote and directed the 1987 classic Wall Street- “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” The only problem is, Stone intended his film to be a satire. He wanted us to be horrified with Gecko, not to emulate him. As far as pop culture icon’s go, Gordon Gecko may be more misunderstood than Archie Bunker. I doubt if Archie Bunker ever inspired anyone to join the KKK, but many a young Wall Street suit has accosted Oliver Stone over the years to shake his hand and thank him, to let him know that Gordon Gecko was the reason that he got into finance. How many hot shots behind the credit default swaps, tor in the derivatives game were inspired by the “greed is good” ethos? How many more among that happy band of Hypercapitalist brothers are holed up in an office right now, contracted by BP or potential takeover bidders Shell or Exxon Mobil creating the legal blueprint that would allow BP to file a prepackaged bankruptcy and separate the costs of the cleanup — and potentially billions of dollars in legal claims — into a separate corporate entity.

What then would come of Tony Hayward’s promise to “pay all legitimate claims”?

While these same layers and bankers will make you feel as if you have committed a moral sin if you try to walk away from an underwater mortgage, they will turn around, and claim it is good capitalist practice to limit losses and liability and utilize the tools the system has installed to keep the rich super rich and the rest of us grateful for whatever toxic scraps fall from their banquet. And if you bitch about it, if you raise your voice and say “Greed is not a good thing you illiterate bastard, Gordon Gecko is making fun of you, he is held up as an example of everything that is wrong with the world” you get labeled a socialist.

How rich do the rich have to get and get that way by raping the economy, the environment and even by raping the Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck fans to dumb to know that they are being raped before Capitalism becomes the dirty word?

Jon Stewart didn’t bitch slap Helen Thomas earlier this week, so much as he ushered her quietly out the door. Thomas, the dean of the white house press corps who is being sacrificed on the alter of AIPAC after she made some admittedly insensitive remarks about Jews residing in Israel, will be remembered for saying that Jews should get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland.

Stewart sarcastically asked: “Why did the Jews ever leave Germany and Poland?” True. The holocaust is a horrific reminder just how awful humans can be to fellow members of the species when under the powerful spell of nationalism.

Speculating on who would get Helen Thomas’s seat in the White House Briefing Room, Stewart said: “You know who is going to get her seat? Elijah.”

Funny. For those of you a few dead brain cells removed from your religious indoctrination, Elijah is A biblical prophet who, according to the book of Kings “brought fire down from the sky, and ascended into heaven accompanied by chariots. In the Hebrew bible Elijah’s return is prophesied “before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord,” making him a harbinger of the Messiah.

But as Helen Thomas rides off into the sunset, can we at least acknowledge that the Hebrew Bible, like the Christian Bible and the Qur’an belong in the mythology section of the bookstore next to the Iliad and the Odyssey? If we can get a critical mass to somehow buy into that, then the whole claim that Israel has to their homeland in Jerusalem would hold about as much water as the any claim that the growing number of tweens immersed in the Greek mythology inspired Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief have to establish settlements on Mt. Olympus.

“Helen Thomas announced Monday that she is retiring, effective immediately,” a Hearst Newspapers statement said. “Her decision came after her controversial comments about Israel and the Palestinians were captured on videotape and widely disseminated on the Internet.”

Helen, say it isn’t so.

If you were like most Americans and you spent the weekend racking up credit card debt that you will never pay to purchase petroleum based products to use at the family cookout where you were forced to listen to unemployed uncle Eddie bitch about the BP crime scene, you may have missed the major hubbub cause by the octogenarian journalist formerly know as the dean of the white house press corps, Ms. Helen Thomas.

What, exactly did she say?

In a video taken in late May that only surfaced on Friday, Helen said the following:
TAPE Tell them to get the get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people [the Palestinians] are occupied and it’s their land. It’s not Germany, it’s not Poland.” She was asked where they should go and she answered, “They should go home, to Poland, Germany and America”

In what appeared to be a coordinated attack, former George W. Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer hit the airwaves and said:

“She should lose her job over this. As someone who is Jewish, and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling.”

“She is advocating religious cleansing. How can Hearst stand by her? If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs.”

While Helen’s argument had some deficiencies, I don’t think that one can make the argument that she was calling for religious cleansing, but Ari’s deftness at spin control is battle tested in that he worked for a village idiot whose reputation to butcher the English language and/ or gleefully admit to violating the constitution or commit war crimes grows even in retirement,

Tensions were already high in the wake of the diplomatic and military tragedy that was the Israeli Defense Forces commando raid of a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla last week, which resulted in nine peace activists dead. So, verbal missteps are understandable.

What she should have said is something like this: World War 2 saw unspeakable acts against a people of Jewish faith. The United States may have been late to the party in stopping this, but it was the last just war waged by our country. The U.S. and her allies in World War two could have opened their borders and provided a refuge, a new home, for Jews displaced by World War Two. But America was Anti-Semitic itself.

In this way the anti-Semitism that gave birth to the holocaust also gave birth to the irrational solution to establish a new country for Jewish people based on using a religious document as a real estate deed.

And it is this anti-Semitic residue that unjustly sticks to anyone critical of the criminal policies of the Israeli government today.

FREE PALESTINE!