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MUPPETEERED

Whether acting in or out as Miss Piggy, Big Bird, Oscar, the Cookie Monster, Kermit the Frog, Animal, Gonzo the Great or Fozzie Bear, according to Goldman Sachs, we, the 99%, are all Muppets in waiting. Those pulling our strings in the name of their own unalienable rights to unearthly wealth creation at our working class expense should be sued by Jim Henson from his grave for breach of contract with the cultural heartbeat and soul of a country that is still a great deal more than the sum of its markets. (more…)

Reasons to Believe

There is a new heartland heartbeat of hope and inspiration making its way across America providing freedom, sustenance, fulfillment, sustainable progress and community-recycled profits. Following English 101 guidance where our teachers taught it was far better to “show, not tell;” actual place-based economic models are starting to transform foreclosed, outsourced and “creatively destroyed” industrial and residential wastelands. Showing through working mainstream bipartisan parables instead of broadcasting via predictable and disheartening partisan political discourse, a new American reality is emerging just below the surface of decay, abandonment and despair where the eye that sees comes up short against the entrepreneurial mind that perceives and acts while the working class soul prospers.

We need to see, touch, and feel what’s possible, to immunize ourselves against the campaign “Super Pac” induced message viruses coming our way. Trapped by “the worst politics money can buy,” anonymously-funded campaign sloganeering turns the pros and cons of vulture versus virtuous versus crony capitalism practices and excuses into a futile and infertile debate. We only know what’s real in our lives, what we aspire to and how we have no choice but to calibrate and try to heal the suffering at home, next door and down the street. Surrounded by decades of premeditated economic devastation that grows stagnant ugliness as an annual metropolitan and rural mutant harvest, we need reasons to believe, reasons to transform moral hazard (over the top risks without bearing any consequences) into stakeholder “friends with benefits.”

While still micro-sited and not yet everywhere, and without falling into the delusional narcissistic trap of wishful thinking, there is a whole new economy struggling under America’s crusty, polarized skin, trying to break free and go to scale. (more…)

Homesteading for the One Percent

(AFP/Getty Images)

Inherited merit is perceived as un-American and justifiably so in the land of supposed equal opportunities. Historically, the “Far West” belongs to the enterprising and courageous pioneer, the indentured servant who paves his or her own way after voluntary conscription, the “failure is not an option” entrepreneur, the hard working immigrant, the colonial self reliant.

Tragically, America’s current housing crisis makes a complete mockery of this vision. More than a policy day late and a refinancing dollar short, now we have turned our underwater homeowners into Katrina-like refugees, disenfranchised in their own land.

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The Bane of our Existence

“Sometimes people need to be fired, and sometimes they shouldn’t be hired at all. That’s reality.” So states Washington Post columnist, Kathleen Parker (“Romney’s rivals serve up a heaping helping of pious baloney”, published January 11, 2012). If only it were that simple…the gospel according to job creators.

Surviving the Great Recession with undisputable income inequality now the American norm, unfortunately not the un-American exception; too many unemployed, under-employed, foreclosed, and socially abandoned voters on all sides of the political spectrum are ready for something more useful from our political leaders this election year than a predictable and useless zero-sum debate placing all of the blame either on Wall Street or Washington D.C. In fact, the one percent versus the ninety-nine percent “occupy our public squares” protest-context frames this stand-off as the elites against the rest of us, fingering the collusion between big money and big government as the principal barrier to a more democratic prosperity. Extending this perception means that the powered and monied-up in both principal political parties are in the “peoples’ docket” with the “get out of jail free” verdict going to the most credible, the healers, the ones who lead by example, who turn their backs on trickle down and trickle up, who roll up their sleeves and get down in the ditch dregs with the rest of us as we dig our way out in ways we can believe. (more…)