Two horses with the same owner: Taibbi asks, "Is the Two-Party System Doomed?"

The sooner, the better. Let's follow the money, shall we?

Is the Two-Party System Doomed?, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

A new study shows us what observation should already have made clear: a messy restructuring of America's political parties is coming

Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose 2013 bestseller Capital in the 21st Century awoke upscale Americans to the shocking news that their economic system was not working for everyone, has written a new paper exposing more uncomfortable truths.

Piketty's new essay, called Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right, studied electoral trends in three Western countries – France, Britain and the U.S. – dating back to the 1940s.

SNIP

America, like pretty much everyplace else in the neoliberal world, is becoming a society split up into unequal camps. We have an extremely small group of very rich people, and a much larger group of everyone else, who may or may not be educated, but increasingly have either zero net worth, or close to it.

The numbers are getting harder to ignore.

American politicians for decades have done an outstanding job of keeping low-income voters from seeing their shared economic dilemmas. The Republicans dating back to Goldwater and Nixon have kept voters transfixed with race hatred and fears about things like gun control, while Democrats have emphasized the Republican threat on social issues like reproductive rights and Social Security.

But having two parties sponsored by the same donors simply can't work in the long-term. The situation ends up being what a Colombian politician once deemed "two horses with the same owner."

From Mitt Romney's idiotic tirade against "the 47%" to Hillary Clinton's recent remarks about how she won all the "dynamic" parts of America, our political leaders have consistently showed that they don't see or understand the levels of resentment out there.

Papers like Piketty's are a warning that if the intellectuals in both parties don't come up with a real plan for dealing with the income disparity problem before someone smarter than Donald Trump takes it on, they're screwed. Forget nativists vs. globalists. Think poor vs. rich. Think 99 to 1. While Washington waits with bated breath for the results of the Mueller probe, it's the other mystery – how do we fix this seemingly unfixable economic system – that is keeping the rest of the country awake at night.

Occupy Public Art, and Free the New Albany Street Piano.

It's a new community at Facebook.

Free the New Albany Street Piano

We are friends of the New Albany Street Piano, not its creator. We merely want to set the Street Piano free.

Are there more important issues to discuss? Of course -- and that's the whole point.

Zirin: "The People of Oakland Need to Occupy Their Sports Teams."

In an ideal world, sports would be about the fun and personal challenge of playing sports. Humans everywhere have long since elevated sports to a position disproportionate to sensible balance, and I've long since accepted this. It's just the way it is.

However, if the tail shall be wagging the dog, then let the whole mutt shake. There are a million sportswriters, and only a handful dare to pace sports in context in quite the same way as Dave Zirin.  

The People of Oakland Need to Occupy Their Sports Teams, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

... This is Oakland: the city of the Black Panthers, Berkeley, the Brown Berets, and Boots Riley. It is almost shocking that there is not a public campaign to demand at least a partial public seizure of these teams, given the public expenditure already invested. I asked a slew of people this past weekend why this campaign has yet to cohere, and the answers ranged from it’s being unrealistic to there being “more pressing campaigns” than trying to untangle sports-league bylaws. But the mega-profits being produced by today’s leagues could actually aid those campaigns, providing new revenue streams for cash-strapped schools and hospitals. Here is where the city could take something from the history of the once-fearsome Raiders: Sometimes scaring the piss out of an opponent can be a very effective tactic. Occupy these Oakland franchises and demand that these owners acknowledge that the teams of the East Bay were yours long before these owners arrived for the great plunder. They can share the wealth or they can spend their own money or they can sell out. But the teams remain. As a T-shirt I saw this weekend said, “Oakland: the people that lead the world.” When it comes to turning the table on sports owners, it’s time for Oakland to lead.

Actually, MOST movies are "too dumb to criticize." Time for some book-readin'.

It's a preachin' kind of Sunday.

I tend to avoid American mainstream movies, as they tend to be depressingly stupid. Two hours expended to glare in pained annoyance, while books await reading, strikes me as a poor bargain even when drunk.

Lately I've been avoiding social media expressions of polarized dumbassery, whether emanating from knee-jerking parties to the right or left. It is increasingly evident that social media was developed to be abused by the 99%, go the glee of the 1%, as the ones who should be marching together to take back what is theirs instead attack each other.

It's called divide and conquer, folks, and you buy into it every single day. Rather than emulating 19th-century peasants prostrate on their knees, praying to the Tsar (or the Koch Brothers, or "fill in the blank: with the name of any multinational corporation) for some measure of hope, perhaps we might commence a shift aimed at taking some of it back.

Without knowing or caring why the sniper was sent to Iraq in the first place -- why soldiers are sent anywhere throughout history -- it's all diversion and fluff. Metaphorically, we cannot all work "for" ourselves, but we needn't work for the Man, either. Ideas and words matter, and it's never too late to invest in the time required to grasp their meaning.

Sermon concluded.

'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

Almost.

 ... Filmmakers like Eastwood, who could have cleared things up, only muddy the waters more. Sometimes there's no such thing as "just a human story." Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context, and this is one of them.

Hegemony in action.

Here's a nice view of health department hegemony, close up and personal, as Julia Hayes asks me to sign off on a spotless inspection of matters in which her department has no statutory right to meddle.

Still acting under protest, I happily did so: "Roger A. Baylor, Juvenile-in-Chief, Tommy baby."

Maher: "They’re not the counterculture. They’re the culture."

I wonder what Councilman CeeSaw thinks. The audio is out of sync, but it doesn't matter, so just listen and enjoy.

From the Guardian: "Occupy protests mapped around the world."

Occupy protests mapped around the world

Where are the Occupy protests taking place in the world after the camps in Wall Street and Madrid? See the full list of places we have found so far - and help us collect more

• Explore the list - and help us add more
The map shows events for which there is at least one independent verification, based on readers suggestions and Guardian research. It's possible we're missing details - go to the full list to add or change events