Tag Archives: Oakland

The Top 1% – And Their Top Hits

15 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Patriotism, Politics

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Protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement rally in Foley Square before marching through Lower Manhattan, October 5, 2011. (Mario Tama/Getty Images via Amnesty International blog).

I had planned at the end of last week to write about what the top one-percent richest people, Wall Street banks and corporations in general want to hear from us – in the form of a greatest hits list in music and in movies. In light of the events of the past twenty-four hours in Oakland and in New York City, I’ve decided to go ahead with this list, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (hereafter known by me as “Mayor 1%”) included.

These folks want everything from us, like an abusive father and husband who wants his wife and children to smile, bruises and all. They not only want us to buy into their sick and ugly version of the American Dream, the one that favors them and their children over us and the planet. They not only want us to be quiet, to shut the heck up and take it prone without lubrication, all of this economic and political inequality. They want us  to do the very opposite of protesting, to smile about all of this, as if we all happy little pickaninnies and Raggedy Anns’ and Andys’, all happy workin’ fo’ our all-wise and all-kind massa, the so-called free market.

And the three-term mayor of New York, Mr. 1%, has been involved in vilifying and actively cracking down on

Occupy Wall Street arrests at Zuccotti Park, November 15, 2011. (Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse) via New York Times.

the Occupy Wall Street movement almost from day one of these protests. He was for police brutality and suspension of First Amendment rights back when only a dozen or so brave souls began to gather in Zuccotti Park in mid-September. And why wouldn’t Mayor 1% be so active? He wholly represents everything that the Occupy Wall Street movement’s protesting. An overbearing, out-of-touch and out-of-time opportunist who’s rigged the political and economic system to his favor.

Well, here’s to you, Mayor 1%, you and the rest of the people you represent, the folks that will have all of us debt slaves from here to eternity. Here are the song you’re playing and movies you’re watching these days:

1. “Rock The Boat” (1974), Hues Corporation – note both the lyrics – like “don’t tip the boat over” – as well as the fact that the group named Hues Corporation wrote this first (or second) disco hit.

2. Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) – the movie fits perfectly what Mayor 1% and Wall Street have wanted from politicians and protesters over the past thirty years. “Do what we say, take our dirty money to do our dirty deeds, or shut the heck up!” I guess Mayor 1% would be the emperor, or Darth Vader?

Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), June 25, 2011. (Nehrams2020 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws due to its low resolution and the subject of this blog post.

3. “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)” (1987), Pet Shop Boys – the song embodies everything the one percent types like Mayor 1% stands for – and what he wants the rest of us to stand for as well. Except they haven’t “had enough of scheming, and messing around with jerks” – they are the schemers and jerks, of course.

4. Boiler Room (2000) – not the greatest film about Madoff-esque Wall Street scheming. But the Wall Street brokers and bankers can sit, watch and critique the bonafides of the film, to point out what the characters played by Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel and Ben Affleck all did wrong in getting caught.

5. The Devil’s Advocate (1997) – a dark, semi-horror (and for some, horrid) drama involving Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves as money and power-hungry go-getters. But get this. Mayor 1% hosts a dinner party with his other one-percent buddies, who dress like the movie’s characters. Mayor 1% dresses up as Al Pacino’s character, the Devil Incarnate. Then, they sit down and watch some of the film. Except they all think that Devil’s Advocate is a comedy.

6. “Out Of Touch” (1984), Hall & Oates – the top one-percent’s closing hit, telling the Occupy Wall Street protesters with derision, “You’re out of touch, I’m out of time.” The “out of time” part would either be about their ability to make money hand-over-fist in five minutes, or about them making that money before we notice another rise in economic and political inequality. Mayor 1%, though, would bring Darryl Hall and John Oates in to sing the one-percenter’s version of “Out Of Touch” to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

It’s too hard to do a top-ten hits list for the top one-percent. Ten is too many for them to begin with, especially without an additional nine zeroes after that ten. And Mayor 1%, you’re officially worse than Mayor “a verb, a noun and 9/11” himself, Rudy Giuliani.

Sometimes Starvation

12 Thursday May 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, race, Work, Youth

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Me (at 185 lbs) & Mark James (Cropped), Pan-African Graduate & Professional Student Association, University of Pittsburgh, February 27, 1993. Lois Nembhard.

My last semester at the University of Pittsburgh as an undergrad (Spring ’91), I took a one-credit Weight Training course. I wanted to learn how to use free weights and weight machines so that I could build muscle tone. I wanted a course that would be easy for me to pass, one in which I could burn up my anxieties while awaiting word about my graduate school future.

Over the course of the semester, I did build muscle. I weighed 175 pounds in January. By my last class on the twenty-third of April, I weighed 183 pounds. I was proud of the fact that the eight-pound gain was all muscle.

But with the end of the school year and undergrad at Pitt came a crisis. Even though I’d start work on the twenty-ninth with the PAARC project at Western Psychiatric as a full-time employee, I wouldn’t receive a paycheck that Friday, the third of May. Instead, I’d have to work for three weeks before receiving pay. After a year of underemployment as a student (I only worked ten or twelve hours a week because I couldn’t pay the other half of my tuition via student loans and keep my work-study allotment at the same time), I thought I was finally over the hump.

It was bad enough that despite my degree, which qualified me for $8.50 an hour, Andrea Hegedus and the other PAARC  bosses only saw fit to pay me at $5.20 per hour. Now I knew that I’d have to figure out how to live on $30 for the next three weeks.

The first week went well enough. I brought lunch from home, consisting of a dried-up hamburger on wheat bread one day, leftover spaghetti the next, and a couple of days in which I didn’t eat lunch at all. That was because I saved my baked chicken and spaghetti leftovers for dinner. I also conserved money by walking the two and a half miles between my apartment on the East Liberty/Shadyside neighborhood border and the Oakland neighborhood in which Pitt and Western Psychiatric are located. Each way.

My Route To/From Work, 6007 Penn Cir S, Pittsburgh, PA 15206 to Atwood St & Forbes Ave – Google Maps, May 12, 2011.

By the end of the second week, I was down to my last $5. It was the tenth of May, and I had another week before payday. It was bad enough I walked five miles to and from work every day and skipped lunch all that second week. The PAARC folks used me to do everything from going to Giant Eagle to buy half-and-half for their coffee to running across Pitt’s campus hunting for books and making 3,000 copies of X and 2,200 copies of Y. Mind you, they hired me to design databases and input data. Surprise, surprise, I had a headache at the end of every work day.

That Friday, I got a call from my old job at Westchester County Department of Federal Programs. It was my boss from the previous summer and holiday season, Joe Carbone, wanting to know if I’d come work for him another summer. Working for him had been a wonderful experience. But the reason I stayed in Pittsburgh was because I wanted to explore the option of grad school as far as possible, even if it meant getting doors slammed in my face. I couldn’t do that while working in White Plains and living at 616 all summer. So, reluctantly, I said, “No, I can’t do it this year,” knowing that I’d get an earful from Mom once I told her my decision.

The one and only time in my life I dined on these, May 12-16, 1991. Source: http://www.stevegarufi.com/ramen1.jpg

It seemed a ridiculous decision two days later. I was down to my final $2.10. I went to Giant Eagle that Sunday, bought a six-pack of ramen noodles for a dollar, and two packs of Kool-Aid for forty cents more. I had enough to by a can of soda, maybe some candy, and that was it until the seventeenth of May.

What compounded my confounding decision was that I remained sixth on the teaching assistant fellowship waiting list in Pitt’s History Department. What made that worse was the fact that no fewer than four students had passed me on the list since I’d first seen it four weeks earlier, all White and male.

Somehow, though, I had faith beyond my circumstances that things were going to work out just fine. I guess all those years of malnutrition at 616 helped me. By the week after my first paycheck for the summer, grad school at Pitt was a done deal, and I had food to eat again.

I weighed myself about five days after my starvation diet at the student athletic center. I weighed 167 pounds, which meant that my weight had dropped to nearly 160 pounds by May 17, and had only begun to recover. I could see nearly all of my ribs, front and back, not to mention my collarbone.

By the Wednesday after three weeks of little and no food, none of that ordeal mattered. For the miracle that I’d hoped in happened just days after my infamous “No” to Joe Carbone. (to be continued).