‘the Republican and Democratic Parties have not delivered the most basic fundamental benefits of a productive economy’ •

the real news network celebrates the year since bush lost with a revival of their election-night talk with ralph nader last year also starring bill fletcher and tom morris. (the video pages have full/wonky transcripts.)

MORRIS: But Mr. Nader, with all due respect, don’t you think that what we’ve seen with this campaign is the awakening of the little people, of the masses, regardless of whether they’re supporting this one messianic sort of personality? How do you split the difference between a Ralph Nader who has always stood for the grassroots, for the common people, for the environment, for all these things—how do you split the difference between what Barack Obama is doing to get into the White House and what Ralph Nader represents? How do you split that difference if you’re Barack Obama?

NADER: Well, he did say you can’t get change unless you get people excited about change. But, I mean, that’s a very clever statement, because, look it, politicians have gotten huge crowds, roaring and roaring, and when they put down their last words, the crowds drift away, never to come back. That’s the problem. Look, is there a tenants’ movement in this country? Is there a poor people’s movement? Is there affordable housing? How many people are working for a full Medicare for all, right? The antiwar movement takes off every four years in deference to the Democratic nominee, so that’s gone. The military-industrial complex is exploding. It’s got half of the federal government budget. Now here’s my point. When he gets a status of president-elect, you’ve got to watch the signs: Who’s going to be his transition team? Who are going to be his appointees? And who does he invite? I guarantee you he will not invite me for a single meeting. That’s the litmus paper test.

FLETCHER: There was a fear of criticizing Clinton because, quote-unquote, “it would give ammunition to the enemy.” Well, look, folks, if Obama is elected, the enemy is going to be sharpening their knives. The right-wing populists are going to be out there; they’re going to be stirring things up. But the problem is that if we hold back in criticism of Obama, he will continue to move to the right. I mean, there’s just absolutely no question. And I think that Ralph is right that the rhetoric—and this is one issue I also disagreed with with Senator Obama: his rhetoric of accommodation, while rhetorically quite interesting and perhaps tactically useful, is ahistorical. And part of what I think is necessary from people like Ralph, from the labor movement, from others, is to emphasize that it really is struggle that brings about change. And struggle is very difficult, and it’s very unsettling for many people, but it’s what we have to remind people after this election.

FLETCHER: There are segments of the Democratic Party that will resist [helping unions] because of corporate influence. There’s no question about it. And part of the problem—and, see, this is absolutely where Ralph and I are on the same page, except for one thing. See, in order to move any of this, you need organization. You don’t need just the Ralph Nader candidacy, Cynthia McKinney candidacy, or any number of others; you need organization on the ground. We need to transform the union movement, right? We need to transform politics in these communities. And people, regular people can’t join something and feel like, “Okay, this is a means for me to bring about some sort of change in reality,” then you substitute one savior for another.

NADER: —So let me give you an example, with the trade union movement is stronger in Europe — out of the rubble of World War II, okay, through their trade unions’ cooperatives, multiparty system, people in Western Europe demanded and got for all their people, by law, universal health care, decent wages, decent pensions, paid four-week vacation, paid maternity leave, paid family sick leave, decent daycare, decent public transit, university—free tuition. Sixty-three years later, the Republican and Democratic Parties have not delivered the most basic fundamental benefits of a productive economy. That’s the difference. And all you can say, say, “We have to organize stronger unions, we have to do this and that.” The motivation is not there. The heads of the union are not the right heads of the union, with few [exceptions]. The key is: how do you motivate regular people who are getting stuffed every day, who are getting disrespected, underpaid, overcharged, ripped off? They die because they don’t have health insurance, 20,000 of them a year. Forty-seven million workers, Wal-Mart wages, $7, $8, $9, $10, under $11 an hour. How do you get them motivated? That’s the key—fire in the belly. Rosa Parks had fire in the belly. The workers in the sit-down strikes in the ’30s against the auto companies—fire in the belly. That’s what’s missing, and that’s what we have to locate and generate. Otherwise, you can have the best plans and the best strategies; nothing’s going to happen.

btw this is why i want a simultaneous country, not a new party. we’re never free to have what we want to have, but we should make the rule — fast — that we can want what we want.

me? hey, look, i got no money, i got no social chops, no flow, i’m nuts. some kid emails me “try leading by example” — like a jilted mentor told me 15ya — i say back, “yeah, you’re right, i should shut up; i don’t like fighting, i don’t like talking with people, i feel sick. virtually the only thing i do like is when we identify our desires — the world we really want to live in, not our personal paradise, but the real place, big, complicated, political, scary in a good way — and go for it, dream it, make it, feed it, talk it into real, like we were walking in the park, it’s so natural.

“—i can’t do those myself. most of the time my brain’s exploding, i barely know who i’m talking to. i’m no anchor or gibraltar or dynamo.”

people avoid switching strategies, consciously, subconsciously. that’s a good game plan unless you don’t know what you want. without the lines drawn it’s a wreck — the default strategy is for personal comfort. inclusion. praise.

what good is the praise of toads?

not even a decent paycheck.

(•)

Obama had a chance, coming into Washington after a big rout of Republicans last year, to set out an agenda of major progressive change. He could have called for expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Instead he handed health reform over to Congress and immediately put out the word that he was open to compromise with Republicans, thus dooming reform from the outset. He could have announced a thorough review of America’s two wars, and then set in motion a withdrawal form both Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead he dithered on Iraq, and added troops in Afghanistan, assuring that both these disasters inherited from the Bush/Cheney administration became his own disasters, which will now drag on through his whole term. He could have declared a global climate emergency, and announced a job-creating crash program to develop renewable energy in the US and to make the US a leader in renewable energy R&D. Instead, he did almost nothing in this critical area. As for the economic crisis, he could have taken a progressive stand against the abuses of Wall Street, ordered a criminal investigation of the banking class, broken up the big banks and established a new regulatory system to put an end to the era of casino capitalism. Instead, he put the bankers in charge of Treasury and poured trillions of dollars into the largest banks, allowing them to grow even bigger and more predatory.

(•)

Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues: global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change … then all Presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures and rightfully so.

In that sense, what team Obama has accomplished in the year since he was elected is nothing less than an unprecedented reversal of decades of unsustainable national policy forced down the throat of the American public by conservatives.

in the long run we’re all dead.

“historians” have that habit of forgiving elites their subtler mistreatments of the populace. at the century scale, absolutely, tending to nature and re/depowering civilization — very big — truly things that leave lines in mountains. finer details like the budget-busting failure of the american hybrid health care system (‘privatized health, socialized illness’) won’t appear in the geological record.

unless of course the blatant, callous, loopy unfairness of some proposals riles people to refuse good strong medicine that has earned corporate blessing.

tck tck tck indeed.

‘A Medicare-for-All system succeeds by doing away with the private health insurance industry.’

The powerful insurers, understandably, don’t like this idea. Yet despite waves of deceptive and misleading propaganda about the purported horrors of government-run insurance, the people do like the idea of Medicare-for-All — polls show it is supported by a majority of the public. But insurance industry dollars have spoken louder than the people’s voices. And so Medicare-for-All hasn’t been given a serious hearing in Congress. Speaker Pelosi should at least enable a clean up-or-down vote. Call (202) 225-0100 and urge her to do so.

Robert Weissman of Public Citizen wants that first vote. He thinks (and I think) this change is fair, cost effective, medically sound, democratic, necessary, overdue, and “inevitable.”

‘I will say [I] think part of the problem is that Transition looks very different in the US

than it does in the UK — that doesn’t explain his attacks entirely, but I do think that thus far, US Transition looks a lot more like affluent people having seed swaps than not. My hope is that with time, things start looking more productive — but I’m still left with the larger question of how well Transition will work in places where Rob isn’t around to carry the banner — how much charismatic leadership is at the root of things.

— Sharon Astyk (in a comment)

ok i was going to and maybe still will this week i hope talk with a friend about these many layers of doing, not doing, public process, and big frikkin’ change in years-not-decades.

internationally negotiated climate agreements—

it’s been in all corners of the brain this month about who the fuck “we” are and how different 02030 is from what “we” imagine.

—are fast becoming obsolete for two reasons

visions of the future, also “unevenly distributed”.…

that ‘astyk’ linked article, the essays linked inside that, in body and comments, the comments on the link-linked steffen essays, all of that… i feel like… “now we’re talking.”

(i also made a comment, a little stupid, a little provocative)

(•)

Can we change fast enough? When thinking about the enormous need for social change as we attempt to move the world economy onto a sustainable path, I find it useful to look at various models of change. Three stand out. One is the catastrophic event model, which I call the Pearl Harbor model, where a dramatic event fundamentally changes how we think and behave. The second model is one where a society reaches a tipping point on a particular issue often after an extended period of gradual change in thinking and attitudes. This I call the Berlin Wall model. The third is the sandwich model of social change, where there is a strong grassroots movement pushing for change on a particular issue that is fully supported by strong political leadership at the top.

(•)

when i begged off talking about this formally it was because i’ve developed an allergy to discussing things that i can see are deeper than is my understanding of them.

it’s an allergy. people suffer allergies, we don’t cure them.

transition stuff is done earnestly and energetically. tracking the comments on the reply, someone referred to a very recent debate about (dis)organizational issues at the land-mass scale.

• why we don’t need formal agreements for national transition hubs
• why we (do) need formal agreements for national transition hubs

it occurs to me that transition itself needs to have a disaster plan, and that disaster would be that unless transition-experienced people are ready to hit the road and teach and help as it all goes down, lots of people wouldn’t gain from that experience, they’d just get et by circumstances.

there’s way too many more people in the world today than anybody’s grassroots plan of peaceful intervention can account for, i think.

a couple real good open.gov pieces on huffpo •

low-angle view:

In McKibben’s words, “there’s no way we could have done this even two years ago, before the web, now firmly connected to cell phones even in remote regions, was built out.” Like other effective modern day campaigns, technology played a critical role from start to finish — from communications to logistics to reporting and media — but was neither an end nor a strategy onto itself. At the end of the day, this crew understood that people are ultimately motivated by other people, not by technology.

So the 350 team prepared organizing guides, broke down the event planning process into nine clear steps, organized trainings all over the world, listened and communicated in more than 17 languages, spent a good part of their days on the phone (ok, skype) with organizers, and ultimately split up and went straight to every region of the planet to begin spreading the word and identifying local partners, local leaders, and support. They even sent McKibben on an exhausting global speaking tour that rivaled that of a U.S. presidential candidate running for global office.

They did all of this organizing faster and more efficiently by utilizing technology. In fact, as McKibben said, it’s unlikely that 350 could have even left the station at a time with any less global connectivity. “We know that the internet is far from perfect,” McKibben said. “We’ve lost contact with organizers for days at a time as the system has gone down in one poor country after another. And we had all kinds of reports from African and Asian cities of organizers sneaking into the one 5-star hotel in town to nab a little wireless so they could send us photos.”

However it should not be overlooked that 350.org’s organizing efforts relied heavily on tried and true organizing principles — electrified with modern tactics. 350 coordinators crafted a simple and easily communicated message, built capacity through a variety of in-person and remote trainings, produced useful materials in multiple languages, and most importantly invested in one-on-one communications in an era where bulk communication via email lists and social media can seem so effortless.

bird’s-eye view:

The resurgent progressive movement needs to think more long-term, come together quickly, and systematically build a Progressive Legislative Exchange to share and hone a steady, perpetual stream of the best, actionable ideas that progressives and liberals, near and far, have to offer for public and private sector problem-solving.

the size of the quotes reflect both article length and my judgment on the writers’ mental picture of 2030.

(•) high-angle view:

At first, [creative commons's idea for sharing eco-patents] might seem more restrictive than the Eco-Patent Commons, but the increased flexibility (companies are free to charge fees or not, and can put restrictions on uses) might mean that more companies will take part and that, in the end, more green patents will be widely used.

@yokoono vs @AlexSteffen (true story mix)

11 things you can do to stop global warming now

green is in and everyone has their favorite eco-tips. here are mine.

1. buy peabody energy and shut it down

2. change water pricing so what meat animals drink comes out of our bathing allowance

3. plant an old growth forest

4. buy america one million electric buses and trolleys for its next birthday

5. scrap your car and with the metal build nice folding electric bicycles, with baskets, for all your neighbors

6. scrap your neighbors’ cars and build a wind turbine

7. for all houses and buildings, flip a coin. heads is an extensive retrofit. tails… is death. dismantle the structure, carry away every piece for better uses, and the owner(s) get awesome friendly ultragreen living/working quarters in a better location in exchange. 2 out of 3 tosses is ok. 5 out of 9 is too many.

8. to manage the waste stream, big polluters and trash producers automatically get a new house, built with whatever comes out the tailpipe of their organization

9. give everyone a pedal zeppelin

10. stop blowing people up

11. eat food, not much, mostly plants; drink grain spirits

what are your favorite tips?

want to be bored by website minutiae? read on

the time has come to begin thinking in a very casual mode about how the links are organized on this site.

currently they are arranged — no, really, they are. shut up — approximately according to how likely they are to have forced me to write something. so it’s like — ranked — from, say, red orange yellow blue, to green? or maybe that’s how they started and then there were jokes about that, and, sort of, thematic articles, tonal stuff like ‘fatima the spinner and the tent’ or ‘the man who planted trees’ that are both lessons i’m not learning but i really really want to learn.

in much the way, by-the-way, that i have been making a real dent in one of my two copies of the worldchanging book, and learning that i love skimming books and each quick pass is a little more informative. that’s news i can use.

what’s about to change with the links is i’m about to add several dozen new ones. i’m switching from the ‘nothing but sources’ approach to begin using concentrated willpower, aka NGOs and other group efforts, to stand in for (and hopefully realize; i’m much too busy to audit the work) domestiforeign policy of the pirate country (‘plunderkeel’ for now, by me) from this geographic perspective.

yeah, i know, right, it’s hard to live in the USA and be into the whole economies of scale thing, and the need for coordinated industrial solutions to earthly dilemmas thing, it’s hard to have a whole strategic whatchacallit that is all of forward-thinking, pluralistically present-sensitive, individuated, and functions as something like a shadow-gov policy. base. thing.

especially if you have like maybe, generously, half the attention span (and read speed) of a mid-pack lawyer. and don’t go to cocktail parties.

what i’d like to do is something like this: get some useful categories, i’d like them to be globally useful, and then fill them with US-centered-but-not-exclusive groups that are on a good track and aren’t fake. i am well aware that what i want from the next decade and this quarter century are not what many big membership orgs think practical — i really don’t know how we’re going to resolve this tension between mammoth fundraising shortfalls and the need to lead plastic rich people to the water of the future that is in danger because they’re incredibly fucking wrong.

‘flattery will get you nowhere,’ sense two. (hello! have you http://tr.im/readplanb?)

truly… i’m not quite settled with the twitter-jotting thing, using it as a scratchpad makes me feel guilty, everything makes me feel guilty, everything makes me feel guilty, but i am closing in on doing the comparison shopping of the non-insane, non-revolving political parties and use their platforms to build a shambles of my own which of course nobody else needs to worry about let alone adopt.

that’s progress.

(•) ’scratchpad’ no, doodlepad. there’s nothing like del.icio.us happening with @pludk. it’s totally unsearchable by subject. it’s… chewing.

http:/peterbrooks/theemptyspace/firstparagraph/

i can take
any empty
space and call it
a bare stage.

a man walks
across this emp
ty space whilst some
one else is watch
ing him and this
is all that is
needed for
an act of
theatre
to be en
gaged.

yet when
we talk
about
theatre
this is not
quite what
we mean.

red
curtains,
spotlights,
blank
verse,
laughter,
darkness,
these are
all con
fusedly
superim
posed in a
messy
image
covered
by one
all-pur
pose
word.

we talk
of the
cinema
killing the
theatre
and
in that
phrase we
refer
to the
theatre
as it was
when the
cinema
was born

a theatre
of box
office,
foyer,
tip-up
seats, foot
lights, scene
changes,
inter
vals, mu
sic, as
though the
theatre
was
by
ve
ry
de
fi
ni
tion
these and nothing
more.

‘Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Great Integral Spirit that expresses itself through what [they] know as creation…

embarked on a bold and risky experiment in reflective consciousness: bringing forth a species able to step back and to reflect on creation in awe and wonder and to participate as a conscious co-creator in the continued creative unfolding. [Tiger salamanders] are that species.

[Tiger salamanders'] reflective [skin] gives [them] the capacity to choose [their] future with [sparkly] collective intent. It was a risky experiment, however, because the capacity for [sticky]-awareness gives [them] an ego that can run out of control if it forgets it exists only as part of a larger [wetland].

In [their] earliest days, [tiger salamanders] raised [their] children collectively in the clan, tribe, or [egg clump], initiating them to the ways of life and the need to care for [their] Earth Mother as she in turn cares for [them, providing siblings to eat].

Over millennia, as [their wiggly] consciousness was awakening and [their] capacities for self-direction grew, [they] learned to communicate through speech, master fire, domesticate plants and animals, and construct houses of skins, wood, stone, and dried mud. [They] developed the arts of pottery, painting, weaving, and carving. [They] undertook vast continental and transcontinental migrations to populate the planet and adapted to vastly different physical topographies and climates. [They] created complex languages and social codes that allowed for life in larger communities.

Then, some 5,000 years ago, something began to go terribly wrong. [They] turned from the ways of Earth Community and embraced the ways of Empire. It was a time of separation and forgetting. Community, partnership, and the celebration of life gave way to individualism, domination, and violence.

The few expropriated the [worms] of the many. The masculine drove out the feminine. [They] continued to worship the Sky Father, but turned against [their] Earth Mother. [They] came to value the power to kill and destroy more highly than the ability to create and nurture life. Conquest became the measure of greatness. Economies came to be based on servitude and eventually money became the prime arbiter of [amphibious] relationships.

Consider the dynamics inherent in a dominator system. With a few on the top and the many on the bottom, everyone is placed in competition with everyone else for the favored positions and the bonds of caring and sharing are broken. The creative energy of the species is redirected from securing the well-being of the [pond] to advancing the technological instruments of war and the social instruments of domination.

The winners expropriate the available resources to maintain the system of domination. Positions of power are too often claimed by the most ruthless and psychologically damaged members of society. And so it has been for 5,000 years.…

In the past 100 years, [these salamanders] have achieved technological mastery beyond the imagination of previous generations. Yet, lacking in the wisdom of place and community that is the heritage of indigenous [herptiles], the cultures [they] call mainstream have lost their way — forgetting what it means to be [cold-blooded] and denying [their] connection to the web of planetary life. The time has come to rediscover [their amphibianity] and bring [themselves] back into balance with [their] living Earth Mother. Creation has presented [them] with [their] final examination to determine whether [they] are a species worthy of survival. [They] must not, need not, fail.

sounds tough, i hope they can do it, i like salamanders

tiny e-goal 3: ecology equity empowerment

i saved this for last because — i already wrote about it — and i feel like it’s the heaviest, for other people, the most meaningful, but to me it’s tied with “space permitting” because what i’m up to and what room and need there is for me to do it are obviously very close.

these are the decisive times. for two years before the 02008 election i wrote that, that the next US president, probably two-term, and attending congresses would make choices that would shape life on earth for hundreds of years or longer.

who was elected didn’t change the truth of that. what they thought they’d be doing in their term of office didn’t change that. as the campaign went on, none of the three contenders last year could have been blind to the epochal morass that was waiting on the desk, no matter how hard they worked to play to the crowds’ expectations.

“ecology, equity, empowerment” was — ok. let’s call this the 4th wordstream. the last one had like this IKEA feel, with the nice green geyser water filling the top quarter, photographed in the real actual yellowstone national park after we were attacked by bison. in the sidebar i made a little charm bracelet, put icons, what were they? —values? ideals?

i don’t do snapshots. i don’t have that stuff. i wanted to include green for all and there were these triplets and — why — what was that about — some dumb idea — yeah well it was — so i think then i went looking and uh.

a couple years ago. on their site they had some photos of people workin’ puttin’ buildings in condition for the near future and one said,

ECOLOGY EQUITY EMPOWERMENT

(was that the order?) and i thought… yes.

is it a labor twist on the people, planet, profit idea? ‘bottom up’ this time? (am i really saying that profit’s only for piranha? or that G4A did/would? sheesh.)

actually i think it clarifies it — taking the principle out of the corporation, out of money handling, and into another way of looking at policy, a real public complement for it.

• what do people need? empowerment, yeah? facilities, rights, remedies, and fusion jazz.
• what’s the planet need? ecological thinking. better homes, better gardens, pedal zeppelins.
• what do profits need? people don’t know this as well but profits are happiest being shared with all the people who helped create them. let’s call that share equity and hope equity isn’t insulted.

ok so now i guess we have the first derivative of the triple bottom line™ and we can think what to do with it, apart from giant futuristic super-popular next-gen labor cyberorganizing — which would be great — and feel great — and people so deserve to feel great after this long con game — i was thinking more like what i would do with it, ok?

i have no idea.

what i thought was to use it as a lens for criticism, analysis, brainstorming, all that. make sure each of the three are covered even in the most cramped tweet. it matters that there are three: further back i wanted to quit my sad dichotomy addiction, so i tried to imagine triangular logic that was deeper than yes-no-maybe and more fun than game theory with a playground ball. i can’t even remember how that went. i think it was pretty simple. “is there another option? are ‘yes’ and ‘no’ really what they seem here?” you wouldn’t think you had to say those things.

yeah i probably got my grade school “planet, world, globe” economic model out of this too. like i said i wouldn’t walk across a bridge i’d built.

i’ve seen worse checklists.

tiny e-goal 1: no simple “lookit this” tweets, space permitting

space permitting that’s got more to it than the 25 words or die of the twitter immersion. which has been real good for getting more direct writing. i don’t have a big vocab in practice, that’s fixed however many newer harder texts i read, the difference comes in application and i don’t ask much. i think. i probably ask more than average. but not on the particular point: that what i build is one or both of useful tool or material.

let’s get the easy part out of the way. it’s kidwork to add a thoughtful layer or an angle to a short recommendation. for instance here was a greenpeace note

U.N. needs more muscle in environment fight: study – http://tinyurl.com/yj66qgq

which took shortlink and verbatim article headline from a finance feed, and it’s fine — i was interested! i read more! — and then — in the last paragraph a big US blind spot was revealed, that i thought changed the opening. it was easy to fit it in.

study sez UN needs better green coordination. who’s against? “United States, China and Russia” [link] (via @Greenpeace)

“russia,” huh, wow, they never make it on US radar — we get our steady diet of ‘chindia’-goating — they take our jobs! they pollute our planet! they they they they. workers. consumers. poor folk. not energy exporters and houses of finance.

nobody has sympathy enough for the filthy rich to sit down and shut up about the future.

ok so that’s the not-so-simple link. to highlight the buried lede and see what i can for context.

beyond twitter and equivalent bumper-stickerism, writing or talking, how do i avoid going too far, pretending i’ve done more analysis than i have? shut the motor mouth as it were. don’t poke or bug central people even when they’re asking for it with sloppy work on socialnets. —”work that looks sloppy to me.”

that’s tougher because my outer-social-spaceman location means i have no sense of what i give or what people need. we’re still getting up steam, really starting now to feel the pressure, and many are going bonkers, naturally, there being pretty weak real links among us, pretty much we pledge allegiance to “one imagination, indecipherable” and all that, and for a long time this morning i pictured us in space, all huddled together by the campfire of the sun with our backs to the cold dark lifeless universe, telling local stories cuz our biochemical reality fills our senses and bellies and makes us laugh and fight and we love it.

remember this you girls you boys
night is as much bigger as
it’s far away but it comes nearer.
all of life, shadowy
or rainbow bright,
is day and
can die and
night can
get us.

when i dream of adding to the conversation, i supplant people, i push them out. when i think about it, awake, present, i know that what i know will leave with me, and what i don’t know will be tomorrow.

‘Many people heap the bank bailouts (TARP) with the fiscal stimulus. This is a mistake

that’s easy to make. But the point needs to be clarified so more people don’t needlessly suffer. It’s up to Obama to articulate the differences in policy so the country can muddle through the tough days ahead. The problem is, Obama is afraid to use his skills as a communicator, because he thinks his message will offend financial industry constituents who wield tremendous power at the White House and on Capital Hill. The bankers and brokerage mandarins are more than happy with the present arrangement, which means that the conveyor-belt connecting the US Treasury to Wall Street will continue to operate at full-throttle diverting ungodly sums of money to broken banks and financial institutions rather than for unemployment benefits, work programs, and state aid.

leaving aside those who have armed their families against the hyperinflation rapture of 2012, what i love is to think of ways to paraphrase the balanced budget belt-tightening autopilot-ness of the public discussion.

we can’t afford to put out the fire — we were just robbed!

or the other angle

my need is real, it hurts bad but the bizpeople are right, i don’t want to look like someone who lies to get money

or the reality of which pols are rightly frightened

i will take whatever you can give and then say you caused the devastation by helping people i don’t like, as demonstrated by the ease with which you helped me

which is to say

i hate my life and you are part of it

die

so i don’t have to

america’s positive outlook in context: animals mainly show their teeth when cornered