New Poem WINNING UGLY 2020

Inspired by a Rolling Stones song from thirty-five years ago.

Pour my endless money into TV commercials
Hope voters stay low information
Respond like lab rats to stimulation
Give them some exhilaration
>
Watch me put Tweedle-Dum down
As I, Tweedle-Dee, paint him as lying clown
Though he says the same things about women
And people of color that I do
>
In a debate, I’ll defend my misdeeds
Then, I’ll pay for a video carefully edited
Making me look like the winner I wasn’t
>
I’ll spend my way to the top
I’ll make liberals cry in despair
I want no taxes raised on me
As a billionaire, I consider this fair
>
If you dare get in my way,
I’ll force you to sign a NDA
And I’ll have you stopped and frisked
On your way home after you’re disinvited
From taking part in my reboot of America

Remember the Bonus Army of 1932 in wake of Occupy crackdowns.

Below is a history lesson that, ideally, should be read by people like NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and L.A. OBSERVED business columnist Mark Lacter (both of which fulminated on the Occupy movement last week, throwing out the usual "dirty, intellectually incoherent, unrealistic hippies" stereotypes).

Wikipedia entry on the Bonus Army of World War One veterans who occupied Washington D.C. in 1932:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

From the Wikipedia article:
Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the infantry and cavalry supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.
A second, smaller Bonus March in 1933 at the start of the Roosevelt Administration was defused with promises instead of military action. In 1936, Congress overrode President Franklin D. Roosevelt's veto to pay the veterans their bonus years early.

Observations for this Thanksgiving Day.

Thanksgiving originally was a holiday celebrating diverse cultures being able to sit together and share a meal, marinating in good will towards people other than themselves.  In 2011, Thanksgiving is a holiday where employees of megastores get to curtail their family time to go to work very late/very early to service
consumers on what is now known as "Black Friday."

"Black Friday" was once an inside-business term for the Friday-after-Thanksgiving sales.  In recent years, the store-opening times were switched to ungodly hours like 5:00 a.m.  This year, because megastores expect the economy to improve enough to strip $20 billion from consumer wallets, Black Friday has turned into Black Thursday-and-Friday.

In 2011, families will sacrifice their family togetherness/good will to stand in front of megastores most of Thanksgiving Day to enter stores as early as 10:00 p.m to buy high-tech items at low low prices.  Or, if they're interested in shopping at Best Buy, they're already sleeping outside or in tents--a method of occupying public space that's more acceptable to government/corporate cultures than the Occupy movement that's being beaten/pepper-sprayed in a city near you.

Speaking of Occupy Los Angeles as it celebrates Thanksgiving before its inevitable forced retreat from L.A.'s City Hall: it's rather pitiful that the city of Los Angeles is unwilling to heed the economic inequity message of the movement instead of making half-assed offers of dollar-a-year store space in the L.A. Mall underneath the Fletcher Bowron Plaza.

[Sidebar: I'm imagining how quickly Occupy Los Angeles would have been crushed by the LAPD/L.A. City Council if the tents/protestors had appeared in, say, Beverly Hills or Century City rather than around City Hall--a part of Downtown that hasn't yet become completely gentrified.]

And, closing this post, here's a Hall of Shame re naysayers towards the Occupy movement:
1. CHUCK HENRY--everybody's favorite blowdried ex-travel host (EYE ON L.A.) turned inexplicably long-running KNBC-TV anchorman made a sort of yucky smiley-face the other night when introducing a story about Occupy L.A.; it was the most contemptuous "they're a bunch of dirty hippies" grin/grimace worthy of the next person on this list.
2. MICHAEL BLOOMBERG--curious if anyone caught MSNBC Tuesday morning to see the grotesque farce of the New York City mayor defending his recent misbehavior to Andrea Mitchell; Ms. Mitchell is married to one-time economic majordomo Alan Greenspan, who helped create the masters-and-serfs feudalism that's the United States in 2011.
3. BERNARD PARKS/THE LOS ANGELES TIMES--the ex-LAPD chief trotted out a whopper of an unlikely scenario--that "neo-Nazis" could one day occupy the space around City Hall ; the city's Newspaper of Record thought Parks' overstatement was so nice, it repeated it twice (both in a "news" article and an editorial).

Various links on the end of Act One of Occupy Wall Street.

Glenn Greenwald of SALON.com: http://www.salon.com/2011/11/15/a_police_raid_suffused_with_symbolism/singleton/

The Wall Street-friendly NEW YORK magazine:
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/can-occupy-wall-street-avenge-its-eviction.html

Re the fate of the OWS library after the Zuccotti Park raid in NYC:
http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2011/11/16/ows_library_reports_missing_books_property_.html

The LOS ANGELES TIMES on "Where to go after Zuccotti Park?":
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-occupy-future-20111116,0,5328113.story?page=1&obref=obnetwork

From DEMOCRACY NOW:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/16/police_crackdowns_on_occupy_protests_from

From THE VILLAGE VOICE:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/11/occupy_wall_str_32.php