It’s a nice start: $2,508 raised so far. However, it’s not that long before the end of this campaign. Unless more contributions, especially some big ones, start rolling in, it’s not going to make it.

Therefore I’m adding additional incentive levels, including some really tasty ones. For example, I am seriously considering making the original artwork for my controversial “terror widows” and Pat Tillman cartoons among the rewards at the upper levels.

If you’re considering supporting the campaign, bear in mind that you don’t get charged at all unless I make the total $40,000 goal, and that the collapse of traditional print media enterprises means that the only way unusual and risky projects like this book about what a revolution would look like here can get done is with support of individual readers.

Thanks to all those who have donated.

And if you can’t donate, please tweet/Facebook/LinkedIn/Pinterest, etc.

After a hiatus I brought my cartoon auctions back last week. The winner paid $126, and will get to choose the topic of a cartoon. Not only that, he keeps the original artwork and has the right to reprint it online or in print in the publication of his choice.

Bidding was pretty active, so I thought I’d give everyone another chance.

This video was shot at Occupy the East End’s General Assembly in Sag Harbor, New York eight days ago. I have been active in many causes since I was a kid, but never have I witnessed such a brazen example of co-option.

Please disseminate to everyone in and interested in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Thank you.

APRIL 8, 2012—FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OCCUPY THE EAST END TO MOVEON.ORG:

WE WILL NOT BE HIJACKED!

We had been silent. We had hoped that the organizations that are attempting to co-opt and dilute the Occupy Wall Street movement would stop. The Occupy movements across the country are fighting for better lives of the 99% of Americans who work for a living. We had hoped that these interlopers would recognize that what they are doing is wrong.

But they have not done the right thing. Now it’s time to speak out and fight back.

A Democratic Party-affiliated organization, MoveOn.org, is actively attempting to hijack the Occupy Wall Street movement. This brazen co-option attempt began by mimicking the Occupy movement’s terminology and rhetoric, not to embrace it, but to channel our movement’s energies toward backing Democratic candidates and policies. MoveOn says: “MoveOn stands in solidarity with the brave protesters at Occupy Wall Street, but we’re not Occupy Wall Street and we’re not trying to become Occupy Wall Street.” If that’s true, why are they posting articles with titles like “Which Corporations Occupy Congress?” and sponsoring events with titles like “We Are The 99%?” This is “Astroturfing”* at its worst. MoveOn is creating confusion on purpose.

Ground Zero in MoveOn’s takeover attempt of Occupy is focused on the eastern end of Long Island in New York. Occupy the East End represents the OWS movement in the Hamptons and Shelter Island, which happen to be the most popular summer playground for the 1%.

Its most recent attempt to co-opt our movement is by scheduling a “99% Spring Training” by a MoveOn front group called “99% Spring” on April 15, 2012 at the same location and time where Occupy the East End has been holding its General Assemblies since the group formed in October of 2011. Occupy the East End delivered an unprecedented unanimous block—every OEE member at the GA issued a personal block—to a MoveOn representative who “asked” OEE to participate—after MoveOn had scheduled the event. The MoveOn rep refused to change the date or time and informed OEE that “you will be taken over [by MoveOn] whether you like it or not.”

We cannot be bought! We will not be co-opted!

Moveon.org is a political lobbying organization that routinely backs Democratic candidates and was originally funded by the billionaire George Soros. MoveOn.org is considered the “lead lobbying group” for Obama’s reelection campaign, and has overt ties to various Wall Street entities.

Occupy the East End is in no way affiliated with MoveOn.org, nor does it wish to become so. The attempt to take over OEE is a hostile takeover attempt to capitalize on the Occupy movement as a whole. Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the East End as a movement rejects the political system as a broken structure that needs to be overhauled from the bottom up.

Call To ACTION

Occupy the East End urgently requests the support of all Occupations and occupiers to rebuff this attempt to CO-OPT OUR movement. All Occupiers are asked to join us at the Windmill on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor, NY on April 15, 2012 at 12:30 pm to make your voice heard at the General Assembly of the REAL Occupy movement!

*Astroturfing: The creation of lobbying groups that appear to be separate from corporate interests, but that are actually funded by them. As opposed to “grassroots” political activism.

With SOPA and its evil twin PIPA dead in the water (or so it would seem) Congress is again using its powers of necromancy to unleash yet another internet killing bill.  If you thought government overreach at the behest of the corporations it serves had surpassed China and Iran in terms of surveillance, censorship and a downright contempt for freedom of speech and privacy, think again.  Just don’t put those thoughts in an e-mail, blog post or comment, Facebook update or Tweet because:

A significant problem I’ve been having is understanding the mindset of the people who still stand behind Obama. From no metric I can conceive of has his presidency been exceptional. On the core progressive issues, his has been a remarkably unimpressive (at best) outing. The defenses I have run into for his term boil down to a single major premise: He’s the best we’ve got, and unless you pick him, even though he’s the lesser of two evils, you will ruin this country because of your selfishness.

I was going to write that such an argument is false. But I had a brain wave last night.

The argument isn’t false. It’s wrong, but it isn’t wrong because of an intention to deceive or because the person advancing the argument is stupid. The issue simply isn’t being framed correctly. So here goes.

Everyone who has ever known a drug addict — if you ever knew someone who couldn’t put down the vicodin, the scotch bottle, the needle, or the scratch tickets — put your hand up. (No one can see you, so put your hand back down.)

Most people who have been pulled into an addict’s life know what happens. Things start to disappear. Even if you own very little, you can have a lot of things disappear before you come to the moment where you start doing an inventory and discover a whole lot of stuff has evaporated. If you’re lucky, you catch the addict in the act. You tail them to the race track, you walk in on them in the bathroom having a drink from the bottle in the toilet tank, etc. And, if you’re able to, you hand the addict an ultimatum: It stops today, right now. If you ever see them doing it again, no matter what excuse they present, you will leave, you will kick them out, you will drive to the police station and fill out a report. And then, you do it.

By all the accounts I’ve read, this is a profoundly difficult thing to do. That’s why there are so many instances of addicts conning their friends, loved ones, neighbors, etc., over and over. It is hard to amputate a significant portion of your life, just like that.

The politicians who have been getting elected are, for the most part, just like addicts. They get elected, and re-elected, by the voters having a lesser of two evils moment of weakness. Having an addict in the house or kicking him out and watching his whole life go to hell on him? Well, maybe he will change this time, and I wasn’t all that attached to grandma’s silver, anyway. I mean, sure, she handed it to me on her deathbed, but, well, my addict really means to change this time. And if I kick him out, then I’m being a bad person, I’m being unreasonable (wait for it), I’m not being bipartisan about all this. I should reach across the aisle, you know. Because it would be the height of folly to pull the rug out from under him now, when he’s so close to cleaning up and flying right.

The politicians are not, if we keep picking the lesser of two evils, going to eventually one day produce a miracle of statesmanship for us, just like most addicts don’t suddenly stop drinking, gambling, whatevering, just because someone told them they had to. After the uncontrolled binge of secret prisons, unlawful detentions, murders-by-drone, stop and frisks, etc., if some politician came forward and tried to argue that the past 20 years had all been a mistake, he’d be dismissed as a dreamer or a lunatic. Pedantic lectures would commence about how the candidate simply doesn’t understand about politics. He’s naive. And so forth.

One thing I run into in the narratives from reformed addicts is a simple enough statement: They almost always say something about how they wish they’d gotten sorted out sooner. How they wish they hadn’t had to spent three years or 30 years slowly losing everything before they finally were able to put themselves together. And that’s the point I’ve reached, because that’s the point the country has reached. Why drag out the remaining descent any longer? Because we’re super-duper hoping someone will leap in, putting right what once went wrong (and hoping each time that the next leap will be the leap home)?

We all know that each “settled for the lesser” only brings us closer to the bottom, and along the way, there has been decades of misery and hardship. Let’s finally take the handbrake off and let the maniacs ruin everything once and for all. At least we can limit the amount of time we all spend suffering.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a decision that could only be described in three letters starting with W and ending with F, to give police the final authority to authorize strip-searches of people arrested for any offense. Broken tail light? Bend over and spread ’em. That goes for you too, Deadbeat Dad, shoplifting cat food granny and the rest of you guilty-until-proven-innocent 99 percenters. Bend over, squat and cough. Your body is the new battleground in the “War on Terror” and the 13 million of you arrested each year are now dungeon fodder play things for uniformed goons on the public payroll. Where once we asked for your cooperation, we now demand your abject humiliation. So if you’re getting any funny ideas about venturing out of the unheated comfort of your soon to be foreclosed upon home, whether it’s to drive with an expired license to the food bank, or more criminally, decide to exercise your democratic right to assemble in the vicinity of a rich person, be prepared not just for water cannons and rubber bullets, but a full-on finger raping by the ever lengthening arms of the law, whose weapons now perform double duty as lethal sex toys.

Your government (or whatever you call the publicly funded entity that exists wholly and unabashedly to ensure the unimpeded transfer of the nation’s wealth into the select coffers of the gangsters on its payroll and their corporate cronies) wants to fuck you. There’s no other way of putting it. They want to fuck you in the worst possible way. Literally, lewdly and above all, painfully. Think joyless dungeon master/camp guard giving your genitals the taser treatment kind of painful. You realize, of course, under your tormenter’s pleather gimp suit is some blandly visaged, pot-bellied technocrat hoping to be home in time to watch NCIS with the wife while you are left to whimper in your restraints.

Once content to “screw” you, or just fuck you over, our “elected” oligarchs have now upped the bar on their depraved appetite for torture porn with a ready army of doctors, soldiers, law enforcement officials and airport screeners to carry out their perverse handiwork. We can now add the judiciary at its highest level to this motley mix of state-sanctioned sex offenders.

It’s bad enough that air travelers have to submit a XXX-Ray or a rough probing molestation by TSA officials to ensure the absence of explosive contraband in their hoo-hoos, or that abortion seekers in some states are forcibly raped with sonic dildos. You thought that Republican presidential candidates making misogyny and homophobia the centerpiece of their campaign trail hate speech was reason enough to fear for an encroaching Idiocracy ruled over by a posse of evil clowns. Now comes the crowning jewel of a full-blown gulag police state in the form of a rubber gloved, raised finger salute to the Bill of Rights and all the other shredder-ready old documents that once served to pre-empt the abuse of power and provide the checks and balances necessary to maintain a republic. The vigilance of The Founding Fathers is clearly no match for the brain trust who brought us the Gaza strip, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay. That the puerile raunch one associates with ‘gonzo’ and straight-to-DVD ‘grindhouse’ porn now serves as blueprints for law enforcement and social engineering in the age of ‘Hope’ is just something else to choke on like a rubber gag ball restraint.

In the swinging, wife-swapping spirit of ‘bipartisanship’, five Republican and four Democratic appointees have proven they have bigger fish to fry than upholding some shredder-ready old document. By adding DWD (Driving While ‘Do-Able’) to the roster of punishable offenses like DWB (Driving While Black) law enforcement will have even further impetus to be discerning, heat packing meat graders deciding which ‘cuts’ to inspect for the mildest of infractions. Giving police free rein to play the Officer Frisky role in ‘Caged Cuties III’ is just one of the many (and hardly unintended) outcomes of a legal amendment meant to pre-empt civil strife in the event of more robust ‘Occupy’ or anti-war movements. Or should any of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” among the 99-ers finally realize that their humiliation will follow them to the grave and rise up, zombie style to snack on their former overlords as if they were delicious ‘pink slime’ school lunches. In which case, the Supreme Court is ready to rubber stamp into law anything to remove existing legal or constitutional impediments to a scorched-earth policy of zero tolerance to dissent. Constitutional safeguards like the 4th Amendment and all its blah-blah-blahing about unreasonable searches and seizures be damned.

What US leaders openly encourage overseas in the form of civil disobedience, they will not tolerate at home. An ‘Arab Spring’ for our colonial subjects overseas, whose dissent we can work into a neo-liberal framework and impose austerity and military rule later on. For American dissenters, even ones who express an anti-authoritarian bent with a broken bicycle bell, its a swift jack boot to the genitals.