Gary Heidt - Guitar, Vocals Orin Buck - Bass David Gould - Drums Rich Gross - Banjo, Steel, Vocals Matt Metzgar - Percussion, Vocals, Drums Produced by Orin Buck and Fist of Kindness Recorded by Orin Buck Mixed by Orin Buck and Gary Heidt ALBUM NOTES: THE DEAD AND THE POWERLESS by Richard Cummings (excerpt) Let there be no mistake, the old world of America is over. There is no bringing it back to life. The fanfare and pretense is just that, a flurry of activity to pretend that life is going on as normal, football games, rock concerts, hundreds of millions for a pitcher, new models of cars, SATs, the stock market, jingle bells, the news, job interviews, elections, the National Book Award. And oh, yes, bailouts. A czar for this, a czar for that. The Republic of Bailout Land is the temporary nation that lies somewhere between the dead and what lies beyond. But don’t wait for a messiah to resurrect the fetid corpse. No election will produce that. American politics is a dead end, a grand illusion of smoke and mirrors that captivates the naïve and engages the deceitful. The game of power is but a façade that hides a barren landscape of decay. And the worship of wealth, that Golden Calf of pretense and illusion, has caused the collapse of everything that had been worthy of our admiration. But in a land of scams, the greatest scam of all time, far bigger than Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme, went virtually unnoticed at the time of the swindle perpetrated on the American people by their elected officials, led by the Great Idiot, Hank Paulsen. After rejecting Paulsen’s three page memo giving him total power of how to allocate the 700 billion dollar bailout of the banks, Congress went ahead and let the banks line up at the window and draw out billions of dollars to save themselves from their self-inflicted catastrophe, without any accountability. The purpose of the money was to get the banks to start lending again, to each other and to businesses, but instead, they have not started lending. A Harvard Law School professor with no subpoena power has the daunting task to find out what they did with the money. When asked what his behemoth bank, J. P. Morgan Chase, did with its bailout bucks, swashbuckling CEO Jamie Dimon quipped, “Some of it we lent and some of it we didn’t lend.” The tax on tea imposed by the British on the colonists, when compared to this, was ludicrously miniscule. Yet it led to the Boston Tea Party and ultimately, the American Revolution. An enraged CEO shouted on Fox News that if there could be a march on Washington for civil rights, then we should have a march on Washington to get the money back. After all, it’s ours, not the banks’. But because the American people are both dead and powerless, the scam goes on. The explanation of why nothing can be done is that the money is gone, so there is no point in trying to get it back. Well, how about nationalizing the banks, confiscating the bonuses and firing the CEOs. Give them a mandate to start lending. By all rights, the Americans should turn off the football game or the moronic sports shows with ex-jocks shouting at each other and take to the streets, marching to Washington to demand the heads of all those who perpetrated the swindle. Follow them to their homes and shout at them, “Crook, liar, phony?” That beats shooting your wife any day. Revolution Road leads to the capital, not to a dead end suburb. Pull the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, cut off all foreign aid (imagine continuing to give aid to Musharraf in Pakistan in the tune of billions of dollars without figuring out he was swindling you for six years), take that money and get rid of the deficit and pay down the debt. In case no one noticed, Americans have become indentured servants, paying for bloated college tuition, ludicrous medical insurance premiums, insane property taxes and medications to combat insomnia and hysteria engendered by the stress-filled lives that people lead in America. This is no normal recession. It is the end of a way of life that can no longer be sustained. It is dead, over. The world that is powerless to be born is so only because of the mass deceptions perpetrated on the people by the combination of corporate and state power. We are beyond reform. The only change that will work is revolution. Read the rest at www.evergreenreview.com To think that the individual is being liquidated is overly optimistic... rather the things that history has condemned are dragged around dead, neutralized and impotent as ignominious ballast. -- Theodor W. Adorno Contact Fist of Kindness: garyheidt@gmail.com fistofkindness.com myspace.com/fistofkindness Thanks to Sanae Maeda, Gary Milstein, Richard Cummings