Breakfast in America

Served by BF Koch

ITITY Arts and Education Editor

Wake up kids, it’s time for breakfast. And you know what they say, you can’t make an omelet without killing half the population of some third-world shithole you probably can’t pronounce or even find on a map, stealing all their resources, and leaving a toxic waste-dump no one can possibly live in where their country used to be. So drink your orange juice and don’t worry, they never complain.

The adults have decided to cut your lunch programs so their rich friends don’t have to pay so many taxes, so eat up. And remember, the ramblings of a Nobel Prize-winning economist divided by zero– which is all you’re going to be left with–is still just irrational gibberish. So don’t be so quick to spend that money the tooth fairy left you. If you want to go to college, you’re going to need it.

Hey, boys and girls, here’s a game you haven’t learned yet called conspiratorial craziness. “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi,” say it out loud three times and the ghost of Richard Nixon will appear. He’ll scare your hamster right out of his cage, and your dog won’t come home for a week, but you can bring him to show-and-tell if you’d like. Just get your mom to sign the subpoena.

Hurry up then, you don’t want to miss the bus. Off to school now, and remember what the teacher said about not smoking near that factory on the other side of the playground fence. You know, the one filled with explosives. And don’t forget your ballistic back packs; you never know when you might get in the way of someone else’s second amendment rights.

So study hard, take those tests, and learn smart stuff because, oh yeah we forgot to tell you, you’ll be in charge of this mess tomorrow. And take the long way home…

Disneyland it Ain’t

Contributed by B F Koch

ITITY Cultural Affairs Correspondent

Along the meandering midway of our abandoned amusement park nation, we see ourselves in mass media fun-house mirrors where talk radio hucksters spin cotton-candy conspiracies and cable news clowns reflect imbecilic confections of fear and suspicion.

On the ramshackle county-fair carousel a restless crowd of backward-baseball-cap rubes, meth-addled moms, and their several-generations-removed-from-the-ability-to-reason offspring, still reach for the brass-ring fantasy that gets further away with each creaking turn.

The sideshow pundits pitch their inbred opinions, the frat boy ex-president paints portraits of puppies, and the fortune teller sees a dark future of foreclosure where grifters in business suits patiently circle like buzzards in the grey sky above.

A chainsaw sculptor turns a piece of dead tree into a trailer-park totem, while down at the derelict arcade of bankrupt dreams the proud tattooed-and-pierced percent desperately try what’s left of their luck at a rigged game of chance they’ve already lost.

America, the exceptionally banal, heck-of-a-job country you’d like to have a beer with, a raucous carnival of corruption that refuses to fold its tent, where the lines are all long, the rides are all rusty, and if you try to cut in, you’ll likely get shot.

Empire of Emptiness

Dispatched by B F Koch

ITITY Current Events Columnist



Heartland USA

From our oppressive foreign policy, to simple disputes over parking spaces, we are a country increasingly incapable of controlling our aggressive inclinations, where the disaffected, potentially dangerous, individual is only dimly discernible amid the mindless search-for-a-motive-reveals-only-madness momentum of everyday American crazy.

Throughout our violent winner-take-all history we have been comfortably unwilling to confront the needless suffering of countless souls caused by the conquest of other cultures, yet are still shocked when the promise of a more perfect union is periodically shattered by the awful anguish of our own homegrown horrors.

We continue to contest the meaning of a cryptic passage on a piece of old parchment, steadfastly clinging to our fictionalized flintlock-over-every-fireplace frontier past, while facing a desperate future in a suspicious stand-your-ground shadow of a society where fearful people live separate lives across a lonely locked-and-loaded landscape of pervasive paranoia.

Karl Rove’s Head Explodes

Special Election Night Coverage by B F Koch

ITITY Political Commentator

The strangest and most shocking half hour in television history ended just before midnight Tuesday when the repulsive Fox news pundit and sleazy Republican Party strategist was forced to face a failure he was simply incapable of contemplating.

As soon as the network called Ohio, and the election, for President Obama, Britt Hume, Bret Baier, and Megyn Kelly offered their contrite condolences, but the mendacious manipulator of political opinion then told a stunned Chris Wallace he would not concede.

For the next thirty minutes Rove stubbornly refused to relent, then, after Michael Barone slowly backed him into a corner from which he could not escape, stunned viewers saw his skull expand to several times normal size and suddenly splatter the studio with its hideous contents.

Barone and Baier instinctively avoided the gruesome fallout, but Kelly, visibly shaken, yet calmly blotting her soiled white blazer, was heard to have muttered just before the live feed was cut: “This will come out, right? I mean, ew.”

Binders Full of Bullshit

Post-it Note from the Political Affairs Desk by B F Koch

ITITY 2012 Election Correspondent

The chameleonesque Cayman Island candidate and his mathematically incompetent running mate continue their leveraged buyout of the upcoming election by suppressing support for the other party while persuading business owners to invest in their cynical swindle.

Their counterfeit campaign promises to apply private sector expertise to our country’s economic recovery while the former vulture capitalist and aspiring CEO of USA Inc. callously calculates how much of America’s remaining assets he can surreptitiously strip.

Their fraudulent, 47% of the people don’t matter, numbers don’t have to add up, hostile soup kitchen takeover, pledges to repeal all policies, except those that would protect wealth extraction and provide a government accountable only to the play-by-their-own-rules, plutocratic 1%.

They have somehow managed to evade serious scrutiny, avoid all accountability, and put over their pretense of legitimacy, despite their say-anything-to-close-the-deal, sociopathic, dog-on-the-roof indifference to not only the concerns of the common citizen but the essential concept of a social contract.

US Outsourcing Continues

Scribbled by E C Koch

ITITY Reports Analyst

New Haven, CT

In keeping with the post-industrial economic formula for optimum profitability, the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has evidenced continued outsourcing from the United States.

Though many have contended with the BLS report’s suspect unemployment rate, there have, as yet, been no inquiries made concerning its outsourcing quotient.

As the BLS report describes, the outsourcing of US cognition reached an all-time high this September, likely reflecting the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and is expected to spike again in November.

While the report contends that Americans are thinking less than ever before, corresponding analyses show that the US, by coming ahead of the next thirty-seven countries combined, still maintains its rank as world-leader.

Not So Fast!

Filed by BF Koch
ITITY Investigative Reporter 



Tweed Courthouse NY


In response to recent events, economists and other contrarians have increased their calls for putting bankers behind bars; as satisfying this may sound however, some consideration should be given to identifying and holding accountable those who actually caused our current financial crisis. Let’s just be sure we’re locking up the right culprits.

Forget the sixteen trillion in emergency Fed lending, four and a half trillion in bailouts, two trillion and counting in quantitative easing, and a couple trillion more in loans and guarantees, it’s the money earned by hard working citizens and handed over to freeloaders who are too lazy to help themselves that really adds up.

Never mind the predatory lending practices and the innumerable counts of perjury committed by presenting robosigned affidavits and other defective documents in foreclosure court proceedings, the real criminals are all those parasitic public sector employees who expect the rest of us to pay for their pensions.

Disregard the million dollar bonuses, the money laundered for drug cartels, and the shorting of funds sold to clients that were designed to fail. The real injustice is that the guy who talked a convenience store clerk into letting him pay for a six pack and a scratch off with food stamps isn’t in jail.

Ignore the evidence that for years banks have systematically coerced agencies into rating subprime mortgage backed securities as investment grade instruments, colluded to rig auctions in municipal bond markets, and skimmed profits from derivative contracts by manipulating the largest interest rate base used in worldwide commerce.

Perp-walks and prison sentences seem a bit harsh when one considers bankers have already had to endure the inconvenience of the occasional inquiry, suffered settlements that don’t require them to admit they did anything wrong, and had fines forced upon them that probably caused them to collect all the spare change from under their sofa cushions.