Mixed Grill

I saw this car with the interesting juxtaposition of bumper stickers at coffee this morning. Oregon plates. Says it all.

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Very interesting article on AlterNet. Did you know that you taxpayers out there subsidize a surveillance center on Wall Street staffed by security personnel that work for your friends at Goldman Sachs, Citicorp and most of their corporate cohorts. This way they get to spy on you Occupy Wall Street types and salt your data away for future payback. From the article:

"The surveillance plan became known as the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative and the facility was eventually dubbed the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. It operates round-the-clock. Under the imprimatur of the largest police department in the United States, 2,000 private spy cameras owned by Wall Street firms, together with approximately 1,000 more owned by the NYPD, are relaying live video feeds of people on the streets in lower Manhattan to the center. Once at the center, they can be integrated for analysis. At least 700 cameras scour the midtown area and also relay their live feeds into the downtown center where low-wage NYPD, MTA and Port Authority crime stoppers sit alongside high-wage personnel from Wall Street firms that are currently under at least 51 Federal and state corruption probes for mortgage securitization fraud and other matters.
In addition to video analytics which can, for example, track a person based on the color of their hat or jacket, insiders say the NYPD either has or is working on face recognition software which could track individuals based on facial features. The center is also equipped with live feeds from license plate readers.
According to one person who has toured the center, there are three rows of computer workstations, with approximately two-thirds operated by non-NYPD personnel. The Chief-Leader, the weekly civil service newspaper, identified some of the outside entities that share the space: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the Federal Reserve, the New York Stock Exchange."

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Fantastic piece by Eugene Robinson in today's Washington Post. Must read. CBO came out with a new study today entitled "Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007." Study shows that the class war is in full swing and most of us are, well, losing. From the piece:

"For those at the bottom — the one-fifth of households with the lowest incomes — the increase was just 18 percent. For the middle three-fifths, the average increase was 40 percent. Spread over nearly 30 years, these gains are modest, not meteoric.
By contrast, look at the top 1 percent of earners. Their after-tax household income increased by an astonishing 275 percent. For those keeping track, this means it nearly quadrupled. Nice work, if you can get it."

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My photography opening is tonight at Pinnell Gallery. The show, titled Monochrome, looks really nice, hope that you can check out the work of the fifteen fine photographers sometime in the next month.

Taylor Buck

Mike Reardon

Louis Nidorf

Ken Seals

N. Dixon Fish

Robert Sommers

Thomas Sauerwein

Bob Feuerstein

Jon Harwood

Kip Peterson

Leven Jester

MIchael Cartwright

Brett Stokes

Grant Brittain

Jerry Kalman