Monthly Archives: November 2014

The Ferguson Frankenjury

30 Sunday Nov 2014

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The Ferguson Frankenjury

“If it takes a riot for America to remember their names then that tells you more about the country than it does about the rioters.”
–Gary Younge, The Guardian.

First the killing.

After being shot six times by police officer Darren Wilson, Michael Brown’s presumably lifeless body (when did he actually die?) was left to lie in the street four hours before being perfunctorily gathered up, like so much trash in the ghetto, by authorities. This neglect is now a perverse emblem of the depth of contempt for black life that persists in America. As Gary Younge points out (The Guardian, October 10, 2014), this young man’s life and then bullet-ridden body were “dispensable, despised and discarded”, as with America’s promise of racial equality.

Then, as if to add insult to injury, there emerged a Kafkaesque grand jury process. Within days of the killing a grand jury had been assembled. But this cornerstone of our ‘Anglo-American’ system of justice was placed in the hands of a mad scientist, Fergson prosecutor Bob McCulloch, who would refuse to recuse himself and instead guide a deeply flawed, yet exquisitely effective, process to its forgone conclusion. McCulloch would, predictably, decline to recommend prosecuting Wilson, an event that occurs within our hallowed halls of justice about as often as a grand jury is all African-American–which is to say never.

In his Guardian article, Younge recalls another jury that deliberated over the fate of white men accused of killing a Black teenager. That jury, in 1955 Mississippi, took all of 67 minutes to acquit the killers of Emmitt Till. “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop,” said one juror, “it wouldn’t have taken that long.” In that case, under Jim Crow segregation, the grand jury actually forwarded charges. The grand jury tasked with deciding whether to recommend criminal charges against Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Brown to death, took its sweet time–more than three months–to deliver a decision. “That’s a lot of pop,” quipped Younge.

When the Ferguson grand jury finally did deliver a decision it was that the preponderance of evidence did not, according to our citizen jurors, rise to the level of ‘probable cause’. In local parlance it was the equivalent of “fuck you”. The jury process was so rotten with foul illogic, so twisted in its legal sophistry as to have invited the opprobrium of none other than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, that standard bearer of Black liberation. According to Scalia, McCulloch’s handling of the grand jury flouted traditions that have stood for ‘hundreds of years’.

“It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor…As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.”

Which is exactly what McCulloch both did not do (forward a charge) and did do (had the suspect testify).

This was no ordinary grand jury; it was a Frankenjury.

The Ferguson Frankenjury process has been unusual in so many ways it is useful to list a few: the refusal of the prosecutor to recommend charges; the 3 1/2 month deliberation punctuated by seemingly mischievous and calculated leaks; the unprecedented 4 hours of testimony to the grand jury from the shooter, (this suggests a creepy parallel with the amount of time Mike Brown’s body was left–lifeless?–in the streets of Ferguson) the drawn out media circus; the interminable delays; the urban counterinsurgency strategy with its militarized ‘peace officers’ in the wings; the preemptive ‘state of emergency’ declared by a feckless Governor more than a week before a decision was announced, suggesting he wasn’t even in the loop; and, finally, the announcement itself coming at night and the smoking streets that followed–all of this so heart-wrenchingly familiar in its result yet novel in its process.

There is also the little matter of Wilson describing Brown as a “Demon” which, aside from being almost comical as a dehumanizing and racist trope, also serves as a defense. We were told again and again that all Wilson had to demonstrate for an effective defense was that he ‘felt’ fear of Michael Brown–whether that fear was rational or not being irrelevant. That this was something for a judge or jury to consider during a trial and not for a sitting grand jury weighing probable cause was almost completely lost amidst the blather.

Elsewhere in his article Younge uses the word ‘prevaricate’ (speak or act in an evasive way, quibble with the truth) where he means, I think, ‘procrastinate’, or delay. A common and forgivable error. But the members of the Ferguson Frankenjury, at least during their lengthy deliberations, had not spoken falsely–they said nothing at all–busy as they were drinking pop for three+ months. But there is something inherently deceitful about their delay, something dishonest in their act of ‘suspending judgment’ that suggests a neologism may be in order, so as to capture both the elements of delay and deceit so intrinsic to the process. 

When an institutional authority engages in a process of delay and equivocation, putting off and perverting justice, it can be henceforth be said to prevaricrastinate; or, if you prefer, procrastivaricate.

Ugly words for an ugly process.

My two Frankenwords are assembled from ‘prevaricate’ and ‘procrastinate’ and each has two word parts swiveling on a fulcrum of injustice: ‘Prevaricrastinate, meaning justice denied, then delayed; and, ‘procrastivaricate’, meaning justice delayed, then denied.

A perfect symmetry.

From my Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989, we find the following nugget within the word usages for ‘prevaricate’:

Prevaricate: “…to betray the cause of a client by collusion with an opponent…To undertake a matter falsely and deceitfully in order to defeat the object professed to be promoted.” That, together with procrastinate, is exactly what Bob McCulloch engaged in: he betrayed the victims of this crime by colluding with the perpetrator, and our institutions either supported that decision or looked the other way.

(Elsewhere prevaricate can mean “to spread the legs apart, straddle…bent, knock-kneed…” but I won’t indulge in that tangent.)

Procrastinate, of course, means “…to put off till the morrow, to put off from day to day; to defer [action], to delay…play a waiting game, use delaying tactics.”  

Let’s dissect the Frankenword, ‘Prevaricrastinate’. First, there is the hacking apart of each word, ‘prevaricate’ and ‘procrastinate’, followed by the stitching together of the two words such that their combined meanings form a new one. When spoken, the word sounds difficult and uncomfortable; it registers a certain labored construction (unnatural grafting) and its enunciation proceeds as if one can hear the gears of justice grinding to a halt. Just as the word ends badly (‘crastinate’) as in a painful gastro-intestinal blockage–so too this jury’s work will come to an ugly end.

‘Procrastivaricate’, on the other hand, with it’s ending ‘varicate’ sounds like ‘validate’ or ‘verification’. This suggests a drawn out process that, while painful, does eventually arrive at the truth–just as our Ferguson Frankenjury has dangled before us. But, as with the Ferguson grand jury’s final decision,’varicate’ is nonsensical in this context. It doesn’t mean anything at all; it just sounds as if it does. It is a word, but a medical term–‘varicies’, from ‘varicose’, as in ‘veins’. So in a poetic way this ending accurately represents the Ferguson Frankenjury process: A sclerotic system that has blockages preventing the free flow of blood (disinterested weighing of evidence) to the body politic (justice). In this ironic sense, it works

Younge’s parallel between the absence of justice in the Till and Brown killings is instructive. If under Jim Crow the racist murderers of Emmitt Till were acquitted, but did at least face charges, whereas the killer of Michael Brown won’t even face a manslaughter or ‘failure to aid’ charge, then what has changed?

Nothing. The process has mutated; but the result remains the same.

Jonathan Mozzochi
November, 2014

“They Bring That Desert Stuff To Our World”–Bill Maher and Islamophobia

09 Sunday Nov 2014

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“They Bring That Desert Stuff To Our World”
Bill Maher and Islamophobia

In case you missed it, Bill Maher has been at it again with religion. Which is nothing new–after all he did make a movie called Religulous. But he is not just grinding his religion axe, which I have been known to swing; he’s been dragging Muslims through the mud in a way that is, well, getting unseemly and personal. In the process he’s managed to exhibit the same loathsome character traits he assigns the religious “whackos” he is so fond of excoriating. At one point in this ongoing, disgraceful rehashing of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis Maher, exasperated at all the ‘hate’ he’s stirred up, suggested he might shut up on the topic.

Please do. It’s getting to the point I want to throw a shoe at you.

Maher and his sidekicks Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins–those instant atheists ever at the ready to demolish whatever straw man caricature of organized religion is offered up for sacrifice–are playing an odious game. It is really difficult to watch the three of them play shills to political forces eager to have an expanded war in the Middle East. They serve at the pleasure of war mongers, all sniggling aside, as their signature adulation of a virtuous ‘West’ is counterposed to a malevolent ‘Orient’. This reeks of intellectual dishonesty and a noxious repackaging of neo-colonialism and xenophobia, albeit with all the trappings of postmodern irony on offer for a forthcoming retreat behind plausible deniability–”we were just joking.” And while it’s painfully familiar, it still sucks because, well, he’s kind of one of us, like Christopher Hitchens. Or Alexander Cockburn.

Such an old ploy, this brutal cleaving of the world into two irreducible and distinct, warring civilizations. Their framework for discussion (if one can call it that) studiously ignores what most liberals and anyone who can legitimately be called a leftist knows to be necessary when addressing this subject: power relations between peoples within and among nation states. As in what forces are arrayed against the democratic aspirations of Muslims? Ah. But therein lies the rub. Maher doesn’t have this problem, as by definition a ‘Muslim’ is anti-democratic. So no need to discuss what role the 21s Century Leviathan plays in this drama. How about in Egypt? Was that a Coup d’etat, Bill? Or perhaps a conscientious, independent, and benevolent military gracefully sidelining a nasty, backwards, Islamic dictatorship intent on murdering those precious standard bearers of Western culture, the cartoonists behind Southpark? How is it that Maher can be a trenchant critic of American influence both at home and abroad but shit the bed when it comes to Islam and Muslims? Answer: He succumbs to classic Islamophobia. But this is nothing new for him in kind; only perhaps in degree. Which raises the question as to how this jackass can pass himself off as a leftist.

But before we get to that, let’s get a working definition for the inelegant but necessary term ‘Islamophobia’. How about unfounded hostility towards and fear of Muslims. Unfounded is the operative term here; and in Bill Maher’s case that will be abundantly clear–no mean Muslims at his door calling for his head.

What would we look for among Maher’s comments that might conform to the defining elements of Islamophobia? How about the following definitive exchange between Maher and Anderson Cooper. In it, Maher manages to hit on all cylinders when responding to a characteristically sophomoric question from Cooper, who has never encountered an unstated assumption he could articulate nor one he would shy away from to please a guest: “Why is Islam the one religion about which so many in America–and the West–censor themselves…? Is it just fear?”

Maher responds: “Absolutely. Because they’re violent. Because they threaten us. And they are threatening. They bring that desert stuff to our world …We don’t threaten each other, we sue each other. That’s the sign of civilized people. And they don’t … People who want to gloss over the difference between western culture and Islamic culture and forget about the fact that the Islamic culture is 600 years younger and that they are going through the equivalent of what the west went through with our middle ages, our dark ages when religion had way too much power … do so at their peril.”

Elsewhere Maher has added:

“New Rule: Although America likes to think it’s number one, we have to admit we’re behind the developing world in at least one thing. Their religious whackos are a lot more whacko than ours! [Laughter]…Our culture isn’t just different than one that makes death threats to cartoonists. It’s better. [Applause]” –Real Time with Bill Maher 2011.
Let’s unpack that load.

Islam is archaic and backwards (‘desert stuff’, ‘dark ages’). Check.

‘Islamic Culture’ is inferior to ‘Western Culture’. Check.

Muslims lag behind more advanced peoples (600 years!). Check.

Islam is uncivilized (lacking the signs of ‘civilized people’). Check.

Muslims are inherently violent (we sue, they fight). Check.

Islam is a religion of violence and supports terrorism (Fatwas against cartoonists). Check.

Elsewhere Maher and his cohorts Harris and Dawkins peddle other stereotypes.

Muslims reject democratic values (otherwise they would have democratic states! Ignore Indonesia. Ignore Egypt before the Coup. etc.). Check.

Islam does not share common values with other major faiths (Even the Pope won’t send his “Swiss Guards” to hunt apostates down). Check.

Islam is monolithic and cannot adapt to new realities. Check.

What’s perhaps more chilling than Maher’s ranting is the disposition of his audience. Was there no one in his studio audience with a conscience? Couldn’t someone even cough to signal opposition?

Maher at once cuts too broad a swath with his biting humor and yet displays an obsession with the flesh and blood particulars of his subject matter that is worrisome: he’s always returning to graphic images of heads being lopped off, suicide bombers and all the rest. Maher would be better off examining the tomfoolery of religion across cultural boundaries than allowing his pathology full bloom in regards Islam.

It’s indicative of his neo-liberal moorings, laden with a culturally permissive patina, that Maher doesn’t bother with the messy notion of a North-South split. That would involve too much heavy lifting and unpacking of his heroic notion of the ‘West’ and the so very unheroic effects of Western imperialism in the third world. Such a different perspective wouldn’t help him render an ‘other’ so different from ‘us’–a rhetorical operation absolutely necessary for demonization–which is what Maher is doing.

All of this reminds me of another American popular culture expression of Islamophobia, the 2007 film 300, described as a ‘porno-military fantasy’ by one reviewer and as a film that trafficked in neo-fascist aesthetics by myself where “so completely is the ‘other’ rendered different that it is difficult to conceive of them as human.”

Coming from national security state war boosters this kind of jingoism is not surprising; but it shouldn’t be welcomed within the liberal left, where Maher moors his ship of fools. I am at a loss as to how any decent person would ever forgive or forget these transgressions. They are despicable.

What’s at play here is a familiar Western superiority complex that needs dismantling. I’m particularly fond of a quote by the late Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano from his book Open Veins of Latin America: “Underdevelopment isn’t a stage of development, but its consequence.” Just that one sentence explodes Maher and company’s narrow, moralistic and ahistorical stance. As in who carved out all those ridiculous state borders from the Ottoman Empire and what effect has that had on the subsequent development of civic society there? How about all those so-called ‘Banana Republics’?

Must we continue with the likes of Ben Affleck as the standard bearer of reason in opposition to Maher and company? Meh. What Affleck lacks in erudition he makes up for in enthusiasm; but sometimes you’ve got to be more than just right, sometimes you need to drop the etiquette and just slap the smile off his face.

Besides, if you must divide the world into the West vs. Islam, secular rationalism vs. religious superstition, how about this: The thoroughly religious injunction against financial interest and debt at the center of Islamic economics is far more rational than the fairy tale of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ or Alan Greenspan’s modern rendition spun from algorithms. How difficult would it be to make that argument for a more just and equitable world?

Although after having suffered through the ignorant ramblings of these Three Wizened Blowhards (Maher, Harris and Dawkins) you wouldn’t think so, I still maintain it is possible to be an atheist without being an asshole.

Jonathan Mozzochi
November, 2014

Capital in the Twenty-First Century–Eternal Inequality?

08 Saturday Nov 2014

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Ghosts of Anti-Fascism Past

Capital in the Twenty-First Century–Eternal Inequality?

No, I have not read all 577 pages of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I don’t think I have the wherewithal to hike through such a dense scholarly forest. Besides, there are also seventy-eight pages of notes inconveniently placed at the end of the book–rather than at the bottom of each page–that drive me bat shit. So I’ll leave it to the saintly patient among us to assemble a more complete assessment. Here I’ll sketch out my preliminary thoughts.

I’ve read more about Thomas Piketty and his economic laws and formula for inequality ‘r>g’ (now immortalized on a t-shirt by Stephen Colbert) than I have read pages of his book. But after having read a hundred or so pages, Capital in the Twenty-First Century now occupies pride of place on my desk where it conceals a good number of bills I would…

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Capital in the Twenty-First Century–Eternal Inequality?

08 Saturday Nov 2014

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Capital in the Twenty-First Century–Eternal Inequality?

No, I have not read all 577 pages of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I don’t think I have the wherewithal to hike through such a dense scholarly forest. Besides, there are also seventy-eight pages of notes inconveniently placed at the end of the book–rather than at the bottom of each page–that drive me bat shit. So I’ll leave it to the saintly patient among us to assemble a more complete assessment. Here I’ll sketch out my preliminary thoughts.

I’ve read more about Thomas Piketty and his economic laws and formula for inequality ‘r>g’ (now immortalized on a t-shirt by Stephen Colbert) than I have read pages of his book. But after having read a hundred or so pages, Capital in the Twenty-First Century now occupies pride of place on my desk where it conceals a good number of bills I would rather not pay. So here’s my two-cents worth, which is all I have left after r>g.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is primarily a study of economics, a discipline I generally hold in low regard, as phrenology or public relations. Despite this built-in handicap, Piketty has succeeded in producing a work of singular importance for anyone concerned with social equality and economic justice. What allows him to do so, unlike so many others before him, is two-fold: a multi-disciplinary approach to the problematic relationship between capitalism and social inequality; and a mastery of a mountain of data sets.

Piketty argues that a systematic rendering of the dynamics of inequality require the scholarly tools of the historian and the sociologist as much as, if not more than, the economist, in order to adequately explain what is at the core of this system of production, exchange and consumption that we all live with. Piketty also owes a great debt to a number of talented colleagues and to relatively recent technological advances (the internet, relational databases) that help with the heavy lifting necessary to manage mountains of data. Such talented coworkers and new widgets allowed for Piketty et. al. to slowly, over 15 years, sort through economic data spread out over a great deal of time (as much as 300 years) and across many different societies (at least 20 countries) and transform it into useful information and from there into a theory. Piketty even goes so far as to argue that his theory rests on laws. That’s pretty audacious, and just the sort of thing, when put forward by economists, I usually find so aggressively stupid–the kind of stuff that ‘naturalizes’ inequality and injustice, where the rich are rich because they work real hard and deserve what they get and, conversely, the poor deserve their lot. But Piketty is grinding a different axe here and although I am skeptical that he has uncovered any hidden ‘laws’ regarding the functioning of capitalism or economics more generally, he has valuable insights.

Captial in the Twenty-First Century provides a much needed re-periodization of the history of global capitalism that reminds us (as if we needed reminding) that as a system it is both unstable and unsustainable. As a political economy it involves a deeply contradictory relationship to democracy. Except for war, depression and revolution, social inequality increases both over time and across nations: regardless of where or when you live, the global rate of return on capital (r) tends to increase at a rate higher than that of the economy in general (g), the result being that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It’s a fairly straightforward equation, but it has far-reaching, profound implications. Piketty’s prescription to solve this problem is not, as revolutionary ideas go, audacious, but it is absolutely inconceivable within the thought world of elite opinion: a global tax on wealth and income. Even Piketty has described this modest proposal as ‘utopian’.

What Piketty and his colleagues effectively demonstrate is that instead of a steady forward march and upward trajectory, where the benefits of capitalist development steadily lift all boats, or trickle down onto the heads of the masses–choose your inept metaphor–the prevalence and persistence of inequality is a key feature of this economic system. The kicker here is that the rate of accumulation of wealth and income by the few is only interrupted when gross economic output (GDP at the national level) exceeds the rate of return on capital. The tendency towards increased inequality is mitigated by technological innovation and the diffusion of education to the masses–but only so much, and such developments can be offset by novel forms of accumulation at the top. Apparently this leveling out hasn’t happened very often over the past 300 years and when it has–during and after world wars, depressions and revolution–it is a by-product of the instability the economic system has itself produced. In other words, only after economic and political convulsions is the process of upwards accumulation slowed or halted; then, after a time, inequality is reasserted. Another way to look at this is that these spasms of extreme violence, capital destruction, and habitat obliteration are this system’s way of regulating itself.
Yikes.

This brings to mind a clever rhetorical Q & A: Why does capitalism triumph over all attempts to thwart it? Because when faced with a crisis, capital turns to socialism to rescue it every time.

Elsewhere Piketty notes the recent emergence of ‘super managers’ pulling away from everyone else and that we are returning to a form of ‘patrimonial capitalism’ that resembles the ‘Gilded Age’ that preceded the Great Depression.

It doesn’t take a Paul Krugman to see that.

But I am also ambivalent about Piketty and his tome. The author self-consciously adopts the accoutrements of radicalism without any of the elements of risk (imprisonment, exile, execution) that have commonly been associated with such ideas–sort of squatting on the shoulders of giants. Piketty’s radicalism is that of a ‘rock star’, the perfect emblem for the Society of the Spectacle (another apt French phrase). If I write dismissively of the hype surrounding Piketty it’s only to highlight an intellectual marketplace that functions to domesticate all manner of dissent and opposition, what others have described as Capital’s ability to assimilate and thereby neutralize red, yellow and black cells. In the process what is so obviously a scholarly work of some importance is being systematically sucked dry of any saliency by a commentariat enthralled with the image of scholarly rebellion but largely incapable of grappling with the most potent ideas at the center of this work. And that includes the gushing praise heaped by the likes of Paul Krugman as well as the absurd red-baiting coughed up by the Financial Times and other hack apologists for inequality.

It’s been inspiring to watch mainstream and especially libertarian economists go back on their heels in the face of a body of work that has exposed their epic failures: first, their inability to document and accept the instability that comes with inequality as an essential historical feature of global capitalism and, secondly, their failure to anticipate the obvious results this contradiction will produce (Crash of 2008). I delight in Piketty’s swipe at American orthodox economists as being numbers obsessed, a collection of blinkered bean counters and malignant technocrats consumed with more profit and novel ways of obtaining it. The essayist Thomas Frank in his review of Piketty’s book recounts an anecdote that neatly captures this point in a satirical manner reminiscent of a Family Guy cut-out skit: a group of American economists at an unnamed Mid-Western university took to sporting white lab coats so as to distinguish the ‘serious’ nature of their pursuits as distinct those of their colleagues in the ‘soft’ sciences of sociology, political science and anthropology. The hubris here tells us everything we need to know about the reining orthodoxy of that profession.

Piketty’s work neglects the role social forces (organized labor, civil rights movements, rural rebellions, etc) play in shaping income inequality–especially by reducing it. This reinforces a mechanistic view of economic forces as being somehow beyond our control, inexorable and inevitable–sort of like the orthodox historical materialism of another era. Piketty is a French structuralist, a school of thought that adds much to our understanding of the role social forces and institutions play in shaping our lives as much as it fails to apprehend human beings as subjects with conscious thought and agency. Such economic laws are said to exist outside us, perhaps above us, to be divined by econometricians with their modern alchemy of algorithms and spreadsheets, and salvation lies in uncovering the ‘laws’ that govern production, exchange and consumption. We need only understand them better and apply them more intelligently.

But the notion of perpetually increasing growth and profit is often presented as natural (immutable) or, worse still, moral (normative). But it is not any of those things (or shouldn’t be regarded as such) and our task is, again, to redistribute. There is no ‘law’–economic, political or moral–that can establish a fairer distribution of resources, income and wealth. Only struggle will achieve that. This is obvious to anyone who cares to look around at the abundance of natural resources that can sustain human life that are at our disposal. That those resources need be exploited by human intervention is a given, but that a market system based on greed and competition is the best way to achieve a sustainable distribution of those resources is an unsupported fairy tale: magical thinking without the sound moral teachings of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel to stoke our wonder and awe and help us engender change. There is really very little science here, just raw power.

Piketty distances his work from that point of view, arguing for interdisciplinary dependence and careful, sober fact-checking. Yet he reproduces that very dynamic elsewhere–at least more than he should–and it is this problem with his work that James K. Galbraith and Thomas Frank rightly point out.

Besides, no matter how many beans are counted, algorithms programmed or equations solved, I don’t consider economics a ‘science’ at all: at best it’s ‘mathematical sociology’, or ‘numerical anthropology’. We are, after all, still human and our ability to reflect on our world and change it means that efforts to quantify our activity should always be held up to rigorous examination and withering critique; that critical stance itself necessarily informed by how that bean counting, that widget, or innovative metric can help alleviate social inequality, how it serves the common good.

Given that Piketty and colleagues have been assembling, publishing and discussing their data for more than a decade and that the book was published last year in France (to mostly yawns) why the explosion in publicity over the past summer? It reminds me of the campaign orchestrated by Adbusters with the help of the PR firm ‘Workhorse’ around the Occupy Movement–some kind of prescient anticipation or luck combined with a ‘flash mob’ moment and technical prowess emerged to launch this book. I’m interested in seeing an analysis of the Harvard University Press public relations strategy on release of the book and other efforts, apparently wildly successful in a narrow economic sense, to sell the book and Piketty himself. My main concern, however, is what this book and the man who wrote it are saying about our world; how best do we evaluate the arguments put forth in the book and the discussion that has followed, and how it is useful (or not) in changing the world. At least it’s heft can be used against champions of the free market, or to help cover up those pesky bills I’d rather not pay.

Jonathan Mozzochi
November 2014