Saturday, March 17, 2012

Existing in New York City: Growling My Brains Out So Damn Futilely

Foto by tgw, New York City, March 2012
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President Obama's Administration Is Allowing Wolf Killings to Go On In Spite of Wolves Being an Endangered Species

Thanks to our friend, the womantrumpetplayer, and her comment below, we have been brought to our feet in protest against man the vicious killer; this weak-minded scaredy-cat who is being allowed to hunt at will and kill at will the wolves of North America--gassing pups in dens, outright slaughter of wolves from helicopters, and free-for-all hunting of wolves from the Rocky Mountains all the way up into Canada and Alaska (where they are allowing hunters with big-game rifles to blow wolves away so that the caribou population can grow so that these wild-killer-instinctually-backwards-human-being hunters can then slaughter the caribou for sport). Shame on our government for allowing this. The mighty wolf that was near extinction a few decades back having made a miraculous comeback is once again the victim of the brutality of the human being, the most deadly and vicious animal ever to evolve out of the jungle--thought to be clever because it has invented rifles so powerful and accurate and traps and poisons--its intention to kill anything it considers wild and a threat to its own security--especially the clever and amazing wolves, so much more important to the world than human beings. We humans are killers. Why we even kill each other--look at the killing sprees our military is going on all over the world. Look at this Sgt. Bates character who killed 16 Afghanistan women and children, blew them away, and then set them on fire to add a little flavor to his brutal killing spree. Our military breeds killers with their kill-or-be-killed attitudes; our culture breeds killers with its macho hunter attitudes. And don't worry, this military animal, Bates, will be given the Medal of Honor by President Obama, a killer himself who kills his own citizens. In Canada, wolves are being slaughtered in the tar sands area where we are fixing to have that worthless piece of shit pipeline shooting down through our heartland whether we want it or not.
http://www.rockin7ranch.com/2007/wolf.jpg
Hey, Check Out This Great White Hunter With His Proud Trophy--what will he do with his kill, dress it out and eat it? make a wolf-skin jacket for his proud obedient stupid wife? Of course, without that high-powered rifle complete with that laser-beam scope on it, this fool wouldn't have had a chance against that wolf.
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Trying to Lose Myself in Music
Sitting here with a backache. God-dammit, I hate backaches. I never had them ever before I started using this Toshiba laptop to write these posts. I'm listening to the wonderful Nat "King" Cole Trio from the 1940s--Oscar Moore, guitar; Johnny Miller, bass. Nat was such an exquisite pianist, though most people if they remember him at all remember him as a pop singer. The story goes the trio was playing in a club and the club owner came to Nat and said he wanted some singing with the group--instrumental stuff just wasn't making it--so Nat started singing. But I remember Nat as a piano player. I heard the trio during its heyday when I was a kid--like "Straighten Up and Fly Right" or "Route 66," but what woke me up to Nat as an accomplished piano player was during his stay in the Jazz at the Philharmonic piano chair. One of the greatest moments is from Jazz at the Philharmonic Volume 1 on a tune simply called "Blues." It's a jam featuring J. J. Johnson, Illinois Jacquet, Jack "McVouty" McVeigh, Johnny Miller, Lester's brother Lee Young on drums, and Les Paul on guitar--and it's the interplay between Nat and Les Paul that is the most exciting feature of this ten-and-a-half-minute jam. The genius of these two cats--with Les laying down a riff and Nat repeating it in his way only for Les to lay another more complicated riff down and Nat simply sliding into the same riff--this riffin' goes on for several minutes to the great delight of the wild audience. And those JATP audiences used to be wild, shouting at the musicians to "Go, Man, Go" and yelling and screaming, especially when Illinois went into one of his wild chile high screeching jive solos--and with that audience whipped up already, here come Les and Nat to do this interplaying--one of the solidest sending musical occurrences I've ever heard. Actually Nat starts the riffing off by interjecting shave-and-a-haircut hits on the high notes, which Les then picks up to swing into with Nat, then it gets serious when Les gets into his solo--and releases into this interplay--I mean it's one of the great moments in jazz music. ...and damn, wouldn't you know, somebody has put it up on YouTube: here ya go--enjoy one of the great moments in jazz--purely spontaneous, I might add, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wacoim8MO8
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Still Concerned
I'm still concerned over the fact that there's no challenge--debatewise--to President Obama, a man, I swear, who has simply put on G.W. Bush's shoes and continued to walk in his path of disaster. When Obama talks about recovery, no one challenges him on it. Today, the government babblers are claiming Osama bin Ladin was out to kill Obama. Come on, doesn't that sound like Bush cry-babying about how Saddam Hussein tried to murder his old worthless Pappy! Why would bin Ladin want to kill Obama? I mean this dude was running for his life most of the time after Little Georgie Porgie Bush let him escape into Pakistan where he was hiding out all those years. Is Obama now wanting to be a martyr?

Here's a guy who now has taken over executive power privileges old G.W. never thought of using. Here's a president who has assassinated three US citizens, one a teenager, in Yemen for what? He says they were al-Queda big shots; yet he gives no proof of their having any thing to do with al-Queda, this amazing army of wild Islamics that no matter how many of them we kill still seem to grow larger and larger and stay in existence, able to get evidently weapons and monies at will. And certainly in President Obama's mind they are still a huge threat against our "national security." The dictator of Yemen recently was going to release the Yemen journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, but Obama personally called our Yemen lackey and ordered him to not release the guy. Why? Because Obama says he's a threat to our national security because he is able to get inside the al-Quedan network and interview them, not necessarily favorably, but by journalistic association that makes him a terrorist.

You can't challenge President Obama on any of his "secret" ploys. He simply throws your questions back in your face. Like the obvious intentions of Obama and Israel to invade and try and occupy Iran. Why? Because they have Weapons of Mass Destruction. But, most experts say they are a long way from developing what nuclear materials they have into anything close to a nuclear weapon. Why are the two most loaded-with-nuclear-weapons in the world afraid of Iran? Pakistan has Weapons of Mass Destruction. They were hiding and giving comfort to Osama bin Ladin, too. So why aren't we threatening to nuke Pakistan? I've always said our government's intentions were all along to go in an secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Go in through India from the Indian Ocean. Of course, if I spout such wild forecasts out there, no one agrees with me. "Farfetched," they holler back in my face.

Obama goes on being cheered by the very people he screwed in terms of single-payer healthcare; refusing to even discuss this form of health insurance and instead letting the pay-or-die insurance giants, the pharmaceutical giants, and the pay-or-die hospitals-for-profit corporations write Obamacare. And now with these Republican idiots still trying to ruin our Medicare system that works in spite of the many doctors ripping it off and ruin our Social Security system in spite of it being soluble for many years to come, does Obama slam 'em down for it? No. Instead he agrees both systems have to be cut. He's still compromising with these anti-American rightwing nutjobs. And when a citizen does stand up to him and tries to argue with him, he simply blows them off with one of his charming retorts. And now unions are kissing Obama's ass. And what has Obama done for unions? Well, in order to bail General Motors out of bankruptcy--another company too big to fail--he forced the unions to take cuts in their pensions and allowed GM to hire new workers at $15-an-hour rather than the union gained $24-an-hour. Obama also gave our Chrysler Motors away to Fiat of Italy--and now watch teevee and see how many Fiat ads come into your face 24/7--and trust me, folks, Fiats are some of the worst cars ever made.

I'm sorry. My friends tell me, "Who'd you rather have as president, Rick Santorum?" And I say, "No, I don't want Rick Santorum to be the president, nor do I want Mitt "the Mormon" Romney or Newtie "Fat Fart" Gingrich--but neither do I want four more years of a George W. Bush clone either. At least why isn't someone challenging Obama to debates?--some progressive Democrat like Russ Feingold--yet, Russ Feingold is working in Obama's campaign now. And Dennis Kocinich got his ass clobbered by another so-called progressive due to a Republican redistricting scheme. And Bernie Sanders has no clout. And just yesterday, Obama announced through Nancy Pelosi (what the hell's she doing in Egypt?) that we are MAKING AN ARMS DEAL WITH THE EGYPTIAN MILITARY! What happened to the Arab Spring? What happened to the NEW democratic regime in Egypt? And why are we making an arms deal with these military goons?

"Yes, we can." Yes, we can what? Keep spying on Americans? Keep taking away We the People's rights? Now sending drones over our own country? Keeping on building that overcostly fence along our border with Mexico? That fence that I was reading was costing us something like hundreds of millions of dollars a mile in some areas. A stupid fence that Mexicans wanting to get into this country simply tunnel under. And if these people are so desperate to get into this country, why the hell can't we negotiate a work agreement with them or their government?--why can't we register these people at border stations and give them seasonal work permits? And if they want to become American citizens, why not give them a chance at it.

And now President Obama has brought his infatuation with unmanned drones to US soil. And, too, for the first time in history, we have a unit of the US Army's combat forces working within our borders; not to protect us from an invasion--oh no--but to spy on us, to seek terrorists from among us, to be able to now pick up ordinary Americans up off the street and declare them enemy combatants and send them off to SYRIA to be tortured--or Morocco--or EGYPT--to be tortured and placed in dungeons--or to be sent off to Guantanamo--a place of evil Obama promised he would close down but which is still running full force.

Yet, Obama is still the darling of the Democrats. He's a shoo in for their candidate with no challenges. There is no debate within his ranks--his corporate goons that he's surrounded himself with are loading him down with millions upon millions of campaign bucks--and he has the nerve to pick the crooked CEO of GE, Jeff Immelt, a CEO who has been a king of outsourcing American jobs to countries like India and China and Indonesia--hundreds of thousands of jobs--recently GE transferring its medical imaging division to Communist China--and Obama picks this fool as his jobs-creation adviser.

And starting yesterday, our free trade agreement with South Korea went into effect--costing us 150,000 jobs. You bet, Obama and Jeff Immelt are creating jobs--in foreign countries.

And, in spite of the disaster of Fukushima in Japan, a disaster we still don't know the full truth about, President Obama is approving new nuclear plants all over the country, recently two in Georgia, already a nuclear-contaminated state, nuclear plants that We the People of the USA pay most of the costs to build these dangerous monsters because no Wall Street firm will invest in them they are so expensive to build. What's up with Obama and his declaring nuclear energy clean energy?

And don't worry, that Keystone pipeline will be built. Check out the current Exxon-Mobil ads on teevee declaring the oil from the sands of Canada our salvation from depending on foreign oil--declaring it good clean oil and the pipeline a good thing--and, listen to this bullshit, "creating hundreds of thousands of jobs." What jobs? Where are these jobs? How will this pipeline bring jobs to the states it will be running through and perhaps corrupting their water supplies? Like if you live in Keokuk, Iowa, how will this pipeline bring jobs to your town?

Whoooooo, such diatribe has left my head spinning.... I'm going looney (George Clooney) with growling--growling at a distant moon--a moon that shines phony light on poor ole doomed human dumbass beings. And We the People of the US are the dumbest, stupidest, most-lemming-like creatures in the world. We are still "A Nation of Sheep."

And, hey, let's stay in Afghanistan another 10 years!

Orwell, I'm going back and listening to the tons of music I have at my disposal. Not today's pop crap. God how it sucks. And I watched Kid Rock last night on P(Public) B (British) S(System) and every son sounded the same, like "Rolling on the River"--every song; and what happened to Kid Rock's Em'nem impersonations? I'm listening to the wonderful old original musics from the USA's unique cultural past when we were uniting, when we were "reasoning together," when we had a true oppositional movement in this country. Like Sly and the Family Stone. Like the Ike and Tina Turner Review. Like Aretha riding down the Detroit freeways in her pink Cadillac. Like Charles Mingus's revolutionary music. Like Charles Ives's very uniquely original transcendental music. Like Lionel Hampton, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Buddy Rich, and Buddy De Franco playing together.

But, don't worry, folks. I give up. Obama should easily have another four years to act worst than G.W. Bush.

In futile humbleness,

theimbecilicgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler


Thursday, March 15, 2012

Existing in New York City: With Alabama on My Mind


Foto tgw, New York City, March 2012
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Note: The dumbass Hollywood actor, George Clooney, got to have a meeting today with President Obama--where they discussed the Sudan problem--Let's see one of us get a meeting with the President--why do our actors have so much power?--could it be because they are multimillionaires? Wonder how much taxes George Clooney pays compared to the average dumbass US citizen? I also see where New York States dumbass (ex-Gov's son his only qualification for being governor), Andrew Cuomo says cutting government employees pension funds is the only way to save the state from bankruptcy--oh how nice it would be if we were all millionaires--why, we could have been if we'd gotten the 14 trillion dollar bailout the absolutely crooked banks got--check out the ex-Goldman-Sachs big-buck VP's revelation this week on just what Goldman-Sachs pirates think about their customers. What a jive ass bunch of turkeys--we should whack 'em all and have a real Thanksgiving Feast.
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Hot Damn, Rick Santorum for President
Yahoo! Rick Santorum just scored big in the backward states of Mississippi and Alabama. Little Rickie whacked his main rivals, Mitt "The Mormon" Romney and Newtie "Fat Ass" Gingrich, all three men fools; yet those Yahoos down South love Little Rickie. He's their favorite fool. I assume all Repugnican votes Down South are White votes. I can't imagine a Black person in Mississippi or Alabama being a Republican. And anyway, aren't the majority of folks in those states Black? And, too, doesn't Karl Rove live in Alabama?

All those little White southern belle gals must love Little Rickie. "He's so darn handsome. Why, I dream at night of a man that handsome sweepin' me off my little dainty feet. And, you know, by golly, I bet he'd make a charmin' president...er-ah, anything to git that knee-grow out of the White Man's House."

Yes, folks, you be assured that any Republican in Mississippi or Alabama is a racist. Rick Santorum is certainly a full-blown racist. I don't think he'd argue with you about that. I mean, come on, how many Black friends does Little Rickie have?--oh, I forgot, he may have a Black house boy in his Pennsylvania mansion.

So Mitt "The Mormon" Romney got his old northern ass trounced. Both Little Rickie and Newtie Boy beat him. "That thar Moore-man dude, ain't he a Yankee?" "You damn right he is. He's from that thar state of Messychoosits and that thar's way up there in the north. Furthest north I ever been is North Birmingham. That's fer enough north for me, boy."

My Alabama Connection
I settled in New Orleans back in the middle of the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. I had loved New Orleans since as a kid I visited there with my family several times. My folks had both relatives and good friends in New Orleans. From my first time there I knew I loved New Orleans. I mean it was such a swinging city even to a little West Texas kid. So when I got the chance, after marrying in Dallas and leaving my job that was not related to my education, my new wife and I easily decided we wanted to live in New Orleans. Right after our marriage, we packed our belongings in rented Chevrolet and headed off for the Crescent City [I lived there two years and NEVER heard New Orleans called the Big Easy.]

My first job in New Orleans was with the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court. This was right before the Civil Rights Act passed. New Orleans had trouble integrating, but it was minor compared to the horrible White racism going on all around it, like over on the other side of Mississippi where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were brutally murdered and buried in a damn on the Pearl River; or the brutality of Bull Connor and the Birmingham racist police department firehosing and sicking dogs on Blacks simply seeking the right to vote--their right to equality; or the racist babbling coming out of Leander Perez in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. In New Orleans, a bunch of Catholic Whites had protested against a Federal judge's orders to integrate the New Orleans school system, and there had been sit-ins at the Woolworth's lunch counter and some other places in Center City New Orleans. But for the most part, New Orleans integrated peacefully. As a result, when I joined the Juvenile Court I found myself working with an integrated staff, though still the staff was divided in the sense the Black workers didn't handle White cases; yet the White workers did handle Black cases. My wife and I soon had made several friends from among that Black staff and most of my White co-workers were very liberal and we had many an integrated party in our apartment in the French Quarter, which was integrated in those days--my neighborhood cleaners being owned by a Black family and several of the tenants in my neighborhood were Blacks--though, yes, I'll admit there was still plenty of prejudice among the old-line established Whites in and around where I lived--especially the old Italian family restaurant I frequented a lot and loved around on Decatur.

My wife and I became members of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, in New Orleans. At that time CORE was an integrated movement. Our field reps were Huey Newton and Julius Lester. I went to my first CORE meeting and it was dominated by White folks, especially a White woman from the Washington, D.C., chapter who was there to instruct us on holding sit ins and preparing for a big march happening over in Laurel, Mississippi and thinking in the future about the bigger march that was planned for Selma, Alabama, later that year.

One of my first times in court representing a Black kid, I came before a judge who had been put on the bench by Huey Long himself. He was a wicked old judge with an evil streak all over his craggy face. When I presented my case before him, he suddenly asked me, "Where you from, boy?" I told him I'd just moved to Louisiana from Texas. He said, "Texas, my ass, boy, I hear Alabama in your voice--you from Alabama, I guarantee you." I set stunned before him. "In fact, boy, I say you from Dothan, Alabama...damn right, I can tell an Alabama accent no matter how you try to hide it. "No sir," I lied, "I'm from Texas; never been to Alabama." That last part was the truth, I had never been to Alabama, but the lie was, my father's family was from Alabama--not Dothan, but Decatur. I was ashamed of my Alabama past--and I've rejected all my life (subconciously) the fact my grandparents on my father's side were from Decatur, Alabama. I've always said my original family came from North Carolina, which a part of them did, though not my immediate relations.

My first trip to Alabama came my first spring in New Orleans. One of my coworkers told me all about this marvelous place that she and her friend summered at. She said, "You and your wife must come visit us in a month when we're planning to spend a long weekend on this island...Dauphin Island...this wonderful place far out in Mobile Bay." "Mobile, Alabama?" I asked. "No, no, my wife and I have sworn we'll avoid Alabama--I mean the meanest racists in the world are over there." She replied, "Oh, no, Mobile is not like Birmingham and Selma...no, and Dauphin Island is far out away from Mobile anyway...and there are Blacks on the island as well as Whites." For some reason, my wife and I decided to check this place out. It was presented to us by others of our friends as a paradise...most assuring us that Mobile was more like New Orleans in its sophisticated approach to integration.

The serene beaches on Dauphin Island
My wife and I took that first trip over to Dauphin Island and we loved it so much we immediately rented a cabin for that whole summer and we spent many a peaceful weekend and vacation on this wonderful paradise. I mean, out on this island you didn't feel like you were in Alabama at all. Though eventually, hanging out around Mobile, I began to check the city out in terms of its Civil Rights history while basking in the sun on Dauphin Island, reading up on it racial history, and much to my surprise, I found that Mobile was in the same class as New Orleans when it came to the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, compared to other Alabama cities, Mobile was an exception to the rule of racism and Klannish attitudes thanks to a White power base that was determined to keep Mobile a fair city when it came to racial equality due to two men, Joseph Langan, a White veteran committed to racial equality who became the Mayor of Mobile from the late 50s into the late 1960s, and John LeFlore, a Black civil rights organizer who eventually was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives. Of course, Mobile had its problems, especially after a Black group called NOW (Stokely Carmichael had something to do with it) turned on LeFlore and withheld Black votes from that years elections and Joseph Langan lost his bid for reelection. Also that year, LeFlore's house was bombed, though no one was hurt. The bombers were never caught though ironically a lot of Black Mobileans believed Blacks who were against LeFlore and the NAACP did the bombing.

At the time I spent my summers on Dauphin Island, I never went into Mobile nor did I read any Mobile newspapers, and though we frequently went back to Dauphin Island occasionally by then my wife and I had discovered Destin, Florida, up the road from Pensacola, where we rented a room for a whole summer in the Destin Holiday Inn, a room with a kitchen and sitting room, right on the beach.

I never however got any further north in Alabama than Mobile Bay and never ever have been to Decatur, Alabama, where, yes, I now admit, my father's family originated.

Today I think of Alabama as a backward state, a stupid state, and I've seen no evidence showing me it isn't. Alabama went Dixiecrat when old racist hypocrite (turned out he had a Black daughter) Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party in 1948 after Harry S. Truman integrated the US Army.
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Obama Our Corporate President
So it does look like President Obama will have smooth sailing into his second term in spite of his acting like a G.W. Bush clone for his first term in office. He's a warmonger, now rattling our swords at Iran based on Iran developing nuclear weapon capabilities of which there is no more proof than there was that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, which it turned out he didn't. I think this sword rattling by Obama is all about OIL. Remember, the largest user of fossil fuels in the world is the US military. They are also one of the largest users of nuclear power in the world, too. Obama, in spite of the Gulf Coast oil spill, is going on with drill, drill, drill, allowing BP to go back to deepwater drilling in our Gulf and also opening up our Alaskan Wilderness to them also. [I've notice there's no longer any mention of the Exxon-Mobil Yellowstone River oil leak--what's that all about?]

So here we go again. No choice for president, just the same ole same oles, to which I agree with Ralph Nadir, there is still no difference in our political parties; they are all corporatized now; playgrounds for millionaires, of which now President Obama is one.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Thanks to our computer ace, he wants to remain anonymous, we did get to load a photo with today's post. It still ain't perfect, though.


Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The Daily Growler Computer Problems

We have switched to having to use a PC and unfortunately it does not allow us to post photos nor does the tool bar give us any indication of where the hell any of our tools are. Our Mac G4 is no longer usable due to the Firefox version we were using now not browsing or when it does open a site the site is in rough draft form. We have a Mac iBook that has the correct operating system in it but when we plug in the Ethernet cable it says "Ethernet cable is not plugged in." We just clicked on Check Spelling and nothing happened. We are pissed to say the least. These sons of bitches change their operating systems so fastly and furiously now it is hard for the ordinary person to keep up with them. Apple is already up to past Snow Leopard now--and Microsoft is already putting out an new version of Windows. We are stuck with Windows XP, which to us is a wonderful operating system--but progress is progress and progress means change, rapid change, because we now exist in a nanosecond world--The Daily Growler has been passed by...so, until we can afford to buy a new operating system--which means we've got to buy a new Mac with Intel processors, we'll be publishing these Mickey Mouse posts--text only posts--crap, is all we can say.

thestaff
for The Daily Growler

Stay tuned in though, we will start publishing hopefully tomorrow, with Orphan Annie singing our theme song.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Existing in New York City Among the Insane Power Elites

Foto by tgw, "A Photographic Look Into Our God's Eye," New York City, March 2012
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Shouldn't We GET THE HELL OUT OF AFGHANISTAN--NOW!
I mean a crazy MF American soldier killed 16 innocent Afghans including little kids--what an insane war this is--the Afghan people had nothing to do with 9/11--all they did was give shelter to bin Laden who our military and CIA put in Afghanistan in the first place to fight the Mujaheddin--the Afghan people didn't ask for him--and then this CIA agent bin Laden ended up in Pakistan anyway--so why didn't we invade and occupy Pakistan? And once bin Laden was assassinated, why are we still turning Afghanistan into a killing field? AMAZING! I think the American people should demand Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Warmonger Obama get us the hell out of there! Our military is insane--a bunch of high-ranking idiots running that show over there. First some idiot ordered the burning of the Koran in public. Now this poor insane soldier--taught by our military to kill or be killed--goes on a killing rampage! Will he get a slap on the wrist--or maybe a Medal of Honor? I mean, come on, he wiped out 16 enemy combatants--what a hero! Obama is a fool to continue this G.W. Bush (that lying son of a bitch) War on Terror--in revenge for some Saudi Arabians making what to me was a miraculous military attack on the USA being they were drunk the night before, never learned how to land one of those big planes, and took over planes full of hundreds of passengers with only boxcutters--I mean come on, doesn't this all sound suspicious? We are idiots. Certified idiots. We are doomed. Our military is commanded by a bunch of dipsticks. Obama is a fool to continue this warmongering. Except our economy is now solidly a war economy! We are still the biggest arms dealers in the world. Why isn't Obama being challenged in debates?
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NYC's Billionaire Mayor Blames Pension Funds for This City's Economy on the Downward Slide
From the NYTimes:
“We really are up against it,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said during a recent trip to Albany, urging the state to reduce pension benefits for future public employees. In a radio interview on Friday, Mr. Bloomberg noted the spreading financial woes of local governments, saying, “Towns and counties across the state are starting to have to make the real choices — fewer cops, fewer firefighters, slower ambulance response, less teachers in front of the classroom.”
Cutting services to the Citizens of NYC is our Billionaire Mayor's solution to our economic woes. So much for economic recovery, President Obama.
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Contemplating Suicide
My last post got many interesting replies from Growler readers and my own roster of good friends. I tried to explain that I'm a fictional character in an ongoing fictional effort at reality. I know that doesn't make sense, but to me it does. As a writer, I find myself forced to write about all aspects of the reality of my life. Yes, I had a heart attack. Yes, I almost died. Yes, in my current condition, I was forced to at least delve into the subject of my own suicide. Suicide is in my relative blood. My nephew who committed suicide, though a bit on the edge all his life, called me many times before he did it trying to talk rationally to me. Trying to get answers to his quandaries from me. Answers I couldn't give him. Answers that he started demanding with phone calls in the dead of some of my nights. And when he didn't get those answers he desperately wanted from me he turned to accusing me. Accusations that soon turned into off-the-wall insults. Me his favorite uncle now devilized as a hater of him. The last insulting phone call I got from him, and I remember it so well, so pissed me off, I turned on him and forbade him from calling me anymore. It was in thinking back on that moment that compelled me to consider if anything, a rejection or a crashed love affair or the fact that I may be ruined by this pay-or-die healthcare system, would cause me to contemplate if not actually do it my own suicide.

The continuing present in my life has a way of leveling things out. Back at Bellevue for another coumadin clinic this time I was waved on through without having to go through a finance person. So I wasn't charged another $220. In fact, I saw that finance woman and I grinned at her and told her I hoped she was having a nice day.

Tonight I feel much better, lighter on my feet, and feeling capable of navigating my way through these narrows I suddenly find my life's ship channeled into. I've been thinking of the Larry Graham song from his Graham Central Station album "Release Yourself"--"You've got to go through it to get to it"--and that sing-song rather chant-able line keeps rocking through my head. I do have to go through this to get to that other side where I can start living reality again. [This album, by the way, is one of the greatest r&b-rock-drive albums ever recorded. I was absolutely pissed off to see two White fools reviewing it putting it down by saying it was supercilious--ignorant White people who wouldn't know great music if they heard it, these two White fools listing that god-damn copycat White Eric Clapton...forgive me, but these Brit fop bastards so turn me off when I hear them ripping off my USA original musics--I hate Eric Clapton the same way I hate the god-damn overrated copycatting Beatles--you know how nauseating seeing Sir Fucking Paul at our Grammy Awards was to me? Sorry, I'm getting irrational.]

One of my Sociology heroes, Charles Horton Cooley, wrote:
"One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide."

Ladies and Gentleman, I do not have a tired mind even after my ordeal; therefore I cease contemplating my own finalization of self criticism. Hemingway and Hunter Thompson felt they had lost their ability to write--in that form of self criticism, they took the only way out for a tired mind.
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The Backwards-Thinking Fools Persist
I see the idiots of Repugnican Kansas have chosen Rick Santorum as their choice to be President of the idiotic USA. President Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, is continuing to beat his loudest war drums--now suddenly against Syria (a rebellion some say was instigated by our CIA infiltrating that country) and surely now at Israel's insistence (are you as amazed as I am of the power Israel has over our Presidents and Congresses?) we are going to invade and try to occupy Iran. The Iranians are a great people; great minds; rational thinkers; yet, they are subject to a nutjob Islamic rule that keeps them suppressed. Now we are threatening along with the nutjob Israelis to annihilate them--why? Because of what? How about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Again the same ole G.W. Bush insane lies are leading us into yet another War on Terror. In order to get revenge for the 3,000 who were killed in the insane attack on the World Trade Center (and not all of those victims were US citizens)--an incident by the way that could have been prevented had our Air Force that was alerted by American Airlines done its job and immediately scrambled fighter jets into the skies that day--we are now killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, some say by the millions--and look at the messes we have created in Iraq and Afghanistan. And look at the continuing fucked up mess we caused in Libya--and the killing we are still doing with our unmanned drones in Pakistan--because they are unmanned drones we tend to think we are not really involved in those killings. Our President stupidly says these drones are so accurate, they're incapable of killing innocent people, only al-Queda terrorists. I'm puzzled. How is al-Queda still such a force against us when I read constantly that there are only a handful of these Islamic nutjobs still around? We the People of the USA are killers. Our Nobel-Peace-Prize-Winning President is a killer. Did you hear the totally dumbass explanation of why our President is allowed to assassinate his own people by our truly dumbass Justice Department head, Eric "Hat in Hand, Lips to the White Man's Ass" Holder? I mean these fucking power-mad fools are jeopardizing not only our economy but our very lives. And now you better believe these mad killers are going to do something absurd and rash to Iran--an innocent people who there's no proof positive that they have Weapons of Mass Destruction. Except every day you hear a new horn-blowing alert coming from Israel or our military on how Iran now is capable not only of flinging nukes over into Israel but also flinging them over and into our glorious country--and why would the Iranians be so insane to do anything like that?--and why would they want to nuke countries like Israel and the US that have huge nuclear weapon arsenals, Israel's arsenal provided to them by the country with the largest number of nuclear weapons on earth, the good ole USA.

And fuck these "improving economy" figures the government is throwing out at us every day--more jobs created--the economy is recovering--BUT, slowly now, folks; always watch for those "BUTS" in everything our government says, which, according to H.L. Mencken and me are all LIES adjusted to seem as though truths.

I leave you today as I have in many past posts with a excerpt from C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite. You decide after reading this if this country is on a suicidal course, one sliding us off into Hell because we never challenge or debate any of these militarists's calls for wars and rumors of more wars.

The military pursuit of status, in itself, is no threat of military dominance. In fact, well enclosed in the standing army, such status is a sort of pay-off for the military relinquishment of adventures in political power. So long as this pursuit of status is confined to the military hierarchy itself, it is an important feature of military discipline, and no doubt a major source of much military gratification. It becomes a threat, and it is an indication of the growing power of the military elite today, when it is claimed outside the military hierarchy and when it tends to become a basis of military policy.

The key to an understanding of status is power. The military cannot successfully claim status among civilians if they do not have, or are not thought to have power. Now power, as well as images of it, are always relative: one man's powers are another man's weaknesses. And the powers that have weakened the status of the military in America have been the powers of money and of money-makers, and the powers of the civilian politicians over the military establishment.

American 'militarism,' accordingly, involves the attempt of military men to increase their powers, and hence their status, in comparison with businessmen and politicians. To gain such powers they must not be considered a mere means to be used by politicians and money-makers. They must not be considered parasites on the economy and under the supervision of those who are often called in military circles 'the dirty politicians.' On the contrary their ends must be identified with the ends as well as the honor of the nation; the economy must be their servant; politics an instrument by which, in the name of the state, the family, and God, they manage the nation in modern war.' What does it mean to go to war?' Woodrow Wilson was asked in 1917. 'It means,' he replied, 'an attempt to reconstruct a peacetime civilization with war standards, and at the end of the war there will be no bystanders with sufficient peace standards left to work with. There will be only war standards ... ' American militarism, in fully developed form, would mean the triumph in all areas of life of the military metaphysic, and hence the subordination to it of all other ways of life.

There can be little doubt but that, over the last decade [1946-1956], the warlords of Washington, with their friends in the political directorate and the corporate elite, have definitely revealed militaristic tendencies. Is there, then, in the higher circles of America 'a military clique'? Those who argue about such a notion-as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and General of the Army Omar Bradley have recently done - are usually arguing only about the increased influence of the professional military. That is why their arguments, in so far as they bear upon the structure of the elite, are not very definitive and are usually at cross-purposes. For when it is fully understood, the idea of a military clique involves more than the military ascendancy. It involves a coincidence of interests and a co-ordination of aims among economic and political as well as military actors.

Our answer to the question, 'Is there now a military clique?' is: Yes, there is a military clique, but it is more accurately termed the power elite, for it is composed of economic, political, as well as military, men whose interests have increasingly coincided.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Thursday, March 08, 2012

Existing in New York City: Soon to Not Even Have a Pot to Throw Up In

Foto by tgw, "Manhattan Under Fog," New York City, March 2012
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Say Goodbye to: Peter Bergman--
one of the members of the wonderful Firesign Theater team I first heard on WBAI-FM (they broadcast out of Pacifica's KPFK in Los Angeles) when I came to NYC in the late 60s and early 70s--Bergman along with David Ossman, Phil Proctor, and Phil Austin were absolutely comedic geniuses in their use of tape, sound effects, sound bites, scripting, and programming to form the Firesign Theater, still to this day some of the funniest stuff ever made in this country of boring comedians. Peter Bergman, 72, American comedian (The Firesign Theater), leukemia. Give a listen to one of the more famous Firesign Theater episodes--with Phil Bergman playing Det. Bradshaw in a Nick Danger adventure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCzgdF_WjOg
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Pay or Die
I woke up yesterday morning feeling wonderful. I was grasped from the proverbial jaws of death by a truly wonderful bunch of my fellow New Yorkers 3 weeks ago...but yesterday morning, that was all shot down. It lies in my soul now a burning wreckage while my heart valiantly tries to follow orders and heal itself. Last night I was encouraged when I read a report from Swedish cellular biologists who said they have discovered that cardiomyocytes (heart cells) can regenerate themselves over a matter of time. I had an appointment with a cardiologist at my hospital yesterday and I was looking forward to discussing this with him or her. Instead, what happened was I was driven out of the Garden of Eden and into a desert. Into a desert where now I'm on my own. "Heal thyself." That's the edict I've been handed.

All who know me know that I have lived outside the real most of my life. Even my real name is not real. I have been successful under different names at several different professions. I've been a published poet. I've had two commercially successful books published. I've been a successful editor and rose in that field to become a Director of Editorial Services for a large financial firm. I've become a successful medical editor in the pharmaceutical advertising game. I've been the lead singer of a downtown Manhattan cult band. I've played numerous club dates with my own groups and several friends's bands around New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, and on Long Island. I've had a recording made and issued by a professional record label. I at one time was a successful copywriter. I've even been a writing consultant. So being me is a boatload of variety full of many spices of life.

I have had affairs and marriages with some of the most beautiful and intelligent women on earth.

In a left-wing libertarian sense I've taken care of myself in many grand manners. I've lived on cash for as long as I could. I've kept an independent mind about all aspects of my life, one aspect being I've been blessed with perfect health all of my life...that is until three Sundays ago when after a wonderful woman tricked me via generous care and while I slept called EMS when during that process I discovered I was having a heart attack.

I sit here at my computer tonight remembering reading A. (for Al) Alvarez's very impressive book The Savage God, a beautifully and poetically written book about suicide. I think back now over how many of my literary heroes committed suicide: Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, John Berryman, Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig, and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Alvarez's book moved me; yet, even though these great writers committed suicide, I never thought of myself ever doing it. I just couldn't do that to myself, I thought. I followed rather writers who loved living, like Henry Miller. Especially Henry Miller. A man who though totally impoverished most of his life; a man who didn't publish his first book until he was nearing 50; a man who lived totally as a writer, as a writer is supposed to live, wide open, full throttle ahead, never looking down, always alive and always spinning off into another writing dimension. Writing book after book about life as being even in times of utter chaos merry and bright, even in times of desperate love, even in times of being jilted by love, still writing down long rows of words that pulled him out of despair and always into cosmic hope. But since this heart attack and since the reality that hit me full face today, now I'm no longer so sure there might not come a point in what life I have left that like Papa and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson I might have the guts to get a fancy Belgium hunting rifle or a 9mm Glock and just point one of them into the roof of my mouth and blow my brains to kingdom come.

Here is Alvarez writing about Sylvia Plath's suicide in The Savage God:

Why, then, did she kill herself? In part, I suppose, it was "a cry for help" which fatally misfired. But it was also a last desperate attempt to exorcise the death she had summed up in her poems.

I have already suggested that perhaps she had begun to write obsessively about death for two reasons. First, when she and her husband separated, however mutual the arrangement, she again went through the same piercing grief and bereavement she had felt as a child when her father, by his death, seemed to abandon her. Second, I believe she thought her car crash the previous summer had set her free; she had paid her dues, qualified as a survivor and could now write about it.

But as I have written elsewhere, for the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expression may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him. The result of handling it in his work may well be that he finds himself living it out. For the artist, in short, nature often imitates art. Or, to change the clichè, when an artist holds up a mirror to nature he finds out who and what he is; but the knowledge may change him irredeemably so that he becomes that image.

I think Sylvia, in one way or another, sensed this. In an introductory note she wrote to "Daddy" for the B.B.C., she said of the poem's narrator, "She has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it." The allegory in question was, as she saw it, the struggle in her between a fantasy Nazi father and a Jewish mother. But perhaps it was also a fantasy of containing in herself her own dead father, like a woman possessed by a demon (in the poem she actually calls him a vampire). In order for her to be free from him, he had to be released like a genie from a bottle. And this is precisely what the poems did; they bodied forth the death within her. But they also did so in an intensely living and creative way. The more she wrote about death, the stronger and more fertile her imaginative world became. And this gave her everything to live for.

I suspect that in the end she wanted to have done with the theme once and for all. But the only way she could find was "to act out the awful little allegory once over." She had always been a bit of a gambler, used to taking risks. The authority of her poetry was in part due to her brave persistence in following the thread of her inspiration right down to the Minotaur's lair. And this psychic courage had its parallel in her physical arrogance and carelessness. Risks didn't fright her; on the contrary, she found them stimulating. Freud has written: "Life loses in interest when the highest stake in the games of living, life itself, may not be risked." Finally, Sylvia took that risk. She gambled for the last time, having worked out that the odds were in her favor, but perhaps, in her depression, not much caring whether she won or lost. Her calculations went wrong and she lost.

It was a mistake, then, and out of it a whole myth has grown. I don't think she would have found it much to her taste, since it is a myth of the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art, having been dragged by the Muses of that final altar through every kind of distress. In these terms, her suicide becomes the whole point of the story, the act which validates her poems, given them their interest and proves her seriousness.

When I worked in the juvenile detention world, I was just out of college, I had to deal with kids constantly threatening to commit suicide, especially those just brought in and scared to death of being incarcerated. I remember one night a beautiful tall Black girl was brought in by the cops. I still to this day have a clear picture of this young lady. She had been picked up after her mother reported her incorrigible, a typical mother's charge when it came to calling the cops on her children. "Mister Wolfe, I just can't control this child anymore. You take her; she might learn a good lesson from being locked up she'll never forget."

After this girl was put in a cell, locked up, I monitored the cell via the cell's intercom, a normal process for new incarcerations, and soon heard her quietly praying. Not to a familiar god, but a god in her head. "Give me the strength to do it...give me the strength to do it, " she kept repeating over and over again. Then she started screaming, "I want to commit suicide! I want to commit suicide!"

As a young man, I had no idea how to handle this type of person. So I went to the senior social worker on the floor and consulted with him.

"Girls threatening suicide are looking for attention," he instructed me. "Here's how I would handle this girl. Go to her cell with the woman night worker and take some double-edge razor blades with you. Have the night worker open the cell and hand the girl one of these razor blades and then show her how to cut her wrists. Leave, and I guarantee you, she'll not think of suicide any more."

Wow. That spun my head around. "Isn't that risky?" I asked. "What if she slices her wrists?"

"Then you're there to administer first aid to her."

Cold. Jesus, I thought, this guy's a Sadist.

I went and found the girls's area night worker, an older woman social worker, and told her she'd better keep an eye on this Black girl in cell 1 that she was threatening suicide.

"Ah, she's a phony. All these girls have no idea what suicide is, they just babble that in order to get our attention. I'll talk to her. Did old Stone give you his razor-blade therapy?"

"Yeah, and I thought that was damn cold of him."

"It works most of the time, though. You didn't know that?"

I never knew what happened. The tall black girl was still alive the next day when I came to work. In fact she became one of the easiest girls to deal with we had in lock up at that time. The boys on the other hand never threatened suicide no matter the seriousness of their charges. In fact, the Black boys always asked for razor blades as that was the way they cut their hair in those days.

That was my first experience with suicidal threats. In my family, we had had a suicide. A distant cousin, a poet, jumped off the highest building, a 16-story hotel, in my hometown. Years before I was born. But as a kid I heard his story usually told in enduring pity by my mother's mother, my grandmother the poet/librarian.

I was taught that suicide was something a human being just didn't do. According to the Christian religion, suicides hadn't a chance in hell of getting into heaven.

The next suicide I recall happened after I left Dallas and had moved to New Orleans. In Dallas, one of the workers I worked with at the juvenile home was a strange little cat, an ex-semi-successful boxer who had gone to college and gotten a degree in Sociology and then had worked on his MSW, his Master's of Social Work. Like I say, he was in spite of his work with juvenile delinquents a strange cat, so strange a cat, he portrayed himself as a bitter mean guy most of the time. Everyone who knew him, even the kids he worked with, knew he was one tough cookie and he'd use his boxing knowledge to lay you out should you cross him with threats of violence. This mean response later got him fired from the juvie after he punched a kid on his watch so hard it knocked several of the kid's teeth out.

My roommate at the time, another juvenile home worker, was this cat's best friend. As a result, this cat visited our apartment a lot. It was this dude who introduced me to smoking marijuana, a dangerous pacification in Texas in those years because if you were caught with a roach or even seeds on you or in your car, you could face life in the Texas State Prison in Huntsville.

The first time I got high with these cats the elevation for me was truly ethereal. Soon I was uncontrollably laughing my ass off and feeling like my feet weren't touching the ground. Though in my sense of euphoria, I noticed the boxer wasn't euphoric at all but rather more deeply serious than I'd ever seen him. While we were high, we all piled into my Cadillac and went down to a bar 3 blocks away. Once in the bar, I again got involved with a laughing fit, as did my roommate. The boxer on the other hand got terribly paranoid and started warning us that several of the other people in the bar looked to him like FBI agents. "You guys have to stop laughing. Those FBI dudes are going to figure us out." He stayed in this mode the rest of the night.

I knew the boxer had been married. And to a very nice respectable Dallas girl, too. I knew this because he had dated my girlfriend before me and she had told me all about his marriage and how brutal and mean it was, both of them so incompatible they were in constant combat; yet when she filed divorce papers on him, he had lost control and whimpered like a baby for her to reconsider and take him back and save the marriage. At about this same time, I met my future wife and broke up with this girlfriend, though, even after I was married and moved to New Orleans I kept in contact with her in order to get Dallas information about all the people I had worked with at the juvenile home.

In July of 1964, my parents were killed in an automobile accident and in order to clear up their estate and to get what they had left my brother and me in their will, I had to return to my hometown, 200 miles west of Dallas. After receiving my portion of the estate--it left me independently momentarily fairly well off--my wife and I returned to Dallas and gave a big party for my old juvenile home friends and compadres. My ex-girlfriend showed up at the party. Later in the evening, and I have no idea what brought him up, I just happened to say I had always wondered what had happened to the boxer. My ex-girlfriend looked at me with tears in her eyes. "Didn't W.M. get a hold of you?" she asked. "No," I replied, "I haven't heard from him since just before I moved to New Orleans." "Well, we're all shook up...those of us who intimately knew him." "What happened?" I asked. "He and his wife...," she was shook up; I knew she had fallen for the guy when they dated. "Yeah, what, they got back together...." "Yeah, they got back together if you believe tying yourselves together and sticking your heads together in an oven and gassing yourselves to death is getting back together."

I couldn't imagine what kind of situation would have driven my wife and I to do that. My God, I couldn't imagine sticking my head in an oven...I mean, it was unthinkable to me.

From then on, my life took a turn toward the celestial and I thus started my various journeys under my various names through life. I moved to New York City and got involved in the wonderful swirls of life possible in this great city back in the 1970s.

All throughout the 70s and 80s, I lived high on the hog in the Big Apple, a wonderful time to live in this town--with its wonderful plays, and its jazz, and its club and bar scene, and the opening up of Artist in Residence lofts in the old manufacturing lofts of SOHO and NOHO and BLOHO. And I lived in the heart of that scene, hanging downtown at the Ear Inn with celebrities and nobodies alike, with Phil Glass, with Cameron Brown, with my own musician friends, with even Christo (that fakir), with even Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi (I've awakened outside John Belushi's old bar/home in my neighborhood one morning drunk on my ass right next to John drunk on his ass), with many eccentric performance artists, including Wendy O. Williams--an eventual suicide--with my writer friends, with Werner Herzog, with Henry Miller's first publisher in this country Bern Porter reading out of seed catalogs, and Rhys Chatham doing his thing, Ned Sublette doing his thing, and Laurie Anderson doing her thing, and some of the US's first futurists doing their thing. And then I got divorced and I started meeting such talented women and having wonderful affairs of all night partying and then making love in every possible way the rest of the night and into the next days--and life was good and we had creative balls and I never had a health problem. In fact, one doctor after checking me out said I was as healthy as the proverbial horse, a verdict I took to mean I might even live forever. Suicide was as far a cry from my thoughts as could be--even when it was determined that the rock critic Lester Bangs, who I knew, had killed himself drinking cough syrup, didn't hit me as suicide; I never knew Lester to hate living--it was just ferocious living, which we all were doing, that did him in.

In fact, up until three weeks ago, I prided myself on my excellent health. I bragged about it. Several of my best friends began to die, my best friend with cancer, my second best friend from a heart attack, my oldest friend in life (from junior high on) from cancer, my ex-wife from cancer, my brother from cancer, my primitive artist nephew while being operated on in an L.A. hospital. And then, one day, out of nowhere, suicide reared its ugly head directly in my face. One of my nephews went into a California State Park and in a very dramatic way blew his brains out with a shotgun. Still that didn't phase me. My nephew was crazy and he'd been loopy all his life--so his method of death didn't surprise me...but then it gnawed at me in the sense I wondered just what in the hell got so depressing that he found it necessary to die that way. I thought back to my years in the juvenile home and that senior social worker telling me suicides were phonies simply looking for attention. And I recalled A. Alvarez's The Savage God and his explaining Sylvia Plath's suicide in that accidental sense. And then Hunter Thompson did it.

I sit now facing either salvation through medical help or the end of my world should I now find myself involved in the pay-or-die healthcare system in this country. Now I seethe with anger as I go to Bellevue Hospital and see the hoards of down-and-outers suffering all kinds of illnesses, some worse than mine, like a lady getting cancer therapy there who spent an hour one day telling us all how she was thinking of moving to Canada where she could get cheaper meds, the cost of her meds killing her more loudly than the cancer she was so-far successfully battling.

Finally, yesterday, the demon of hospitals for profit reared its ugly head in my life. I was told by Bellevue finance that from now on my visit to the coumadin clinic (coumadin is warfaren a blood thinner that I was told is saving my life) would cost me $220 a visit--and I've got a coumadin clinic visit tomorrow because they're concerned about my blood now getting too thin and putting me at a risk for serious external and internal bleeding that must be controlled--and instead of being happy about it, I'm depressed--because I'm going to need to go to these coumadin clinics maybe twice every week--which means $440 a week until they get my bleeding under control and my blood able to clot again. And I'm sitting here reading this Swedish cellular biologists report saying cardiomyocytes (heart cells) can regenerate over time and I'm thinking, yeah, but how do I get my income to regenerate at the same time? And then the evil little thought hits me. What if these Capitalist sons of bitches ruin me? What if this hospital presents me with an outrageous bill...like a $20,000 bill, which would pretty much wipe me out and leave me dangling helplessly over debtors's hell? Would I be able to end my life given such a hopeless situation?

Tune in tomorrow for the next chapter in this continuing saga of my battle with life and inevitable death. Treat it like a mystery story.
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Hospitals for Profit
The fact that our country hasn't got a National Single-Payer Healthcare Program is to me criminally ludicrous. The fact that when Obama started touting his Obamacare he firmly stated when he gathered his healthcare experts, all criminals from the healthcare insurance industry, the hospitals-for-profits industry, and the big pharmaceuticals, that single-payer healthcare would not be on the table. To make sure this wouldn't happen he chose a criminal senator from the low-life backward state of Montana (a playground for the filthy rich), Max Baucus, a criminal whose main political donations came from these criminal institutions who rob with impunity the sick and dying in this country who have no insurance due to their losing their jobs and their homes and their pensions and their savings, over 50 million people and probably many more than that--or even people who have healthcare insurance and yet due to the outrageous deductibles and high-end co-payments are still reduced to pay-or-die situations should a major disease event happen in their lives, like a battle with cancer, or perhaps the sudden invasion into their lives of an unexpected heart attack. How will they react when a hospital has the nerve to tell them, "You either come up with all the money in the world or we will withhold your treatment!" WOW. That to me is criminal. Inhumane. And add onto that that We the People of the USA pay the highest prices for drugs in the world, drugs that cost these pharmaceutical company pennies to manufacture; yet yield them billions upon billions in profits, profits enough that their criminal executives dance around the Maypole every year with huge bonuses and huge salaries, driving fleets of BMWs, jetting around the world in their own fleet of jets, setting up golf outings and doctor drinkathons and convention parties and tons of whores and party girls available--and you don't think that's true? These are companies whose toxic drugs kill hundreds of thousands of patients every year and yet they are never held accountable for any of these deaths.

I blame Obama for promoting this inhumane and insane pay-or-die healthcare in this country and trusting the very criminals who are benefiting from this type of inhumane insurance to come up with these bogus national healthcare plans, Obamacare actually going to force Americans to buy into one of these plans whether they can afford it or not or else suffer a tax penalty.

And our doctors and nurses! Why aren't they protesting this? I know for sure the nurses at Bellevue Hospital are under strains shoved down on them by their millionaire administration people who force them to work long hours, two or three days at a time before getting a couple of days off--going off and recruiting nurses from the Philippines, from the Caribbean, and doctors from India or Pakistan. Amazing. Amazing.

Like why couldn't we have free clinics around a city as large as New York City? Free clinics where one could get free exams, free tests, free blood work, free meds.

I'm astonished that our politicians are so dead set against a single-payer health insurance system. These millionaire politicians and their many bureaucratic lackeys and goons have the finest healthcare in the world thanks to We the People, this Congress of millionaires who hate poor people, who hate sick people, who hate people who can't afford this pay-or-die insurance. Like that asshole Ron Paul said, and please don't be fooled by his phony stances, he would let his best friend die rather than give him free healthcare; yet, this bastard still takes the best healthcare in the world from these worthless poor folk--those living on individually less than $20,000-a-year.

I'm ranting so hard my heart is pounding a little too fast for my mental comfort. I'm one tick away from dying; and I soon may be several thousands of dollars away from being saved.

I leave you with some healthcare statistics:

Health Insurance

  • The United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not have a universal health care system. Source: Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences
  • In 2006, the percentage of Americans without health insurance was 15.8%, or approximately 47 million uninsured people. Source: US Census Bureau
  • Among the 84.2% with health insurance in 2006, coverage was provided through an employer 59.7%, purchased individually 9.1%, and 27.0% was government funded (Medicare, Medicaid, Military). (There is some overlap in coverage figures.) Source: US Census Bureau
  • The primary reason given for lack of health insurance coverage in 2005 was cost (more than 50%), lost job or a change in employment (24%), Medicaid benefits stopped (10%), ineligibility for family insurance coverage due to age or leaving school (8%). Source: National Center for Health Statistics
  • Health Care
  • More than 40 million adults stated that they needed but did not receive one or more of these health services (medical care, prescription medicines, mental health care, dental care, or eyeglasses) in 2005 because they could not afford it. Source: National Center for Health Statistics
  • Medicaid, which accounted for 12.9% of health care coverage in 2006, is a health insurance program jointly funded by the federal and state governments to provide health care for qualifying low-income individuals. Source: US Census Bureau
  • Medicare, a federally funded health insurance program that covers the health care of most individuals 65 years of age and over and disabled persons, accounted for 13.6% of health care coverage in 2006. Source: US Census Bureau
  • Medicare operates with 3% overhead, non-profit insurance 16% overhead, and private (for-profit) insurance 26% overhead. Source: Journal of American Medicine 2007
From www.healthpaconline.net

thegrowlingwolf
for The Nonprofit Daily Growler

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Existing in New York City: While Our Permanent Billionaire Mayor Toots His Own Horn

Foto by tgw, New York City, March 2012
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Our Billionaire Mayor Has His Own "Horn-Blowing" Teevee Channel

I was sitting here recuperating from a heart attack watching teevee when I accidentally came across New York City's Billionaire Mayor's constantly (24/7) running television show, usually called something like "Access to the Mayor" or something simple and honorable like that. This teevee show--it must cost thousands of dollars a day to produce--is totally Mayor Mikey Bloomberg's channel and his mug is on it most of the day, every day, and, like I said, the channel is on the air 24/7. Today as I accidentally came across it, Channel 25.2 on NYC commercial pap HD teevee, a woman, a White woman, was on it praising the Mayor's support for the fashion industry and as she spoke, there he was, Mayor Mikey himself, squatting by her side. He's a really short person who thinks he's super sexy and handsome. This White woman, rather frumpish looking to be a fashion-industry spokesperson, continued trumpeting in government-speak how the New York fashion industry is currently on the rise and providing jobs for nearly 175,000 people. Then Mikey himself got up and started blowing his own horn, something he's a tried-and-true expert at--although, to be honest, all NYC mayors have in the past done photo-op after photo-op in which they blow their own horns--Ed Crotch (Koch) was famous for it and so was Rudi "Mussolini" Giuliani--but neither of these two boobs were on their own teevee channel 24/7 like Little Mike is. So then Mikey started singing his own praises over the NYC fashion industry. All the while, I'm thinking: "Wait a gol-darn minute...I live on the outskirts of what was once the thriving alive and in-the-streets-evident NYC fashion industry (the Garment District)--From 5th Avenue over into West 30s--from the Fashion Institute of Technology on 7th and 26th over to 8th Avenue and up 8th Avenue from 26th on up to near 42nd Street. I see no evidence of that once great area of hustle and bustle left...." The Mayor was humming on about how he's brought the fashion industry back...blah, blah, blah, 175,000 jobs...blah, blah, blah. And I'm hollering "WHOAAAAA!" at the teevee set.

OK, there is still a fashion industry here, yes. But, in my point of view, it's the penthouse variety and not the actual manufacturing variety. Very few, if any, designer fashions are manufactured in New York City anymore. Oh, yes, there are sweatshops all around the boroughs; sweatshops in Chinatown; sweatshops out in Queens; sweatshops over in Jersey. But 175,000 jobs? Who are these 175,000 fashion-industry workers? Does our mayor include Betsey Johnson as a fashion-industry worker?

I recall back in the 70s when the fashion industry manufacturing up and left New York State and moved to Communist China, Hong Kong, Macau. All the French houses, too, joined this movement to cheap labor. So what are the 175,000 jobs still here in New York City? And out of 9 million people, almost 9% of whom are out of work, what the hell does 175,000 jobs mean? To Little Mike the Billionaire Mayor it means he's bringing jobs to NYC. He also toots about how TOURISTS with billions of bucks (our mayor thinks in terms of billions) come to NYC for the fashion seasons--and yes once or twice a year the fashion shows fill Bryant Park with tents and runways and rock bands and the fashion elite, but I don't see any Chinese piecemeal workers at these shows. I don't see any old Cuban ladies doing lace work at these shows. I don't see any Mexican ladies doing handstitching at these shows. I do see a lot of Hollywood fops at them. I see Betsey Johnson doing cartwheels at 60 years old at them. I see a lot of paparazzi and big-time buyers at them. I probably would see Donald Trump at them; maybe Sean "Puffy Diddy Diddler Puffed-up" Colmes at them--but then he's a fashion guru isn't he? I see a lot of that crap at these shows. But I don't see the final product being made in New York City.

Here's fashion fop Alexander Wang's (a young wonderboy designer who's fucking Lenny Kravitz's daughter) sweatshop manufacturing in NYC--I suppose the Mayor claims these jobs are part of the overall 175,000 jobs.

"FANS call him chic, but his workers say he's a taskmaster.

"Thirty workers claim they were forced to work 16 hours a day or longer, without overtime, in a suffocating, windowless, 18sq m room by the acclaimed fashionista, who earned a whopping $25 million in 2011.

"Wenyu Lu and dozens of co-workers charge that Wang, 28, and his brother Dennis Wang violated numerous New York State Labor Laws at their operation at 386 Broadway.

"As a result, Lu and the others have suffered injuries and illness and lost time from work, according to the suit filed in Queens Supreme Court.

"Lu claims he was hospitalised for several days after he passed out at his work station because he was forced to work 25 hours straight - without a break - and was told he'd be fired if he didn't follow orders.

"Lu, 56, a three-year employee of the Wang factory, claims he was also ordered to 'perfect a professional grade leather trouser from cut to finish in four hours.'

"The job normally takes 12 hours, and results in a pair of pricey pants that can retail for $300, the suit says.

"When the four hours passed, Lu claims he was insulted and called names by Dennis Wang, who ordered him to not take a break or go home until the job was completed, the lawsuit says.

"Lu was ultimately fired on Feb. 16 after complaining about the labor law violations, bad working conditions, and applying for worker's compensation, said Ming Hai, his lawyer.

"The designer's reps said they had no comment because they hadn't been served with the lawsuit yet.

"The California-born phenom burst onto the downtown New York scene when he launched his first women's ready-to-wear collection in 2007.

"Since then, he's become known for his casual, weathered T-shirts, tank tops, dresses - and outrageously high-heeled platform sandals.

"Retailers including Barneys, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman all feature his lines."

So there ya go. There's some of the 175,000 fashion-industry jobs Mayor Mikey Bloomberg has brought to NYC.

Funny, isn't it, how an Asian-American businessman uses his own people like slaves. Or am I being prejudice?

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Check Out the Labels in Your Clothes
I don't buy clothes if the label says "Made in China." And it's hard to find clothes that don't say that. Especially affordable clothes. I've been to K-Mart and shopped recently. I bought some very stylish tee shirts and a couple of nice pullovers, which when I brought them home found that two of my new shirts had holes in them. All these shirts said "Made in Pakistan." Pakistan! I can imagine the horrors of making shirts in Pakistan. Most of my old clothes I bought from an old friend of mine who had a man's clothing store on Park Avenue. All his clothes were labeled "Made in Italy." He had a deal with a designer in Milan. "Made in Italy" clothes I don't mind, though surely there are sweatshops in Italy, especially Milan, a city I visited way back when I worked for Viacom International in the pre-Mel Carmazin era. I noticed especially how my Milanese host, a VP with Italy Radio and Television, wore the most beautiful suits and shirts and shoes--and that impressed me enough I got on an Italian kick, though I found Italian design the slickest around at the time, still some of their quality in terms of stitching and coming unstitched left a lot to be desired. Like Italian cars are nicely designed but in terms of solid built, well there's some problems there. I once almost bought a Lancia back when I had money but while test driving it, it not only stalled out at a red light, but when turning a corner, one of the door handles fell off. On the other hand, I hate Fiats, especially those little tacky toy cars that are currently flooding the US market now that President Obama gave Chrysler away to Fiat.

Currently due to my lowered income, I buy minor-league baseball teeshirts and old golf fashions on eBay. Every now and then I get a "Made in China" tee, but it's surprising how the older-era ones are all proudly made in the USA. Still, it's hard to find any clothes today that aren't made somewhere along the Pacific Rim. They use formaldehyde in their clothes, by the way.

As a New Yorker, I find it so embarrassing now to go through Times Square (now it might as well be called Disney Square) and see all the Disney clothing stores selling cheaper-than-cheap Mickey Mouse teeshirts all made in China by slave labor--or how about child labor? Like I say, the Chinese treat their cheap labor force like slaves, which is what happens when a Communist country becomes the world's most successful Capitalist country.

Ah the ironies!

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Sunday, March 04, 2012

Existing in the Police State of New York City: Protected From Evil Muslims by the NYPD

Foto by tgw, New York City, March 2012
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Say Goodbye to: Don Mincher
. Don played his whole long career as a first baseman in the American League: for the Washington Senators, Oakland As, Minnesota Twins, Seattle Pilots (before they were the Mariners), the new Washington Senators that went on to become the Texas Rangers. I recall in 1966 when Don was a part of a baseball record when he and 4 other fellow Twins hit 5 home runs in one inning--one of the other Twins being Harmon Killebrew.
Don ended his life as president of the Southern League, a minor league.
Don Mincher, 73, American baseball player.
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Sittin' Here Thinkin'
My friends think I'm nuts for besmirching President Barak Obama's record during his 1st term in office. They assure me he will be better his second time around. One friend sites the following as Obama's accomplishments: Obamacare; getting the troops out of Iraq; putting the economy on a recovery track; making General Motors profitable again; and responsible for the successful assassination of bin Laden.

I can't argue with them. They ignore my cynicism (they do not read the Growler). I say, wait a minute, Obamacare is a pay-or-die healthcare scheme put together by the health-care insurance, hospital, and pharmaceutical industries's lobbyists that doesn't take effect until 2014.

I banter on with my friends: Obama continued G.W. Bush's and Hank Paulsen's idea that banks are too big to fail and continued the bank bailouts when he could have stopped them dead in their tracks when he took over. I then try to tell my friends that the stock market rising to 13,000 again is good for people who have 401Ks, IRAs, bonds, or tons of mutual fund investments, but it really has nothing to do with economic recovery in a whole sense. The stock market is easily rigged by the large pool investors like state pension-plan managers and huge block investors. Like in what sense does it being at 13,000 help people who have lost their asses in the housing bubble burst (housing prices are still falling; new home construction is still on the negative side) and the bank fraud schemes that caused the bubble to burst?

As to ending the War in Iraq: there are still 100,000 contractors there; and Hillary Clinton has a State Department army of 7,000 combat troops there to protect the world's largest-ever Embassy. Why not blow that damn thing up and bring these mostly security-company-based contractors home, too, along with our worn-out, injured, and mentally fucked-up troopers?

I spout on saying Obama has continued to OK British Petroleum's going full ahead with offshore drill, drill, drilling policies, currently encouraging more offshore drilling than ever before. Obama has limited BP's "punishment" to a measly chicken-feed 7 billion or so dollars which when they pay it then their case will be closed (like a limited-liability out for them--which means the victims of the oil spill can't sue the investors (stockholders) only what the company itself is liable for)--and this pay-out punishment is like a slap on their wrists to the foreign petroleum company for wreaking god-knows-what damage on our Gulf Coast waters. You can't Google any adverse effects on the Gulf by that oil spill now several years later. There's all praise for British Petroleum on the Internet for miraculously cleaning up the worst oil spill in US history--BP says most of the spill simply evaporated. I just read a high-praise-for-BP article that says the oyster population in the Gulf is "coming back magically" due to BP's clean up efforts. Not back to the way it was before the spill, of course. Gulf Coast hotel ads rave about how responsible BP was in cleaning up the beaches--why, hell, the beaches are now even cleaner than they were before the spill. Amazing. BP is a God-blessed miracle company.

Plus, insanely in my way of thinking in terms of the devastation still being revealed by the Fukashima nuclear plant diaster, Obama has approved the building of two new nuclear power plants in Georgia without a contest. And he touts nuclear energy as clean energy. That's idiotic to me. Especially when We the People of the USA assume the brunt of the huge costs it takes to build these monsters.

Barack Obama has also taken advantage of G.W. Bush's giving himself executive privileges to give himself even more and more ruthless executive privileges, like his now being able to assassinate US citizens (he's already assassinated 3 in Yemen) if he deems them enemy combatants (a G.W. Bush invention)--all he has to do is give the word. Like the recent dumbass, truly dumbass, NATO goof of openly burning Korans in Afghanistan, a dumbass move that has gotten NATO troops including Americans killed; yet no one in the upper-room ranks have been held responsible for this. Where did the order come from? What stupid ass command person ordered it and have they been thrown in the stockade over it? President Obama is our Commander in Chief. Wouldn't you run something like that by him before you did it?

President Obama has also continued G.W. Bush's policy of now allowing U.S. Army regular forces to be active on US soil. He has also continued the Bush policy of spying wildly on US citizens. Hell, he's continued this insane War on Terror that Bush started with lies. He allowed NATO forces to bomb the bejesus out of the Libyans in the meantime ignoring the same progressive movements going on in Bahrain and Yemen. On top of this, Obama, in love with drones, has authorized 20,000 drones to fly over the USA to spy on American citizens.

And as to the car industry's recovery. One of the reasons for this recovery is in the bailout agreements of the whole bailout scheme of General Motors in which Obama reached a deal with the Auto Workers Union to where the senior workers got to keep their $23-an-hour wages BUT new hires were limited to $15-an-hour. Think about that. Just look at it and make up your own mind. And here's another fact no one knows: the average number of years people are now driving cars has risen up to 10.5 years. This year's recent spur in terms of buying new cars? Peoples's old cars are wearing out and they are being forced to buy new cars but with money they really don't have, which means in order to buy a new car, they're having to cut back in other areas, like healthcare, food, and clothing, etc. [The Marxian Economist Richard D. Wolff explains this much better than I can. Go to the The Daily Growler "My Blog List" on the right and scroll down to Richard D. Wolff's Economic Update on WBAI-FM radio--an hour program and give a listen.] Also, remember, Obama gave Chrysler to the Italian company Fiat; plus Japanese Toyota's sales are up, too.

Hype. Election year distractions. Like this current bullshit over contraception! A distraction from our REAL problems.

Obama has never blamed any of this on G.W. Bush. He never mentions the man--except remember, he did appoint this fool to co-chair the rebuilding of Haiti (something that yet has never been done) with Slick Willie Clinton. We have only two more years to legally prosecute G.W. Bush for his many heinous crimes against the American people; after two years, this little spoiled brat prick will have gotten away with lying us into two supercostly economy-wrecking wars, spying on American citizens, and this insane idea of enemy combatants and the reason for Guantanamo (by the way, didn't Obama promise to close Guantanamo?).

I could go on, but that's enough. No, I wouldn't like to see Rick Santorum as president. No, I wouldn't want to see Mitt Romney as president. And I definitely wouldn't want to see Jeb Bush, that vote-stealing little bastard, as president (the Repugs are talking him up as a convention stealer). But I still just don't trust Obama.

My friends tell me they have no choice but to back Obama. They're even donating money to him. Gary Null, one of my favorite muckrakers, has given up on trying to bring about debates with Obama this time around--he's focusing on the 2016 election year now and says progressive Americans should be putting all their energies into finding a candidate then who is a true changer and not just a man of "Yes, We Can" sloganizing.

I'm still thinking of not voting for any of these creeps.

I just noticed that Sarah "Paleface" Palin--remember, she was John "Failed Mission" McCain's VP running mate in 2008--has endorsed Allen "Hat in Hand" West. Maybe she knows something the rest of us don't know.
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Watching PBS Fundraiser Tonight
Let me tell you the music lineup PBS (our Public British Broadcasting Co.) dragged out on stage tonight. How about John Tesh! Howard Stern called this Hollywood idiot "the blond Frankenstein." But oh glory, there John was tonight, fronting a huge big orchestra, singing pop songs a wee bit lower than Harry Connick, who everyone knows I despise. And then if John Tesh was blemish enough, right after the Blond Frankenstein sung pap songs, guess who they brought out to pander subscribers for them? How 'bout the B-52s!!!! The B-52s. Where the hell did they dig them up from? They're all middle-age and sagging all over the stage now.

Don't worry, I didn't vex my achy-breaky heart listening to one note of any of these two musical American embarrassments.

thegrowlingheartlesswolf
for The Daily Growler