Chaos Demands Hard Times

"Get the possum hardtack out, Ma, the vittles is gettin' low..."
It's a beautiful springlike morning in old New York City. Hi, y'all. I'm sunny and bright myself. I had a roommate in college, a man I despised on sight, who would bounce out of his bed every morning stentoriously bellowing "Time to get up and be bright eyed and bushy tailed." Oh Jeez how I hated that son of a bitch. BUT, I had to live one semester with the irritating bastard, so like Admiral Stockdale, I kept faith in myself and my self-control and survived this military-school-trained "marchin' fool," as he called himself. And you should have seen this guy. He was about 5' 7" and weighed about 300 pounds. I used to laugh like a hyena when imagining this dude dressed in a military uniform and marchin' like a fool. I laugh even now thinking back on this dude's waking me up for hundreds of mornings with his "Mom" orders to be "bright eyed and bushy tailed." What the hell does that mean anyway?

But, hey, I'm bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this mornin'--I feel like Richard Rogers & Oscar Hammerstein, feeling like singing, "Oh, what a beautiful morning." I've often wondered if either Hammerstein or Rogers had ever seen Oklahoma when they wrote that show? "The corn grows as high as an elephant's eye." That's a good line, man. And as a really little kid my mother took me to see Oklahoma--a traveling company that included Bonnie Riatt's daddy, John, who'd replaced Alfred Drake the original lead in the show. I loved that music. I knew all the songs by the next day--singing them over and over--though I was a toddler, man, a fuckin' toddler--that's "preponderous," as Casey Casem would put it.

The construction going on next to my building started their neighborhood disturbance at 6:30 this morning, the earliest they've ever started. What is amazing about this construction site is that even though New York City has suffered below-freezing temperatures and a couple of blizzard-like snowstorms over the past two weeks, these birds have never missed a day of work--plus, they've poured concrete nearly every day and that concrete has hardened and set and is up as foundation walls two-stories deep over there already--I mean, that's amazing to me. They are desperate to get this 18-story building up, I suppose, while the private equity company backing the developer is still pumping money into the site. How ironic is it to live in a town where on every block of nearly every street a hi-rise building development is going on; yet Wall Street is crashing and people are losing their jobs (900,000 a day--is that right? That's preponderous, man, fucking preponderous) daily by the thousands--apartment construction down around Wall Street has halted--still the construction goes on next door to me.

Wall Street and the crooked banks are firing right and left. Three dudes who lived above me in the penthouse, paying $5,000-a-month (can you compute that?--it means you'd have to make at least $60,000-a-year just to pay your rent), banker boys from the hinterlands, were there yesterday and they are totally gone today: one fired a couple of months ago, the other two fired just this past Monday. One of them told me he was having to move back to Colorado and live with his parents. The only money he has to his name is the severance pay he got when they fired him. He looked distraught. I told him to cheer up. To go back to Colorado and take his New York City banking experience and form a community bank in his hometown--you know, put together local banks--City banks they were once called; National banks they were once called, too; Citizens banks they were once called, too. CitiGroup, once the First National City Bank of New York, is from whence come Barack Obama's economy experts, Larry "Deregulation" Summers (what possessed Obama to keep this creep on his staff--the Clintonistas?) and Robert "Goldman-Sachs/CitiGroup" Rudin, who along with Nutjob Larry deregulated like Ronald Reagan and Reaganomics taught them was the right thing to do, the "voodoo" thing to do--the free-market economy--oh yeah--the "free" in that free market meaning free to trade their products all around the world with no taxes, surcharges, or tariffs on these goods--that's what that means--that's the whole basis for the Global Marketplace to be successful--free (tax free, tariff free) trade meaning larger and larger profits; plus the ability to move factories around the world in cargo planes searching for that Cheap (almost Slave) Labor that is vitally needed for more and more profits to come tumbling tax-free into the Big Bellied Power Elite's already stuffed pockets--stuffed with stolen monies made off stolen labor and stolen natural resources and stolen economies, stolen through the backwards/laissez faire machinations of the IMF or the World Bank (both USA controlled) or GATT or the NAFTA trade agreements--we opened our borders to Mexican truckers but not Mexican immigrants looking for salvation! Look at how Obama's Dumbocratic majority is refusing to do away with porkbarreling--now called "earmarks." Old Hillbilly Hillary, by the way, as New York State senator, was the earmark champion, giving out billions in earmarks to her big NY campaign contributors. [Mr. Ed: One must forgive the Wolf Man his "figures"--like saying Hillbilly Hill gave out billions in earmarks. That could be an exaggeration and since we don't fact check his work and nobody around here cares about exact numbers anyway, we go ahead and let him use whatever figures he wants--sort of like the Pentagon when they just don't count enemy dead or enemy civilian casualties. Whether exaggeration or not, Hillary Clinton was the champion earmark writer in Congress last year. It paid off, she spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in her unsuccessful two-year-long campaign to be president--close to a billion bucks herself--just think of the billions of dollars these pretentious fools spent trying to get elected to a $400,000-a-year job. It must be worth all the risks--I mean, the perks must flow in like alchemist gold--which is all this trillions and trillions of dollars there toying around with are, alchemically produced by a miracle money-making contraption called a printing press.]

You see that's the catch here. These people are all rich. Nearly every Congressperson is worth at least a lousy million or two. A lot of their extra cash comes from campaign contributions, which they use as though it were their private money--and don't believe they don't use that money for personal needs. Obama's a millionaire already. You see where my drift is going? Like Obama announcing he was going to do away with tax loopholes and increase the taxes on everybody making $200,000-a-year (his first figure--now he's changed it to $250,000--he's already learning the art of flip-flopping). His own party is now fighting him on these "changes" and he's backing down. You can't take a rich man's source of tax-free money away from HIM--like Slick Willie has more millions than his Hillbilly wife--the MAN always has control of more money than the WOMAN. I think Nancy Pelosi must be the richest woman in Congress. Obama's now in the Power Elite. We should no longer expect anything drastically different from him. His nuts are being twisted by White Men more powerful than all the pretty words and promises Obama can string together in order to make it into the Power Elite.

Chaos doesn't scare the Power Elite. They feel they are divinely blessed, don't you remember? They make no mistakes. They don't lose their estates to foreclosure. They don't lose their private islands. They don't have their excess private jets and yachts taken away from them--oh no, instead they get special tax allowances for the depreciation of their jets and yachts and landholdings, all held over from the big junk bond days of easily gained tax-free money and power--the junk bond days that made Warren Buffett worth, think of this, 65 billion dollars--he and Billy Gates together are worth way over 100 billion dollars. That amazes me as much as these construction workers pouring concrete in 12 degree weather and in a blizzard--and the stuff hardens overnight and is a solid wall the next day--or at least we hope it's a solid wall and not made with concrete full of bubbles--you know, we call it Mafia concrete up here--where the Mafia used to control the building supply industry and the demolition industry and the heavy machinery industry--one assumes they still do.

I had a New York City step-relative who was a building contractor, he built skyscrapers, he used to brag, and he'd further brag how Italians were the best building builders; and, by God, he even looked like Al Capone--short, smarmy, plump, wearing custom-tailored suits, big rings and a Rolex on each wrist--and he smoked big stogies just like Al did. I recently tried to Facebook my beautiful step-cousin, his daughter, who when I was thirteen and she and her family visited my family in far, far, wildly windy and hot West Texas, I fell madly in love with--she was in high school; I was still in middle school. And I danced and pranced and hotrodded all over the place trying to woo this step-relative beauty--but I could find no trace of her or even her father, Fat Andy--they've seemingly disappeared from the Yonkers landscape. My step-grandfather, my step-cousin's mother's father, was born in Harlem in the 1870s--his family were Dutch. Later when the Blacks came to Harlem, in the early 1900s, these Dutch moved to Yonkers where they were in control until the Italians started pouring into Yonkers to eventually take it and Westchester County over. Like I once briefly lived in Mount Vernon, New York. Just two doors away was a Mount Vernon mob boss's house--always jumping with family functions, big limos out in front of the house--a huge wedding one time that filled our little street with limos--big stretch Caddie limos were the popular Mob form of transportation in those days.

Obama on the one hand (he's definitely right about national healthcare) seems like a rising sun--on the other hand, he's more like trying to analyze difficult problems in moonlight--the light of the Wolf, what I consider more essential problems, like these devastating Neo-Con invasions and occupations of two nations that had nothing to do with the attacks on New York City's World Trade Center (one of the greatest military actions in modern war history, if you think about it) and supposedly tried to blow up the Pentagon--and what would that have mattered had they destroyed the Pentagon?--it would have saved us trillions of dollars and millions of lives (millions when you consider the Iraqis and Afghanistans we've killed, maimed, imprisoned, or driven out of their homes into exile in countries that don't really want them there). You notice, there is no reporting from Iraq anymore--no kill ratios--no tallying of American dead anymore--it's somewhere over 4,000, but we have no idea what the real tally is for sure. And I've never seen any real figures on how many Americans have died in Afghanistan--remember General G.W. "Toy Soldier" Bush gave that war to NATO--he washed his hands of that folly. And you can make a case for G.W. Bush being a fucking traitor from what we now see was on his mind from John Yoo's advisories to him--the little bastard was planning a military coup--this is too fucking suspicious--I'm sorry--why isn't that sorry bastard, Bush, in prison; why hasn't he been hanged as a traitor?--instead he's living well with Pickles in Dallas at a cost of 2-million-a-month to guard the bastard and provide him with his precious library and free office space and staff and Pickles, too, gets a little stipend--what a life, eh? Plenty'a bucks. They got a foreclosed-on mansion at a bargain--We the People paid for that, you know! Look at the good life our ex-presidents live--even the one who stole his presidency. For instance, old Mammy Babs just had a heart attack--and, oh, you bet, she's well taken care of--the best healthcare in the world We the People provide our crooked and deceitful leaders, our Power Elite--like the Queen of England (a Nazi-rooted Queen) just bestowing knighthood on Uncle Teddy Kennedy! "Watch how you handle that sword, Liz. Teddy's got one foot in the grave already." Wouldn't that be funny if the Good Queen Liz decapitated Uncle Teddy during the knighthood ceremony (Queen Elizabeth, the Queen of Scotch, as I like to call her, if you are to believe the rumor she hides bottles of Scotch all over her many palaces). How stupid are the people of Great Britain? Worshiping such a worthless old piece of shit Queen and her exceedingly worthless children, especially her totally worthless fop son, Prince Charley, and her totally worthless grandsons, those two prissy bastards--hell, Prince Harry is proud of his Nazi past--remember, he wore Hitler's favorite uniform around the London party whirl for a while. He apologized. Then in Africa recently he had to apologize again after declaring his family used to own Africa and all its wooly-boogers. But Prince Harry is humbly excused all his faux paux--he's so cute--and he's so British! And We the White People of the USA seem to still allow ourselves to be faked out by British men and women--check out how many Brit immigrants come here and rip off jobs right and left from We the People and that's fine--at least these are White people immigrants--and we White people know you can trust real White people like the humanitarian Brits or the White-as-Snow Russians, who also immigrate to this country at will--the white ones that is--some of those Central Asian Russians look like they've got a tinge of "brown" in their heathen blood.

Lord Chaos is jumping up and down with glee at the tailspinning free fall the whole world is in--who'll grab the controls and save our asses? I was hoping it would be Obama, but so far, I see no real change--same ole same ole--just another face in the Power Elite crowd now. I hope he's learning a valuble lesson--you can't be a Conservative and for change at the same time. Remember my Debbie Harry parallel lines theory of human relationships. It works in politics, too.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler