We the People of the USA Are Cursed

A Meeting of the Lords
Here in New York City Tuesday our little Napoleonic mayor, the fifth richest man in the world, by the way, ran his first commercial offering himself "humbly" up as a continue-the-same-ol'-shit candidate for mayor of NYC. He's running for a third-term, an illegal term, but rich guys have the power (the money) to make the illegal legal--it's the divine power you inherit simply by becoming rich! So the Mayor changed the law in his own head and the asskissing City Council went right along with him--hell, yes, the City Council members get richer the longer this little rich asshole stays in power. The jobless rate in Harlem is 50%--the mayor's solution: "Gentrification." Gentrification was brought on the scene by the real estate industry in the 1970s here in NYC; then it was called "Urban Renewal." In those days a lot of the Upper West Side from Broadway and around 65th over to Central Park West and straight on up to Morningside Heights and the Columbia U (a neighborhood disrupter) campus was basically Puerto Rican. Urban Renewal successfully ran the Puerto Ricans out of these neighborhoods and then gave their old buildings over to developers who came in and took over these city-condemned great old brownstone buildings, renovated them, then rented them to "upwardly mobile" (you could be upwardly mobile in NYC in the '70s especially if you were free, white, and 21) Whites--Blacks will tell you about how hard it was for a Black person to rent an apartment anywhere "below" Harlem in Manhattan long after the Civil Rights Act was passed and discrimination became a Federal offense. Urban Renewal became "Gentrification" in the 1980s and using his gentrification powers and his connection to the private equity fund investment schemes, the mayor gives city condemned properties away and rezones neighborhoods in favor of White developers who then build hotels for White tourists and hi-rise luxury condos for White folks making over $80,000 a year that sell for way over a million bucks and if these are rentals, they go for a minimum $2,000-a-month, which means to rent a gentrified apartment in NYC, you have to make at least $25,000-a-year just to pay your rent; and much more than that to buy a 1.6 million-dollar-apartment and make huge mortgage payments--30-year loans--which means most of your life you're going to be in debt in just trying to pay for a place to live. White people are the ones who are gentrified: like politicians (which includes Black people who learn to kiss White power people's ass and don't rock the White boat at all) (all Congressional politicians own several homes, including summer homes, hunting lodges, no matter whatever paltry impoverished district they represent. Remember how John McCain had no idea how many homes he owned. And Charlie Rangel, the Harlem politician, for instance, who's right now sitting back on his overweight hands taking care of his bad health (he's grossly overweight) with the best of health care We the People can buy him, while the Mayor takes Harlem away from him and his people, remember, Charlie has so many private homes, he forgot he had one in the Dominican Republic he was renting out for big time-share bucks. Yes, folks, Congressman from Harlem Charlie Rangel forgot he had a home in the Dominican Republic so he didn't pay any taxes on that income--ever.

You notice how many politicians are in tax trouble? Including our own "Civil Servant" Timmy Geithner, the head of our Treasury--he didn't know he owed $40,000 in back taxes--he didn't know! You know what would happen to you and me if we told the IRS, "Oh, hell, I never knew about owing you that money; my accountant handles all of that, so I knew nothing about it so I'm not guilty of tax evasion based on the fact I'm rich and keep getting richer of the stupid taxpayers of the USA"? So politicians can afford to own all kinds of homes and apartments anywhere they want. And rich peoples's worthless children (both US and foreign rich people--remember one of Osama's many brothers and sisters was going to Harvard when his Saudi-Arabian buddies brought down the WTC) also rent up a lot of Manhattan's gentrified apartments while they're attending Columbia or New York University (these two NYC universities own tons of high-class real estate in this city--NYU owns acres of land in the Village and East Village; Columbia University once owned Rockefeller Center--yeah, folks. Columbia was originally called Kings College--and it still is, a White "Ivy League" (that used to mean all White males) privileged college that only kings's kids and oversmart scholarship-driven kids can afford to attend--these young squirts have to have places to live while their wiling away their leisure time going to these privileged, high-class, and terribly expensive (government subsidized, by the way) schools. So Daddy gives them a $5,000-a-month allowance and a fistful of credit cards and tells them they're on their own--to pull themselves up by their Timberland boot straps--so yeah, a lot of hi-rise luxury apartments are packed with college-age goons--and also the little broker trainees on Wall Street were living in these high-on-the-hog apartments--like the $5,000-a-month penthouse in my building--it's been full of little outlander bank/financial trainees, some of them making over $100,000-a-year on their entry-level jobs--except, now these little creeps are losing their jobs by the thousands a day--my building's penthouse just emptied out three little banker trainees who lost their jobs--but there is already another single little rich frip living up there already.

So gentrification is the mayor's tool with which he has changed New York City into a tourist trap, his intentions to finally drive all Blacks and Latinos and White Trash out of Manhattan and turn it over to the 1% who control all our wealth, which includes the Royal Family of Dubai (they are divine they are so close to Allah), the Royal Family of Saudi-Arabia and that way he's going establish a big-buck tax base and he'll keep NYC in the black forever and ever more, Amen, or should I say Selah? And look at the shit coming out on Prince Bandar Bush these days, how he through his father bribed the US and Britain into selling weapons through him--bribing politicians and weapons makers, etc. (like the Carlyle Group)). And look who was representing Prince Bandar...until Obama made him head of the CIA. Yep, Slick Willie's old buddy, Louis Freed. Also, a whole lot of Brit power dukes and earls bring their journalists and their young chefs and their designers and their Broadway plays and their many rockers-famous-for-one-day over here to broker them to instant success. All these Brits coming here can't wait to leave Liverpool (any city named after the liver is a filthy place), Manchester, and especially London and come to "Amer-i-ka" and make their fortunes and fame. Also, tons of world celebrities come to New York to gobble up condos and apartment complexes as investments for the tons of money they are paid for the crappiest movies or dumbest teevee shows--yep, celebs love real estate. Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi and their celebrity buddies almost singlehandedly changed the wonderful old artistic neighborhood of Tribeca in Lower Manhattan back in the late seventies and early 80s into a luxury condo and leisure-class celebrity closed community. I lived down there when these two comedians came in with their Satuday Night Live bucks (these two are Canadians remember) buying up all the bars and small restaurants and the 5-story buildings they were in, especially a whole block of buildings down on Warren Street (and I used to live at 77 Warren Street) and they bought up land and buildings all up and down Greenwich and Washington Streets, eventually investing in the building of a huge private apartment complex with the help of City University--their developments eventually leading to all A.I.R. (artists-in-residence) lofts being bought out, the artists driven out, and the fops and moneyed privilege moving in and taking over Tribeca--now actors like Robert De Niro claim Tribeca as their own, their creation, like that god-awful Tribeca Film Festival started by De Niro and one of his Black gal concubines--Bob had a Jones for Black chicks and probably still does, though he's getting pretty sotty looking and old these days--and those first couple of Black girlfriends almost ruined him, too--I could have told him, but he wouldn't listen to me.

This is how the White Power Elite control neighborhoods and drive out the "untouchables" (this is a caste system we're talking about). First of all, they get control of a mayor and a city council and these mayors and these city councils immediately start rezoning and using eminent domain rights granted them by the political Power Elites to destroy old neighborhoods, steal the land, and then in the name of progress turn it over to big-time playboy developers who then will gentrify (read: White Wash) it by building malls and condo complexes and hotels and closed neighborhoods. Like they're doing today in disrepaired New Orleans. Like they did in Atlanta when the phony Olympics (now corporate-sponsor-owned) were held there several years ago. The city destroyed what they called in White terms a "run down" (read: Poor, mainly Black) or "blighted" neighborhood, bulldozed homes, apartments, stores, whatever, down and rebuilt all that phony Olympic shit they have to build--oh, yes, a new Olympic Stadium, and plenty of hi-rise condos for the phony Olympians to stay in, and for the vaunted press to stay in and have their "central" centers in. Or in L.A. when the Dodgers moved there, the bastards, and the City of L.A. bulldozed down one of the oldest Latino neighborhoods in L.A. to build the Chavez Ravine ballpark.

So our little Napoleonic mayor is running for a third term. His pals in commercial television are making a big deal of it. Wednesday morning they were trumpeting the fact that this is the earliest any mayor has ever started his campaign, way ahead of his rivals, who they manage to not name! Then they run shots of Bloomberg going around the city, usually with plenty of Black people in the shots, all smiling, all praising this little rat bastard who hates them, who condescendingly smiles at them the same as when her High Ass the Queen of England goes to Harlem to kiss Black babies (preferably those dying with AIDS) or when America's Princess, Princess Di (I guess I could call her Princess Dead now, couldn't I?...oh, I know, I'm condemned to Hell for such a pun, the lowest level to boot) used to go to Harlem and hang with the Blacks and, yes, again kiss their babies and hold the little wooly-boogers close to her royal privileged bosoms!

The commercial teevees around NYC are bragging, too, how our little Napoleonic asshole rich-boy mayor has already spent 1 million bucks of HIS OWN MONEY in his campaign...oh, joy, and that makes it OK for him to illegally run for this third term. See what I mean about money making the illegal legal?

This fucking mayor represents the real estate industry and a tourist industry he himself poofed into being, like Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice (the story by Paul Dukas, a French composer who taught his music students to, "Listen to zee birds. They are zee masters" (pardon my French)) could poof brooms and water buckets and shit with the wave of his wand. Boom! One day out of nowhere the Mayor announced tourism was now New York City's number one industry. He went on to issue a rule that said New York City residents, especially Manhattan scumbag residents, should bend over backwards for tourists no matter how hickish, uncouth, dumbass, Euro-trash, or illegal they might be. Like we should give up traffic lanes on Fifth Avenue to diesel-belching tourist buses; and we should give up our famous-avenue sidewalks to the garbage of tourists, fast food wrappers blowing in all the gutters, Styrofoam containers clogging up the drains, 16-oz cola cups blowing like tumbleweeds up and down the streets, along with the smelly piles of garbage stacked in front of these hotels and hi-rise luxury joints, in big hefty bags, which the poor break into looking for deposit bottles and cans, looking for something to eat in the kitchen garbage, scattering garbage all over our sidewalks, or bags of wastepaper from the office buildings busted open with the papers gliding all about the sidewalks whipped by the surface winds--sidewalks sometimes blocked by stupid tourists ganged around a big map they've paid $3.00 for at a Chinese junk souvenir shop, which are thick like weeds up and down Fifth Avenue now--selling NYC souvenirs made in Commie China--even the city maps are printed in China--hell, New York City is China now--that's what it is! It's China and what's not China is Saudi-Arabian or Dubaian or Arab Emirates or Indian or British--like one of the tackiest and tallest buildings in Times Square (the NY Times hasn't been in Times Square in many moons now) is the Reuters Building. Reuters! Do people still use the Reuters news service? In this day and age of the Internet, who the hell needs Reuters?

And New York City is also Disney! Mickey Mouse rules Broadway these days. The latest, a Broadway rendition of the "The Littliest Mermaid"--Disney tales always follow the crackpot mind of Walt Disney--full of fairy princesses and kings and humble servants and poor peasants luckily getting to meet and become the love interest of royalty--White royalty--even Disney's jungle animals are White--oh, I forgot, Uncle Remus and Tarbaby are Black, aren't they? Mickey's Black, too, if you check him out. That's why he has to wear white gloves. Minnie's Black, too. Goofy is White. Let's see, Pluto is White, I guess--Pluto's Mickey's dog in case you've drifted away from the Gospel of Disney since your childhood. Donald Duck is White. Hell, he's Aryan White. There are no Blacks in Donald's world--or if there are, they are the Ugly Ducklings! The Black Swans. And the Black Swan label was the first Black-owned recording company in the good ol' Land of the Free Whites and Home of the Chief Wahoo Braves (White Native Americans, I suppose)--I was thinking t'other day, the Washington Redskins could get around getting sued all the time by Native Americans by simply putting a White spin on the name and saying the Washington Redskins are named after the redskin peanut!

And I'll say this, this prick of a rich-boy mayor has changed this city. That he has. His rezoning every neighborhood in all the boroughs has created a building boom unlike any I've ever seen in this city I've lived and loved in for 40 years now. There are building projects going up on just about every block in Manhattan as I sit at my Mac and type this shit. The humongous new 2,000-room hotel over on Sixth Avenue between 29th and 30th is progressing right along. They're up over 35 floors with it now--it's gonna be 62 stories before it's "topped off" as they say. It's looming up now just out my southwest-facing bay window and is now totally blocking my western view--blocking my view of those magnificent spring and summer sunsets. Now broad wrap-around glass windows will blare their fishbowl contents at me all day, so close, I, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, will be able to sit in my window and eyeball all the activities and shenanigans going on in a solid 62-story wall of glass windows. All these new buildings look absolutely the same on the outside--prefab concrete slab walls and floors with huge plate-glass windows making up the mid-floor walls, except for one side of this building which is totally solid, no windows, a traditional way of building buildings in NYC, the side where they can build another building always left windowless, except in the case of my building. My building at one time in the 1870s was the tallest building in this neighborhood. It is said to have been built as a Federal prison hospital but has spent most of its long existence as a hotel, the older of the two buildings that make up my "building" was once an exclusive hotel called The Grand and boasted of a music room, a ballroom, and a gambling casino on the first two floors. So my building does have apartments with windows facing east from the 7th floor on up to the penthouse on the 12th floor. Now the hotel being built on the east side of my building will be built flat up against my building thus blocking out all the apartment windows that once were auctioned off at high prices due to their eastern views, which includes a view of the Empire State Building, which looms up over my neighborhood and my building. This hotel, too, is going to be 18 stories, which means it will block out all eastern (especially morning) sunlight--I won't be able to go on my roof anymore and watch the sun rising up over Long Island, coming aboard Manhattan via Brooklyn.

Ah, but the tourists (of course tourism is tanking at the moment; I just read where France, the largest tourist economy in the world, is suffering from a loss of tourism (which usually means American tourists) big time) who'll be packing into this new hotel will get to enjoy that view.

And it's the views that count in this development binge. High-floors with spectacular views and believe me, there are spectacular views to be had from even an 18-story building in NYC--but think about the views from an unobstructed by other hi-rise buildings building that's 62-stories tall! I mean, from the penthouse or luxury hotel suite on the 62nd floor--man, you can see almost to L.A. out your west-facing windows, the far end of Long Island out your east-facing windows--your southern view looks almost to Bermuda and from your northern view you can almost see the North Pole (a Russian tourist spot now that you can sail a boat right up to it). So it's the top floors of these buildings that make back the costs of the construction and eventual management takeover of the property. I once heard Donald Trump saying he'd bought an old 40-story tower in Chicago. He paid like 35 million for it. He renovated it, he said, for another 35 million. He said he then rented to top two floors out for 70 million bucks and the rest of the buildings offices and apartments were clear profit.

The hidebound backwards-thinking Holy Roller preachers are saying we are now living under God's curse and that's the cause of all our economic troubles and inability to handle guns with care and the reason we have a Black president instead of a free, white, and over 42 skunk like G.W. "I'm Takin' It Easy" Bush. This is the Curse of Adam they're talking about--you know, when Eve (the evil woman) talked dumbass Adam into eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge--you see, if you ate this fruit, the tomato they say, then you'd know as much as God (Allah), which is forbidden--the punishment for eating those tomatoes and getting as "smart" as God was DEATH. You see, if the Evil Woman (Eve, for Evil not Evelyn or Ave) hadn't talked old dumbass Adam (he and Eve were White, so don't get worried--it's the Curse of Ham that turns you Black) into eating a tomato, which left he and Eve naked and Adam took a look at Eve's hot little body and bang--you know the rest of the story--God (Allah) had to kick these two out of paradise (Paradise was at the joining of the Tigres and Euphrates rivers in IRAQ!) and condemn them to DEATH. Philip Wylie says Death is the price we have to pay for SEX.

So, folks, our economy continues falling into the toilet and We the Poor People of the USA keep on bailing out our squandering rich and famous speculators, keeping them afloat at all costs. Warren "Junk Bond" Buffett loses 30 billion dollars! Oh boo-hoo, the poor bastard only has 30 billion left to live on. Wells-Fargo, that bunch of crooks, that's Warren "Junk Bond" Buffett, and don't worry, folks, Wells-Fargo got a huge fistful of our bucks, too. Warren demanded it and he got it. He's wealthy so he's divine.

I say, take your money out of banks; quit paying your exorbitant credit card ripoffs and your mortgages and resist foreclosure, stand your ground, protect your right to "the pursuit of happiness" under the ignored Bill of Rights (more important than the Constitution)--and leave this 1% who owns us all, leave 'em spinning in the middle of the Global Autobahn like an empty beer can you throw out the driver's side window of your car as you're boogieing down some lonesome highway with a cold six-pack beside you in the seat and with the radio blaring Chuck Berry--and you toss these empties out that window and they hit the macadam and start spinning like my little red top--and that's where we should toss these broke (empty) bankers and financiers: out the driver's side window leaving 'em spinning like crazy in the middle of a highway going nowhere.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler