Alfred E. Newman and the Demon Dumbass Behind the Deficit (courtesy severinbrowne.com)
Oh Those Crazy Teabaggers...er-ah, I Mean "Tea Partiers"
How great is it watching these clown shows going on in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, those great progressive states?--I mean, come on, Wisconsin is more famous for and proud of Senator Tailgunner Joe McCarthy than it is for Senator Robert LaFollette--they voted out Senator Russ Feingold, the most progressive senator in the District of Corruption, in favor of a millionaire Teabagger--so what the hell did they expect when they elected this idiot, Scott Walker, as their governor?--you see now how Wisconsin is a typical Middle-American/Silent-Majority state full of politically schizophrenic (divided) citizens?
And Michigan? Come on. I don't ever remember in my lifetime Michigan leaning way left, in spite of it being the home of some of the nation's largest and most powerful unions, including the United Auto Workers of America once under the leadership of a tough old auto worker, Walter Reuther. I mean I know Michigan as the home of the American Libertarian movement--Holland, Michigan--I know now that Michigan has had the highest numbers of foreclosures in the country--I know, too, that Detroit, Michigan, is still one of the most depressed cities in the USA--having three good friends natives of Flint, Michigan, from them I know that their once all-American hometown, once home to General Motors plants where they made Chevrolets and Buicks, is now a relative ghost town, a wild town, so wild there are parts of Flint the cops refuse to enter--and last week, the new Tea Party Michigan House and Senate, duly elected to power by the idiot citizens of the Yahoo State of Michigan, passed into law a measure that now gives them the power to takeover a failing Michigan city or town, like DETROIT maybe, and like Flint for sure, throw out all the duly elected officials--including the mayors and all city workers--and sell that city to a private management corporation. There ya go Michigan! Ironies galore in all of this Chaos...and it is Chaos, folks, and in Chaos there is anarchy before there is a new world order.
I marvel at how dumb our most gifted pundits are in terms of history. All these Teabagger assholes are doing is wanting to revert this country way back to the 1880s and 1890s when the Generals and Commodores and Captains of the Capitalist Industrial Revolution rode roughshod over us--with the help, I might add LOUDLY, of the US Government. The Industrial Revolution that started in England and was brought to this country by our new Power Elite, especially the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, Andrew Carnegie, the Melons, the Fricks, J.P. Morgan, Commodore Vanderbilt (he was a commodore in the sense he owned a yacht--believe me, that asshole never was in the U.S. Navy), Mr. Goldman and his son-in-law Mr. Sachs, Henry Ford (our first billionaire). They were ripping us off so god-damn ruthlessly, the aristocrat Teddy Roosevelt had to go after them with his Trust-busting big stick--an act that got his aristocratic ass thrown out of the Republican Party and his name besmirched forever by the Republican Party Machine.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was a sham anyway--and though it broke up say the Rockefeller's monopoly, Standard Oil, it didn't break up the Rockefeller pirating ventures--they still kept their oil companies--they simply turned them into Standard Oil of New York, New Jersey, Ohio, California, etc. Nor did it change these pirate bastards determined to throw buckets of shit on American workers who wanted to unionize for fair wages and safe working conditions and something as simple as good ventilation. The Power Elite Industrialists then took advantage of the rivers of immigrants coming here, especially from China, Ireland, Italy, and hiring them at slave wages--hiring them to build their railroads, to work their mines, to cut down the forests, to do their shit work--fleecing these poor bastards not only of their worth but in a lot of cases of their very lives. You see there were NO unions then--only Anarchists. Bosses could force workers to work 16-hours-a-day, 6 days a week...only giving them Sundays off because most of the swellhead robber barons claimed to be great Christian (except for Mr. Goldman and Mr. Sachs) men so they gave their workers time off on Sunday to go confess their sins and get the blessings of the holy church ("Work for the night is coming, when you'll work no more") so they'd have the strength to report at 5 am the next morning to begin their 6-day workweek again.
The first union to make any big noise was the International Workers of the World, the IWW, the Wobblies, led back in the early 20th-Century by Big Bill Haywood and promoted by Emma Goldman and Mother Jones and the legendary Joe Hill. And God-Almighty-damn how the Christian-Power-Elite Robber Barons hated the Wobblies. Next in power came John L. Lewis's United Mine Workers. And the Robber Barons hated John L. Lewis; and then they hated the Maritime Union, the Dockworkers Union, and later the AF of L and the CIO, and later the United Auto Workers union--and how better to hate them than to call them Commies. And there were Commies among these various unions, some high up in them, most of them coming into visibility in this country along a parallel line with the Russian Revolution. Yes, the unionists read Marx and they had their hopes built on the Russian Revolution that to them was a Workers Revolution, though now we know it wasn't a revolt of the workingclass at all but of the peasants. These American low-paid home-grown and immigrant workers were peasants though because they were in the USA--why, we don't have peasants in this country. No. Just pissants and poor folks and lower classes and "goldbricking lazy bums."
The Capitalist Pig bosses for most of their controlling existence have ridiculed the poorest classes, including the working class in this country. While Commodore Vanderbilt and his worthless family were building oversized mansions in Newport and New York City, the workers who made him and his worthless family rich (even building their mansions for them) were living in tent cities or labor camps or the sordid slums of the cities. Then the Great Depression hit...and the unions got themselves in an "I told you so" situation and the union movement swept into full swing through the twenties and thirties and the forties and especially during World War II. And it was the unions in this country that put their asses on the line, suffering horribly by being the victims of the many brutalities including maiming and death rained on them by the Robber Barons's private goon squads (the Pinkertons, etc.) that also included State Militias and National Guards and also US Army troops--the workers's tent cities and labor camps and labor housing were set on fire. And as the workers and their families ran from the fires, the goons and the Guard were shooting them--or the Robber Barons hired goons to infiltrate unions in order to murder union leaders and organizers. And the workers put their asses persistently enough on the line that they eventually got collective bargaining rights in terms of fair wages, safe working conditions, health-care benefits, life insurance, vacation time, sick days, pay for overtime, the 7-hour work day--the 35-hour workweek.
And oh how this Union strength and the Standard of Living it created--Unions created the Middle Class in this country--pissed off the Power Elite, the greedy rich, those Captains, Commodores, and Colonels of Industry. And they have viciously tried to put Unions out of business ever since. During Truman's administration, starting this movement during the last days of Franklin Roosevelt's reign (4-term President), the antiUnion uppercrust led by the fabulously rich Senator Robert Alonzo Taft of Ohio tried to stifle Unions again--ending winning big time with the passing of the Union-punishing Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.
[The Labor–Management Relations Act (Pub.L. 80-101, 61 Stat. 136, enacted June 23, 1947, informally the Taft–Hartley Act) is a United States federal law that monitors the activities and power of labor unions. The act, still effective, was sponsored by Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred A. Hartley, Jr. and legislated by overriding U.S. President Harry S. Truman's veto on June 23, 1947; labor leaders called it the "slave-labor bill"[1] while President Truman argued that it was a "dangerous intrusion on free speech,"[2] and that it would "conflict with important principles of our democratic society,"[3] Nevertheless, Truman would subsequently use it twelve times during his presidency.[4] The Taft–Hartley Act amended the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA; informally the Wagner Act), which Congress passed in 1935. The principal author of the Taft–Hartley Act was J. Mack Swigert[5] of the Cincinnati law firm Taft, Stettinius & Hollister] From Wikipedia.
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In Madison, Wisconsin, 185,000 rallied over the past weekend--the largest protest gathering in Wisconsin history; yet, self-centered prick with high-flown political ambitions, Governor Scott Walker (Wisconsin cheeseheads elected him), boldly, with a pompous look down his nose at his constituents, signed into law the bill that takes away government workers (includes teachers, cops, firemen) right to collective bargaining, which pretty much does away with what empowerments the State Workers Union had. The nutty Governor said he hoped this inspired others across the state...oops, er-ah, he meant others across "the nation" but he went on through with the slip--then he finally got it right when in his closing remarkable remarks he hoped this great piece of legislation that will wreck the infrastructure of the Wisconsin State government was going to inspire other states across the nation to do the same thing--and, trust me, "those" other states have already started following suit: in Michigan, in Indiana, in Maine, in Idaho, in South Dakota, in Texas. Worthless states in terms of jobs, safe homes, a chance to make more than just a living. States so dumb and with such confused populations, they rush to the polling places to shoot themselves in the foot by electing these cornball lying bastards who've got them so damn afraid of their own shadows they are willing to continue trusting these assholes for their salvation, when these Demons are actually taking them straight down the slippery road to Capitalist Hell. I heard that in one state, the Teabagger governor was trying to pass a law taxing seniors's pensions and savings accounts.
SENIORS: The Tea Party goons want you DEAD and out of the way (and trust me, so do President Obama and the Corporate-moneyed Democrats). Of course the irony here is the fact that all these Tea Party billionaire supporters are old farts in their 70s and 80s (like the Koch Brothers and that old decrepit asshole Alan Simpson). They "don't need no welfare," you see, because they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and "you fool senior citizens didn't, so FUCK all ya senior bastards!" Baby Boomers, by the way, hate their parents. Why? Because their parents covered their asses so well they don't know how to handle responsibilities--especially those involving handling money, marriage, sex, and the ability for them to pull themselves up by their fancy bootstraps.
A Big Lie Being Revealed in Japan As It Once Again Gets Nuked
Nuclear power plants...ah, come on, folks, you've nothing to fear if they build one in your backyard. Hell, with our modern construction techniques, shit, one of these new-fangled nuclear plant sons'a bitches can survive a 9.0 earthquake! And off goes the buzzer: WRONG!
SURPRISE! These new-fangled nuclear plants cannot survive a 9.0 earthquake. The poor old Japanese who should have known better than to be suckered into the nuclear power plant flim-flam after Harry "Ass" Truman melted 300,000 of them during WWII. But the Japanese are a pretty dumbass people--why continue living packed like sardines on these teeter-totting islands? I read where this earthquake shifted the Japanese islands 8 feet--though earthquakes are nothing new to the Japanese who suffer hundreds of tremors every day--same as Californians--and look for this same thing to happen in California--and surely there is a nuclear power plant built over the San Andreas Fault in California--but not to worry, it's perfectly safe.
Just like hydrofract gas drilling recently caused a series of earthquakes in what every one of those Arkies thought was earthquake-safe Arkansas.
I often ask the question of my geologist friends what the purpose of oil and gas is in the Gestalt of the World? This planet of plates and plate-shiftings as part of the balancing act that keeps this spaceship sailing at a steady high-speed pace in its orbit around the Sun, our only GOD should you be one of those "lost" souls looking for a Big Daddy in the Sky.
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From C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite):
Americans like to think of themselves as the most individualistic people in the world, but among them the impersonal corporation has proceeded the farthest and now reaches into every area and detail of daily life. Less than two-tenths of 1 per cent of all the manufacturing and mining companies in the United States now employ half of all the people working in these basic industries. The story of the American economy since the Civil War is thus the story of the creation and consolidation of this corporate world of centralized property.
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Check out our old compadre Nicholas Egon Jainschigg's new blog--over in our blog list. He's just returned from Russia and has his first post since returning of his impressions of Moscow, etc. Nick's as precise a writer as he is painter. Nick's one of the truly most horizontally and vertically broad in all-round perspective people I know (oh what an adjectival tribute!)--one of the great art minds, teachers, illustrators, and now painter in the US certainly.thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Say Goodbye to:
Drummer Joe Morello: Joe Morello, 82, American drummer (The Dave Brubeck Quartet).
New York City Radio and Club Personality Danny Stiles:
Danny Stiles, 87, American radio host
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